by Brian Meehl
He was right about the ID but I was still feeling guilty and annoyed. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. The nearest cop or fire truck could be fifty miles away.”
He handed me his cell phone. “Okay, be a Good Samaritan; call nine-one-one.”
I called 911 and told the operator about the burning car and the two men stranded on Route 59. I gave her the mile-post number we’d just passed. When she asked me if I was at the scene I said, “No,” and hung up.
“Feel better?” Ruah asked.
“A little, but I still feel like a bad Samaritan.”
“Neither of those guys looked hurt. Part of being a jock is going with your gut, and something told me not to stop. If it was wrong, I’m sure God will find a way to punish me. He usually does.”
It was a weird thing to say for someone who was blessed with being a millionaire baseball player. If T.L. punished me like that, in a few years I’d have money and bulging muscles and be a champion biker. It made me wonder if Ruah was on the run from more than his agent blackmailing him over a dark secret. Maybe the reason he didn’t want to talk to the cops was because he was a fugitive. I mean, what did he see that made him think the two men were bad guys? It takes one to know one, right?
Before I went off the paranoid deep end, I reminded myself that even if he was a fugitive it wouldn’t be the first time I’d traveled with one. Mom was a double fugitive: from the law and my father.
When we got to a town called Yuma we started following county roads north. The miles on my GPS clicked under 30. Whenever we came to an intersection we took whatever turn kept the compass pointing due north. At about 14 miles from St. Petersburg we headed up a road called RD XX. It was perfect. X marks the spot. When the GPS showed less than 10 miles the readout went to tenths of a mile and clicked down even faster. My heart was banging away at the same pace.
The compass arrow began swinging east. We were about there but it was off to the right. When the needle hit three o’clock we came to an intersection. A big sign pointed east: ST. PETER’S CHURCH 1 MILE. I could see a few buildings down the road. I asked Ruah to stop. I pulled out my last pages of Huck Finn and read out loud the clue poem my father had written.
Just as Huck took Bible in hand,
Causing dead boys to fill the land,
Take up your quest to holy St. Pete,
Then find letter boxes trim and neat.
Look for a family, the house of Huss,
Whose four little angels never fuss.
“Cramped up and smothery” they may seem,
Their feuds of life are but a dream.
Walk amidst their peace of mind,
And what you seek you will find.
19
St. Petersburg
We got out in front of St. Peter’s Church. There were only three houses in the place, so there weren’t a lot of “letter boxes,” or mailboxes, to check. The weird part was that my GPS was pointing out of town, and saying we were 0.22 miles from the geocache.
The first house, all closed up, had a mailbox pole but no box. The second house had a mailbox but no name on it. The third house, a farmhouse to the southwest, was where the compass pointed.
As we started walking toward the farmhouse a pickup pulled up. A farmer leaned out the window. “Can I help ya?”
“We’re looking for a family named Huss,” I said, and pointed to the farmhouse. “Do they live over there?”
He shook his head. “No, that’s my house.”
“Does anyone named Huss live around here?”
He shook his head again. “Not anymore.”
“Where did they go?” I asked.
“They moved.”
“Where?”
“Over yonder.” He jogged his head in the direction of his house.
I couldn’t see any other houses. “But you said they didn’t live here now.”
He stared at me as his tongue worked inside his craggy cheek. “I didn’t say anything about ‘live.’ They moved to where we all move one day.”
Ruah chuckled. “Are you saying that’s a graveyard up there?”
The farmer nodded. “Yep. And full of Husses.”
After he drove off, we walked to the graveyard. There were about ten rows of gravestones. Ruah started walking through them, looking for Husses. I checked my GPS. We were 60 feet from the geocache; the compass pointed toward the back of the graveyard.
“When your father was talking about ‘letter boxes trim and neat,’ ” Ruah said, “he must’ve meant gravestones, huh?”
“Yeah.” I followed the arrow and walked down the grass path that ran through the graveyard. The feet kept ticking down. A cell-phone ring made me jump. I turned as Ruah pulled out his phone and checked the caller ID. He didn’t answer it.
I went back to my GPS. I was 20 feet from the cache. I had to be on top of it. I looked around. A few feet away was a big reddish gravestone with HUSS carved on it. “I got it!” I looked around the gravestone for a geocache. “This can’t be right. There’s no cache, unless it’s underground.”
Ruah joined me. “You think your dad wanted you to become a gravedigger?”
I shook my head in frustration.
“What did the poem say at the end?” he asked.
I pulled out the page and reread it.
Look for a family, the house of Huss,
Whose four little angels never fuss.
“Cramped up and smothery” they may seem,
Their feuds of life are but a dream.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. Ruah pointed toward the back of the graveyard. There was a metal sculpture with a welded sign: GOD’S LITTLE ANGELS. Beside it were seven small crosses.
We moved closer. The silver-painted crosses displayed little nameplates. Each nameplate had a family name and BABY. The four crosses in the middle all had the same name: HUSS. I read the poem’s last lines again.
Walk amidst their peace of mind,
And what you seek you will find.
I looked at Ruah.
“You first,” he said.
I walked between the four crosses, toward the wire fence at the back of the graveyard. On the other side was overgrown grass. I leaned over the barbed wire at the top of the fence. Deep in the grass was a patch of metal. I reached down and pulled up a camouflage-painted ammo can.
Ruah watched from the other side of the crosses. “It looks like he didn’t wanna hide something in the graveyard and disturb the dead.”
We sat on a bench in the graveyard and unclipped the lid on the can. The geocache was like the one in Hunter. One plastic ziplock bag had some money, another had some more Huck Finn chapters, and the third had a trinket—actually, two trinkets: a plastic crown and a little net bag filled with plastic gold coins.
“What’s with the crown and the bag of gold?” Ruah asked.
“The last cache had a toy raft in it,” I explained, “and the chapters were all about Huck and Jim rafting down the river. Maybe in the new chapters, one of them gets crowned king and becomes filthy rich.”
I flipped through the chapters to find the next highlighted words. The first one was “Providence.”
Ruah stared down at it. “What’s that?”
“Probably a town.” I kept flipping until I found two highlighted syllables: “ut” and “aw.” They added up to “utaw.” I picked up my GPS, went to Find, Cities, and entered Providence, Utah. After hitting Goto, a number flashed on the screen. I wanted to throw the GPS over the fence. “Four-hundred-seventy-five miles? That’s on the other side of the Rockies!”
Ruah picked up the ziplock bag with the new Huck Finn chapters. “Looks like your old man wanted you to do some serious traveling, and some serious reading.”
“Yeah, but for all I know, Huck Finn is a thousand pages long and I’m gonna end up geocaching all the way to China.”
“Treasure hunting’s not supposed to be easy.”
I stared at the plains rolling west. The Rockies weren’t even in sight. I cou
ldn’t believe my father was sending me on such a wild-goose chase. I had no idea where it would end, or even if there would be some “bad book” waiting for me. For the first time I wondered if Mom was right. Richard Allbright was a crazy-ass sinner who would’ve made a crappy father.
Ruah broke the silence. “If you want, I’ll take you there.”
I stared at him, trying to figure out what was going on behind his dark glasses. “Why would you wanna do that?”
“You mean besides wanting to know if Jim or Huck becomes a king and strikes it rich?”
“Yeah, besides that.”
“Because you’re good company, and I need a front man.”
“A front man?”
“Until yesterday, no one recognized me with my dreadlocks shaved off. But the lady at the gas station pegged me, and last night the man at the campfire almost did too. As long as I keep driving and trying to sort things out, I need to stay out of sight. I could use someone to go into gas stations and grocery stores. If you’ll be my front man, I’ll drive you to Providence.”
I didn’t know what rule or law Ruah had broken for his agent to be blackmailing him. It didn’t matter. Mom had raised me as an antinomian, and right then whatever law of the land Ruah had broken was less important than one of God’s laws: Billy Allbright, honor your father.
“It’s a deal,” I said, reaching out to shake on it.
He held up his hand. “There’s one more thing.”
“There’s a catch?”
He nodded.
“What?”
He pulled out his cell phone, flipped it open, and punched three numbers. “Denver, Colorado,” he said into the phone, grinning at me. “Ever been to a major league baseball game?”
“No. What’s that got to do with—”
He cut me off as he got an operator who dialed him through to the Colorado Rockies box office. As he listened to recorded messages, he punched more numbers on the phone, then hung up. “We won’t be able to make tonight’s game, but there’s a day game tomorrow. Next stop, Coors Field.” He stood up and started out of the graveyard.
I threw the stuff back in the ammo can and started after him. “I thought you wanted to stay out of sight. A baseball game is hardly out of sight.”
“True, but I haven’t seen one from the stands in years. I’d like to see the game from where I first fell in love with it. Maybe it’ll help me decide between quitting or playing.”
“What if someone recognizes you?”
Ruah pulled his cowboy hat low over his face. “Hat.” He tapped his sunglasses. “Sunglasses.” He pulled a long face. “Frown. When Tiger Woods smiles—bing—everybody knows it’s Tiger. When Tom Cruise smiles—bing—everyone knows it’s Cruise. But if Ruah Branch never smiles”—he pulled his face even longer—“no one knows it’s him.”
I stared at his long, sad face. He really did look different.
“Do we have a deal?” He reached out a hand. “Huck, baseball, and the road to Providence.”
“Yeah.” I grinned. “We have a deal.” We shook on it and my insides jumped. It wasn’t from his boa-constrictor grip this time. I had a ride over the Rocky Mountains and to the next geocache.
20
Reset Buttons
After we found I-76 and headed for Denver, I started reading the new chapters of Huck Finn. Neither Huck or Jim becomes a king or gets rich. Instead, a couple of con artists, who say they’re a king and a duke, join them on the raft and do all sort of scams on the local yokels as they travel down the river. By the time we pulled into Chatfield State Park outside Denver, I’d read almost half of the twelve new chapters. I could’ve finished them, but I kept taking breaks to stare at the Rockies rising in the distance. They looked like a jagged saw blade running the length of the horizon. And the saw was flecked with white where patches of snow were stuck in its teeth.
After dinner we sat by the campfire and Ruah read a chapter of Huck out loud. As it got dark we decided not to read any more and save the rest for the long drive to Utah.
We talked about how the two frauds, the king and the duke, kept becoming different people. One minute one of them was a born-again pirate, the next they were Romeo and Juliet. In the chapter Ruah read they’d just become Englishmen and “long-lost relations,” as they tried to cheat a family out of its inheritance.
“It’s like they walk around with reset buttons,” I said. “And when they wanna become someone else they just hit their buttons.”
“Not a bad thing to have,” Ruah said.
“Especially if you’re using it to rob and cheat people.”
He stared at the fire. “What if you had a reset button to undo things—you know, reverse the clock?”
I wondered if he was talking about what his agent, Joe Douglas, had on him. But I didn’t ask because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know whatever secret Ruah was hiding. “Yeah, that’d be cool,” I said. “Whenever I said something dumb to a girl”—I poked myself in the forehead—“beep, I’d hit it. And once I knew it worked, I’d probably just hold it down—beep-beep-beep-beep-beep—until I’d rewound my entire life.”
“Until you were really born again?”
“Yeah.”
“Who would you wanna be reborn as?”
I started to say Billy Allbright for real, but I stopped. I didn’t want to get into my real name being Billy Hayes, being a bastard, and all that.
It’s almost like Ruah read my mind, because he said, “You don’t have to answer that.”
And I didn’t.
We watched the fire for a while. Then he said, “According to some Jewish people, humans really do have reset buttons.”
“Really?” My mom had told me that Jews believed a lot of strange things—not eating bacon, not driving on Saturday, ruining every boy’s first birthday by giving him a puppy cut—but I’d never heard of Jews and reset buttons. “Maybe they believe in a reset button ’cause they wish Christ never happened.”
Ruah laughed. “No, that’s not quite it, and their reset button’s not on their forehead.”
“Where is it?”
“The story, the way the rabbis tell it, is that before a Jewish kid is born, he knows the Torah by heart. But right before he’s born, an angel touches the baby here.” He poked his finger between his upper lip and his nose. “The angel’s touch leaves the little groove above your lip, and it makes the baby forget all his knowledge of the Torah. After that, the kid spends his lifetime relearning what he knew before he was born.”
“Yeah, but what about the groove above a Christian’s lip? How did it get there?”
“Maybe an angel does the same thing to Christians: they forget the Bible and have to relearn it.”
I scoffed. “Whatever, it’s a sketchy story.”
“What’s sketchy about it?”
“It says that first God makes you smart, then he makes you dumb.”
He shrugged. “That’s Old Testy for ya.”
“Old Testy?”
“God of the Old and New Testaments: Old Testy and New Testy. But the thing about going from smart to dumb isn’t just Old Testy; it’s New Testy, too. Paul says, If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.”
I didn’t say anything. I was too weirded out. I mean, I’d run away from a scripture-spouting mom, and who does God throw me into an RV with? A scripture-spouting dude. Whoever thinks God doesn’t do humor should be sent to hell for not having faith in the Hilarious Father. “How do you know all this stuff?” I asked.
“Before I signed to play in the majors I almost went to Princeton. I wanted to go into seminary.”
“Why did you pick baseball?”
“I can always go back to school.” He threw a log on the fire. “The story about the Jewish baby unlearning everything is how I feel about baseball right now. An angel hit me right here”—he poked his lip groove—“and took away my knowledge of the game. Now I have to relearn the game from scratch, starti
ng tomorrow, with sitting in the stands and just watching.”
It felt like he wasn’t talking to me; he was talking to himself, and whatever demons were carving trails in his head.
A cell-phone ring made us both jump. Ruah dug out his phone and checked it. Flipping it open, he got up and walked away from the fire, out of earshot. After a while he hung up, came back, and slumped in his chair. He looked like he was practicing his long face for the next day, or someone had died.
Someone had.
He told me the call was from his friend in Cincinnati, the one who’d loaned him the phone. The Cincinnati police had come to see his friend. They’d been contacted by the Colorado Highway Patrol because my 911 call about the burning car had been traced to his cell phone. “The Highway Patrol wanted to know who made the nine-one-one call,” Ruah said, “about a murder scene.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “What?”
“The two guys trying to flag us down had killed a man in the car, and set it on fire to make it look like an accident. After the nine-one-one call the cops showed up and caught ’em.”
“So if we had stopped—”
“Who knows. Fact is, we didn’t.”
His phone rang again.
“Who’s that?”
He checked it. “It’s the same number that tried calling in the graveyard this afternoon. Probably the Colorado cops. I didn’t answer then, and I’m not answering now.”
“We gotta tell them what we saw.”
“Sure, in time. But I’m not walking into a police station and making a statement now. They caught the bad guys. They can wait to hear from us.” The phone stopped ringing. A second later it beeped with a message.
He stared at the phone in his hand. “Right now the call log on this, past and future, is in the cops’ hands.” He looked up at me. “You know in Huck, when they touch a rattlesnake skin and it brings ’em bad luck?” He held up the phone. “This is our rattlesnake skin.”
He tossed the phone across the fire. I caught it before it hit me in the chest. “Take it down to the lake and throw it in,” Ruah ordered.
“Aren’t you gonna listen to the message?”