Mom handed me a glass of cold water. I bit my lip to stop myself from asking if my father could still be alive. If I did, she might make a connection to the fifty-dollar Bible.
I listened to her go on about how God had spoken, and how things were going to be so different in Independence that we might never move again. I thought I was going to explode from not being able to jump up, go find a DVD player, and see what was on the disc making my head spin with questions. Was it a fake? Some kind of joke? Was it him? If it was, what did he really look like?
After what felt like hours, Mom calmed down enough for me to say I wanted to go to the library to check out some books for camp. I went inside, grabbed my sneaks, slipped the DVD from its hiding place, and shoved it in my cargo-shorts pocket. As soon as I got out of sight, I started running. I didn’t stop till I reached the library I’d spotted earlier.
The man at the information desk told me I had to do two things before I could use a computer: get a library card and stop sweating. I spent another five minutes of torture filling out a form.
I got my card and convinced the info man I was done sweating. He took me to a computer. He handed me a box of tissues and told me to clean the headphones when I was done. I threw on the headphones and tried to feed the DVD into the slot. My hand shook so much it took several tries before the slot grabbed the disc and gorped it.
The screen started all black, then words came up: FOR CHARLES WILLIAM ALLBRIGHT. A picture blipped up. An old man stared out at me. He was in a bed, propped up on pillows. One hand, wrapped in tape, dropped to his lap. At first the hand looked bandaged, but it was a remote control taped to his palm. There was no guessing his age because he looked so sick. His gray skin hung on his head like a wrinkled sock. His longish white hair fanned back against a pillow. This can’t be my father, I thought, it’s Methuselah. I’d seen my dad countless times in the mirror, but the mirror door had swung open and a ghost was staring out at me. I wanted to shut that door, pretend it was a dream. I couldn’t. The ghost had me hypnotized.
He blinked, real slow. His dark blue eyes disappeared, then reappeared. His mouth cracked open. “Hello, Billy. I know I’m not much to look at.” His voice was stronger than he looked. And it sounded like his tongue was shoveling sand along with his words. He sucked in a raspy breath. “Nevertheless, to quote Darth Vader, ‘I am your father.’ ”
The last word shot a bolt of pain through my chest, like there was an invisible arrow sticking in my heart that he’d reached out and batted. Part of me wanted him to bat it again. He was my father, back from the dead!
His wrinkled face bunched into a smile or a grimace, I couldn’t tell which. “I suppose it’s rude and presumptuous quoting Darth Vader when your mother has probably shielded you from the corruption of popular culture. But that’s me, rude and presumptuous Richard Allbright.” The more he spoke, the more the life in his eyes spread into his face.
“Maybe you’re wondering how I ascertained that you’re called Billy, and that you’ve been raised as a God-fearing, Bible-thumping, Christo-terrorist. Well, I’ve been keeping my eye on you and Tilda for some time.”
His head slowly turned. His hand, the one with the remote, lifted and reached offscreen. I stared at his profile. Under the wrinkled curtain of skin, his nose was just like mine: a big beak. My stomach ballooned like I’d whoop-de-dooed over a hill. Before I could find the next piece of him that was me, he pulled something across the screen.
It took me a second to recognize what it was: a white board with a map of America’s middle. Pushpins poked from the map in all the places me and Mom had lived. Colored string zigzagged between the pins. It was the zigzag path of my life with Mom. “I’ve kept track of you by Googling Tilda’s name,” he said. He sounded so close in my headphones. “I’ve read the entertaining accounts of your exploits in police blotters and local newspapers.”
He pulled the board away and stared at me again. “Your mother’s Christian zeal is why I’ve come to you tucked inside the Good Book. The Bible is my Trojan horse.”
He swallowed as slow as he blinked. “But why, you may be wondering, has your ancient, deadbeat father suddenly materialized? First the bad news. By the time you see this I will have unmaterialized. I will be dead.”
“No!” For a second I couldn’t understand why he didn’t hear me.
He kept going. “I may sound like I’ve got some time, but I assure you my hour upon the stage is up. If it wasn’t, I’d—” His hand waved the thought away. “Enough of that. To the news that isn’t bad. I’ll let you decide how good it is. It comes in two parts. The unvarnished truth about the past. And a possible truth about your future.”
He took another raspy breath. “I don’t know what Tilda has told you about your birth. Here’s what I know. We met on a Mississippi riverboat. She was there to get gamblers to bet on Christ. I was there taking part in a conference on Mark Twain and giving a talk on one of his books. That’s who I was, and still am: an expert on Twain, and a professional collector and trader of all things Twain. I’ve sold everything from first editions of his books to a strand of his hair I found in his dictionary. I call myself a Twainiac.”
I was in a trance, hanging on his every word.
“Your mother, the beautiful Tilda Hayes, wandered into my talk. We spoke afterward and fell in love. I don’t know why a Twainiac and a Bible-thumper fell for each other, but we did. Maybe it was Twain playing a joke on me from the grave, or God playing a joke on both of us. In any case, our undying love lived long enough for me to come to Jesus and for you to be conceived in a reckless moment of passion. Then the trouble began. As you grew inside Tilda, the life-in-Christ growing in me miscarried. The unbeliever I’d been before meeting your mother was born again. I kept offering to marry her, but she refused to wed a man who hopscotched from sin to salvation and back to sin again. For her, there was only one explanation for her dire circumstance. I had been sent by Satan to tempt her and she had failed God. When she was four months pregnant she disappeared without a trace. The only thing she took was my name.”
The throbbing pain in my chest was back again, worse. Now he was grabbing the arrow and twisting it. He was calling me a bastard. I wanted to rip the pain from my chest and plunge it into him. But I couldn’t even talk back to him.
He sucked in another breath. “For years I didn’t know what had happened to Tilda, or to my child. After I found you on the Internet, I wrote letters to you. I suspect she intercepted them, because I’ve never heard back. Perhaps she has intercepted this. I even showed up at some of the places you lived, hoping to see you. But you had always moved on by the time I got there.”
I wondered if he was telling the truth. I wondered how hard he’d really looked for me. The answer I got was a twisted smile. He went on. “I don’t have the strength to dwell on past failures. I want to talk about your future. I have something for you. Your inheritance. Like me, it doesn’t look like much. It’s only a book.” His white eyebrows lifted. “I call it the ‘bad book.’ Of all the things I’ve held in my hands that Mark Twain once held in his, the bad book is the most valuable of all.”
I had no clue what he was talking about, but as he spoke his craggy face filled with life. His gray skin shaded pink. His cheeks seemed less sunken. He began to look like the Reverend Richard Allbright I’d always seen in the mirror.
He pushed his head off the pillow. A strand of white hair slipped to his shoulder. “The world has never seen the brilliant story Twain feverishly scribbled in the bad book. It’s the sequel to his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For scholars, the story is priceless. For collectors, it’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. For me, it’s the only thing I’ll ever give to my son”—his eyes shut, he leaned back into the pillow—“Charles William Allbright.”
I didn’t care about some book. I didn’t care about the money. I only heard the echo of his words—“my son.” I wanted to hate him for never finding me, for never being my father. I couldn’t. How could I hate a man who’d pushed open the mirror, like a lid on a coffin, and uttered my name? He was my Rip van Winkle sleeping all this time. He was my father.
His eyes opened again. “Here’s the problem. I can’t send you the bad book. If your mother saw it, she’d say it was written by the devil and destroy it. If I could, I’d bring it to you myself. I can’t. You have to fetch it, by yourself. And because I fear Tilda might be watching this, finding the book won’t be easy. It will be a treasure hunt.” He swallowed and went on. “Your first clue is a riddle. Here it is: Where do you find the book of Genesis and human conception?”
I listened to a breath rattle through him.
“If and when you begin your hunt, here’s my advice. Be like Huck Finn. Huck said, ‘I don’t take no stock in dead people.’ In other words, Billy, don’t take no stock in invisible fathers. Only take stock in what fathers leave behind.”
He blinked in slow motion. His eyes were wet and shiny. “Before I fade to black—I have no right to say this, but I will because I never had the chance. I love you. Then, now, forevermore.”
He lifted his other arm from under the covers. There was a tube sticking out of it, snaking offscreen. His hand with the remote reached for a knob on the tube. I suddenly realized what he was about to do.
“Don’t!” I heard my voice shout outside the headphones.
His quavering fingers turned the knob. He looked at me; his voice scratched in my ears. “I pray to all the gods, let his adventure begin with my end.” His finger moved onto the remote. The picture went black.
What I remember after that was like a foggy dream. The info man was at my side, acting like something was wrong. He pushed the box of tissues toward me. I knocked it out of his hand, or maybe he dropped it. I shouted that I wanted my DVD back. He must’ve given it to me. Running out of the library, I felt it burning in my hand.