The Adventures of Flash Jackson (19 page)

 

When I went home Mother was still asleep, so I made myself some dinner and then brushed and curried Brother. Poor old sad sack—he hadn't been getting much attention from me lately. He gave me the cold shoulder when I first came in, and it took me a while to warm him up to the point where he'd stick his soft mouth in my neck. But eventually he came around, and we snuggled up and chatted just like old times. The sun was going down, and a few stray rays shot in the stable door and lit up his coat like he was a model walking down a runway.

“Haley,” said a voice.

I whipped around fast. It was Mother, standing in the doorway.

“Flaming frog farts, Mother!” I said. “You scared the lights out of me!”

She didn't say anything. She just stood in the doorway, leaning on it and looking down at the ground: the classic bad-news posture.

“Mother?” I said. “What's wrong?”

She had that old look on her face again, too, the same sort of look she'd had when Fireball McGinty was called to the Great Workshop in the Sky. She'd been wearing it a lot lately, what with the Grunveldts passing on like they did. It was her death look. And she had it on again.

“What is it?” I asked again.

The fact that she hadn't said anything yet told me how bad it really was.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He's dead,” she said.

I knew she was talking about Frankie. Who else? You get a sense sometimes of the order in which people are going to leave you, and you know who's next on the list. My spirit floated out of me once again, just like that, without warning, and it stood off to one side watching myself have this conversation with her. I was a whole other person, one who'd just walked into the stable by chance and was witnessing this event unfold between two strangers. That was good. That way it wouldn't mean anything to me. It had nothing to do with me at all—it was these other two people, some kind of problem that was totally separate from my own. I could just walk away at any time.
What a relief
, I thought.
I don't think I could handle this type of thing right now myself. How interesting other people's problems are
.

I heard Haley ask, “How did he do it?”

Mother couldn't speak. Mother didn't want to say it. But Haley had to know.

“He killed himself,” she said.

“How?” Haley pressed her.

“He…got loose, somehow,” said Mother. “And he beat his head against the wall.”

“Then he can't be dead,” said Haley. “You can't beat yourself to death. You'd pass out first. Right?” Oh, she sounded hopeful, this Haley girl. She sounded desperate. I felt sorry for her.

“He knocked himself out,” said Mother. “But then…they think he had an aneurysm. Or something.”

“And he's dead?” Haley asked. “They're sure? He's not just unconscious?”

Mother nodded.

“Are they
sure
?” she pressed. Boy, did I feel bad for that girl. She looked like she was about to collapse. I got the idea she'd had strong feelings for this guy, whoever he was. I got the impression she'd wanted to marry him or something. Poor dumpy broad—she'd have a lot of trouble finding another guy.
Look at her
, I thought.
Her ass sticks out too far, and her hips are too wide, and if she wasn't wearing a skirt I bet you could see her thighs rubbing together. A girl that big ought to be big on top, too, but not this one—she is all out of proportion
.

“Okay, Mother,” said Haley. “Thanks for telling me.”

Mother's eyes were hollow. “I'm so tired,” she said. “I'm so tired.”

“Why don't you go back to bed,” said Haley.

“What are you going to do?” Mother asked.

“I don't know,” Haley said.

I was just standing there by an empty stall, watching this whole thing. I think the horse knew I was there. He looked at me, and I could swear he winked—but of course I could only see one of his eyes at a time, so maybe he was just blinking. Haley turned and put her arms around the horse. She buried her face in his long, warm neck and smelled him. I could tell that if that horse hadn't been there she would have fallen straight over into the muck, and that she wouldn't have cared enough to pick herself up again. And I didn't hear the woman called Mother walk away, but when I turned a moment later to see if she was still there, she was gone.

Poor people
, I thought.
Poor, sad, sad people
.

J
ust like that, the entire Grunveldt family had been wiped off the face of the earth, all three of them gone in a matter of days. Their house was dark and cold, the For Sale sign that Mr. Grunveldt had never gotten around to taking out of the yard standing like a coded message telling the world what had happened. You never could tell what a For Sale sign really meant when you saw one. It might mean
We Hate It Here and We're Going Back to Where We Came From
, or possibly
There Was a Terrible Divorce
, or even, as in this case,
Everyone Here Is Dead
. It never just means For Sale.

Funerals are the worst of life, boiled down and condensed into a ceremony. I'll never forget old Fireball's service, though I've tried to many times. We cremated those bits of him we could find and put them in an urn. I was not allowed to touch the urn itself, but I put my ear close to it to listen. He was a big man, but I knew they had squeezed my father in there somehow. For years I had nightmares, imagining him trapped inside that little container, pleading to be let out and nobody listening.

A triple funeral is more than three times worse than a single one. It's three to the power of ten times worse, maybe three million to the
power of ten million times. No—it's three lives ended, no more and no less, and that is plenty bad enough. So let me not dwell on the end of things but rather on the beginnings.

A few weeks after Frankie was buried, my thigh cast was taken off and replaced with one that only came up to my knee. I felt like a whole new person. My leg had gotten skinny, and hair was growing on it like I'd never seen before, but it was my leg, my old leg returned to me. It would take me a long while to get the thigh muscles back. I would have to exercise it a lot. I would have to make a point of moving around.

The good thing about the new cast was that it finally made it possible for me to ride Brother again. I saddled him up and rode out into the countryside, a knapsack on my back, a cane strapped to the saddle, and my bad foot wrapped in a plastic bag to keep the mud out. I'd given up my crutches, and the pain was considerably less now. It felt good to have all that horseflesh moving under me, indescribably good. You never realize how much you love to move until you can't do it anymore. I'd forgotten about wind in the face, about certain sounds that were accessible only when away from other humans: bird arias, for example, and the secret songs of trees, rubbing against each other in the wind.

I spent hours perusing the landscape on Brother, remembering how much I loved it in the woods. It gave me what I needed most: quiet. My mind was like a turbulent river, and I wanted it to settle down again.

It was in these moments that a plan came to me. Life, obviously, could not go on as it had been. The thing for me to do, I decided—and I had to do
something
—was to go to my grandmother's for a while, and not just for a short visit, either. I was going to stay for a while. It sounded crazy even to me, but I needed a long time in the woods. I needed to get over losing Frankie that way. I needed to figure things out.

“Are you sure that's such a good idea?” Mother asked, when I told her. “It'll be a hard life.”

“I'm not planning on living there forever,” I said. “Just…a while.”

“Every day there is a trial,” said Mother. “Believe me. I know.”

“I know you know,” I said. “I want to know too. That's why I'm going.”

“Well, what, exactly, do you think you're going to learn from her, anyway?” said Mother. “And what about school? Are you just going to drop out?”

That was a hard one, the part of this conversation I'd been dreading. I had the brash confidence of a youth who assumes that the wisdom of the world can be parceled out and handed over on demand, if only the right person is asked. And I certainly didn't give a damn about school, which had never been kind to me. Dropping out seemed like a great idea. Also, I had reversed my original position on Grandma. I no longer cared if she smelled bad or talked funny. I no longer cared about any of the things I used to care about. All I cared about was getting away for a while. I couldn't stand it around here anymore.

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm going to drop out.”

Mother put her face in her hands. After she had been silent for a few moments, I realized she was crying.

“What?” I said. “It's not a national tragedy, Princess.”

“You don't understand,” she said into her hands. “You won't until you have children of your own.”

“Don't understand what?”

Mother sat up and took her hands away from her face, revealing it to be bright red and wet. “Every mother's worst fear,” she said, “is that her daughter is going to drop out of high school. Because you know what happens next?”

“What?”

“Pregnancy.”

“Oh, please!” I shouted. “What do you take me for, some kind of trailer-park bimbo? How am I going to get pregnant out there when it's just me and Grandma?”

“You'll find a way,” Mother said grimly. “I know the statistics. First comes the dropping out, then the drugs. Then the sex.”

“I cannot even believe I'm hearing these things from you,” I said. “You're worse than insane. You're—”

“Don't you dare say that to me, Haley Bombauer,” said Mother. “I'm still your mother, and I'll smack that smart little mouth of yours.”

“You're the one who needs a smack,” I said. “When was the last time you had an original thought? One that didn't come out of a women's magazine?”

“You shut up,” said Mother.

“
You
shut up,” I said, and then she did it. She got up and smacked me across the face, just like she said she would. I literally saw stars for a moment, bright pinpoints of light that danced across my field of vision. I shook my head to clear it. Mother already looked like she couldn't believe she'd just done it.

“Ow,” I said. “That really hurt.”

“Are you going to smack me back?” she asked.

“What? I—”

“Answer me. Are you?”

“No, I just—”

“Then be quiet and listen to me,” said Mother. I had never heard her sound like this before. Her voice was quiet and low, almost murderous. “Something's telling me this is my last chance with you, Haley. You're not a little girl anymore. If you're bound and determined to ruin your life by dropping out of school, there's really nothing I can do about it. But I can certainly let you know how I feel.”

“Well, that's what you did, all right.” My jaw felt like it had been popped out of place.

“I'm sorry,” Mother said. “Sometimes, Haley, you just don't know when to close your mouth.”

“I don't want to talk about it anymore,” I said. Suddenly I had the feeling that I was going to really lose it, either start screaming or
crying or something, and I wanted to get away from her fast. “I'm going to lay down.”

“We'll talk later,” said Mother. She was shaking now. “When we've both calmed down.”

 

I didn't think I ever would want to talk to Mother again. But after I lay in bed for a while, waiting for the ache in my cheek to subside and staring angrily at the ceiling, she came into my room and sat at the foot of my bed.

“You don't know the first thing about it,” said Mother. Now she sounded resigned. “You think it's some kind of holiday.”

“I do not,” I said.

“It's hard.
She's
hard. She's
cruel
.” As if I had already forgotten about the story of my mother as a child, left alone in the woods to fend for herself. I wondered what she had taken from that time. The more I got to know my mother the more I realized that her life was not about
experiencing
anything. It was just about getting through it. I didn't have much to say to a person like that.

“Maybe that's what I need, is all I'm saying,” I told her, still looking up at the ceiling. “Something hard. Something challenging. And it can't be any crueler than
this
.” I gestured around me, not at our house or at her but at the world that encompassed us, the empty house next door and the memories of Frankie that flooded me every time I glanced absentmindedly up at his vacant cupola. It was the same world, after all, mine and Grandma's. The same sun shone on it, the same moon circumnavigated us. It was cold comfort, but it was true. I knew I wasn't running away from anything. “Besides,” I said, “I thought you wanted me to get to know her better.”

“Not
that
well,” said Mother. “I want you to visit her once in a while. Be nicer to her when you see her. Not
become
her.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” I said, disgusted. “I'm not going to
become
her. I'm not her. I'm
me
.”

“Watch your language,” said Mother, halfheartedly. “You don't know what's going to happen out there. You don't know anything about it.”

I waited for her to say something else, something that might help me make some sense of things, that would make it unnecessary for me to leave home to seek wisdom and understanding elsewhere—something that would perhaps allow me to discover miraculously that I had been living in the bosom of knowledge all along. But the most unforgivable betrayal our parents commit is that they don't know everything. They can kiss away the cuts and bruises, but they can't bring back the dead, and for that we damn them, at least when we're young. And Mother was abandoning me to the world even while trying to keep me close to home. She didn't see that by her own ignorance she was pushing me further away instead of welcoming me into the same pathetic little shelter she'd been living in for years.
Just wait, it'll blow over
, she seemed to be saying.
Let enough years go by and it will be just like it never happened
. Certainly this was the philosophy that had kept her going all this time, ever since my father died. She didn't understand that if she had welcomed death, it would have made her richer. She would have been familiar with it then, and would never have been afraid again. And, more to the point, she could have taught that secret to me.

But this was not the way it was going to be with Mother, not ever.

“How does it work?” I asked, sitting up. “I mean, do you have to let her know ahead of time, or what?”

“No,” Mother said. “You just go.”

“I can just show up?”

“You're her blood, Haley,” said Mother. “You don't need an appointment.”

As if she was a doctor, or a shrink. Well, I wasn't going for an hour-long session. I was going to stay for as long as it took.

“She won't mind?” I asked.

“She's beyond minding,” Mother said. “She doesn't mind anything. Your grandmother is not like ordinary people.”

Well, that I already knew. That was why I was going out there in the first place. But I had to be sure that this was the right thing, and the only person who could tell me this was the person whom I least trusted in the world, yet the only person I knew who knew her.

“She's enlightened, like,” I said. “Isn't that it? Holy?”

“If that's what you want to call it,” said Mother. “It has other names.”

“Like what?”

Silence. What else was I expecting?

“Mother?”

“You won't be the same,” she said. “Ever. I just hope you're ready for that.”

“Bloody hell,” I said, exasperated. “Don't you see that's what I
want?
”

 

Mother told me there was no way she was going to mind Brother for me when I might be gone for a long time, so the next morning I took him up to the Schumachers', promising to pay them whatever I could in return for taking care of him. They had plenty of stall space, and they had boarded him for me before, so I knew it wouldn't be a problem. Mr. Shumacher looked at me kind of funny when I said I didn't know when I'd be back, but he had enough manners not to ask me any questions. I didn't tell him where I was going, either. I didn't want anyone to know. I wasn't ashamed or anything like that—it was just my business, is all. Then I had Mother take me down the county road in the truck and drop me off at the beginning of the fire trail.

“Be careful,” said Mother. “And be respectful.”

“All right, all right,” I said.

“When will you come home?”

“For the ninetieth time, I don't know,” I said. “Just let me go, will you? I'll be home when I'm ready.”

I took my backpack out of the truck and turned to say good-bye to her, but she was already taking off down the road, without another
word. So she'd had enough of me too. I felt a little pang when I realized that it was possible Mother was as sick of me as I was of her. Mothers weren't supposed to get like that, not where their children were concerned.

It was a week to the day after Frankie died. I hadn't been on that trail in a long, long time. I remembered things I'd seen before, like a ship-sized log, downed and rotting, and some kind of nest up in a tree—a nest so big it looked like an eagle could have lived in it, or even a pterodactyl. Things grew large out here where people never came. Everything out here was just the same as it had always been, and already I felt relieved. Still a log on its way to unbecoming a log, still a nest being a nest. Me still me, and yet not quite.

My leg was still weak and the going was slow. I came to the end of the trail after a couple of hours, and there was the shack, just like I remembered it. Grandma was sitting on a stool outside, hands on knees. Her sparse white hair was hidden by a bonnet, and the wrinkles in her face were as deep and dark as canals. You couldn't see her eyes from that distance because they were hidden in the shadow of her craggy forehead. I hadn't sent her any word—how could I?—but it looked as if she knew I was coming. She was waiting for me. I pulled up a chunk of wood, and sat down on it without saying anything. I could feel her looking at me, so I looked back at her. It was simple: We just looked. We didn't have to talk.