by Brian Meehl
I thought it was a great deal. I just had to make sure as I read the loose pages I didn’t let him see the yellow highlights or my father’s clue poems. After the fun we’d had last night, I trusted Ruah. He was a nice guy, but I had to remind myself: yesterday he’d turned out to be someone else; there was no telling who he might turn out to be today.
As we drove through the downpour toward I-70, the lashing rain smacked the windshield, and the wipers flung the water off Giff’s giant eye. I watched water stream off the outside mirror and jump onto the side window. Then it wound in a swirl, like a churning whirlpool trying to bore through the glass. Giff would have none of it. We were high and dry inside the great fish.
Ruah wouldn’t let me summarize the first eleven chapters of Huck that I’d already read. He wanted me to read it out loud from the beginning. I gave in when I realized I only had seven new Huck chapters from the geocache in Hunter. I didn’t want to run out of chapters to read. Then I’d have to explain why I didn’t have the whole book. So I started from page one.
I got as far as the middle of page three when I stopped midsentence. “By and by they fetched the—”
“What?” Ruah asked. “Fetched the what?”
“I can’t say it.”
“Can’t say what?”
“The N-word.”
He laughed. “It’s not like you’re using it, you’re just reading it.”
“I can’t read it.”
He gave me a cockeyed look. “C’mon. In your whole life, you’ve never said ‘nigger’?”
“No, I mean, yeah, I mean”—just talking about it had me all flustered—“I’ve never said it.” And I hadn’t.
He chuckled. “That’s a biiig problem if you’re reading Huck Finn. So lemme set you straight, dude. It’s not the words you speak, it’s how you speak ’em.” He gestured at the pages in my lap. “Now, go on. If we gotta stop every time we hit the N-word and give you nigger therapy, we’ll never get past chapter one.”
I found my place on page three. “By and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers …”
Saying it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
16
Colorado
I read as we plowed through the rain. It was still coming down hard when we hit I-70. I read the eleven chapters and started on the new ones from Hunter. The only time Ruah interrupted was when we got to the part where Huck stops two slave hunters from finding Jim on the raft. Huck fools them into thinking the raft is infected with smallpox and they won’t go near it.
“How bogus is that?” Ruah exclaimed.
I looked up from the page. “I dunno, I thought it was a pretty good trick.”
“Not the story.” He pointed up ahead. “The sign.”
I read the Colorado welcome sign as it shot by. WELCOME TO COLORFUL COLORADO.
“I mean, what are they saying? Colorado’s filled with people of color?”
I’d never been to Colorado. “Is it?”
Ruah looked at me like I had another walnut-sized nosepickium. “That was a joke.”
The sign reminded me of a game I played with all the welcome signs I’d seen moving from state to state. I’d rewrite them. I also needed a reading break. I only had a chapter and a half left before I ran out of pages, and then I’d have to make up something about not having the rest of Huck Finn. “Maybe the sign would be better if it was ‘Discover the Color in Colorado.’ ”
He nodded. “Cool, or how ’bout, ‘Colorado—You’re Not in Kansas Anymore.’ ”
I didn’t get it. “Is that a joke too?”
He slid me a look. “You’re kidding, right?”
I shook my head.
“ ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore.’ ”
“I know,” I said. “We just crossed the line.”
He pulled his head back like a turtle. “Are you telling me you’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz?”
“I’ve heard of it but never seen it. My mother says it’s part of the toxic culture.”
“What’s toxic about The Wizard of Oz?”
“There’re witches in it, right?”
“Oh, right, forgot about the witches. You folks don’t like witches and Wiccans, black magic and all that satanic stuff.”
“Exactly.”
“So, according to your mom,” he said, waving to the pages I was holding, “what’s toxic about Huckleberry Finn?”
I scoffed. “That’s a no-brainer. Huck lies, steals, smokes, and makes fun of Christianity.”
“Even worse, he saves Jim from slave hunters.”
I ignored his sarcasm. “Yeah, well, maybe that’s not so bad.”
“But he’s breaking the law.”
When he said that, it suddenly hit me. “He’s an antinomian.”
“A what?”
I explained how that’s what mom and I were, and how we answered to a higher law than the law of the land. We answered to the law of God. Huck, in his own way, was an antinomian too.
When I finished I realized the rain had stopped. Also, I’d forgotten how far St. Petersburg was into Colorado. I told Ruah I had to take a piss. I had put the GPS device in my cargo-shorts pocket so I could check it now and again.
In the bathroom, the GPS had St. Petersburg 93 miles away. The compass was pointing to about eleven o’clock, north-northwest. Pretty soon I needed to stop going west and head north.
When I got back to the front, we were on dry interstate in bright sunshine.
“You gotta keep reading Huck,” Ruah said, putting on his sunglasses. “I’m totally into it, and besides, you’ve learned to say ‘nigger’ with the best of ’em.”
I laughed at his joke this time. He was right. Saying “nigger” in front of him—reading it, anyway—had become just saying another word. I pulled out the chapter I’d been reading.
“By the way,” he said, “what’s with all the loose pages? Didn’t your Huck come with a cover?”
“Yeah, but I bought it used and it was falling apart.” I held up the pages, making sure the top one didn’t show any highlighting, and tried to make a joke of it. “You can’t judge a book by its cover when it doesn’t have one.”
He chuffed a laugh. Even better, he stopped asking questions. I read out loud for another five minutes till his cell phone rang. He picked it up and checked the caller ID. He dropped the phone on the console.
“It wasn’t my mom, was it?” I asked.
“No.”
He didn’t say anything else. He seemed lost in thought.
After a while, he said, “Oh man, sorry. I totally forgot about Huck.”
“That’s okay.”
“Do you wanna take a break or keep reading?”
“My voice is getting kind of scratchy.”
“Yeah, let’s take a break.”
It was weird that he suddenly wanted to stop. I mean, part of me wanted to stop because I was almost out of pages. But part of me wanted to keep reading, because we’d reached a part where Huck’s caught in a longtime feud between two families, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, and a new shoot-out was about to begin. I figured whoever had called Ruah must’ve upset him.
When we got to the Colorado Welcome Center, Ruah took the exit and pulled into a parking spot. “I gotta make a phone call,” he said. He got out and walked onto a grassy strip.
I checked my GPS. We were 91 miles from St. Pete. The compass was pointing almost straight north. I checked the map in Ruah’s atlas. All the roads up to northeastern Colorado were north-south. I could either cut north from the welcome center, or go another twenty to thirty miles west and then go dead north.
I watched Ruah pacing out on the grass. He was on his cell and slicing the air with his hand. Then he shouted at whoever was on the other end. “I’ll pull the trigger when I pull the trigger, okay? Until then, fuck off!” He hung up, turned his back, and stared at the sky.
I didn’t know if “trigger” was just a figure of spe
ech or the real thing. Whatever, it creeped me out. I figured it was time to find another ride.
I eased the door open and grabbed my backpack. As I slid out, Ruah was headed back to the camper.
“Billy,” he called, the anger totally gone from his voice, “you taking off?”
I shouldered my backpack. “Yeah.” He wrapped a hand around the outside mirror. “It sounds like you’ve got some stuff to deal with, and I can probably get another ride at the welcome center.”
He shot me his friendly smile. “I’m sure you can, but what about the rest of Huck Finn? I’m hooked on the story of a black dude trying to free himself from the chains of his time. You can’t leave me wondering what happens to Huck when the feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons is about to detonate.”
“Maybe they have a copy in the welcome center—one with a cover.”
He laughed. “I doubt that. Tell you what, if this is about what I think it’s about, and you’re freaked about my phone call, I’ll make you a new deal. I’ll tell you the twisted story of my call if you’ll ride a little farther and finish the chapter you were reading so I know what happens to Huck. After that, we’ll go our separate ways, and I’ll find my own copy of Huck.”
I still needed to go a few more exits west before heading north. I also figured the ride you know is better than the ride you don’t. Not that I completely knew who Ruah was, or what he was dealing with.
I was about to find out—most of it, anyway.
17
Trading Secrets
Back on the road, he told me about the phone call. “It was my agent, Joe Douglas. Remember how I said there are certain people I don’t want tracking me down? He’s top man on the list.”
“What does he want?”
“First, he wants me back in uniform and on the ball field. Every day I don’t play he loses ten percent of my take. He loses seven grand a game.”
I did the quick math. No wonder Ruah could afford a Trek. He could afford a truckload of Treks. “You make seventy thousand dollars a game?”
“Yeah. Next year, after filing for free agency, I could make a lot more. Which is the second thing Joe wants: to negotiate my new contract so he can keep raking it in. But I’m done with him. I wanna fire him.”
“Why?”
“That’s another story. The problem is I can’t fire him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got something on me.”
“What?”
Ruah laughed. “If I told you, you’d have it on me too. The thing is, if I fire him he’s gonna go public on me.”
“And if you don’t fire him he’ll shut up.”
“Now you’re getting the picture.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“Pretty much.” He thought for a moment. “It’s a little like the feud in Huck Finn between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons.”
“How so?”
“Baseball has its own little feud. The two sides seem to be the nicest, most civilized people in the world when they’re with their own. But put them together, and they wanna kill each other because that’s how it’s always been with the feud, no questions asked.”
“What feud are you talking about?”
He shrugged. “It’s a baseball thing. The point is, I’m tempted to ditch it altogether.”
“Ditch what?”
“Baseball. I’m thinking about retiring.”
I stared for a sec, not getting it. “Aren’t you too young to retire?”
“Yeah, but when you make seventy grand a game, you can retire anytime you want.”
We rode in silence. I could tell he didn’t want to say any more about what Joe Douglas had on him and why he was AWOL from baseball. But there was one thing that kept bugging me. “If you borrowed your friend’s phone so no one could track you down, how did Joe Douglas get your friend’s phone number and call you?”
He stared ahead. “The best I can figure is that Joe went online, pulled up the call record on my cell phone, which I left back in Cincinnati, and called every frequently dialed number till he reached me on my friend’s phone.”
“But if you had just let him call, and didn’t call him back, he never would’ve gotten to you.”
He shot me a look. “True.”
“So if you didn’t want him tracking you down, why did you call him back?”
He chuckled. “You’re getting too good at this, detective. Like I said yesterday, life would be a bust without secrets.” He nodded toward the pages sticking out of my cargo pocket. “Now how ’bout finishing the chapter so we can find out what happens to Huck in the feud.”
I read the last few pages, about a bloodbath between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons. Huck feels terrible because it began after he delivered a note hidden in a Bible. A bunch of people get killed, Huck escapes and reunites with Jim, and they head back down the river on the raft. At the very end, Huck says:
I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
There was another clue poem from my father scrawled at the bottom of the page, but I didn’t risk reading it. Ruah might’ve seen me.
Ruah didn’t say anything for a long time. The weird thing was how he didn’t ask me to keep reading. It’s almost like he knew I was out of pages, that there were no more in my pocket.
Finally, he said, “Alright, I coughed up a secret and told you why I’m on the run. Now I’d like to ask you something.”
I tensed up. But what he said was true. He’d told me about his agent and being blackmailed, even though he wouldn’t tell me what his agent had on him, or what the feud in baseball was about. I figured I’d do the same: tell him something but not everything. “Okay,” I said, “ask away. But I may not be able to answer.”
He pointed at the pages I’d read. “What’s with the yellow highlights?”
I pulled the pages closer, but it was too late. His eyes had been better than my lame attempts at hiding the highlights.
“You told me you bought it used. So someone must’ve read it and marked it up,” he said. “What do you think all the highlighting’s about?”
I thought on it, just like Huck was always doing. Since Ruah was a multimillionaire, it didn’t seem likely he would muscle in on my treasure hunt and try to steal the bad book. I mean, in four or five baseball games he made what my father said the book was worth.
So I told him how the pages were from my father, and he was the one who had marked them up. I told him the highlights were clues to towns and coordinates. I showed him my GPS, told him about how I was using it to geocache, and that it was going to lead me to a rare book my dad had left me. And that’s what I was hoping to find in St. Petersburg.
He was fascinated by all of it. At one point he said, “Man, I thought I had secrets!”
Then he asked a bunch of questions that made me tell him about getting the Bible with the DVD in it from my father. I told him how I’d never really met my father, but now it was too late because he was dead.
But I didn’t tell him about being a bastard, and I didn’t tell him about the bad book being some sequel to Huck Finn. I trusted Ruah, but not that much. And besides, if he wasn’t going to tell all neither was I.
When he was done asking questions, he said, “If you want a ride to St. Petersburg, I’m good for it.”
I looked north. There was nothing but wheat and rangeland, not a farm, a house, or a vehicle in sight. Looking at the vast emptiness between me and St. Petersburg I did a little rewrite. The ride you have sure beats the one you may never get. “That would be great,” I said, grinning. “Thanks.”
“There’s just one problem.”
“What?”
“You haven’t told me where it is.”
I pulled out my GPS and turned it on. The compass a
rrow was now pointing north-northeast. “We just passed the turn north.”
Ruah took the next exit and we backtracked.
18
Bad Samaritans
As we drove north on Route 59, the road was more deserted than western Kansas. A sign said COPE 27 MILES.
I checked my GPS. “After Cope it’s another sixty miles, and St. Petersburg isn’t on the map.”
Ruah gazed at the empty road. We hadn’t passed a vehicle yet. “Hitchhiking this might’ve been tough.”
“I could’ve found a bike and ridden to St. Petersburg in a day.”
“Yeah, you could’ve.” Ruah patted the dashboard. “But then Giff would’ve never swum across the Sea of Nothing.”
After Cope, we kept heading north, through rangeland scattered with islands of pale green grass. It was so wide open and treeless it actually began to look like a rolling sea.
When my GPS ticked down to 40 miles, a plume of black smoke rose on the horizon. We figured it was a brush fire or someone burning a field. As we came over a rise, about a mile away, we saw the flames. They were licking up from something on the road. It was a burning car.
Ruah slowed down. The car was engulfed in flames and just off the road. There were two men near it. As we got closer, they waved for us to stop. One of them moved to the middle of the road. Ruah slowed and started to pull onto the shoulder. When the man in the road came toward us, Ruah suddenly swerved back on the road and gunned it. Shooting past them, they yelled at us. The closest man hardly had any teeth. He punched the end of the camper as it sped by.
I whipped around to Ruah. “What’d you do that for?”
His eyes darted between mirrors. “It didn’t look right.”
“Their car was on fire! They needed help.” I gestured to the back. “And we have a fire extinguisher.”
“No fire extinguisher was gonna put that out. I didn’t like the look of ’em. It could’ve been a setup for a robbery.”
I started to say something and stopped. I mean, it was his camper.
He looked over. “Besides, with all that smoke, the police and fire trucks will be coming. The last thing we need is the cops asking you or me for ID.”