The Adventures of Flash Jackson (27 page)

Haley
, I would ask myself,
are you ever going home again?

Why?
I would respond.

I never came up with a reasonable answer. I was becoming my grandmother after all. I had imbibed more knowledge from her than I'd known. I loved to walk through the woods alone now, naming every plant I saw, gauging its effectiveness in fighting this or that ailment, or as a preventative. I had graduated to a whole new level of herbal mastery. My eye was practiced. For the first time, the study of herbs began to seem like a pleasant immersion, one to which I could devote the rest of my life without ever being finished. Once this idea would have annoyed me, thinking of how far I had left to go. Now, however, it seemed like a blessing. Finally I had a purpose in life. I knew something most other people didn't.

(Note to self: When menstruating, bury used tampons very deep. Something has been digging them up lately. Something big.)

 

Try this, next time you find yourself alone in the woods. Plant your feet firmly on the ground, and raise your arms at imprecise angles to your body, one higher than the other. Close your eyes. Now, never move again. When a breeze comes, allow it to sway you. When something
sniffs around you, let it. If that creature chooses to burrow under your skin, don't move. Eventually, your arms will drop off, and new ones will grow in their place—longer arms, and more numerous, so that at the end of your life you will have not two of them but seventy or eighty. Your skin will expand as your insides get bigger. Your heart rate will slow down, gradually, until it beats only four times a year. You will stay like that for years upon years, until you begin to die.

This is what it's like to be a tree, a millionth part of the forest. I had learned to love trees even more than before. I sat and watched them, and this is what I learned.

Your death will happen at this same slow rate, taking perhaps five years, maybe fifty. Half of you may die while the other half lives on indefinitely. Your head could be lopped off by lightning while the rest of you survives. Eventually, though, you will fall. It may take an age for you to accomplish even that simple act. Don't allow your spine to bend, not even in your penultimate moment, for a tree never gives in to death. Even after you've hit the ground, and your body begins to be consumed by thousands of insects, you are still a tree. Even after you have been carted off, molecule by molecule, you are still a tree. Even if in a hundred years, someone comes by and notices nothing where you once stood, you are still every bit as much a tree as you were when you planted yourself there, thinking tree thoughts and having tree dreams.

If we had time to make this kind of experiment, what would the world be like? But we don't have time, of course. Time is a gift that comes with size. Trees are bigger, they outlast us by far, and are superior in every respect. This is what I learned, sitting at the foot of those ancient oaks, surrounded by them on all sides. It is an honor even to be with a tree. They are infinite in patience and understanding of every process ongoing. How could they not be? This is their nature. This is the way they were made.

I loved the trees not least because they knew everything that is happening everywhere in the forest. Once I had begun to learn to pay attention to what they knew, then I knew it too. That, combined with
the gifts I had taken from Grandma, were what allowed me to realize one day that someone, somewhere, had an ax, and was doing some lumbering, not a mile from where I sat.

There is a romantic notion that trees resent being cut down. They do not. They understand their role in the world, that they are there to make homes. If a human comes along, chops a few trees down, saws the wood into lumber and makes a house out of it, this is only a very elaborate version of what an owl does, or a fox, or a bird, when they construct a nest or a burrow. The fate of trees is to give up their bodies. Nothing unnatural about that.

But I had come to believe that
these
trees were different. The woman I thought of as Grandma told me repeatedly that nothing had changed in this forest since she'd come to live there, and that it was the source of her ageless power. I understood then that if the trees were cut down, that essence would go away. That's because they were, quite simply, the oldest trees around. In ordinary times, their demise would not have been significant. But these were not ordinary times. There
were
no older trees than these, at least not in this part of the world. I knew that this was not a permanent state of affairs. Trees were destined to outlast people, and someday there would once again be continents of forests, stretching so far and deep that no creature living within them would know there was any other kind of place. But that was the long view, the big picture. Today, here and now, someone was cutting down a tree, and everyone in the forest knew about it.

I, however, was the only one who could put a stop to it.

It required little forethought. I was already as dressed as I was going to be, already prepared for battle. I slipped away from my grove of oaks—not bothering to say good-bye, since they would scarcely have noticed my absence by the time I'd returned—and headed off for the epicenter of the disturbance. I wore only my twine belt, with the knife in the bark scabbard. Though I knew I was still far out of earshot of whoever it was, I moved silently, from shadow to shadow. That bear had been around again, and another forest rule is that you never
make noise, unless you are trying to attract a mate. Which I was not. Silence is golden.

Moving like that, I could cover a mile in about half an hour, not counting the time I took to stop and still my breath and heart, or the moments when I heard various noises and stopped to determine what they were before continuing. Trees do not mourn their dead, but they are aware of what's happening, always talking about it. I followed the trail of gossip, that's all. In an hour, perhaps a little more, I was within a hundred yards.

For a while now I had heard the blows of the ax. I smelled diesel fuel, though I couldn't hear an engine. And I smelled a human, too. That scent, at once familiar and repulsive, cloyed in my nostrils, and I had to stifle a sneeze. Sweat. A trace of deodorant. It was, of course, a man.

I could see his outline as I crept closer, protected by underbrush and low-hanging branches. I did not make the slightest sound. There was a road near here, a seldom-used path cut out long ago by some enterprising ranger or lumberjack. It was mostly overgrown, but still serviceable for someone with a truck or a tractor. The trees here were not so old, either, but still important. They knew things that the other trees did not. I grew angry. Why, of all places, of all trees? Why did this person have to cut down these?

The man wore a baseball cap, and he swung with a calm efficiency that showed he'd done this many times before. The cap was low over his eyes, so I couldn't see his face, but his back was to me anyway. Nearby was a tractor, which he no doubt intended to use to drag home his prize. He must have been building something back at his farm.

I sat for a long time, fascinated, and thought about all the gossipy stories I'd heard about men from women. A common phrase among the women I grew up around was something along the lines of
She'll never catch herself a man
. It was something women said of other women when they wanted to feel superior, when she was following an independent course that no one could understand. A variant was,
How does she ever
expect to catch a man when she goes around like that?
More than likely this had been said of me in the past. But the idea of “catching” a man had always seemed ridiculous. Men were not high-flying, unattainable creatures who resisted every attempt at domestication. Matter of fact, they were never too far off, especially when they smelled food. To me, huntress extraordinaire, catching a man seemed about as complicated as trapping a cow. No matter. None of that had anything to do with me. I was only going to scare this one off, not keep him. I had no use for a man at all.

I had, by this time, become adept at imitating a number of animal sounds. I sorted through my repertoire now, trying to find one that would be suitably threatening. Nothing came to mind except Bear, and I was afraid to throw his voice lest he hear me and think he was receiving an invitation.

What would be even more frightening to a man than a bear?

That's easy
, I thought.
I'll pretend I'm another man, a bigger one
. I'll scare him off by pretending I'm human. I would say,
Get out!
in my loudest, deepest, most terrifying howl. Nothing is more frightening to people than one of their own kind, provided they believe that human is insane, violent, or possibly a returned spirit.

Just as I was clearing my throat, the man turned for a moment. He took off his cap and reached for a bottle of water under the tractor's seat, still clutching his ax, and I had a clear view of his face.

It was Adam Schumacher.

I was stunned. How long had it been since I'd seen him? At least a year. Our last meeting had been at his farm, on the Fourth of July. Embarrassment swelled in me as I remembered how I'd felt when he and Roberta disappeared into the barn, the same barn he and I had shared the year before. Blond-haired bastard. Well, I would show him.

I had completely forgotten that I was naked, of course. Without another thought, I stepped out of the brush, strode toward him—his back was to me again—and shouted: “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

It had been months since I'd said that many words, and the effect was not what I had hoped for. I did a fair amount of talking to myself, but my voice was still unused and out of shape, and instead of a stentorian lioness's roar, what came out instead was a pathetic kind of meow, the noise an irate kitten might make if you stepped on his toes.

Still, I managed to scare the daylights out of him. Adam spun around and stared at me, bug-eyed. He didn't recognize me. I had lost a lot of weight since seeing him last, and my personal hygiene left a great deal to be desired. I'm sure my face was literally invisible under the layers of dirt. It's a wonder he didn't smell me coming up behind him. And Lord only knows what raced through his mind as he stared at me.

It was only then, when I felt his eyes on me, that I remembered I wasn't wearing a stitch. Well, it was too late to do anything about that now. He'd seen me. I wasn't feeling in the least self-conscious. In fact, I was thinking that
he
looked a bit silly, wearing all those clothes when it was a perfectly beautiful day out.

Adam's eyes were huge. He couldn't move. One hand held the water bottle upside down, so that the contents trickled out, and the other held the ax. It was the ax I wanted. I intended to stop him from chopping down any more trees. These were
my
woods. So I stepped forward quickly and put my hand on his wrist, partly also to keep him from chopping me in half. I could tell that thought was running through his mind, too. I was sure now he hadn't recognized me. He thought I was Bigfoot's wife, maybe, or some kind of mutant being that was going to suck out his brain.

He didn't try to move. His nostrils widened as he took in my odor, but he must not have found it unpleasant, because there was no expression of disgust on his face. Slowly, he dropped the water bottle and moved his hand up to my breast, cupping it in his warm, callused hand.

I was completely unprepared for that, I can tell you. Nor was I any better prepared for the way it felt. No one had touched me like that before. The last fellow to put his hand there had, in fact, been Adam
himself, but that had been different. It was in the barn, and it was sweaty and hurried and really more for fun than anything else. This was a different story. We were both older now. Certain things were more immediate, and more clear.

What happened next is still unbelievable, as many times as I've gone over it in my mind. Unbelievable and exciting. Exciting and animalistic. I had known all along that I was an animal, but Adam had yet to learn that he, too, had more in common with our forest brethren than he thought.

I think it must have been my smell that took over and made him crazy. There was no denying that my smell was as strong as it could be, that it proclaimed to everyone far and wide who I was. I knew Adam had never really smelled a woman before, that I was washing over him like a tidal wave, a force of nature. Something else took him over, some part of himself that he didn't know he had. I had awakened the caveman in Adam, with predictable results.

There was no question of kissing. It was not that kind of encounter. I watched in amazement as Adam ripped off his own clothes, tossing his T-shirt off into the bushes, yanking his jeans down to his feet. He was already erect. He stood there before me for several seconds, letting me look at him, waiting to see my reaction.

I stayed. I couldn't help it. I was too fascinated. I found myself pondering his penis, never having seen one before—not in this state, certainly. It was shortish and thick, the soft sack of his testicles descending through a mass of blond fuzz, heavy and pendulous in the heat. I took his cock in my hand, amazed at its rigidity, its length, the way the blood pulsed through it with the ferocity of a river. I stepped in closer. Large parts of me were screaming that I ought to run, but other parts were urging me to stay, that it was all right, that it was supposed to be this way.

I moved closer to him until I could feel his member pressing into my belly. He rolled his eyes back and shuddered at my touch, and the
next thing I knew I was on my back, looking up at the sky, and Adam had entered me and was thrusting energetically, with simultaneous purpose and abandon.

I will not say I was raped. I may not have intended it to happen, but I certainly didn't object to it. Nor will I say it hurt. True, he was entering parts of me that had never been entered before, and the sensation was indeed painful and overwhelming, but overall not unpleasant. I had the distinct impression that he was getting more out of it than I was, that he knew what he was doing, whereas I did not. This did seem to be unfair, but I could hardly blame him for that.