You Don't Know About Me

by Brian Meehl

  “I noticed, and I only got one good arm.”

  “I know how to drive,” I said. And I did—another advantage of moving so much: Mom let me drive on back roads.

  Ruah checked his mirror. “There’s no time to switch.”

  When I spun to see how close the trucks were, I caught my reflection in the outside mirror. I still had the bullet hole. The only vigilante who knew it was fake was King. “We’re not gonna outrun these guys, are we?”

  “Doubt it,” Ruah answered.

  “I got an idea.” I told Ruah what might get us out of this, just before a pickup roared past us in a cloud of dust. I jumped in the back and grabbed a blanket. A second later the camper skidded to a stop.

  I was on the couch, under the blanket. I scooched up on my elbows and snuck a peek out the windshield. I could see one pickup in front of us blocking the open gate in the brush fence. The other pickup was behind us. Two doors slammed.

  I pulled the blanket under my chin and pretended to shiver. The guy from the pickup behind us passed by the side windows. He was a huge guy, not much older than me, and looked like a football player.

  The other one, who came to Ruah’s door, I couldn’t see. His voice sounded young. “You’re not going anywhere, mister,” he told Ruah.

  “Not anymore,” Ruah said. “You boys have me blocked in pretty good.”

  The guy at Ruah’s window kept talking. “We want the kid.”

  “That’s who I came for too,” Ruah told him.

  “Who are you?”

  “I work for the hospital up in Boise.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I got a call to pick up a patient that needed emergency treatment. Normally, I’d come in an ambulance, but when it’s got a broken axle you come in what you can get.”

  The football player finally spoke up. “That kid’s not sick. We saw him yesterday. He was fine.”

  “Are you gentlemen familiar with how flesh-eating disease works?” Ruah asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘flesh-eating disease?’ ” the other guy asked.

  “I’m sure he looked fine yesterday,” Ruah explained. “But when flesh-eating disease breaks skin, and the patient gets a fever, things get ugly fast.”

  “This is bull,” said Football-guy.

  Ruah waved a hand at me. “Go ahead, take a look.”

  Football-guy leaned through the passenger window and stared at me. I made sure the blanket shook along with my shivering. His eyes squinted. “What’s on his head?”

  “That’s a flesh-eating lesion. He’s got a bunch on his body.”

  Football-guy backed out the window. “You mean he’s bleeding?”

  “He’s starting to. That’s why I’ve gotta get him to the hospital, where we can deal with the threat.”

  “What threat?” the other guy demanded.

  Ruah chuckled. “There’s a reason they call it FED.”

  “What’s FED?”

  “Flesh-eating Disease, of course. And any disease that likes to feed is contagious.”

  Football-guy jumped in. “That’s why we carry tire irons and bats.”

  Ruah nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose that might protect you, but anyone who gets hit with blood splatter—”

  “This is total crap,” the other guy interrupted. “Jimmy, grab the kid outta there and let’s go.”

  Jimmy looked at me, then the other guy. “Why don’t you grab him?”

  “Look, fellas,” Ruah said, “I’m just trying to do my job, but you guys have me outnumbered and outmaneuvered. If you want him I wish you’d take him, ’cause the longer we sit here the closer he gets to bleeding all over my camper.”

  There was a pause that went on forever. Then the guy I couldn’t see kicked the door hard. I flinched, went into a shivering fit, and let out a little groan of pain.

  “Mister,” the guy said, “we’re gonna cut you and that slab of plague back there a break.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy added, “there’s no way we’re gettin’ FED.”

  “I appreciate your kindness,” Ruah told them. “It’s probably the best decision you’ll ever make.”

  Jimmy squinted as his brain tried to process Ruah’s meaning. He gave up and settled for kicking the door like his friend. The two of them went back to their pickups and roared away, making sure to hit Giff with rooster tails of dust.

  I popped off the couch. “That was amazing!” I jumped into the passenger seat. Ruah didn’t look at me. His face was tensed up.

  “Yeah.” He turned on the wipers to clear the dust. “Our second dust storm in a week.” He looked over. His mouth did a little spasm of a smile. His eyes looked spent and sad. “Now take that damn thing off your forehead.”

  47

  Crossing Lines

  Heading to the highway that would take us north to I-84, Ruah grilled me about what was happening in the canyon. I told him about meeting the Potlatchers behind Kings, Burning Man, and going back to be in their movie until the Notus posse showed up to even the score.

  As we drove through Homedale, Ruah pulled over at a pay phone. “Go call nine-one-one and tell the cops what’s going on in the canyon.”

  “How are they gonna find it?”

  “All they gotta do is follow the smoke.”

  I called 911, but the operator cut me off. Some hikers had already reported the fire and trucks were on the way. When I told him it was more than a fire, he started asking questions I didn’t want to answer. I hung up. Back in the camper, I vowed that when I got to Portland, I’d check and make sure King wasn’t as bad as the murderers in Colorado and hadn’t turned Cave Sweet Cave into Grave Sweet Grave.

  The vow didn’t stop me from feeling bad about what had happened. I mean, the Potlatchers weren’t evil. Yeah, they were scam artists, but it’s not like their sins were all about greed. They stole, lied, and cheated for a cause. They said they wanted to make an un-movie and save people from some disease they called GLASSED. They weren’t the first in the world to do bad for what they considered good. The Bible’s full of people like that. Jacob lies, cheats, and steals his brother Esau’s birthright to the family property. Then Jacob becomes the father of Israel. And then there’s Christ. Jesus wasn’t exactly loving his neighbor when he grabbed a whip, lashed into the money changers, and whipped their asses out of the temple. So maybe Nico and Momi were bad, but not all bad. And even if they deserved a taste of God’s smite stick, it still made my insides chung every time I flashed on Nico getting kicked, or imagined what the men had done to Momi.

  As we drove, it wasn’t just big worries scratching at my mental door. There was one rodent of a thought that kept skittering through the cranial walls. Why wasn’t Ruah as pumped as I was about the awesome trick we’d played on the guys in our getaway? I was still catching air over it. So I asked him, “You know what made me think of the flesh-eating-disease thing?”

  He shook his head. “Not a clue.”

  “Remember how Huck kept the slave hunters away from Jim by telling ’em the raft was infected with smallpox?”

  “Right,” he said flatly. “It was pretty smart, Billy.”

  “Yeah, but what if it hadn’t worked? I mean, for a second there I thought you were gonna give me to ’em.”

  “I was playing it cool.”

  “But what if they still tried to take me?”

  With his good hand he reached behind the seat and pulled up a sawed-off baseball bat. “Even with one hand, I still swing a mean bat.”

  I laughed out of relief. “Okay, but how did you know so much about flesh-eating disease?”

  “I didn’t,” he replied. “I made it up.”

  “It was a great fake-out.”

  “It wasn’t a total fake-out.”

  I didn’t follow. Either he knew about flesh-eating disease, or he didn’t.

  He caught my confused look. “Hold the wheel for a sec.” I did and he dug his wallet out of his pocket. He handed it to me.

  “What’s this fo
r?”

  “Open it, go into the deepest right pocket, and pull out what’s there.”

  I pulled out a picture. It was of a white guy with dark wavy hair and a friendly face. What made him look extra friendly, and maybe funny, too, was a gap between his front teeth. “Who’s this?”

  “Jerome Silks. He was my first real boyfriend.”

  I stared at the picture. I had no idea what to say.

  Ruah went on. “Jerry died from AIDS. The way he went wasn’t much different than from flesh-eating disease.”

  Staring at the picture, I tried to come up with the right thing to say. If there was a right thing to say. I slipped the photo back in the wallet and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

  Ruah chuckled. “Sorry about Jerry, or sorry you asked?”

  “Him, of course.”

  He took his wallet and dropped it on the console. “Thanks.” After a moment, he chuckled again. “I’ll always remember Jerry for inventing a new Major League Baseball stat.”

  “What?”

  “He always told me I led the league in dishonesty.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The two of us had been together for over a year when he gave me an ultimatum. I could start being honest, come out of the closet, and we would stay together. Or I could keep lying, stay in the closet, and we’d break up. I chose the closet and the relationship ended. But we stayed friends.”

  Ruah stared ahead. In the late-afternoon light, his dark skin looked bronze. His face was statue-hard. It turned to molten lava as he spoke again. “A couple of seasons after we broke up Jerry got sick, real sick. I was traveling a lot, but whenever I got home I visited him in his apartment or at the hospital. Then he moved back to his apartment to die. Jerry’s parents came to see him but never when I was around. I never even met them. In the last few weeks, his folks moved in. They wouldn’t let me see him anymore. After he died, they even scheduled the funeral for a date I was on the road.”

  “Did you go back for it?”

  He shook his head. “When you’re in the closet, playing by ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ you don’t walk into your manager’s office and tell him the family matter you gotta go home for is your ex-boyfriend’s funeral. When they buried Jerry, I was in center field at Dodger Stadium, running down fly balls and bawling my eyes out.”

  I said I was sorry again, but I’m not sure he heard me.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I think if I had come out, my baseball career would’ve been over, but Jerry Silks would still be alive.”

  We drove in silence after that. I started thinking about the times I’d called him an abomination. I couldn’t deny it, part of me still believed it. But another part got to thinking about other abominations. Like what people do to each other. Like Jerry’s parents not letting Ruah see him when he was dying. Like having the funeral on a day when they knew Ruah couldn’t come.

  As I sat there, something started making me feel worse. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Then it hit me like an antelope leaping out of nowhere. The abomination done to Ruah had been done to me. The door to his friend had been slammed in his face. The door to my father had been shut my whole life. Ruah couldn’t go to his friend’s funeral because he wasn’t wanted. I couldn’t go to my father’s funeral because I never knew he was alive. Maybe those kind of things aren’t abominations to the Lord; maybe you don’t find them in the Bible. But they’re horrible just the same. They’re the abominable sin of letting a man freeze in the Desert of Cold Hearts.

  We crossed into Oregon. We were on such a back highway, the welcome sign was in rough shape. It was rusty, hung at an angle, and punched with bullet holes. It still managed to say WELCOME TO OREGON—THINGS LOOK DIFFERENT HERE.

  Neither of us said anything. I guess we didn’t feel like making fun of it, or trying to make it better. As I look back, I know why. Sometimes the truth is too true to be made fun of.

  I pulled out the last chapter of Huck Finn that I’d gotten in Notus and had already read on the playa at Burning Man. I read it to Ruah.

  At the end, Huck says something about a person’s conscience that summed up how I was feeling. Maybe it summed up Ruah’s feelings, too. Huck says a conscience “takes up more than all the rest of a person’s insides.”

  1

  S’mores

  As the sun dropped lower, we stopped in a town before heading to Farewell Bend State Park. I was still wearing the ghost-miner costume, so Ruah went into a store and bought me a pair of jeans, a couple shirts, and sneakers. He joked that if people saw me in ratty overalls and holey boots, the police might arrest him for child neglect or maybe white slavery.

  At Farewell Bend we found a campsite at the end of the lake. After being with the wacko Potlatchers, it felt like an old routine, getting back to how Ruah did things. As he started dinner I got a campfire going and cut marshmallow sticks.

  I watched dusk slowly push the last sunlight up the bare hills that surrounded the lake. The hills were so brown and pillowy they could have been named the Breadloaf Mountains. The fishermen on the lake were bringing their boats to the boat ramp. I liked seeing how each boat trailer splashed into the water, disappeared, caught a boat, and rose out of the lake in a gush of water. Even if the fishermen hadn’t caught a fish, at the end of the day they always landed “the big one,” their boat.

  After dinner, we got out marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars. When Ruah was s’mored out, he leaned back and checked out the stars. I made another one and gorped it down.

  Staring skyward, he said, “Remember how Huck and Jim wondered if God made the stars or if they just happened?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got another one for you. Did T.L. carve the Grand Canyon, or did it just happen?”

  I was sure God created the world, but if He’d done everything, right down to the Grand Canyon, I wasn’t sure He would’ve had time for His day of rest. And I was a big believer in days of rest. “I haven’t decided on that one,” I told Ruah.

  “Okay, you’ll take a pass.” He kept looking up. “Got one more. Jerry Silks—the guy whose picture I showed you—do you think he died of AIDS ’cause God was punishing him, or did it just happen?”

  I tossed my s’mores stick in the fire. “Why are you asking me about what God did or didn’t do?”

  He shrugged like all he was doing was asking my favorite color. “Just curious. But I’ll put a different spin on it. Do you think Jerry’s in Heaven?”

  I squinted into the fire. “I dunno.”

  He gazed back at the stars. “I know he’s up there.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “The Bible tells me so.”

  I almost laughed, and I would have if he’d been talking about anything but his dead friend. “There’s nothing in the Bible about gays going to Heaven.”

  “Not in those words,” he said. “But when I was killing time back in the Sunnydale Motel, I opened my Bible and reread the book of Jonah. That’s where I found out Jerry’s in Heaven.”

  “There’s nothing in Jonah about gays in Heaven.”

  “Yes there is, and no there isn’t.” The firelight lit up his big smile. “And I’m gonna tell you about it. You can hear it tonight, or tomorrow on the road; your call. It’s part of the all-the-way-to-Portland travel package.”

  In the past few days I’d had my share of blackmail. At least this was more like graymail. I let out a sigh. “If I gotta listen to your crazy ideas I might as well listen to ’em on a stomach full of s’mores.”

  He laughed. “As long as they don’t make you hurl.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, quick review. God tells Jonah to go preach to the Ninevites—Jonah runs away—gets swallowed by mondo fish—repents inside fish—prays for God’s full-on forgiveness—gets it—and goes and preaches to the Ninevites. But when the Ninevites do the same as Jonah—see their sinful ways, repent, and get forgiven when God pulls his wrathful punch on their city—guess who get
s all pissed off?”

  “Jonah,” I said, trying not to sound irritated by the fact that I hardly needed the SparkNotes on Jonah.

  “Right. Which makes him a hypocrite.”

  “I never heard anyone call Jonah a hypocrite.”

  “But he is. He accepts God’s compassion and forgiveness for himself, then he gets steamed when T.L. gives it to others.”

  “Okay, but that’s got nothing to do with gays in Heaven.”

  “But it does. The lesson of Jonah is that life’s journey, whether it takes you into a fish belly and back, to hell and back, or wherever and back, changes your view of the world, or it doesn’t. Jonah’s journey hardly changed him at all. At the end he’s pissed ’cause T.L. didn’t fire-’n’-brimstone Nineveh like He said He would. But God went on Jonah’s trip too, ’cause God is everywhere. And Jonah’s journey did change God.”

  “How?”

  “When T.L. answered Jonah’s prayer of repentance in the fish, it reminded God of His own capacity for compassionate forgiveness. Not just for one guy, but for a whole city. It reminded God that He doesn’t always ride the hard, straight line. Sometimes He zigs, sometimes He zags. The real meaning of Jonah is obvious: if T.L. can change His mind, and let compassion overrule wrath, so can we.”

  I didn’t know what that had to do with gays, but I didn’t say a word. I just let him cruise on.

  “As I was doing my Sunnydale Bible study, I realized the Jonah story was just an earlier version of the Christ story. T.L. gave His peeps the Jonah story, but a lot of ’em didn’t get it. So God did a rewrite. He gave us the Christ story and people finally got it: Christ chooses compassion over wrath. God can’t say it any clearer than when His Boy says, For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

  “But two thousand years later there are some Christians who still don’t get it. They want a hard-line, no-contradictions God. They run around screaming, ‘Give ’em wrath, Lord. New York deserves nine-eleven. New Orleans deserves Katrina. Gays deserve AIDS.’ They’ve turned Love thy neighbor into Loathe thy neighbor. You know what these latter-day Jonahs remind me of?”