by Brian Meehl
As Sloan turned onto it, I looked for a house with no vehicles in front and that wasn’t boarded up. I pointed to a paint-chipped house near the end of the street. “That’s it.”
We stopped in front of a rusty mailbox. The door was flapped open and the box was jammed with uncollected mail. I got out and shouldered my backpack. “Thanks a ton for the ride. I really appreciate you going so far out of your way.”
He broke into a friendly smile. “Right now nothing’s out of my way. Sometimes you just go where the road leads.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling back. “I know what you mean.”
He nodded toward the house. “I hope your dad catches a miracle.” Then he glanced at the mailbox. “And gets the chance to catch up on his mail.” He extended his hand. “Good luck, Billy.” I shook it. “Enjoyed your company.”
“Me too.” My cheeks went hot. It was one of those totally bozo things that had a way of jumping out of my mouth. Did “me too” mean I enjoyed my own company or his?
As Sloan turned the camper around at the end of the street I made a big deal of pulling all the mail out of the mailbox. I waved as he went by. The second the camper disappeared around the corner, I stuffed the mail back in the box.
I pulled out my GPS, turned it on, got satellite, and thumbed to the distance and compass screen. I was four-tenths of a mile from the cache. I knew from the manual that the electronic compass was only good if you were moving. I started walking, and the arrow swung to the right. I walked back to Main Street and followed the compass north. The distance clicked down to 0.2. I thought I was going to walk right out of town, but the arrow started moving right again.
The blast of a horn made my heart almost rocket out of my chest and explode over Hunter in gooey fireworks. My eyes shot up; I dodged a huge harvesting machine hogging the road. It was my first lesson in geocaching: eyes-onscreen-not-on-trail gets you buried but no treasure.
I kept walking till the compass arrow pointed dead right, to a patch of green with a carved stone sign: HUNTER CITY PARK. The GPS distance number was down to several hundred feet. Walking into the park, the feet clicked down like crazy.
I knew from the manual that the GPS was only accurate to about thirty feet; inside that the satellite pinpointing could get blurry. The other problem was the tree cover in the park. It could mess with the satellite reception. I kept losing the signal and having to walk around till I picked it up again. The closest I got to the waypoint, where the cache was supposed to be, was in the middle of a grassy area. I couldn’t believe my father would have actually buried the bad book. It would’ve been way too hard to find, and books don’t do well underground.
I went over to an old wooden merry-go-round, sat down, and got out my Huck Finn pages. I wanted to double-check to make sure I’d entered the exact coordinates that had been highlighted in the pages. As I flipped through the pages, I accidentally dropped the last one. The wind started blowing it across the grass. I chased it down and stepped on it.
Lifting it up, I thought it was the first page because my father’s scrawly handwriting was on it. But it wasn’t his first poem. It was a second one, written on a page I hadn’t read: the last page of Chapter 11. I read the poem.
When Huck slips into girls’ attire,
Things really begin to misfire.
He’s such a mess as a miss,
You can’t trust ’im to take a piss.
He would forget to take a seat,
But stand and shoot like Piss Pot Pete.
So look where genders do part ways,
To find out where your treasure stays.
I didn’t have to finish the part where Huck dresses up as a girl to know my father was giving me a major clue. So look where genders do part ways/To find out where your treasure stays.
I looked up and saw a small white building across the park. I ran over to it. There were two doors, marked MEN and LADIES. Padlocks were on both doors. I circled around the building. There was nothing that would hide a book. I checked the GPS. I was twenty feet from the geocache. It had to be here somewhere. I looked up. The building’s roof was flat. Of course, it was on the roof!
I found the nearest tree and monkey-climbed the trunk. The roof was covered in crappy old leaves, nothing else. I jumped down. The bad book had to be inside one of the restrooms. I had two options: (1) Go find whoever had the keys and explain why I needed to get inside, or (2) beg, borrow, or steal a bolt cutter.
I banged my back against one of the doors, slumped to the ground, and cursed. Why would my father hide it in a place that might be locked up? Why would he force me to bring someone else in on the treasure hunt or break the law? It didn’t make sense.
As I sat there fuming, something in a nearby wall of trees and brush caught my eye. A patch of gray. I stood up and walked toward it. I pulled back a branch. There was more gray. It was some kind of wooden shed. The door was gone. I pulled back another low branch and spotted two strange shapes: whitish ovals, like horseshoes. Then I realized they were old toilet seats on open boxes.
I’d seen them in farmyards before but never up close. It was an outhouse, a two-seater. It was the park’s men’s and women’s restroom from another era. It was where “genders part ways” and “treasure stays.”
I didn’t waste a second wondering about the rules and regs of using a two-seater in another century. I grabbed a stick, cleared the spiderwebs curtaining the door, and stepped inside. Deep shadows filled the corners but I could see shapes. There was a thick beam above the toilet bench. Nothing on it but dust. I spun around. Nothing in the lower walls. I looked up at the support beam above the doorway. An odd-shaped box sat on the beam. I pulled it down, feeling its cool metal. I shook it. Something rattled inside. It felt surprisingly light. Maybe the bad book wasn’t as thick as I’d imagined it.
I took the box outside, into a splash of sunlight. It was an old ammo can from the army. I unclipped the lid. Inside were three plastic ziplock bags. I knelt on the grass and pulled them out. Inside one were some twenty-dollar bills. Another held a small plastic toy: a raft with Jim steering and Huck fishing from it. The last bag held a small bundle of pages, beginning with Chapter 12.
My insides ricocheted off one another. I was thrilled I’d found the cache my father had planted; I was crushed that the only book was more Huck Finn. It was like Christmas when you open a present and it’s not what you’d wanted. I’d expected my treasure, my inheritance. But I’d gotten some pages from an old book, some money, and a kid’s toy instead. At least the money would buy the lunch I’d totally forgotten about.
I took the bags to a picnic table and opened the one with the pages. I turned the first one over. On the flip side was a new poem my father had scribbled.
Wondering why such a place
Is waypoint one in your chase?
It’s just because, from where I stand,
I do not know where you began.
So I did choose the Midwest middle
In which to plant your next riddle.
From our nation’s belly button,
You pick more Huck, no homebound glutton.
That was why he’d picked Hunter, Kansas. It was at the center of the huge circle where he thought I might live. He’d only been off by one state and a few hundred miles.
I started flipping through the new Huck Finn pages. The first highlighted words were “St. Petersburg.” After that came four highlighted words and syllables: “call,” “oar,” “add,” and “o.” I put them together. “Call-oar-add-o.” Colorado. Maybe that’s where my father had lived, and where my treasure was. St. Petersburg, Colorado.
I had to keep going west. But how far? I went through more pages and noted all the highlighted letters and numbers. They added up to N 40° 33.183 lat, W 102° 49.146 long. I held down the GPS’s thumb stick to set a new waypoint. I entered the coordinates and clicked on Goto. The distance to St. Petersburg, Colorado, flashed up: 241 MILES.
8
Packin’
I walked out of Hunter and tried to thumb a ride. After a half hour, in which two vehicles blew by me, I spotted a white puffy thing in the distance. It was either a camper exactly like Sloan’s or the same one.
One of the cool things about wide-open spaces is that when you see someone you know coming your way, you have plenty of time to make up a story about why you are where you are and not where you said you’d be.
Sloan pulled to a stop and stared at me with a curious expression. “What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked back.
“Alright, I’ll go first,” he said. “When I was looking for the geodetic center of the U.S.—”
“Did you find it?”
“No, it’s on someone’s ranch, and you can’t go there unless you do a song and dance to get permission. Anyway, something kept bugging me. The magazine on the top of the mail in your dad’s mailbox was Glamour. I didn’t picture your dad as a Glamour man, so I thought maybe he wasn’t there anymore and that was someone else’s mail piling up.”
“You’re right,” I said. “He wasn’t there anymore.”
“Did he go to the hospital?”
“No. I asked one of his neighbors and they said my uncle came and got him. He took my dad to his house in Colorado.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
After a pause, he asked, “Are you going to Colorado or back to Columbia?”
“I’m not sure. First I wanna get back to the interstate and get something to eat.”
He offered me a lift and I gladly took it. As we drove south he must’ve caught me sucking up the peanut butter smell coming from the back of the camper because he suggested I make a sandwich. I didn’t hesitate. It was fun trying to keep the peanut butter and jam jars from sliding off the counter as we drove. I took my sandwich up front; it was the best PB&J I’d ever eaten.
When I was done, I told him I’d made up my mind. I was going to Colorado.
He glanced at his cell phone on the console. “If you’re going that far, don’t you think you should let your mom know?”
“Last time I tried she still hadn’t gotten a phone.”
“That was a few hours ago.” He pushed the phone toward me. “I’m sure she wants to know you’re safe.”
“What makes you sure I’m safe?” I asked, trying to change the subject. “Colorado’s a long ways. Anything could happen.”
“True,” he said. “But you’re safe for now, ’cause I’m packin’.”
The hairs on my neck prickled. “You have a gun?”
“Of course.” He slipped off his shades and gave me a sketchy look. “Doesn’t every black dude? Wanna see it?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
He waved a hand at the glove compartment. “Go ahead. It’s in there.”
My fingers were sweaty as I pulled the compartment handle and it dropped open. There was no flash of silver or black steel. There was just a worn book. “It’s a Bible.”
He laughed at his twisted joke. “That’s right. You’re packin’ and I’m packin’. It’s the only weapon I’ll ever need.”
I shut the glove compartment harder than I meant to. “Why’d you do that?”
“You mean freak you out?”
“Yeah.”
He slid his sunglasses back on. “I was checkin’ you for coolant.”
“Coolant?”
“Yeah. You gotta check a radiator to make sure it’s got enough coolant. You gotta check a person to see if he’s got cool.” He smiled. “You got it.”
“Thanks. But why do you care if I’m cool?”
“ ’Cause if I’m gonna drive someone west the rest of the day, they gotta be cool.”
“You’d do that?”
“Like I said before, right now I’m just going where the road leads.”
I didn’t exactly know who I was riding with, but the way I looked at it, it didn’t matter. If there was one thing I’d learned in those past few days it was this: you can ride with someone all your life and not really know who they are.
9
Busted
I borrowed the road atlas Sloan had in his door pocket and looked in the index for St. Petersburg, Colorado. It wasn’t listed. St. Petersburg had to be so tiny, it wasn’t on the map. I noticed the latitude and longitude on the edge of the Colorado map and matched them up with what I could remember of the numbers I’d found in the new set of Huck Finn chapters. St. Petersburg was somewhere in the northeast corner of the state.
After we got back on I-70, the rumpled quilt of field and rangeland began to smooth out. We were almost to the town of Hays when we stopped for gas. Pulling into a big truck stop, Sloan stopped at the pump farthest from the mini-mart and restaurant. He handed me some cash and asked me to go pay for the gas. I wondered why he didn’t use a credit card, and why he wanted me to go inside, but I didn’t ask. I had other things to worry about.
I looked up through the windshield. A security camera pointed down at the camper. I didn’t know how hard the police and Mom might be looking for me. I pulled my baseball cap out of my backpack and slipped it on. Heading for the mini-mart, I walked toward a woman gassing up her pickup. She stared at the camper. I looked back. Sloan had put on a cowboy hat.
When I passed her, she checked me out, too. For a second I worried she might’ve seen my picture on the news. But I was three hundred miles west of Independence. TV stations wouldn’t be showing my picture that far away. Then I realized she was checking us out because we made a weird pair. In western Kansas, a black dude and a white kid traveling together probably wasn’t an everyday event.
I gave the cashier the money. When I got back outside, I was glad to see that the lady was gone. But her pickup still stood at the pumps.
While the camper guzzled octane, Sloan gave me a handful of change. “My cell’s not getting a signal. Go find a pay phone and see if you can get through to your mother.” I didn’t want to call her, but it seemed like he wasn’t giving up till I did. “Don’t forget my change on the gas,” he shouted as I went back inside.
I found a pay phone and dialed 411. Luckily, there was still no listing for Mom. But it was beginning to seem weird. I mean, Sloan had a point. If she was worried about me, why didn’t she have a phone yet? I’d been a runaway for over a day.
I heard a TV in the walkway to the restaurant. I went over to make sure they weren’t showing me on it.
The TV was turned to a sports report. It showed baseball highlights as a sportscaster rattled off scores. Then a picture of a ballplayer flashed up on the screen. The sportscaster called him “Ruah Branch” and said that he’d been put on the “fifteen-day DL,” whatever that was. The player’s weird name caught my attention, but it was his picture that froze my blood. It wasn’t the red cap with a big C on his head. It wasn’t the long dreadlocks spilling out from under the cap. It was the smile splitting his face. I’d been seeing that smile all day.
The TV cut to a commercial.
I jumped as a hand hit my shoulder. It belonged to the woman with the pickup. Her leathery skin was bunched up around a tight smile. “Havin’ a nice vacation, sonny?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I stepped back, pulling away from her hand. I figured she’d scoped the Pennsylvania plate on the camper.
“That’s a smart RV you boys got.” She hitched a thumb behind her. “Is that your big brother drivin’ it?”
“No, ma’am,” I answered with a half laugh. She wasn’t going to catch me on that one. “We’re not exactly the same color.”
Her smile bent tighter. “You don’t say. If he’s not kin”—her head cocked—“who is he?”
It was creepy how she kept asking questions. I swallowed to buy time.
“He’s my coach, my baseball coach,” I tried to keep my voice calm and cool. “He’s taking me to Bible baseball camp.”
Her eyes ratcheted open. “Bible baseball camp? What’ll they think of next?”
“I dunno, ma’am. I gotta go.”
Her hand shot forward onto my shoulder again. Her grip was as tight as her smile. “What position do you play?”
I was no baseball expert, so I didn’t take her bait. “A little of everything.”
“You pitch, too?”
“A little of everything,” I repeated, wiggling out of her grip.
She eyeballed my long arms. “With those arms, I bet your fastball hits forty miles an hour.”
I forced a smile. “On my best days, yeah.”
Her look told me I’d fallen for the bait anyway. Her eyes gleamed with excitement. “You’re no ballplayer, and he’s no coach. I know who he is.”
I was done being nice. I dodged around her, pushed open the door, and jogged to the camper. “Sloan” was behind the wheel with the motor running. I jumped in. “I know who you are,” I blurted, “and so does someone else!”
His reaction blew away any chance he really was Sloan. He threw the RV in gear and took off.
I looked back and saw the lady come outside. She was dialing a cell phone. I didn’t know if she was calling the police about me, or some friend to say she’d just gassed up next to a star baseball player.
“Jump in the back,” he ordered. “See if anyone follows.”
Watching out the back window, no pickup or flashing police car came after us. The camper swerved, and the inter state slid away as we took an exit.
I went back up front. “Where are you going?”
“A little evasive action,” he said. “Neither of us wants to get caught, right?”
“Who wants to catch you?”
“Fans. They can be brutal.”
“You really are Ruah Branch?”
“Unfortunately, yeah.”
At the top of the exit ramp he took a left, heading south. It wasn’t the direction I wanted to go, but I wasn’t about to argue. When your getaway driver goes off trail, you go with him till you’re in the clear.