The Adventures of Flash Jackson (11 page)

“Just imagine,” murmured Miz Powell.

“Oh, I've imagined many a time what it must be like to be Frankie,” I said. “And it's never any fun at all.”

I flashed back then to Frankie telling me about his theater. I don't know why I thought of it then—it just came to me. It'd been one of those many moments when it seemed like Frankie was tuned into a different channel than the rest of us, one that broadcast ideas only he could understand. I'd never been able to forget the day he drew those plans in the dirt, because I'd never been able to explain it. On the spur of the moment, I told Elizabeth all about it—his idea for a “theater of the human spirit,” and how even though he'd never mentioned it again, at the time it had seemed like the most important thing in the world.

She listened with a sort of faint half smile of fascination, and when I was done, she said, “The Oracle at Mannville.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I was thinking of the Oracle at Delphi,” she said. “Have you ever heard of that?”

“No, ma'am.”

“The ancient ones all had their oracles, and for the Greeks it was Delphi,” she said. “It was where they went when they had questions about the future. Some say the Oracle was a schizophrenic personality, someone who spoke in riddles which people would then try to piece together. Nowadays we take our oracles to the hospital, but back then they were valued as seers. Delphi was dedicated to Apollo, if I remember correctly. And a very important part of Greek culture oracles were, too. Some say the temple was a holy site even before the Greeks came—part of an even older culture, one that the Greeks themselves had taken over. Possibly the Etruscans.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn't really see at all.

“If Frankie had been born in Greece three thousand years ago, that's where he would have ended up,” said Elizabeth. “People would have come from miles around to ask him questions, and he would have gone into a trance and answered them.”

“A
trance
?”

“What they call now an episode,” she said. “That's a very interesting story, Haley. Thank you for sharing it with me.”

This comment had a kind of air of finality about it, and I looked up at an old clock on the mantelpiece to see that it was nearly ten. I hadn't realized it was so late—time had been getting away from me all day. I reached for my crutches and stood up.

“I better get going,” I said. “Thanks for the tea, and the conversation.”

“You're most welcome, Haley,” said Elizabeth. “You're a very mature young lady, you know. I have enjoyed speaking with you. Are you going to tell anyone where Frankie is?”

I liked that—she wasn't
telling
me not to tell anyone, she was
asking
what I was going to do.

“Not yet,” I said. “You're right. It is up to him. But his parents are near the breaking point, so I think the sooner they know he's all right the better.”

“I understand completely,” said Elizabeth. “We'll have a talk in the morning, he and I, and we'll decide what to do.”

She let me out onto the porch and helped me down the stairs, watching as I headed across the dewy lawn toward the road. There was a half-moon up, casting a gauzy white light over everything like a thin film of spiderweb. I love moonlight on a clear night such as that. You can almost feel it in your hair, like wind.

“Safe home, Haley,” she called after me.

“Thanks, Miz Powell,” I said.

I thought about the Oracle at Delphi as I headed back toward the old Bombauer domicile. What Elizabeth didn't know was that I came from a long line of oracles myself—not the schizo kind but the witchy kind. I was still tingling with weird energy from my little experiment at the kitchen table that afternoon. I wondered what she would make of
that
.

I had completely forgotten to ask her about the old Flash, the one the East Germans got—and now on top of that little mystery there was the matter of that old Nazi pistol in her bathrobe pocket. She was a curious one, she was. I made up my mind to get back there as soon as decency and good manners would allow, maybe after all this business about Frankie was resolved, and then I would ask her some more questions. She would be a wealth of good stories, old Elizabeth Powell. I just knew it.

 

Next morning around ten, Mother came home from the Grunveldts with her face all flushed with excitement. “He's home,” she announced. “Frankie's home!”

“Is he?” I said. I tried to act surprised. “Where's he been?”

“He won't say,” she answered. “The police are talking to him, but he won't tell them anything. But the important thing is that he's safe and sound.” She kicked off her shoes, and then she stopped and looked at me. “The poor dear thought he was going to be sent away to Gowanda,” she said. “That was why he ran away.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“I don't know why on earth Frankie would think he was going to
Gowanda, unless someone had
told
him he was going to Gowanda,” she said, looking hard at me. “Someone who was trying to tease him, and ended up scaring the life out of him.”

“Don't even start with me,” I said. “
I
wouldn't tease Frankie like that. I know how sensitive he is.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm what?” I said.

“You're sure you don't know where he was?” she asked.

“Sure I'm sure,” I said.

“You would have said something, right?”

“'Course I would,” I said.

“All right, then,” she said. She was so relieved at the whole business being over that she just let it drop right there. “I think I'm going to bake a celebration cake.”

I was glad she didn't push me anymore, because lying like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I can only keep it up for so long before I start to fold. And her mention of a celebration cake made my stomach gurgle and shrink at the same time. Even at the tender age of seventeen, I'd already conditioned myself to stay off the sweet stuff—seems it went straight to my rear end without even stopping off in my gut first to say how-de-do. And now that I was leading a “sedentary lifestyle,” as they say in those magazine fitness ads, I was porking up a little more than I was happy with. But I never could resist Mother's celebration cake. And she hadn't made one in a long time, not since I was little—because we hadn't had much to celebrate, you see.

I sat with my leg propped up and watched as she took out the flour and baking soda and sugar and got down her favorite mixing bowl, an old piece that had belonged to my father's mother—my other grandmother, who I never knew. She and my grandpop on my dad's side both passed away before I was born, her of cancer and him of a heart attack. That's what country living will do for you—not the clean air, mind you, but the food. Us small-town folks have never been noted for their dietary smarts. Eggs fried in bacon grease for breakfast, and in
some families red meat for dinner five nights a week, which you can't help because there's so damn much fresh beef around here. And when you go out for dinner, it's pizza or fried chicken or cheeseburgers. Trucker food, mostly—and I have never in my life seen a healthy-looking trucker.

Mother popped out to the henhouse and swiped herself a couple of eggs, which she proceeded to break into the bowl. Then she stopped herself, and said, “Chocolate or vanilla?”

“Oh, mercy,” I said. “That's like the Devil asking Eve if she wants an apple or an orange.”

“Very funny,” she said. “I think chocolate.” She melted up a few squares of the unsweetened kind of chocolate, and added some more sugar to the mixture.

“Mom?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“What about what happened yesterday?”

She put some butter on her fingers and started greasing up a pan.

“What about it?” she asked.

“Don't you want to talk about it some more?”

“Was there something more you wanted to say?”

She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving a big streak of butter and flour. A little wisp of hair was hanging down over her forehead. She was going gray, I realized. I mean, grayer. Seems like she'd always had at least a little gray up top ever since I could remember. But for a moment there she looked more like her own mother than she did like herself, and I got a little twinge, thinking that someday she was going to be an old lady too, and that day was not as far off as it used to seem.

“I guess I just wanted to know more about it,” I said. “Like, when Grandma taught you how to do it. What was that like?”

She sort of smiled, not looking at me, but I could tell it wasn't a happy smile. It was the kind of smile someone trains themself to show when what they really feel like doing is crying. My mother would always smile, even with an arrow in the gut. I guess it's a generational
thing. Me, I would always let the world know what was going on inside me, even if it wasn't all sugar and spice. Tell you the truth, I think I must have gotten into the line for puppy dog tails and pails of snails instead, or however the hell that stupid song goes.

“What makes you think she taught me?” she said.

I was surprised. “Well, you were acting like—”

“I learned the way you learned, Haley,” she said, “which is why I've decided not to be mad at you anymore. I didn't really have any right to be mad in the first place.”

“You didn't?” I asked, thinking,
Now, this is progress!

“I've been thinking it over. I remembered the first time I tried it on my own. My mother found me doing it, just like I found you.”

“Was she mad?”

Mother kind of winced. She never told me too much about how it was growing up, other than that they didn't have electricity and running water and all that, and I wondered sometimes if it had been rough on her in more ways than one. Grandma was pretty old now, but she was still tough, which of course would lead one to believe that when she was younger she was even tougher. Stronger. And out there in the woods like that, people get to making their own rules. I wondered what kind of punishment a religious fanatic—hate to say it, but that's pretty much what my grandmother was—would use on her own daughter, out there in the middle of nowhere. She could have been doing just about anything to her. And the fact that Mother didn't talk about it made me think that maybe sometimes some bad things did happen.

“I don't know,” she said. “I couldn't tell if she was mad or not.”

“What'd she do?”

She stopped pouring the batter into the pan and just stood there, holding a spatula.

“I always swore I'd never do things like that to my children,” she said. Her voice had gone soft now, so I could barely hear it. I stayed quiet and listened. “She sent me away,” she said.

“Away where?”

“Out. Into the forest.”

“You mean by yourself?”

She nodded.

“For how long?” I asked.

“A whole day,” she said. “Sometimes two. She thought it would make me stronger. She really didn't do it to hurt me, Haley. I believe that. It wasn't punishment. It was supposed to be a teaching. But…I wasn't allowed to bring any food or water.”

“Two days with no food or water? Was she trying to kill you?”

Mother was still staring at the cake batter.

“Yes,” she said. “In a way, I think she was. She said if I was still alive when she came back that it would be a sign.”

I felt shock settling over me like a cold, wet blanket. My mother, abandoned in the forest as a girl? By her own mother? I felt a kind of protective rage, almost. Like she was my daughter and not the other way around.

“A sign of
what
, for crying out loud?” I asked.

“Of my…connection,” she said. “A sign of whether I was fit to carry on her work. She must have gone through the same thing herself, when she was a girl. We all did.”

“Who all?” I asked.

“My mother, and her mother, and her mother,” said my mother. “It's old, Haley. It's ancient. You come from a long line of very gifted women.”

Well, I guess
that
makes everything all right then
, I thought. Child abuse wasn't child abuse if it was a family tradition.

“You have to be tested, after all,” said Mother. “And you have to be found worthy.”

“Those are the rules, huh?” I asked sarcastically.

“Yes, Haley,” she said. “Those are the rules. And they're very old rules. We might not like them, but we have to follow them.”

“Who's we?”

“Us. The women who decide to take this path.”

“What path?”

“The path you started on yesterday,” she said, calmly.

Well, that gave me a case of the jumps. If I'd known I was letting myself in to be practically murdered, I certainly wouldn't have gone ahead with my little whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

“Couldn't you find your own food and water?” I asked. “I thought you said you knew the forest pretty well.”

“No,” she said. “I couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“I didn't have it,” she said. “I just didn't have what it took.”

“What do you mean? To survive?”

She nodded. “I just sat there and cried,” she said. “She told me later she found me exactly where she'd left me. I hadn't moved. Not an inch.”

“Well, no wonder,” I said. “A little kid out there—how old were you?”

“About six, I guess.”

“Six! And she left you on your own in the forest!”

“You have to understand,” said Mother. “She was testing me. Even children want to fight for survival. It's an instinct.”

“But you didn't?”

“But I didn't,” she said. “It was as if I didn't care. Like I was waiting for someone to come along and save me. That's just the way I am, I guess. Not like you.”