You Don't Know About Me (8 page)

The thing about trail rides, even a roadie-run on stolen treads, is that the track is always going to throw you a few death cookies you don't expect. The first one hit me as I climbed the overpass above the interstate and looked back at the truck stop. A man in a Hawaiian shirt was running across the parking lot. He wasn't jogging like he'd forgotten his wallet. He was running like he'd seen a punk steal a bike off his SUV. He jumped in the SUV; it jackrabbited forward.

I topped the overpass and bombed the hill on the other side. There was no way I was going to outrun an SUV. I had to disappear before he hit the top of the overpass and
got me in his sights. I screamed toward a big service center at the bottom of the hill. The huge neon sign on the roof flashed
I-7-OASIS—FEED UP FUEL UP.

I carved around the back, power-slid to a big Dumpster, and popped off. I lifted the bike and pushed it over the rim of the Dumpster. The bike disappeared and crashed on the bottom.

I looked around. No one had heard it. My first instinct was to climb up and jump in after the bike, but it seemed too obvious. Hawaiian-shirt might find his bike, but he couldn't find me.

I spotted metal rungs running up the back of the service center. They led to the flat roof. I ran over and climbed so fast my backpack trampolined on my back. Halfway up, I saw the SUV tear past the service center. The driver hadn't seen me turn off behind it.

I swung onto the roof and scooted through the poles under the I-7-Oasis sign. I hunkered down behind the low wall and looked across the highway. I could see the truck stop on the other side and the bus. Kids were gathered around it. Brother Jeremy was pacing; once in a while he'd throw an arm at Ben. Ben just stood there, his head hanging. He might've been crying, because he kept wiping his face.

I suddenly felt meaner than Case and the R-boys put together. They'd only tacoed my front rings and given me a crappy name. Poor Ben was thinking that because he'd let me out of his sight, I'd been pervert-snatched and stuffed in a car and would soon be maggot meat.

A girl ran off the bus with a piece of paper. It was the
note I'd tucked in my seatback for someone to find. It was to Mom, telling her I'd run away to visit my father's grave in New Orleans, and to find out what I could about his life. I picked New Orleans because it would steer them away from Kansas. New Orleans was also a sinful place, the kind of place a Mark Twain idol worshipper like my father might've lived. Mom would buy it.

When Brother Jeremy finished reading the note, he put a hand to his face. I imagined it was getting redder by the minute. Then he looked in my direction.

I was so jittery I ducked behind the wall, like he could actually spot my cranium poking over it. I kicked myself for being so paranoid and looked over the edge. He was holding a hand to his ear, like he was on a cell phone. I hoped he wasn't calling my mom so soon.

I hadn't thought that part through. I'd been so mad at her I hadn't pictured her hearing that I'd run away. It made me feel like the meanest kid in the world. A couple nights earlier she'd told me I was the candle she wanted to shine on the world. And here I was, about to run away on a trip that might snuff her candle out. Even if I made it back to Independence, her worrying and fearing would carve her up big-time. With all that guilt carving
me
up part of me wanted to jump up, wave my arms, and scream,
Here I am! Ha-ha! Big joke! Fooled ya!

But I didn't, for another reason: the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Mom followed the rule; so did I. And if she could rob me of a dad for sixteen years, I could rob her of her little shining candle for a couple days.

A car gunned up to the gas pumps in front of the Oasis. It was the SUV. I watched the man get out and talk to a service guy: probably asking if anyone had seen a kid on a bike. He didn't look like he was getting the answers he wanted. He threw up his hands, got back in his SUV, and slammed the door.

As he drove back up the overpass, I noticed a group of people, a mom and three kids, standing in the parking lot. When the SUV reached the group the man gestured at them. They all got in and the SUV headed back toward the interstate.

I was right about one thing: they had enough money to lose a bike, and vacation on. It didn't make me feel less rotten about stealing some kid's steed. But it was too late to do anything about it. I was a liar, a runaway, and a thief. I'd sunk as low as Huck Finn.

The wail of sirens froze me. That's who Brother Jeremy had called: the cops. The sirens came from all directions. One cruiser came down the interstate and zoomed off the exit toward the truck stop. Another came up from behind the truck stop and was the first to get to the bus and Brother Jeremy. Then a third squad car came flying down I-70 from the other direction, took the exit under my nose, and shot across the overpass.

The first cop started talking to Brother Jeremy. When the other two got there, one spoke to Ben, and the other talked to the kids. They were probably getting a description. Ben might remember what I was wearing. Even though my clothes were in my suitcase, I'd stuffed a last-minute T-shirt in my backpack. I dug it out, stripped off my blue
button-down, and put on the T-shirt. With cops all over, grabbing the bike out of the Dumpster and riding west would have to wait.

It took an hour before Brother Jeremy stopped talking to the police, making phone calls, and filling out paperwork. The cops covered both sides of the interstate, looking around, talking to people and probably giving them my description. But they never checked the Dumpster, and they never came up on the roof. The bus finally took off for Bible camp. Now they had something else to pray about when they got there: the kid who ran away to sin camp in New Orleans.

I didn't take any chances. I stayed on the hot roof all day. Whenever I moved to stay in the shade of the sign, my sneaks would stick to the tar seams like gum. I didn't have any water, so I ended up with wicked cotton mouth. I fell asleep and woke up to the sound of a fly. It buzzed out of my gaping mouth. If I'd come to any faster I might've gorped it.

Whenever I needed to distract myself from being hungry and thirsty, I read more
Huck Finn
pages. But reading about Huck and the runaway slave, Jim, hanging out together on Jackson's Island only reminded me how much better they had it than being stuck on a tar roof in the middle of a Midwestern heat wave. They were on an island in the Mississippi River, and had all sorts of berries, food, and plenty of water. But then Jim did get bitten by a rattlesnake and got drunk as part of his cure. My hideout only had tar snakes that smacked at my sneakers. The Diamondback I wanted to get to was down in the Dumpster.

Every once in a while, I checked to make sure the bike
was still there. It was, and getting covered in layers of trash. My new plan was simple. In the morning, I'd wait until there was traffic, dig the bike out from the garbage bags and old auto parts, and start riding west on small highways. After I'd bought a map and a GPS device and gotten far enough away from the exit where I'd disappeared, I'd dump the bike and start hitchhiking.

That night, by the glow of neon, I started the last
Huck Finn
chapter I had. In Chapter 11, Huck goes sketchy. He disguises himself as a girl to try to find out what's going on in his hometown.

I got sleepy before I finished the chapter, but it made me say a little prayer before hitting the z-bag under the neon and the stars.
Lord, in my adventure over the next couple days, if I turn into a total weenie and put on a dress, have no mercy. Zap me with one of Your supernova-hot, jagged-judgment bolts.
I mean, I'd robe-up and become a Muslim before I'd put on a dress.

Clanging metal jolted me awake. Hearing the grinding whine of hydraulics I jumped up and ran to the back of the roof. The sky was graying up. The neon sign threw light on what was making the racket. The Dumpster was getting pulled onto a truck's skid-bed. It was stealing my bike! Okay, not
my
bike.

I grabbed my backpack and started down the ladder. Whoever was working the winch loading the Dumpster onto the skid-bed was on the other side of the truck. I jumped from the last two rungs, ran to the rising Dumpster, and threw my backpack over the side. I clambered after it and into the Dumpster. When the tilting Dumpster banged down on the skid, I dropped between a wedge of garbage bags. Something hard jabbed me in the back. I rolled and felt it: a bike pedal.

The winch went silent; so did I. The last thing I needed was the driver thinking I was a raccoon or a big rat in his Dumpster. Then it hit me there might be
real
rats in there with me. It smelled like rat heaven: a swirling cloud of french fries, fried chicken, and sour milk. Under the low idle of the diesel, I heard the driver walk around the truck, get in the cab, and shut the door. So far, no stowaway coons or rats, just me. The truck ground into gear and jerked forward. I wasn't hitchhiking, and it was no raft, but it would do.

I lay on my garbage-bag mattress and watched streetlights flicker off as the sky brightened. Whenever we stopped at a light, the smell of old food swirled into my nostrils. With each stop it smelled less old. Me and mom had never been so poor or so hungry as to go Dumpster dining, but I hadn't eaten in almost twenty-four hours, and my throat was so smack-cotton dry, I was ready to stick a straw in a mud puddle.

I tore open garbage bags and looked for food scraps. I found a take-out box of uneaten ribs someone had forgotten to take out, half a baked potato still in tinfoil—but no
sour cream—and a big Slurpee cup two-thirds full of soda. It wasn't the Feast of Faith doughnut spread, but it tasted like a feast. Besides, Dumpster dining was in the Bible. They didn't call it that—no Dumpsters back then—but they always left the fallen bits of the harvest in the fields for the poor people to “glean.” I told myself I wasn't Dumpster dining, I was doing some latter-day gleaning.

After we turned onto a highway, I cleared trash off the bike and pulled it to the top. I found my backpack; it had a black stain where it had come to rest against a box of discarded oil filters. I checked inside, and some of the waste oil had spread onto the leather Bible. The pages were now a mix of gilt-edged and oil-edged. I grabbed a rag and wiped off as much as I could. I'd broken enough commandments without turning the Good Book into the Gunk Book.

We turned off the highway and headed for a big landfill. I two-shouldered my backpack and got the bike into position. The truck backed up to the dumping area and stopped. I waited for the driver to get out and gave him a few seconds to walk around to the controls on the other side.

I must've waited too long, because the hydraulics suddenly kicked in. I lifted the bike and dropped it over the side. The Dumpster started to tilt. I hoisted myself over the edge and jumped backward, making sure to clear the bike.

“Jesus!” someone shouted in a high voice.

Between the voice scaring me and the weight of my pack, I landed off balance and back-stacked. More surprising was the driver on my side of the truck working controls.
Most
surprising was the driver being a she: a short woman with tattoos covering her thick arms.

“How long you been in there?” she asked, her eyes bulging.

I jumped up. “Just for breakfast.” I snatched the bike off the ground and popped on. “Thanks for the ride!” I hammered away. If she said anything it was drowned out by the sound of the garbage sliding out of the Dumpster.

I hit a highway called WW and headed away from the sunrise. I had to go west and needed a map of Kansas. I had no idea how far Hunter was. The first gas station I passed was closed. The sun was still shining up the rolling farmland.

After an hour, I rode into Columbia, Missouri. I stopped at a 24-Hour Petro Mart and bought a Kansas map. I took it outside and looked in the index for Hunter. It was a tiny town in the center of the state. I figured it was about four hundred miles away. It was a long day of hitchhiking or I could bike there in three to four days. As long as I didn't have to ride through Independence and get nailed by Mom, or picked up by the cops.

I went back inside the Petro Mart and asked the whiskery old man at the counter, “Do you have GPS things?”

“No,” he said, giving me a cockeyed look. “You'll have to go to Bass Pro on the north side of Seventy.”

As I was leaving he pointed outside at my bike. “You gonna ride that all the way to Kansas?”

My stomach wonked. What if the old guy had seen my picture on the news? Now he knew I was headed west and he might tell the police. “Nah,” I told him, “I'm just on a scavenger hunt with some buddies. I gotta find a Kansas
map and borrow a GPS thing.” It was a lie I thought Huck Finn might be proud of.

I crossed the interstate. The Bass Pro Shop was a giant wooden building the size of an airplane hangar. I rode past a parking lot filled with fishing boats and hid the bike behind the building. I didn't have a lock; the last thing I needed was someone stealing my stolen steed.

I found the electronics department and got a guy to show me their cheapest GPS device. I barely had enough money; it cleaned me out. I wasn't worried. No matter how long it took to get to Hunter, I wouldn't starve. Once you've eaten at McDumpster's, you know where to find a Crappy Meal.

Outside, the lot was filling up. Going back around the building, I did a panic skid in my sneaks. There was a police car cruising the lot like the cop was looking for something, or someone. I put it together in a flash. The old guy at the Petro Mart
had
seen my picture, called the cops, and told them I might be at Bass Pro.

I did a one-eighty and started the other way. I glanced back and saw the cop car doing its own one-eighty. Luckily, he hadn't checked behind the building and found my bike. But he was coming my way again. I had to hide. There were no ladder rungs leading up the side of Bass Pro. The only way to get on the roof was to go back inside and buy climbing equipment.