You Don't Know About Me (10 page)

He shrugged. “Long as I have the same right not to talk about some things.”

“Sure.” I pointed at his hands. “Why are your hands like that?”

He lifted one off the wheel and opened his plate-sized hand. “Melanin.”

I squinted with confusion. “Melanin?”

“It's what makes me black and you white.” He said it as casual as saying what he'd had for breakfast. “My skin's packed with melanin to stop the African sun from burning it up and giving me skin cancer. Yours is white so the weak northern sun can get to your skin and supply you with
vitamin D and a bunch of other good stuff. The only reason my palms and the bottom of my feet aren't black is because the sun doesn't hit me there.”

I half smiled. “That's not what I was asking about. I was asking about your calluses. I've never seen so many.”

“Oh, these,” he said, flexing his fingers. “I get 'em in my line of work.”

“What's that?”

“I'm an entertainer. Mostly in casinos and on cruise ships. I'm a juggler.”

“What do you juggle to get calluses like that?”

“Big stuff. From baseball bats to chain saws. Sometimes I even juggle chairs.”

I looked back into the little apartment behind us. It was kind of messy, with some clothes thrown around, but I didn't see anything you might juggle. “Where's your juggling stuff?”

“I'm on vacation. Jugglers need vacations too.”

“Where are you going?”

“For now, as you deduced, detective, west.” He patted the dashboard. “That's the great thing about an RV. You can just hop in and blow with the wind.”

For a while the only sound was the drone of the engine and wind-rush through the open windows. Purple clover spilled over stone outcropping on each side of the road. The hills were sparse and green, and the only trees had slid into the creek bottoms. We passed a barn with big white letters proclaiming
NO GOD, NO PEACE. KNOW GOD, KNOW PEACE.

He chuckled. “I was wondering if we were in God's country. Now it's a fact.”

He said it kind of sarcastic, like he was a nonbeliever. He'd seen my Bible; he knew I was a Christian. If he wanted to start some religious debate, I wasn't taking the bait.

“So, where is Hunter exactly?” he asked.

I was glad I'd studied my map earlier. If I didn't know where Hunter was my story about my dad would've been a bust. “West of Salina,” I said. “Exit two-oh-nine.”

“On the interstate?”

“No, Hunter's about twenty-five miles north.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I'll take you to your exit on one condition.”

I shrugged, trying not to look too excited about getting another hundred miles out of the ride. “What's that?”

“When we get there you call four-one-one and see if your mom has a phone yet. If you've disappeared I'm sure she's trying to get a phone.”

“Okay.”

We dropped into another silence.

Even though I'd lived in a lot of places, I was looking at new country. I'd never been this far west, or seen such open land. It wasn't flat exactly. Pale green hills rolled to the horizon, like an endless ruffle of green quilt on a giant bed someone had forgotten to make. It took God six days to make the world. Maybe on one of those nights He had slept here.

Sloan took Exit 209, turned at the bottom of the ramp, and pulled off the road near a historical marker. I tried to look cool, like I'd seen the road dozens of times. But the road to Hunter was nothing but a rail of blacktop cutting through a patchwork of green corn and tan wheat stubble. The only traffic was a turtle crossing the asphalt.

Sloan got out and unhooked my dried jeans from the bike. He left me inside to change and told me to use his cell phone to call 411. Luckily, there was still no listing for Tilda Allbright. I wasn't ready to talk to her. I wanted to get to Hunter and find the bad book first. Calling her would be a lot easier if I were heading home.

When I got out, Sloan walked back from the historical marker and pointed northwest. “Twenty-seven miles that way is the geodetic center of North America.”

“What's that?”

“It's the starting point, the dead center of all the lines and boundaries in the U.S.”

“Right.” Shouldering my backpack I realized I probably should've known about something so close to Hunter. “I forgot the weird name for it.”

“I could run you up to Hunter and then go see it.”

I didn't get why he was being so super nice. It made me
suspicious. “You don't have to. Some cars will come along soon.”

He looked at the turtle, now taking a break in the middle of the road. “That turtle doesn't think so.”

I chuckled. “I know it doesn't look it, but people do live around here.”

“I'm sure they do, but I came out here to see the country. And you can't say you've seen Middle America until you've seen the true
middle
of America. C'mon, I'll drop you in Hunter on the way.”

I looked at the turtle. It was back to inching across the blacktop. And not because a car was coming. “Alright.”

The road north was like a roller coaster for eighty-year-olds. We did whoop-de-doos over the rises. Coming up over some of them you felt like you were on top of the world. You could see fields and rangeland for miles and miles. And there was another sign that the road was always empty. The mourning doves and other birds on the blacktop were so unused to traffic they waited till the last second to spring into flight.

Sloan asked me questions about my dad. I made up a story about how he used to have a farm, but lost it, then drove harvesting equipment for other farmers until he retired. I was totally Hucking-up.

As we got close to Hunter it was way past lunch and my stomach started growling. Stomach growling is like the yawning thing: you can pass it on. I heard Sloan's stomach too.

“Is there any place to eat in Hunter?” he asked.

“Ah”—I fumbled for an answer—“I don't think so.”

“What do you mean you don't think so?”

“Last time I was there, there was a diner, but I think it was about to close.”

“Well, if you're starved you can hop in the back and make a peanut butter and jelly.”

Even though my stomach sounded like the cat house at the zoo, I didn't go for his offer. It didn't fit my story. “Nah, I'll wait and get something at my dad's.”

We crossed railroad tracks and drove into Hunter. It looked like a ghost town. Main Street was a short stretch of run-down, empty buildings. My fib about the diner was almost true. The Hunter Café had an old sign saying it was moving across the street, but it hadn't survived there, either. The only building with a car in front was a post office not much bigger than the stamps it sold. And there was a tiny museum called Yesterday House.

“Huh,” Sloan grunted, “looks like they should rename Hunter ‘Yesterday Town.' ”

“Yeah,” I said, “it's not much, but my dad has always liked it here.” It was hard acting sad about seeing my dying dad when all I wanted to do was snatch the GPS out of my backpack and follow its compass arrow to the treasure. I pointed to a street with run-down houses and trailers. “That's his street.”

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,

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.