Joe wailed, “You broke my leg!”
“It’s just a kneecap,” Ruah said.
“Fuck you!”
Ruah picked the book off the floor, looked at it, and handed it to me. “This is it?”
I nodded. “He was gonna use it against you.”
Ruah looked down at Joe. “Yeah? Two can play his game.”
Joe screamed up at him. “You’re so fuckin’ outed! Both of you faggots! Your career is over! You hear me? Fuckin’ over!”
Ruah never flinched or took his eyes off him. “If it is, it’ll be your loss.”
Joe stopped squirming. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You’re gonna keep being my agent.”
Ruah turned to me. “He may be a total scumbag, but he’s always been a good agent.” He looked back to Joe. “Tell ’im baseball’s favorite saying about agents.”
Joe scowled and spit, “Born an asshole, died an agent.”
“He doesn’t deserve it,” I protested. “He’s worse than a scumbag.”
Ruah half smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ve got my own little punishment worked out for him.”
He wouldn’t say what it was. Instead, he gave Joe two orders: (1) He had to drive himself to the hospital and get his knee worked on. When Joe claimed he couldn’t drive, Ruah told him he’d purposely broken his left kneecap so he still could, and (2) Joe had to meet Ruah the next morning in Seattle, where, he said, they’d “finalize their deal.” Joe agreed, and Ruah sent me to fetch his car, parked down the road. Giff was parked behind it.
After we helped Joe into his car and he drove off, Ruah and I sat on the porch. I told him everything that had happened with my father and Joe. Then I asked him how he knew to come to the farmhouse. Ruah told me he had gotten suspicious as soon as Joe had shown up at Boot Heel Collectibles. It meant Joe knew too much. Ruah pretended to ditch me to see if Joe would follow me after I left the store. He did, and Ruah tried to follow Joe in a taxi but lost him. Then he went back and turned Boot Heel Collectibles upside down until he found the address carved in the floor. That was how he found the farmhouse.
Ruah rubbed a hand over his head stubble. “Here’s what I don’t get. Joe got to the Potlatchers in Idaho—he told me that in front of the store—but how? The last time Joe had any kind of bead on us was back in Denver.”
For a second I thought about Hucking-up and concocting a story about how it all came about. But there’s no way I could lie as good as Huck and Tom. I went inside and got my backpack. I dropped it on the porch and dug out the cell phone.
Ruah stared at it in disbelief. “You had it all the time?”
“I always wanted to give it back,” I explained. “I know it’s a lame excuse.” I handed him the phone.
I watched him connecting the dots. He looked over at me. “It was the call record, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
He chuckled. “I’ll be damned.”
I couldn’t believe he wasn’t yelling at me. “Aren’t you pissed off?”
“Nah.” He shook his head and whacked me on the shoulder. “Once a rattlesnake skin starts a string of bad luck, no one can stop it. You just let it run its course.” He stood to go.
“You know, you could spend the night,” I said. “My father will be rested up by morning, and it’d be great if you met him.”
“I’d love to,” he said, “but I gotta be in Seattle tonight.”
“Okay, but you can’t leave without something.” I went into the living room, collected the paperback pages of the last ten chapters of Huck Finn, and gave them to Ruah. “It gets pretty wild in the end.”
“You finished it?”
“Pretty much. My dad has a fancy copy with pictures.”
I shrugged. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
As we walked down the driveway, I asked what he meant when he told Joe they’d “finalize the deal” in Seattle.
He grinned. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
We stopped at the end of the driveway. He chuckled at the awkwardness of the moment. “So, what do you wanna do? Shake? Hug?”—he raised a fist—“Knuckle-bump?”
I laughed nervously.
“Or we could pray.”
I shook my head. “Last time we did that I ended up in a fight and got a bloody lip.” As he laughed at the recollection, my last word jogged a memory. “Remember when you told me about the Jewish baby? You know, the one who knows the Torah by heart, but then an angel touches him on the upper lip and he spends the rest of his life relearning his religion?”
Ruah nodded. “Yeah.”
“That’s what I feel like now.” I tapped the groove above my lip. “Like my dad touched me here, and I’ve forgotten everything I ever learned. How to be a Christian, how to talk to my mom, how to live, even how to say goodbye.”
He flashed a smile. “I know what you mean.” He poked his upper lip. “Reset, reset, reset.”
“What do you have to reset?”
“How to play baseball like God wants me to.”
“How’s that?”
“I found the answer in the Book. Job five, seven.”
I waited. “You’re not gonna tell me?”
“No. You check it out.”
There was nothing more to say.
He wrapped me in a bear hug; I hugged back. It didn’t feel strange at all. We were just good buddies saying bye.
As I walked back to the house, lights spilled through the ground-floor windows. The upper floor was dark in the moonlight. I thought I saw something move in my father’s bedroom window. I figured it was a curtain again.
I went upstairs to check on him. When I put the bad book back on his bed, his eyes opened. He started telling me about the dream he’d just had. In the dream, he was standing at his bedroom window and looking into the moonlight. He watched two figures walk down the driveway to the road. But they weren’t any figures. It was Huck Finn, walking Jim to freedom.
I told him it wasn’t a dream. He’d woken up, gone to the window, and seen me walk down the driveway with my friend Ruah.
He gave me a puzzled look, then shook his head. “No, I know what I dreamed; I know what I saw. When you see Huck and Jim, you can’t mistake them for anyone else.”
I didn’t argue. I sat on the edge of the bed until he went back to sleep.
I took the letters off the hall table and into the study. There were two envelopes, both torn open and probably read by Joe Douglas. On the first envelope, my father had scrawled For Billy, if you came too late. The other envelope said To be opened only upon my death.
I pulled out the first letter and read what he had typed on his store’s stationery.
I left the second envelope on his desk. I took the fancy copy of Huck Finn to the living room, lay on a couch, and finished “Chapter the Last.”
When I got to the last paragraphs, where Jim tells Huck that his father, Pap, ain’t a-comin’ back no mo’, and Huck realizes that his father is dead, it was too creepy. I had to go check on my own pap.
He was sleeping, breathing steady and quiet.
Back downstairs, I turned out the lights and stretched out on the couch. Slipping into the z-bag never felt so good.