You Don't Know About Me by Brian Meehl

plastic ziplock bags. I knelt on the grass and pulled them out. Inside one were some twenty-dollar bills. Another held a small plastic toy: a raft with Jim steeringand Huck fishing from it. The last bag held a small bundle of pages, beginning with Chapter 12.
    My insides ricocheted off one another. I was thrilled I’d found the cache my father had planted; I was crushed that the only book was more
Huck Finn
. It was like Christmas when you open a present and it’s not what you’d wanted. I’d expected my treasure, my inheritance. But I’d gotten some pages from an old book, some money, and a kid’s toy instead. At least the money would buy the lunch I’d totally forgotten about.
    I took the bags to a picnic table and opened the one with the pages. I turned the first one over. On the flip side was a new poem my father had scribbled.
    Wondering why such a place
Is waypoint one in your chase?
It’s just because, from where I stand,
I do not know where you began.
So I did choose the Midwest middle
In which to plant your next riddle.
From our nation’s belly button,
You pick more Huck, no homebound glutton.
    That was why he’d picked Hunter, Kansas. It was at the center of the huge circle where he thought I might live. He’d only been off by one state and a few hundred miles.
    I started flipping through the new
Huck Finn
pages. The first highlighted words were “St. Petersburg.” After thatcame four highlighted words and syllables: “call,” “oar,” “add,” and “o.” I put them together. “Call-oar-add-o.” Colorado. Maybe that’s where my father had lived, and where my treasure was. St. Petersburg, Colorado.
    I had to keep going west. But how far? I went through more pages and noted all the highlighted letters and numbers. They added up to
N 40° 33.183 lat, W 102° 49.146 long.
I held down the GPS’s thumb stick to set a new waypoint. I entered the coordinates and clicked on Goto. The distance to St. Petersburg, Colorado, flashed up: 241 MILES.

8
Packin’
    I walked back through town. I figured I’d hitch back to the interstate, get something to eat, and then hitch as far as I could that day. I also decided to spend some of the five twenties I’d found in the ziplock bag on supplies, starting with a sleeping bag.
    I walked out of Hunter and tried to thumb a ride. After a half hour, in which two vehicles blew by me, I spotted a white puffy thing in the distance. It was either a camper exactly like Sloan’s or the same one.
    One of the cool things about wide-open spaces is that when you see someone you know coming your way, you have plenty of time to make up a story about why you are where you are and not where you said you’d be.
    Sloan pulled to a stop and stared at me with a curious expression. “What are you doing here?”
    â€œWhat are
you
doing here?” I asked back.
    â€œAlright, I’ll go first,” he said. “When I was looking for the geodetic center of the U.S.—”
    â€œDid you find it?”
    â€œNo, it’s on someone’s ranch, and you can’t go there unless you do a song and dance to get permission. Anyway, something kept bugging me. The magazine on the top of the mail in your dad’s mailbox was
Glamour
. I didn’t picture your dad as a
Glamour
man, so I thought maybe he wasn’t there anymore and that was someone else’s mail piling up.”
    â€œYou’re right,” I said. “He wasn’t there anymore.”
    â€œDid he go to the hospital?”
    â€œNo. I asked one of his neighbors and they said my uncle came and got him. He took my dad to his house in Colorado.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œReally.”
    After a pause, he asked, “Are you going to Colorado or back to Columbia?”
    â€œI’m not sure. First I wanna get back to the interstate and get something to eat.”
    He offered me a lift