You Don't Know About Me (25 page)

I pulled out my GPS and turned it on. I got out the last
Huck
page with the business card taped to it, entered the coordinates written on the back, and went to Goto. I
figured I was southwest of Notus, in the ridge of hills I'd seen earlier that morning. I might have even crossed into Oregon. The GPS showed 315 miles to Portland. The compass pointed west-northwest.

I read the clue poem hidden under the card that I'd seen earlier.

I wasn't sure what he meant by “last write,” but I had a hunch. I undid a shoelace from my sneaker, got out my Leatherman, and cut off a long piece. I put the key on it and hung it around my neck. I memorized the address on the business card, then put the card in the Bible.

The metal boot heel was weighing heavy in my pocket, so I decided to put it in the pack. As I slid it out of the plastic bag, I dropped it. It hit the dust with a thud. When I picked it up it left a print in the dust. I stared at the print. Inside it was the cross pattern of little circles. It hit me where I'd seen the pattern. Okay, not
seen
it,
read
it.

I dug out the first chapters of
Huck Finn
from my cargo pocket and started flipping through them. On page sixteen, right after Huck finds some tracks in new snow, he says,
There was a cross in the left boot-heel made with big nails, to keep off the devil.
Huck knew it was his drunken
father's boot print. He knew Pap was back in town and looking for him.

My father had named his store after that boot heel. And he'd put it in the last cache to tell me something. Huck saw the print and knew Pap was coming for him. My father left the boot heel to tell me
I
was coming for
him
.

The screech of a bird jerked me back to reality. A buzzard soared overhead. Finding my father's treasure wasn't going to happen if I became buzzard chow. On the chance that actually happened, I figured I'd better call Mom. If it meant that Ruah's friend in Cincinnati found out I still had his phone and told Ruah, so what. I wouldn't be seeing Ruah again.

I dug out the cell and turned it on. It was a good time to call Mom for a couple of reasons. (1) It was Sunday morning, so she'd be in church and I could just leave a message. (2) If I was about to become desert kill, I wanted her to know I loved her. I pressed buttons till I found her number in the call record. I got her voice mail and left a message about how I was fine and that I loved her. I didn't pour it on too thick. If I did she would've known I was in trouble. The only lie I told her was that I was almost to New Orleans.

After I hung up, I started thinking maybe I wasn't the only liar in the middle of nowhere. Nico and Momi had had plenty of time to swap vehicles and come back.

Another buzzard showed up. That did it. I started walking toward the last dirt road we'd been on. The soaring buzzards suddenly veered away. I heard what spooked them: a vehicle on the other side of the brush fence.

I saw Momi, ran back, and helped her open the gate. The
“styling-mobile” pulled through. It was a bigger, newer van, with one of those expandable roofs. But no one was going to raise it soon. Something big, lumpy, and longer than the van was wrapped in a tarp and tied to the roof.

I opened the side door and expected to see a mini version of Ruah's camper. The inside was more like an office, with a desk, computer, printer, and what looked like moviemaking equipment. The back was jammed with boxes and hanging clothes. Some looked like costumes. Momi reached back from the passenger seat and swiveled the plastic desk seat to face forward.

For the next hour we headed west, into Oregon. Whenever I snuck a peek at my GPS, the miles were ticking down steadily. Then we turned south onto a county road. There was a big wooden sign with an arrow:
TO BURNING MAN
. “Where are we going?” I asked.

Momi answered with a question. “You've never heard of Burning Man?”

“No.”

“It's not the mother of all Burning Man festivals in Nevada,” she added, “but it'll still blow your mind.”

I didn't want to blow my mind, I wanted to keep blowing west. “You said you were driving to Portland today.”

“We'll have you there by sunset tomorrow, promise,” Nico said. “But if you haven't seen Burning Man, you can't miss it.”

I leaned back in the hard seat. “What is it?”

“Mo, how would you describe it?”

She shrugged. “How do you describe the color purple to a blind man?”

“You don't,” Nico answered. “You heal him and let him see for himself.”

“Does the thing on the roof have to do with Burning Man?” I asked.

Momi gave me a solemn look. “That isn't a ‘thing.' That's the Tree of Life.”

“And, yes,” Nico added, “it has everything to do with Burning Man.”

She let out a gleeful shout. “Where you're gonna see Wachpanne Papa do his thing!”

It seemed like the more questions I asked the less I found out. “Who's Wachpanne Papa?”

Nico shot me a grin. “Billy boy, you're lookin' at 'im.” His shoulders did more laugh gymnastics.

We drove into a widening basin. The sagebrush carpet began to show worn spots of putty white dust. As the bare spots grew bigger, the Potlatchers told me we were headed into a dead lake bed that hadn't held water for thousands of years. “Alkali flats” they called them. It was as if God had ironed the land like a white shirt. And the heat made it feel like His iron had just lifted. In the distance, the wind blew up a smoky curtain of dust.

Behind the white curtain a city began to take shape. It was made of giant tents, strange towers, and a mega-sprawl
of RVs, tents, and small domes. Nico said it was Burning Man, Oregon. The tallest tower looked like a giant stick man, with arms spread like Christ. Nico said when the tower got torched, Burning Man would be over, and the city would disappear overnight.

As we drove closer to a plastic fence, Momi told me how the “MOOP fence” surrounding Burning Man caught windblown litter. MOOP was short for Matter Out Of Place. Burning Man was big on leaving nothing behind. “The only thing it leaves,” she said, “are memories of radical self-expression smoldering in every burner's brain.”

We stopped at an entrance manned by a hippie-looking guy with long hair and a beard. He was naked except for a carpenter's apron. I felt like a COOP: a Christian Out Of Place. I wondered if “radical self-expression” meant “hippie-heathen, drugged-out orgy fest.” If it did, I didn't want to be there. But it wasn't like I had a choice. Everyone was going into Burning Man, not out. And walking out of the alkali flats in the blistering heat would've been a suicide march.

Nico handed hippie-guy a ticket. It confirmed what I'd begun to suspect. They'd never planned on going straight to Portland.

Hippie-guy put his palms together and bowed. “Welcome, Wachpanne Papa. Awesome that you've come with your bodacious squaw, Yellow-haired Woman, and”—he looked back at me—“who's this? Glorious spawn of Yellow-haired Woman and Wachpanne Papa?”

Nico laughed. “Not quite. This is our new assistant, Billy Lost His Bike.”

Hippie-guy gave me a little bow. “Welcome, Billy Lost His Bike. May you leave here as Billy Lost His Virginity.”

Nico and Momi cracked up. I turned red and leaned back in the shadows of the van. I was sure there were heat waves coming off my face, like the ones shimmering above the baked ground.

Taking a road into the sea of tents and RVs, we got stuck behind a water truck sprinkling the dusty road. A dozen naked men and women danced behind the truck playing in the spray of water. And that was only the beginning of naked people. Every other person was naked or topless. Some people I thought were dressed weren't dressed at all. They were wearing nothing but paint and glitter.

“Better get used to it,” Momi said, turning to me with a giggle. “This place is clothing-optional.”

The weirdest part was how most of the naked people were doing normal things, like barbecuing and playing Frisbee. I mean, nobody was acting like they were in a drugged-out orgy-fest. Sure, there were people drinking beer and stuff, but I didn't see any falling-down drunks, or drug-crazed hippies climbing towers and jumping off because they thought they could fly. I reminded myself it was still day. Maybe at night, all the nakeds dropped their burger-flippers and Frisbees and went drunken, drugged-out orgy-fest.

As the Potlatchers looked for their campsite I wondered if God was playing a joke on me. I mean, back at the one-pillar doghouse I
had
prayed for some pretty neighbors and a lusting-in-my-heart test. So what does God do? He tosses me into a nudist colony. And all the naked and topless women I was seeing hadn't exactly rolled out of a
Victoria's Secret catalog. Some of them were as old as my mom. The worst was a fat woman so covered in dust she looked like one of those fertility goddesses you see in a museum. God had answered my prayer alright.
So, Billy, you want naked women? You got naked women. But you're gonna see so many in so many different shapes and sizes you're gonna wanna put on a blindfold. And, since you're such a wicked, sinning Peeping Tom, I'm also gonna show you naked men!

When we drove by two naked guys walking along, holding hands, that did it. I forced myself to look at things that didn't jiggle, swing, or bounce. Luckily, there was plenty of distracting stuff. Most of the campers, tents, and domes were covered with wild decorations. Everything from fake palm trees around an Arab-looking tent with a herd of plastic camels to an RV that looked like a birthday cake with huge candles on top and naked-girl blow-up dolls leaping out of the cake. There was no getting away from naked.

Momi turned with a big grin. “Talk about an escape from the ordinary, huh? Wall-to-wall extraordinary!”

I wanted to tell her I'd been on the run from the ordinary for a week and wasn't sure how much more extraordinary I could take. I just asked, “So what's Wachpanne Papa gonna do with the Tree of Life?”

“It's no big deal,” Nico said with a shrug. “The great Sioux medicine man, Wachpanne Papa, will perform the sacred Sun Dance and heal our sickly Earth Mother.”

Momi beamed. “And this year we rented a show tent twice the size.”

We drove past a huge tent with a big sign on top:
CAMP
RENEWAL
. We followed a dusty track down the side of the tent, and pulled into an empty campsite. My butt was sore from sitting on the hard seat, and I had to take a leak. I spotted a row of port-a-sans at the end of the road. Momi had to go too, so we walked there together.

There was a line at the port-a-sans. Luckily, there were distractions from all the body parts flapping in the breeze. The port-a-sans were decorated too. There was one made to look like a big green pea called the Pee-Pod. Another was covered with Dr. Seuss characters. On the door were the two little creatures from
The Cat in the Hat
, but their names had been changed from Thing 1 and Thing 2 to Fling 1 and Fling 2. And there was one my mom would've attacked with her Carry Nation hatchet. It also happened to be the one that opened up when it was my turn. The outside was covered with scripture and copies of the Left Behind series, the famous books about the End Times. Above the door, the port-a-san's name was stuck on two rubber butt cheeks:
THE RIGHT & LEFT BEHIND SERIES
. The best part was the sign on the door that let you know if the port-a-san was vacant or not. Instead of
OCCUPIED
it said
RAPTURED
.

When we got back to the campsite, Nico was pulling a large banner out of the van. I helped him and Momi hang it over the entrance to the Camp Renewal tent. The banner
announced,
WACHPANNE PAPA—SUN DANCE #2
. They told me how the Sun Dance had to be performed four years in a row, with the four corners of the world—north, south, east, west—each being danced to before the entire Sun Dance would heal the earth.

I had more questions, but people started coming around. Some had seen Sun Dance #1 and were excited about the next one. Momi passed out flyers saying that Yellow-haired Woman would be “bartering for witness cards in Camp Meccumenical at sundown.” Nico pounded a stake in the ground with an arrowhead-shaped sign attached. The sign announced:

I wanted to know what was so bloody about it, but they said it was “bad medicine” to talk about the dance right before performing it.

Some Burning Man volunteers helped get the Tree of Life off the top of the van and into the big tent. They helped
Nico and me dig a hole in the middle of the “new-life lodge” and “plant” the Tree of Life. It's not like the Tree of Life was going to grow. It was just a trunk, about fifteen feet high, with a thick fork at the top. It was barkless and polished white from wind and sun. I told Nico it looked more like a giant hunk of driftwood than a Tree of Life. He said, “Before night is done it will grow a bounty of fruit.” He was beginning to talk funny, like Wachpanne Papa, I guess.

When I asked him if he was really an Indian, he told me he was a “raging confluence” of Indian and white blood. “My forefathers include the fierce warrior Crazy Horse,” he said, “and General Custer. Sometimes my red and white blood gets into such a riptide I want to scalp myself.” He put his hands on my shoulders and stared at me with his blue eyes, probably from the Custer side of the family. “You see, I dance the Sun Dance to heal not only the earth. I dance to heal myself.”