You Don't Know About Me

by Brian Meehl

  I packed some clothes for camp. I got into bed and shoved the leather Bible, with the DVD back in it, under my pillow. It wasn’t to soak up verses in my sleep or anything like that. I was worried Mom might steal it.

  The amazing thing about the Bible is that it’s no regular book; it’s God’s Word. So when you stick it under your pillow, the Word is going to invade your brain whether you like it or not. The part that crept into mine was from Job, where Job plops down on a dung heap and wishes he hadn’t been born. God hadn’t exactly stripped me of everything and covered my body with boils, but I knew how Job felt. I wished I’d never been born.

  To stop feeling sorry for myself I asked WWJD? What would Jesus do? A handful of answers wormed out of the Bible and into my mind. The juiciest one was when Jesus is setting the Pharisees straight. If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

  If Christ’s gospel of love starts with hating your family and your life, then Jesus was truly my savior. I was ready to Son-up and walk in His Way.

  Note to the Lord #2

  T.L.,

  You made me a bastard. When I opened my Bible to find what You say about bastards, here’s what I found.

  A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord (Deuteronomy 23:2).

  Let me see if I got that. My children, my grandchildren, all the way to nine generations, won’t be going to heaven. Right?

  But the Bible also says that children can’t be punished for their parents’ sins, and that only the wicked will suffer for the sins they alone commit (Ezekiel 18:20).

  Now I’m confused. So I can’t be punished for my parents’ sins, but because my parents never got married, it still means that me, the bastard, plus my offspring for nine generations will be shut out of heaven. If both these things are true, then the only way all this can stack up and not topple over is in a riddle.

  THE RIDDLE

  If a kid can’t be punished for his parents’ sins, then why is the kid whose parents birthed him a bastard punished by being shut out of heaven?

  THE ANSWER (as far as I can figure)

  My parents weren’t the only ones who sinned. I did too. If human life, which is sinful, starts at the moment of conception, then so does sin. So sometime between the moment I was conceived and the moment I was born, I sinned in my mother’s womb, and my punishment was being born a bastard.

  Makes sense to me. Did I nail it?

  There’s just one thing I’m still wrestling with. What about the nine generations after me? I mean, You’re saying that, for whatever reason, they’re still going to be so sinful (in the womb or after) that they’ll be denied entrance to heaven too? So if I’m going to be the father of nine generations of sinners all going to hell, shouldn’t I do You and the world a mega-merciful favor and not have kids?

  As You can see, my prayer rug’s in a twist over this. I hope You can help me untangle it.

  Looking forward to Your answers, thoughts, Word slams, lightning bolts, or whatever zigzag loving-kindness You can spare.

  Your confused fan, then-now-forevermore,

  Billy

  1

  Between the Covers

  I woke before dawn and checked under the pillow. The Bible was still there. Questions and worries zipped through my brain like bats. Morning takes forever when you’ve got brain bats.

  After breakfast I tossed my backpack and suitcase in the back of the car. I vowed to be sullen and silent during the ride to the bus taking me to Bible camp. But, as Mom had proved with my father, the flesh is weak. One of my nagging questions jumped out. “If you weren’t married, and he was such a sinner, why did you take his name?”

  She sighed. She looked like she’d had a rough night too. “If I didn’t take his name, no one, including you, would have believed I was a widow, now, would they?”

  She had a point. “What’s it say on my birth certificate?”

  “Hayes.”

  “So when I get my driver’s license and have to show my birth certificate, I’ll be Billy Hayes?”

  “I don’t know.” A muscle in her jaw bunched up and relaxed like a frog’s throat.

  We drove the rest of the way in silence. Obviously, a name wasn’t any more solid than taffy. It could be stretched into whatever lie you wanted it to be.

  We stopped in a church parking lot near a big coach bus. When she hugged me goodbye it was weird; she felt like someone else. She was someone else. It was the first time I’d hugged Tilda Hayes.

  I got on the bus and passed the little kids in the front. I recognized older kids from Feast of Faith. They were wearing a variety of stuff, from hippie tie-dye to black goth. I wondered how much Mom had looked into this Bible camp.

  I found two empty seats, dropped my backpack by the window, and sat in the aisle seat. Then I saw a guy get on the bus; my stomach flopped. It was Ben. My gut coiled tighter as other guys came up behind him. Luckily, Case and the R-boys didn’t show.

  Ben said “Hey.” I said “Hey” back. He jammed his skateboard in the overhead, dropped his backpack on the floor, and plopped down in the seat across the aisle. I wasn’t going to bring up the other day if he wasn’t.

  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 ha
d 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.

  You don’t know about me without you have heard stories from your mother. Read these pages, follow the clues, and you will know me better.

  My eyes shot over the first sentence of Chapter 1.

  You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

  2

  Geocaching

  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:

  I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it: but it warn’t no use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that stuff was just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies.

  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.

  Huck might judge that Tom S. lies,

  But “genies” do live in da skies.

  They fly in “lamps”—more or less—

  Satellites with GPS.

  Get a device, your “iron ring,”

  Then geocache, that’s the thing.

  Read Huck Finn to map and measure,

  And Genie-PS to find your treasure.

  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.

  3

  My Getaway

  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.