The Adventures of Flash Jackson (14 page)

Suddenly I felt like the biggest cad in the world. “Yes,” I said.

“So if you told Frankie something that upset him, yet you knew not to be true…”

“…but he didn't,” I finished for her. I was feeling pretty sheepish by now.

“Maybe you ought to tell him you're sorry,” said Miz Powell. “That you didn't mean what you said.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said quietly. “You're right. I will.”

“We have to take extra care with the Frankies of the world,” said Miz Powell. “Some may see them as burdensome, but the fact is they're rare as white bulls.”

I didn't say anything. Her point was well taken.

“Do perk up, Haley, dear,” said Miz Powell. “We all say things we're sorry for later.”

I did my best to smile at her. She smiled back. Then she checked her watch.

“Do you have to go just yet?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I don't actually have to go anywhere.”

“But I thought you—”

“It was a fib,” she said. “A white lie. Just in case—” She jerked her head toward the door, to where Mother was lurking in the kitchen.

I stifled a laugh. Mother could drive anyone nuts. Then, suddenly,
I felt shy. “Will you tell me about the old Flash?” I asked her, toying with the ratty old quilt on my bed. The Shumacher twins had made that for me, a present on the day I was born.

“The
old Flash?
”

“The guy you said got shot by the East Germans.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “That Flash.”

“You don't mind me asking, do you?”

“No, I don't mind.”

“Because, I was wondering…how was it you came to know someone like that?”

“You mean, someone who found himself in predicaments where getting shot by the East Germans was a real threat?”

I nodded. Elizabeth peeled off her gloves one finger at a time and dropped them into her handbag, thinking.

“Do you know what OSS stands for, dear?” she asked.

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“Back during the war, which started when I was about your age, the Office of Strategic Services was much like what the CIA is today. In fact, the OSS became the CIA after the war ended. It was an intelligence service, you see, made up of America's best and brightest.”

“Like you?” I asked.

She smiled again, weakly. “No, no. I was only a secretary then. In fact, at first I was only a WAC—that's the Women's Army Corps, you know. I was attached to the Eighth Army and sent to England, where I worked in an office. But then I was…
approached
, as we used to say.”

“Who by?”

“By whom.”

“By whom?”

“By someone who wanted to know if I could be trusted with some special work. Someone with an interest in my linguistic abilities. I speak French, you know, and some German. And a little Russian.”

“Wow,” I said. “What kind of work? Spy work?”
This was getting good
, I thought. Elizabeth Powell in a dark cloak, dagger in hand,
skulking around the shadows. Elizabeth and James Bond rocketing around in a car with built-in machine guns.

“I can tell what you're thinking, and it was nothing like that,” she said. “It had to do with coded messages. They needed someone to help type them out and make sure they were delivered in a secure fashion. It wasn't very dramatic or exciting, but it was important. They had to be absolutely sure you wouldn't talk. ‘Loose lips sink ships,' as they used to say. And I was flattered to be chosen, because in those days women weren't often entrusted with much that was really important.”

“So you learned code?”

“Well, not exactly,” she said. “It's hard to explain. There was a Nazi coding device called the Enigma machine, which the Germans used to encrypt their messages to each other. What they didn't know was that we also had an Enigma machine, which we used to decode those messages.”

“And you worked on that machine?”

Elizabeth smiled. “Well, to tell the truth,” she said, “I'm still not allowed to discuss that part of it. I signed an oath, you see.”

“Wow,” I said. “Would the OSS come after you if they knew you blabbed?”

“The OSS doesn't exist anymore, actually,” she said. “After the war I went to work for the CIA. And of course I had to sign an oath for them, too. More than once, as I recall.”

She sat there with a twinkle in her eye and her handbag on her lap, looking for all the world like the grandmother I wished I had instead of that crazy old biddy out in the woods.

“The CIA?” I said. “Come on. You
were
a spy!”

“I never once went undercover,” she said, “so if you're hoping for tales of espionage and intrigue, I'm afraid I have to disappoint you.”

“Oh,” I said.

“What I
did
do, for a time, was work as a handler,” she said.

“What's a handler?”

“This was after I'd been asked to stay in London, when the war ended. I saw no purpose in coming back home—after all I'd seen and done, even though I was still effectively a glorified secretary, life on the farm seemed like it would be the end of me. So I stayed in England, a choice I never regretted. Even though I lived there more than two-thirds of my life, I never grew homesick, and England never stopped fascinating me—it was so rich in history and tradition, and those are two things that have always impassioned me. And eventually, I worked my way up to more responsibility, and more sensitive material.” She paused and looked up at the ceiling, like the memories she was talking about were dancing around up there. “A handler is someone who deals with spies,” she said. “There aren't as many spies in the world as people seem to think there are. Very, very few people in the CIA's employ ever go under deep cover. But those that do have an extensive support network behind them—people to receive their messages, and to make sure they safely get in and out of wherever in the world they're going, and to debrief them when they get home.”

“
That
was what you did?” I asked.

She smiled again. “I can't confirm or deny that I actually did that,” she said. “I can only tell you that such things went on.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “Or they'll shoot you.”

“For heaven's sake, I doubt
that very
much,” she said.

“And was this Flash guy your spy? Were you his handler?”

The smile disappeared. “I can tell you we called him Flash because that wasn't his code name,” she said. “It was his nickname. He had a different code name altogether. But that's actually all I can tell you about him. The rest is still classified.”

“Did you even know his real name?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I worked with him for over ten years, and I never knew his real name at all.”

“That's a long time to know someone and not even know what to call them.”

“Yes, it is.”

I saw a look of pain cross her face then, for the first time since I'd met her. It was quick, but it was there. She had cracked the tiniest bit.

“And he got shot?” I said.

“Our project was ultimately a failure, yes,” she said. Her voice was hard now.

“Did you miss him?”

Elizabeth looked straight at me. After a while I realized she wasn't going to answer.

“Sorry,” I said. “None of my business.”

“That's quite all right,” she said.

“Was your husband in the CIA too?”

Elizabeth rooted around in her purse for something, but I could tell it was the kind of rooting women do when they're not really looking for anything in particular except a distraction.

“Haley,” she said. “May I tell you something?”

“Sure,” I said.

“This is a secret,” she said. “Not something I wish to be known. You understand?”

I nodded.

“I was never actually married,” she said. “To my career, yes. But I didn't have time for a husband. I was always traveling, and the Agency didn't exactly encourage me to form emotional ties to people. So I simply didn't.”

“I see,” I said. “You just tell people you were married so they don't ask questions, is that it?”

“You are a bright girl, Haley,” she said. “It's such a pleasure to meet a young person with your perspicacity.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, thinking meanwhile that the first thing I'd do when she left would be to head for the nearest dictionary. “So—then you never had any kids, I guess. And if you weren't married, you didn't have any family over there either.”

“No,” she said.

“So…who is there?” I asked. “I mean, who do you have?”

Too late, I realized I already knew the answer. And she could see that I knew it by looking at me, and that she didn't have to respond: The answer was no one.

Elizabeth and I sat for a good hour, just talking away, while I could hear Mother fluttering around in other parts of the house like a trapped bird.

“What, may I ask, is your interest in Flash?” she asked. “Didn't you mention another fellow by that name to me, when we first met?”

“Oh, him,” I said. “That's Flash Jackson. He's not a real person. He's kind of like a…I don't know what you might call it. An idea. Or no—a philosophy. Inside me.”

“An alter ego, you mean,” she said. “A persona.”

“I guess so. It's hard to explain. It comes out of a game me and my dad used to play, but it's gotten bigger since those days. It means more now.”

She settled back in her chair.

“Tell me about it,” she said.

Why the hell not?
I thought. She'd told me secrets, and I felt like I could trust her. Besides, Flash wasn't really a secret. I didn't give a crap who knew about him. I
liked
talking about him. So I did just that for quite a good little while, about how when I was racing down the road on Brother, imagining that I was a stuntman, I didn't feel like chubby old Haley Bombauer, farm girl, anymore. When I started thinking like Flash Jackson I started seeing things through his eyes, and everything became an adventure. Life was suddenly dangerous, but the
good
kind of dangerous—the kind that kept you awake and on your toes every moment, waiting to see what perils lurked around the next corner. A dive in the swimming creek was a lot more interesting when the creek was full of crocodiles, after all.

But hearing myself talk about it made me realize that it sounded childish, kind of dumb—
juvenile
, to use a Miz Powell kind of word. It
made it sound like the kind of game an eight-year-old kid plays to keep himself amused. And it wasn't that at all. It was way more than that. I thought of how to explain it in a way she would understand, and suddenly I hit on a good one.

“Flash Jackson is a
code
,” I said.

“Do you mean a code of honor, or an encryption?” she said.

“Both, I guess. Does encryption mean all scrambled up so no one else can understand it?”

“Precisely.”

“Then yes, it's that. But I like code of honor, too. Not really honor—a code of living. A promise.”

“A promise?”

“A promise that life will always mean something,” I said. “That I'll never let myself get trapped, or bored, or sucked under into this stupid small-town life. I mean, I
like
living here. I don't want to leave. But sometimes the people around here drive me crazy. Why can't a person live in a small town without
being
that small town? Can't I
be
New York City and still
live
in Mannville?”

“I'm not sure I understand you,” said Elizabeth.

“It's just the gossiping, and the boredom, and the…I don't know what you call it, the
nearsightedness
.”

“Myopia,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“It means nearsightedness.”

“Well, do we
have
to be that way? Can't we be higher than that?”

“A very good question,” said Elizabeth. “Haley, I don't know the answer. But I do know that a girl can certainly try. She can show her spirit, so to speak.”

“I guess that's what it's all about, really,” I said. “Spirit. I see so many people around here just going through the motions, like. They don't care much about what goes on in other parts of the world. They don't care about anything, in fact. They just want to get through
their day with nothing out of the ordinary happening. That's a good day for them—a day when everything happens exactly the way it's supposed to, and they don't have to learn anything new.”

“Indeed,” said Elizabeth. “That's never changed, not since I've been around.”

“I'm not saying a person has to travel the world to be interesting,” I said. “Although I think it's pretty neat that you've done that.”

“Thank you,” said Elizabeth. “I think you're pretty neat too.”

I kind of blushed. Nobody had ever called me neat before.

“You sound a whole lot less English all of a sudden,” I said.

Elizabeth smiled a new smile, for her—her whole face lit up, as if she was laughing with her eyes.

“What's so funny?” I asked.

“I used to know a girl just like you,” she said. “When I was growing up. Her name was Letty Horgan.”

“What about her?” I asked.

“She was a tomboy too,” she said. “She even had a horse, as I recall. Though in those days that wasn't so unusual. And we used to say she was full of Zam.”

“What's that?”

“Zam is Flash Jackson,” said Elizabeth. “Same thing.”

“It is?”

“Letty was a great deal like you,” she said. “Same spirit, same energy. She didn't mind living the kind of life that was set out for her, but she wanted it to be fun. You see? And interesting.”