You Don't Know About Me (7 page)

As Ben fished an iPod out of his backpack, I asked, “Are all these kids going to the same camp?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We've got preppies, geeks, hipsters, goths, emos, granolas”—he pinched his thumb and finger together and sucked air—“even some stoners.”

A red-faced man stood up at the front of the bus. He said he was Brother Jeremy. After he led a prayer for a safe trip the bus rolled out of the parking lot. I saw Mom standing on the sidewalk. She couldn't see me through the tinted windows. It didn't stop her from waving goodbye. I didn't wave back.

I looked over at Ben. An iPod earbud was jammed in his ear, and he jerked to music. The little kids in the front started singing a song about going to Bible camp. They sang it so many times, Brother Jeremy got up and fed a DVD into a player. The TVs hanging from the overheads started playing one of the Chronicles of Narnia movies. There was only one DVD I wanted to see: my father's. I needed to hear the exact words of his riddle again.

There are times in life, and not nearly enough, when God actually hears your thoughts and says,
You know, I haven't answered any of that kid's prayers lately. Maybe I'll toss him a kindness.
And that's what He did. As Ben reached into his backpack, I spotted something silver about the size of a book. “Is that a portable DVD player?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Can I borrow it for a minute?”

He shot me a sketchy look, pulled the player out and handed it over. “I guess I owe you something after the other day.”

I said, “Thanks,” hoping he was done talking about my little baptism. I pulled the leather Bible from my pack and slid the DVD from the slot in the back cover.

“Weird place for a DVD,” he said.

“You think?” I stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“To the bathroom.”

“Dude, is that porn?” He reached for his player. “No way you're gonna use it to jerk off.”

I pulled it away. “It's not porn, trust me. You said you owe me, right?”

“Alright,” he grumbled. “But if I find out that's porn”—he broke into a grin—“you are so loaning it to me.”

I stepped into the bathroom at the back. Between being unsure how to work Ben's player and the buzz of seeing my father again, it took a while to get the thing to work. I fast-forwarded to the part at the end where my dad gave me the riddle. “Where do you find the book of Genesis and human conception?” I hit the stop button. I didn't want to hear the rest. The last thing I needed was to come out of the bathroom doing another tear-ectomy.

When I handed the DVD player back to Ben he took it like it had some flesh-eating disease. He told me if I'd slimed it with impure thoughts or anything else, he'd have everyone calling me Corndog by the end of the day. I thanked him, then shut my eyes like I was going to catch a nap.

As I tried to answer the riddle, Ben having his head in the pornosphere helped me solve it. Of course, it also could've been God who made me think of fornication. Genesis is found in the Bible. Human conception usually happens in a bed. So the answer to the riddle was “Between the covers.” Since my father had hidden the DVD in the back cover of the Bible, I figured the next between-the-covers was in the front.

I pulled the Bible out. My heart was banging so hard I thought someone might hear it. Luckily,
Narnia
was in the middle of a loud battle. I put the Bible on the window seat, turned my back so Ben couldn't see, and opened the book. Inside the front cover was another slit in the leather. I
poked a finger inside. I felt paper. Trying to pull the paper out, it started to rip. I opened the slit wider. I could see a narrow stack of pages. I carefully pulled them out. They were from a small book. The top page read
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I slid the page aside. It only got weirder.

Above “Chapter 1” there was a note scrawled in my father's shaky writing.

My eyes shot over the first sentence of Chapter 1.

On the bottom of the first page of
Huckleberry Finn
was the first clue. The “hunt” in “hunted” was highlighted yellow. I flipped the page. On the next page, “er” in “Huckleberry” was highlighted. Put them together and they made
“hunter.” Maybe that was me, the treasure hunter. Whatever, it didn't mean much. I went back to the start of Chapter 1 and started reading.

I didn't get far before I realized I didn't like the story. The language was kind of hillbilly, and the kid telling the story, Huck Finn, seemed like a loser, starting on page one. I mean, he believes everyone lies, and he doesn't even think it's bad. Okay, I wasn't one to talk about lying, but at least I knew it was bad. Huck also smoked, wanted to go to “the bad place” (to hell instead of heaven), and said the N-word like some people say “like.” On page six he says the N-word seven times. And Huck wasn't just a bad character; he was so fickle his nickname could've been Switchback. I mean, one minute he believes every stupid idea Tom Sawyer puts in his head, like why they need to form a gang of murdering outlaws, and the next minute Huck's having deep thoughts about prayer and saying “there ain't nothing in it.”

All this happened in the first eleven pages. If you ask me, Huck was a total fred and a jerk. I got why
Huckleberry Finn
was a banned book. Mark Twain was a crappy writer and the story sucked. There's no way I would've kept reading if it weren't for my father and the clues I was supposed to find. And yeah, I was wondering if my father was a few links short of a full chain.

I kept reading. On page fourteen, I found the next clue. It was big. There was a highlighted part at the end of the chapter. It's after Tom Sawyer tells Huck about rubbing genies out of magic lamps, and how they make your wishes
come true. Huck does an experiment to see if there's any truth to it. The highlighted part was when Huck says:

Why were those words highlighted? The answer was on the next page. In the space above Chapter 4 my father had written a poem in his barely readable scrawl.

I knew a lot of lingo from moving around, but I'd never heard “geocache.” I knew about GPS; it was the navigation system we didn't have in our car, and never would because Mom said we already had GPS. Our “God Positioning System” she called it.

I was going to need some help. I tucked the
Huck Finn
pages in the Bible and turned to Ben. He was watching
Narnia
while bobbing his head to the music from his iPod. I tapped him on the arm.

He pulled out his earbud. “Wha'?”

“Do you know what geocache is?”

“Huh?”

“Geocache.”

“Geocaching, sure, dude. It's how you get techies who are paler than vampires to go outside and catch some rays.”

“Seriously, what is it?”

“Why do you wanna know?”

“I just read about it.”

He glanced at the Bible on the seat. “Geocaching in the Bible. Never knew.”

I laughed. “No, no, in another book.”

“Geocaching is treasure hunting for science geeks,” he said. “But they don't find treasure, they find worthless stuff, like key chains and other junk.”

“How does it work?”

“They go to a website, get the longitude and latitude coordinates of”—he air-quoted—“a ‘geocache' that someone has hidden, and they use a GPS device to wander around till they find the coordinates and the cache. It's usually a can with some trinket in it. Then they scurry back to their computers, go online, and brag about their find.”

“Sounds totally lame,” I said, trying to seem disappointed.

“Totally. Any more questions? Secret of the universe? Why God hates us?”

“No, that's it. Thanks.”

He jammed his earbud back in.

I figured he might watch me after that. I didn't want him seeing the
Huck Finn
pages and asking questions. I waited until he was back into the movie and his music, and reopened the Bible to the
Huck
pages.

I reread my father's poem and it made more sense. He was telling me to get a GPS device and use it to look for a geocache. That was how he'd hidden the bad book. But if GPS was going to be my “genie” and lead me to the treasure, there had to be more clues. One of the poem's last lines said, “Read
Huck Finn
to map and measure.”

I flipped through the rest of the pages. I found another highlighted word: “can.” A few pages later, the “sus” in “missus” was highlighted. “Can” and “sus” didn't make any sense. Then I remembered how I'd put “hunt” and “er” together. “Can” and “sus” together made “cansus.” Kansas. It only took a second to switch gears. My father wasn't calling me a hunter. He was pointing me to a town: Hunter, Kansas. The treasure he wanted to give me, the bad book, was there.

Just one problem: the bus was headed east on I-70, across Missouri, away from Kansas. And another: Hunter could be a big town; a book could be anywhere. If geocaching was like Ben said, with longitude and latitude, there had to be more clues.

I kept flipping pages. I found highlighted letters, numbers, syllables, and punctuation. I wrote each one down in the Bible. They added up to
N 39 14.011 lat, W 098
23.679 long.
“Lat” and “long” had to be short for “latitude” and “longitude.” They were the exact coordinates in Hunter, Kansas, of where my father had hidden the book!

Back to mondo problem #1: I was getting farther away from Kansas. And new, mondo problem #2: I didn't have a GPS device, much less know where to get one or how to use it.

I was at a fork in the trail and had to choose a track. Take the safe one: go to Bible camp, go home, save up till I could fix my bike, buy a GPS device, jump on my steed, and ride to Hunter, Kansas? Or take the gonzo track: leap off the bus, buy a GPS device with my camp money—if I had enough—and hitchhike to Hunter? I liked the gonzo track except for the hitchhiking. I'd heard so many horror stories from Mom, I thought hitchhiking was another word for suicide. And what good was treasure if I ended up being an organ donor in some pervert's trunk?

Then it hit me. Maybe God had something to say about it. I went for one of Mom's providence checks. I shut my eyes and prayed till I felt the Spirit. I opened the Bible, finger-planted on a page, and looked. I choked back a laugh. My finger touched a verse in Mark.
Honor your father and your mother; and Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death
. Talk about a weird sign. If I honored my father and ran away to Hunter, I'd dishonor my mom. If I honored my mom by going to Bible camp, and ignored my father and the inheritance he left me, I'd dishonor my father. If God was telling me anything it was
I'm on the fence, kid. Your call.

I knew the track I had to take. It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment to make my move.

As I waited, I started reading
Huck Finn
, picking up where I'd stopped in Chapter 4. It was kind of freaky. Huck's father shows up out of nowhere, like my father had. But the similarity ended there. Huck's dad, Pap, is a drunken bum who beats his son. He kidnaps Huck and holds him prisoner in a log cabin until Huck escapes, and then Huck fakes his own death so nobody will come after him. I wasn't going to fake my death, but I was going to make sure nobody came after me.

After
Narnia
ended, Brother Jeremy announced that we were stopping at a truck stop. He told us to buddy up with someone and stretch our legs. We were to stick with our buddy and return to the bus in ten minutes. Ben and I buddied up. When I grabbed my backpack, he asked me why I needed it. I told him I was carrying so much money I took it everywhere.

“You didn't take it to the bathroom,” he said.

“That's 'cause I knew you'd watch it for me,” I said. We got off the bus.

Inside the truck stop, I steered Ben to the DVD racks and told him I wanted to buy him a DVD for lending me his player. I gave him fifteen bucks and said I was going to the
restroom. When he brought up the buddy system I told him it was for little kids. He gave me a “whatever” shrug and went back to the DVDs.

I found a side door and slipped outside. In the parking lot there was an SUV with a tangle of bikes on a rear rack. I undid two straps and pulled down a Diamondback. The seat was too low; it didn't matter. As I ripped across the lot I was out of the cockpit and pumping hard.

My plan was simple. Find a small highway heading west and ride until I could do two things: (1) Buy a map and a GPS device, and (2) When I was far enough away, start hitchhiking.

I felt bad about nabbing someone's steed. I told myself there were so many bikes, and the car was so big and chichi, buying another Diamondback wasn't going to kill them. But it didn't make me feel better, or make me forget that I was busting another commandment: Thou shall not steal.