You Don't Know About Me

by Brian Meehl

  Billy, if you haven’t finished reading it, please do. Afterward, feel free to sell it when and if you need the money. It’s presently worth $15,000 to $20,000.

  2. MY COPY OF THIRTY THREE YEARS AMONG OUR WILD INDIANS, by Col. Richard I. Dodge, along with the hundreds of notes handwritten in the book by Mark Twain.

  Billy, a book can liberate the one who reads it, and the one who writes it. Trapped in the bad book, in Twain’s notes, is the great writer’s ghost. You must set him free. You can do it in two ways. You can become a writer and finish the story Twain so brilliantly conceived. Or, you can ensure that the book gets to someone who will tell the story the world has been waiting to hear for over 125 years.

  3. One Regret

  I regret not learning a vital lesson from Huck and Tom. The lesson is this: if you insist on wearing God’s honest truth hour after hour, day after day, the time will come when the truth becomes a millstone around your neck. Huck and Tom know the importance of “letting-on,” of lying. They know an occasional falsehood can preserve a greater truth.

  Billy, my regret is a particular day I chose truth over falsehood. On that day, “letting-on” would have made a colossal difference in our lives. If only I had let-on to your mother that I still walked with Christ, she would not have left me, we would have been married, and I would have been your father. I didn’t let-on. I brandished the fiery sword of truth, and you and I were blinded to each other until—if there is a God—we shared some time together.

  My eyes teared up too much to go on. When I could read again, the last few paragraphs were about him leaving the rest of his property, and the contents of his store, to his “reliable assistant for many years, Ms. Harriet Martineau.” Her phone number was included. Underneath was his signature, the date, and the signatures of two witnesses. Below that, he wrote:

  P.S. If I was not afforded the luxury of uttering some pithy last words on my deathbed, I designate Huck Finn as my proxy, who pronounced the wisest last words of all. I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.…

  I read the will three more times before I called Ms. Martineau. I recognized her voice. She was the one who’d left the panicky voice message pretending to be with the book-burning group. She was as heartbroken as I was, even though she had been prepared for my father’s death for months.

  She came over to the house and helped me deal with everything. After the ambulance left, she made some lunch and we talked all afternoon. She gave me an envelope of money my father had told her to hold for me. She told me stories about him until after midnight.

  When she left I picked up the phone and called Mom. I woke her up, but I figured she wouldn’t mind. “Mom,” I said, “is it okay if I come home?”

  “Praise be—” she said. “Praise be—” She started to cry before she could say anything else.

  I told her I’d fly to Kansas City the next day. It was so weird. She didn’t ask me where I was calling from, or if I’d found my dad, or anything. She just said she couldn’t wait to see me.

  As I lay on the couch that night, I thought about what I’d tell her about my adventure. Some things I could never tell her, like the night at Stonehenge. I wasn’t telling anybody that, ever. But some things weren’t so easy. Like what would I say about my father? Would I tell her I’d seen him alive, or should I let-on that he’d died before I got there?

  Huh. I just wrote a Huck and Tom word, “let-on.” What my father had said about Tom’s and Huck’s lesson was true. There’s no way I could tell her the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I had to let-on about some things.

  I decided to tell her I’d seen Richard Allbright alive—true—and for a short time before he died—true. But I wouldn’t tell her about his genizah and the bad book.

  17

  Homecoming

  Harriet drove me to the airport. As the plane took off I watched Portland drop away until we flew through a roof of white clouds. As we rose into bright blue sky, I pulled out the bad book.

  It was like my dad had said. Mark Twain had left lots of scribbles in the margins, like a skipping stone flying through the pages. I got the general idea of the Huck Finn sequel, and it was good. It was full of “howling adventures,” like Tom Sawyer promised. I wondered if I would ever be a good enough writer to fulfill my dad’s wish and tell the whole story. I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t have to answer that yet. I put the book away and leaned back. Going on so little sleep, I z-bagged in seconds.

  I had another dream.

  I’m at a desk. I’m writing a note to the Lord and saying what I write out loud. T.L., if You ever get around to adding more books to the Bible, You might think about this one: The Book of Billy

  Billy Allbright sat on a wall,

  Billy Allbright had a great fall.

  All the Lord’s horses and all the Lord’s men

  Couldn’t put Billy together again.

  But patched up he was and back on his shelf,

  Thanks to a fellow known as himself.

  I know, it’s super short, I say as I write, but I think more people might read the Bible if there were more short books squeezed between the long ones. Just a thought.

  I sign the note: Your big fan, then-now-forevermore, Billy.

  When I woke up, I wrote the dream down in a notebook.

  Flying over Kansas City, my stomach folded like a taco. It wasn’t air turbulence, it was Mom turbulence. I had no idea how I was going to tell her:

  The New J-Brigade was now an army of one.

  Her Jesus-throated Whac-a-Mole had molted into another bird. A Doubt-up Learn-again Christian.

  I got off the plane, walked down the long concourse, and saw her though a glass door. She was standing erect, as always. Her gray eyes looked as bright and shiny as I’d ever seen them. They were more than juiced with the Spirit; they were dancing with light.

  Closing the space between us, she clasped her hands together, then threw her arms around me. She squeezed so tight the air went out of me. I hugged back.

  She pulled away and gripped my shoulders. “Lemme look at you.” Her eyes darted over my face like she was trying to find something, an answer to some question she couldn’t put into words. She raised her hand and touched my cheek, like the answer could be felt.

  Her warm fingers made me smile and feel jittery all at once. I didn’t know when her touch would turn to iron.

  “You’ve changed,” she whispered.

  I nodded. “Yeah, a little.”

  “No,” she corrected. “When God touches someone, they change a lot.”

  If she believed God had been the one who’d touched me, I was cool with that. “Okay, Mom.”

  She didn’t ask how; that was a shocker. She just said, “He touched me, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shot me a secretive smile. “I have something to show you.”

  I couldn’t believe she wasn’t asking about my singed backpack. I mean, it still reeked of smoke. What mom doesn’t ask her runaway kid why it looked like he hitchhiked to hell and back?

  As we walked to the car she talked about little stuff: the weather I’d missed, the job she’d taken in Kansas City, how she’d fixed up the house. I kept waiting for her to stop, grab my hand, and say a prayer of thanks. She never did.

  When I opened the car door, a great smell billowed out: the smell of grilled meat and onion rings. I got in and noticed the white plastic bags on the back seat. “What’s that?”

  “A picnic.”

  18

  Picnic

  We drove a few minutes in silence. Then she said, “So, tell me something I don’t know.” She didn’t say it like she wanted a confession. Her voice was more like a friendly invitation.

  I said the first thing that popped into my head. “I wasn’t sure you were gonna be here.”

  She laughed. “Billy, I would’ve waited for you until the moon turned to blood.”

  “That’s not what you told me a few days ago.�
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  “You know me,” she said, waving a hand. “I’m the mother lion. But that was my last roar.”

  “You’re done roaring?”

  She chuckled. “At you, anyway.”

  She was being so nice and forgiving I had to check and see if I was talking to the right person, and not some demon who’d taken over Mom’s body. “You haven’t stopped praying, have you?”

  “Lord no!” she exclaimed with a laugh. “Why do you ask that?”

  “I just thought this was gonna be a three-way reunion. You know, you, me, the Heavenly Father.”

  “Not today, Billy. I’ve been talking to God nonstop since you left. It took Him so long to answer my prayers, He and I are overdue for a day of rest.”

  We drove into Independence and started up the big avenue near our street. She turned early and drove toward William Chrisman High School. She pulled into the school driveway.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  She pointed at the glove compartment. “Open it.”

  I did. There was a letter on top of the other stuff. I pulled it out. It was from the school and addressed To the Parents of Charles William Allbright.

  “I don’t want any arguments about it,” she said. “You’re going to high school.”

  If I could’ve seen my face I’m sure I looked like I had most of the time at Burning Man: totally gob-smacked.

  “I figured if you survived on the road by yourself,” she said, “you can survive this house of sin.”

  I reached over and hugged her. “Thanks, Mom. Thanks so much.”

  She eased me away. “Thank the Lord, Billy.” She quickly raised a finger. “But not today.” She opened her door and got out. “C’mon, time for our picnic.”

  I carried the food and she carried a blanket. We spread it on the middle of the football field and had a feast. We ate barbecued ribs, scarfed onion rings and french fries, and washed the feast down with buckets of soda. I was mega-hungry, but not just for food. I was starving for answers. It was like she’d been the one who had run away and come back a different person.

  “What happened, Mom? What changed your mind about school?”

  She stopped chewing on a rib. “Your running away was God’s way of showing me something.”

  “What?”

  “I prayed for answers to what this was all about, especially in the past few days, when my fears were greatest.”

  “What were your greatest fears?”

  “That I’d never see you again. On earth or in Heaven. Then God showed me something.”

  “Did you do a providence check?”

  “No. I had a dream.”

  “What was it?”

  “The dream’s not important, only the message it revealed.”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer right off. She took a long drink of soda, making me wait. “The hardest lesson Christ teaches is this: the greatest love isn’t found in what’s held, the greatest love is found in what’s let go. God showed me that the only way I could have you back was to let you go.”

  “That’s why you’re letting me go to high school?”

  She nodded. “Yes, but don’t start thinking you’re free as a bird. There’s still a few strings between us. Like living with each other, loving each other, going to church.”

  I looked in her eyes. They shone bright, with speckles of green reflecting off the grass. I’d seen those eyes before: on a little girl in an imaginary forest. I grinned. “I’m cool with that.”

  We ate key lime pie and watched swallows swoop and dive for insects as the sun began to set.

  Smart neighbors.

  * * *

  When you’re homeschooled, you never go “homeschool clothes shopping.” In fact, that’s probably the first time those words have ever been hung on the same line. Anyway, the next morning, Mom took me shopping for school clothes. We had a few disagreements, but we managed to find stuff she didn’t think was hell-wear and I didn’t think was weenie-wear.

  After that, she went to her data entry job in Kansas City. It gave me the chance to do a job I needed to do: data hiding. I poked around the house looking for a place to hide Thirty Three Years Among Our Wild Indians. But the one-pillar doghouse was so small it didn’t have room for hiding places. Then, through a window, I saw the birdbath in the backyard.

  I scoped it out. It was made of cement. I lifted the big dish off the support column. The column was hollow. I wrapped the bad book in tinfoil and sealed it in a ziplock bag. It just fit inside the column. Then I put the cement dish back on top. It wasn’t exactly an old silo, but it was still a genizah.

  19

  Entry the Last

  Well, I’ve written down what happened last summer. So now I have to ask:

  Did I tell the story I promised my dad I would?

  Yeah, pretty much. I didn’t write everything, of course. There’s not enough blank journals in the world for that.

  Do I regret any of the “sinful” things I thought and did?

  Maybe some of the things I did were a mistake, but I don’t regret any of them. I learned a lot from them. And a “sin” you can learn from, maybe that’s not so bad after all. Huck says, “You can’t pray a lie.” I say, you can sin a good.

  Will I keep writing?

  Not for now; my hand’s more twisted up than taffy. Of course, someday I’ll pull the bad book out of my genizah and honor my dad’s wish. I’ll release the ghost of Mark Twain, and let him tell the story of Huck, Tom, and Jim lighting out for the Territory.

  But right now, I’m one step ahead of them. Last fall, I lit out for the territory of high school. I navigated tenth grade without turning down the hall that ends in the lake of fire.

  Some good stuff even happened.

  I made the honor roll, which made Mom proud, and made her homeschool teacher of the year—according to us, anyway.

  Mom found my first edition of Adventures of Huck Finn and didn’t burn it when she found out how much it was worth.

  I met a girl who was nice enough not to show me the color of her boobs after our first kiss.

  I got my buddy Ben to take up mountain biking, and we’re now two of the best rippers on the school MB team. We even invented a race combining biking and geocaching. Maybe someday it’ll be on ESPN.

  I finally saw a major league baseball game when the Reds came and played the Royals in an inter-league game. And I had a good time catching up with Ruah.

  My mother broke down and bought a TV, and now I’m big into baseball. But nobody gets why I’m a Cincinnati Reds fan.

  Ruah became a free agent, and Joe Douglas negotiated a megamillions contract for him.

  The real bizarro thing is that Joe became the go-to agent for other pro athletes who wanted to come out of the closet. It earned him a nickname, “the gaygent.” The Hilarious Father strikes again.

  Biggest change of all? It looks like we’re going to stay in Independence. The one-pillar doghouse isn’t base camp for the New J-Brigade, or home to any Jesus-throated Whac-a-Moles. It’s just home to me and Mom.

  So, yeah, a lot of changes.

  But one thing hasn’t changed. I still think Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a dangerous book. Why? Because it can change a person. It’s like my dad said, “A book can liberate the one who reads it, and the one who writes it.”

  Acknowledgments

  This book was inspired by a chance encounter with a true-life Twainiac, Robert Slotta, who introduced me to the tome in which Twain outlined his never-written sequel to Huckleberry Finn. Bob filled me with his irrepressible passion for all things Twain, which included a few shots of Mark Twain bourbon.

  Once begun, the story of Billy Allbright traveled a meandering and hazardous road, and only survived because of many Good Samaritans. Gerri Brioso, Peter Ford, Jen Booth (and Monkey), Lois and Siegmar Muehl, Richard Termine, Matt Evans, Gwen Maynard, Henry Shiowitz, and Cindy Meehl all provided excellent direction and advice and rescued the effort from dig
ressive dead ends and polemical potholes. More than once.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank five people I know only via their writing and the courage of their convictions. They, along with Twain’s Jim, informed and inspired the character of Ruah Branch. While there are many who have broken the bonds of silence, I would especially like to acknowledge this quintet for singing their songs of freedom: Billy Bean, John Amaechi, David Kopay, Patricia Nell Warren, and Mel White, thank you!

  A big thanks to designer Trish Parcell for the gift of her cover art. But the greatest gift while shaping this book came from on high. Whether they are a constellation of angels or an array of GPS satellites, my agent and editors—Sara Crowe, Michelle Poploff, and Rebecca Short—are my guiding lights. Without them, You Don’t Know About Me would have been You’ll Never Know About Me.

  About the Author

  Brian Meehl and Billy Allbright (the guy bombing through the pages to your left) have something in common. They’ve both ridden zigzag trails. Meehl’s first zig was rag-waggling (aka puppeteering) on Sesame Street and in films like The Dark Crystal. Then he zagged to laying ink (aka writing) for kids’ television. He even tricked out his bike with a few Emmys while navigating Between the Lions. Right now, he’s looking for his next zig, which may be jumping the pond to France and writing a long-winded tale about a man who blew Europe away with his backside: Le Fartiste. But first, he has to finish spilling and quilling the sequel to his second novel, Suck It Up.

  If you’d like to know more, scope out brianmeehl.com.