I bolted awake to a voice. “Run!” It shouted louder. “Run, Tony! Run!” It came from outside. I realized the camper was stopped; it was early morning. I looked through the window.
A man ran toward our campsite. He wore zebra-striped pants and a bright orange shirt. He was some kind of prisoner. He turned toward the camper. I fumbled in my pocket for my knife. The man grabbed the garbage can at our site and spun back to the road. A pickup pulled up, a trash container in its bed. Behind the truck was a flatbed with a bunch of men all wearing the same zebra-striped pants and orange shirts. The prisoner emptied the garbage can in the pickup, dropped it back on the ground. “Run, Tony, run!” one of the prisoners yelled, and they all burst out laughing.
I heard the curtain slide in the sleeping loft. The shouting had woken Ruah up. He groaned. I listened as he rolled over and went back to sleep. I was wide awake.
I went outside. The rising sun painted the mountain peaks to the west with light. The other campsites were dead quiet. I pulled out my GPS and turned it on. I was stunned to see we were only 6.9 miles from Providence. Ruah had driven most of the night. I wanted to grab my pack and start walking to Providence. I could be there in two hours. But I also felt like I had to wait. I mean, he’d driven me so far.
I walked to the end of the campground, where there was a stone bench. It overlooked a sparkling lake with chalky cliffs on the far side. I sat down and tried to figure out what to do. Then it hit me. The garbagemen were actually a sign from God; they were His messengers. One was telling me, “Run!” The other, the man emptying the garbage can, was a warning. If I didn’t go now, God was going to show up and dump me out of the camper like garbage. God was telling me His junior Jonah had traveled long enough in Giff. And just like Jonah, who spent three days and three nights in the belly of the Great Fish, I had spent three days and three nights in Giff. It was time for me to be spit out.
God’s will had opened to me as clear and sparkling as the lake in front of me. My insides swelled with flowy giddiness. I remembered how Huck had put it when everything became crystal clear. Here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face.
I slipped into the camper and lifted my pack. I thought about waking Ruah to thank him and say goodbye, but he was sleeping soundly. I wrote him a note.
Providence is 7 miles north. I’m going up there to find the geocache. If you want, I’ll meet you at whatever diner’s up there. I’ll buy you breakfast, and we can say goodbye.
Billy
Whether he came to Providence or not was up to him. I was giving him an out. If he’d finally gotten tired of riding with a “homophobe-in-training” and wanted to ditch me, he was getting his chance.
The campground was on the edge of a town called Hyrum. Following the compass arrow on the GPS, I walked up the main street to the highway. I put out my thumb and got a ride from a guy going to work in Logan. He dropped me on the commercial strip outside of Providence. As I walked into town, the GPS ticked down to 1.5 miles from the cache.
Providence was mainly nice houses on tree-lined streets. I walked up Center Street, following the compass toward a big hill rising behind the town. The cache site was looking very different from the first two. It wasn’t in a dying little town, or the graveyard of a dead one. Of course, with a name like Providence, you’d expect something nicer.
But for all the nice houses, the town didn’t seem to have a diner or any breakfast place. If Ruah was going to meet me for breakfast it would have to be back down on the strip.
At the top of Center Street was a lush green park called Vons Park. A mountain stream ran through it; the compass pointed up a trail next to the stream. My GPS ticked down to 0.35 miles.
Remembering how tree cover can mess with GPS reception and accuracy, I pulled out the last Huck Finn chapter—where the drunken king and duke fell asleep together on the raft—and read the clue poem my father had scrawled at the end.
Upon the raft four sinners dwell,
But only one is bound for hell.
To find out which will take some tricks,
Although your crick’s no River Styx.
You’ll find no crossing on Charon’s boat,
Not a single troll or billy goat.
At trail’s end is nature’s span,
Across the way, hell in a can.
As you seek, don’t be daft,
Remember Huck is on a raft.
I got that the “four sinners” were the king, the duke, Huck, and Jim. But why only one of them was going to burn in hell I didn’t know. From what I’d read of Huck Finn, I would’ve guessed they were all going to hell, except maybe Jim. His only sin was running away from being a slave. He was pretty much an antinomian: breaking land law to obey God law. God doesn’t believe in slavery.
I started up the trail along the stream. The path climbed through woods, opened onto a little meadow, then rose through thick woods like a tunnel. My eyes darted between my GPS and the shadowy ground; I didn’t want to step on any snakes. At 0.1 mile it switched to 525 feet; the numbers ticked down super fast. My heart raced along with it.
I had no idea what my father meant by “River Styx” or “Charon’s boat,” so I focused on “At trail’s end is nature’s span.” I figured I could decipher that one.
The trail got tighter and creepier as I got under a hundred feet. I used a stick to do some cobweb clearing. I half expected to trip over a dead body.
Then I saw it. “Nature’s span”: a tree trunk fallen across the creek. I tightroped over the trunk and almost fell in the water when my foot slipped. I looked in the undergrowth for “hell in a can,” whatever that meant. I thought maybe it would be a red gas can, you know, like fire in a can. I looked all around for twenty to thirty feet, but found nothing.
I checked the GPS. I was still 70 feet from the cache. With the heavy tree cover I could’ve been off by fifty or a hundred feet. I reread the poem’s last line. “As you seek, don’t be daft/Remember Huck is on a raft.” It made no sense. There was nothing like a raft, low, high, or anywhere.
I started back across the creek to see if the GPS’s distance reading would get better in a tree-cover hole above the trail. As I crossed I glanced down at the GPS. The compass needle swung back upstream. I lost my balance. I threw the GPS toward the trail as I fell off the skinny. I could get wet, but my GPS couldn’t. I landed on my ass in the stream. The water was really cold.
I clambered out and pulled the GPS out of a bush. It still worked. Then I saw the overgrown path, barely visible as it continued up the creek. I yanked out the pages in my wet pocket and hoped my father hadn’t written the clue poem in bleeder ink. Luckily, he hadn’t. When I saw the line, I slapped myself on the forehead. “You big dope. ‘At trail’s end is nature’s span.’ ” I wasn’t at trail’s end.
I ran up the trail. There it was: another fallen tree spanning the creek. My GPS was showing less than 30 feet. Since I was already half soaked I didn’t bother with the tree crossing. I splashed through the water. On the other side there was more dense undergrowth, but this time there was something else. A bunch of old limbs lay side by side on the ground. “As you seek, don’t be daft/Remember Huck is on a raft.”
I yanked up dead limbs, keeping an eye out for snakes. Something yellow flashed. I jumped up, banging my head on a branch. The yellow didn’t move. It was the plastic lid of a coffee can half buried in rotting leaves. I pulled the can out and peeled off the top.
I wasn’t surprised by what was inside. Ziplock bags with some money, a thin stack of book pages, and a little plastic toy: a devil with a pitchfork. Okay, someone in Huck Finn was going to hell. And I wasn’t surprised that “hell in a can” hadn’t turned out to be the bad book. It was getting pretty obvious my father didn’t want me finding it till I’d read all of Huck Finn. I just hoped Huck wasn’t as brick thick as the Bible. If it was, my treasure trail was going to be a death march to Mongolia.
On the second page of the new chapter I found a highlighted word: “not.” In the next few pages, four more highlights followed: “us,” “I,” “da,” “ho.” Notus, Idaho? What kind of name was that?