The Adventures of Flash Jackson (13 page)

“Well, he's loose now,” said Frankie. “Probably somewhere under your bed.”

“Find him.”

“How? He's scared. He's probably under the floorboards.”

“Frankie, you find that thing and get it out of here. I don't care if it means you have to rip up the floor. You do it. Hear?”

Frankie looked from me to the floor and back to me. Then he looked
at the floor again. Then he looked at me, and a devilish grin crossed his face.

“No,” he said. “I won't.”

It was a Mexican standoff. The two of us just stared at each other, me wanting to jump out of bed and wring his neck, and him smug and secure knowing I couldn't do it. He stood there with his arms crossed and stuck his tongue out at me.

“I will kill you,” I said calmly. “If you don't get that snake, I will wait until I'm better and I will cut your throat like a pirate. And there's nowhere you can hide.”

“It serves you right,” said Frankie. “First off, you shouldn't hurt animals.”

“A snake is not an animal,” I said. “A horse is an animal. A snake is a snake.”

“Second of all, it'll teach you not to be so mean to me,” said Frankie.

“I'm not mean to you, you shitbird,” I said. “I'm the only friend you've got, and if you don't find that snake and relocate him fast, you won't have any friends at all.
Comprende
?”

Frankie colored red and crossed his arms. “That's not true,” he said. “Elizabeth is my friend too.”

“No, she isn't,” I said.

“Yes, she is!”

“You scared her in her garden,” I said. I really
was
being mean now, but I was so mad at him for bringing that snake in I didn't care what I said. “She told me she didn't like that. She was scared of you.”

“Shut up,” said Frankie. “She knows I didn't mean to.”

“She only felt sorry for you,” I said. “That's the only reason she let you in. She doesn't really like you.”

Frankie's lower lip started to tremble and his eyes filled up. He picked up the empty margarine container and backed toward the door. I could see I had gone too far.

“Frankus, no,” I said. “I was only kidding.”

“No, you weren't,” he said.

“I was too.”

“It sounded real.”

“It wasn't. I'm sorry.”

“I don't believe you,” he said. And he turned and ran. I could hear his size thirteens clomping on the floorboards as he ran down the hall and through the kitchen, and then the screen door as it squeaked open and slammed shut, and my mother's faint voice, saying, “Bye, Frankie, nice to see you.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

I sat up in bed and swung my legs over the edge, resting the bad one on a chair. I'd have to find that snake myself, because Mother sure as hell wouldn't want anything to do with it, and I would not be able to think of anything else for the rest of my life until it was gone. I scanned around the floor until I saw something move underneath the window, just a little flicker of a tail. Then I saw it in plain sight, lying tucked in the crack between the wall and the floor. My stomach did about three flips, but I stayed in control of myself. I reached over with my crutches and prodded it once. It didn't move. Frankie was right—I had killed it. That little movement I'd seen must have been its death shudder.

“Lord, you and I both know this snake deserved to die, but please don't let Frankie know I really did kill it,” I said. “And let him know I was only kidding, because I shouldn't have said what I said to him, amen.”

“Are you talking to yourself in there?” Mother hollered from the living room.

“Yes, I am, thank you very much!” I hollered back. And I went and hunted up an old pair of gloves and some tongs, ignoring the pain in my leg so I could safely get that abomination of nature out of my room.

M
other asked me if I wanted Grandma to come out again and check me over while I was recuperating from my latest visit to the hospital, but I said I didn't care to see her anytime soon, not after the stories she'd been telling me about being abandoned in the forest. I went so far as to say that as a matter of plain fact I didn't think I wanted to see that whiskery old sorceress ever again, but Mother said I shouldn't take it that way. If anybody should have been mad about it, it was her, she said, not me. And she wasn't mad about it, not anymore. She'd gotten over it a long time ago.

“You could learn a lot from your grandmother, you know,” she told me.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like all that information she's got stored in her head, all about herbs and healing and stuff like that. Things that might get forgotten otherwise. I think she's waiting for you to come ask her about it.”

“What makes you think that?”

“A feeling,” she said. “You're old enough now, after all.”

“You change your mind or something?” I asked. “Seems to me just a few days ago you were ready to burn me at the stake for looking into that pot.”

“Don't make jokes about being burned at the stake,” she said. “That really used to happen to us, you know.”

“
Really?
” I asked. “To
us?
Our family? Cool!”

“No, it was not cool,” she said. “I could tell you stories that would curl your hair.”

“Do tell,” I said.

But Mother shook her head. “Not until you can hear them without poking fun,” she said. “Maybe you're not ready after all.”

“Please,” I said. “What good is all that stuff, anyway?”

Mother looked at me for a long minute. “You know the answer to that,” she said. “You were born knowing what good it is.”

“Well, she's going to be waiting a long while,” I said.

I knew that upset Mother, but for some reason she didn't say so. That was pretty unusual, because ordinarily she never held back when she was upset about something. She must have been turning all this over in her mind, thinking about whether or not she wanted me to learn Grandma's secrets, thinking about what kind of person it would turn me into. And she must have realized that she did want me to do it after all. In fact, I began to think that she wanted me to do it so much she was afraid to push me into it, for fear I'd push back even harder.
What gives with the sudden urge?
I wondered. She'd left Grandma long ago—maybe even before she'd had a chance to learn much from her. Maybe she was sorry now that she did it. Maybe she wanted me to make up for her own mistakes.
Well, fat chance of that happening
, I thought.
I don't live other people's lives for them. That's not why I'm here
.

Mother bit her lip, and said, “I know she'd like to get to know you better, Haley. Every time I see her she asks why you don't come visit more.”

“That,” I said, “is a riot. Last time I went out there she smacked me on the ass because I was wearing shorts. On the ass. You do not
slap Flash Jackson on the ass or anywhere else. Got it? You just don't do it.”

“Shorts are unladylike, in her mind,” said Mother. “That's why she did it.”

“Flash Jackson doesn't give a flying fart what's ladylike and what isn't.”

Mother rolled her eyes. “I see we're back on the Flash Jackson kick now,” she said.

“It's not a kick,” I said. “It's reality.”

“Haley,” she said, “she's the only grandmother you have.”

 

Regardless of my grandmother shortage, I was done with all that oracle-witchery-healing stuff. If learning how to Lift the Veil meant I was going to have to be left out in the woods for days, or something else just as horrible, I wanted nothing to do with it. I'd be content never to have another vision as long as I lived.

And what Mother didn't seem to understand was that Flash Jackson wasn't a joke. He was a way of life, and one I intended to continue living to the fullest, just as soon as I was perambulatory again. Flash Jackson wasn't really any more of a person than Bugs Bunny—I knew that full well. He was a state of mind, a way of looking at the world, a costume I could put on that kept me from getting shunted in with all the other simpering little hussies in Home Ec or the Future Housewives of America Club—believe it or not, there really
was
such a club at Mannville Junior-Senior High School, even though it had been phased out of every other school in the country thirty years earlier. Yes, old Flash Jackson was my religion and my drug, my Jesus of Nazareth and my little white painkilling pills. He was all my imaginary lovers that came at night and did things with me that I can't even bring myself to put on paper. He was the feeling I got when I was soaring bare-assed naked from the topmost branches of a sycamore into the depths of the swimming hole. Nothing I knew about God came close to comparing with what I knew about Flash Jackson. And nobody
in the world was even worth explaining Flash Jackson to, or so I thought—until I got to know Miz Elizabeth Powell better.
She
was the one who taught me that Flash Jackson had been around even longer than I had, that he'd had other names in other lifetimes—and he'd been known to other people besides me. I hadn't discovered him at all.
He
discovered
me
.

But before I get into that any further I should probably back up a few steps, to when Frankie ran out of my room all upset and teary eyed because of the snake incident.

 

It was the same old story: me lying around after my latest operation, with too much time on my hands and only my own poor brain to amuse me. It was just like when I'd broken my leg in the first place—things started spinning around and around in my head, only this time instead of word games all I could think of was Frankie's face. He was so upset about what I'd said that I got to thinking maybe he was going to run away again, and that it would be all my fault this time. I'm the first to admit it—sometimes I just don't know when to let up on a soul. I don't know why I have this mean streak in me, and why it always seems to hurt the people I care about most. It hasn't always been there. In fact, I don't remember ever feeling that way until after old Fireball McGinty passed on to the other side. I guess it has something to do with how hard it was on me to lose him. And part of me, a small and hidden part, was afraid that one of these days I was going to push someone so far away from me they'd never come back.

Which wouldn't do at all, of course. I didn't want to end up a lonely old lady with no friends and a herd of cats winding around her ankles. You saw plenty of that around here, if you kept your eyes open—there were as many abandoned people around Mannville as there were abandoned cars in the woods, old people whose children were sacrificed in war or else grown up and gone away to the cities. You ever get to feeling sorry for yourself and need a reminder of how good you actually got it, head over to the old folks' home by the high
school and spend an hour talking to the people there. The school choir used to go there at Christmas to sing carols, and I never went in but that I came out as depressed as a turkey on the last Wednesday in November. No, there was nothing for it but that I'd have to mend my ways. For the ten thousandth time in my life, I resolved to be
good
.

And for the ten-thousand-and-first time, I wondered how long it would stick.

I got to feeling so miserable I had to talk to someone. For obvious reasons that someone was not going to be my mother—she didn't know Elizabeth had been harboring him, and if I had anything to say about it she never would. I felt sure that was going to come out if I unloaded myself on anyone but the right person. So what did I do but call Elizabeth Powell herself and ask her to come over—because when two people have a secret, it's most natural for them to confide in each other about everything else.

“I'd come up to your place, but I'm still kind of laid up,” I said. “Just had another operation.”

“Shall we have tea?” said Miz Powell. “I've just had some Darjeeling mailed to me by a friend in India.”

“Sure,” I said, thinking
Who the hell has friends in India?
“But this has got to be a kind of personal conversation between you and me. Not Mother.” In a whisper I said, “It's about Frankie.”

“I see,” said Elizabeth. Her tone didn't change a bit. She didn't even sound worried that someone might have discovered her part in the whole mess. She was as cool as ice.
Man
, but she had style. She had Flash Jackson written all over her. “Shall we say in one hour?” she said.

“See you then.”

An hour later on the nose there was a knock at the door. I heard Mother exclaim “Why, Miss Powell! How nice!” and the two of them yipped and yapped at each other until Mother walked her back to my room, and said, “Haley, isn't this a nice treat? You have a guest!”

“How frightfully charming!” I said, trying to sound surprised.

“I thought I'd stop by and bring you this tea,” said Elizabeth, setting down a tin box on my nightstand. I guessed it was the Darjeeling from India. I opened it up and took a whiff of it. Your sense of smell can carry you instantly across miles and years, you know, and for a moment I was somewhere I'd never been: a tent in a high, foreign desert, the scent of nearby elephants competing with the odor of something delicious cooking in an iron pot, over a fire of fragrant wood.

“This for me?” I asked, returning to the here and now. “Wow.”

“It is, Haley,” she said. “For both of you,” she said, nodding at Mother, who practically curtseyed with gratitude.

Nobody had ever brought me anything from India before. I held the box close to me like it was some kind of religious relic. Elizabeth looked like she was trying to hide a smile. I guess around me she must have felt like Christopher Columbus, handing out mirrors and baubles to the natives.

“I can't stay long,” she said. “I have an appointment in town.”

“You look nice,” I told her.

“Yes, I
love
your outfit,” Mother said.

Elizabeth looked the very model of an English lady, in fact. She wore a tweed skirt and jacket and a little hat pinned to her iron-colored curls, and a pair of white gloves. I could see Mother eyeing up those gloves, all right—it might have been the first time a woman was seen dressed like that around here. I wondered how long it would be before a pair of the same gloves found their way into Mother's Sunday church getup. And yet you could tell that Elizabeth wasn't
trying
to be fancy. She wore those clothes like they were everyday things, like housecleaning togs.

“You want to sit down?” I asked.

“Certainly,” she said.

“I'll leave you two alone,” said Mother, not without a touch of envy—she wanted to be part of whatever we would talk about, but she could tell that Elizabeth had come there to see me, not her, and thank goodness she had the sense not to intrude. She stepped out into
the hallway and went back into the living room. Elizabeth sat down next to the bed and folded her hands on her lap.

“Now,” she said, “what's all this about Frankie?”

“I've really gone and done it,” I said. I told her about the snake, and the kinds of things I'd said to him, and how awful I felt about it.

“And I'm worried about him again,” I said. “It looks like his parents have decided not to move for now. But honestly, Elizabeth, they can't live forever. They're both heading into their eighties. What's he going to do when they're gone?”

Elizabeth settled back in her chair, took a deep breath and held it for a minute, like she was displeased.

“Is he
really
so incapable of taking care of himself?” she said, letting her breath out slowly. It wasn't really a question—it was more of an out-loud thought. “Is he so
helpless?
”

“That's what he acts like,” I said. “Because of that Fanex and everything.”

“But has he ever been encouraged to get beyond that? Or has he always been treated like he's never going to grow older, and so he simply
doesn't
grow older?”

“I don't know,” I said. “He's been the same way ever since I've known him, which is practically forever. He's not faking it.”

“I know that, Haley, dear,” said Elizabeth with a touch of impatience. “All I'm saying is, if Frankie were to be put in a situation where he had to rely on himself more, I think he might be equal to it—as long as he had friends to rely on in turn. Friends like you, for example.”

“Like me?”

“You would help him, wouldn't you? If he was in trouble?”

“'Course I would,” I said.

“Even if it was something simple, like showing him how to cook, or something like that?”

An image of Frankie alone in the kitchen came to me, and I shuddered with dread. Frankie on his own wouldn't need a friend—he wouldn't even need parents. He would need four full-time maids.

“I suppose I could show him a thing or two,” I said.

“And do you think he knows you would do that?”

“Sure he does,” I said. “We're always helping each other out. He saved my life when I fell through the barn roof, after all. I'll always owe him for that one.”

“I haven't known Frankie for very long,” said Miz Powell. “Yet he seems like one of those rare, trusting souls.”

“You're right,” I said. “He does get worked up about things sometimes, but he's not the type to stay mad. He's like a little kid that way.”

“Of course, children are easily frightened,” said Miz Powell. “They often believe everything they're told. Isn't that true?”