You Don't Know About Me (41 page)

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.”

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.”

“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.

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.”

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 digressive 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
.

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
.