The Adventures of Flash Jackson (29 page)

But for now, I was on the hunt. I would not be able to rest until I had figured out what was up. No one was talking—the trees gave me no sign, and the animals seemed to prefer to forget whatever it was, as if it had scared them more than they were willing to admit. I crouched low and began to move, stepping carefully and deliberately but going as fast as I could. I started out moving in a broad circle, with the oaks as the center. This was the best way to commence a search.

My first clue came in the form of a whiff of some kind of fuel. Just the tiniest bit, far off. Another tractor? Another logger? No, the trees would have told me of that immediately. And it wasn't diesel fuel. Something else. Some kind of fuel I didn't recognize.

I set off in the direction of the odor. I moved warily now, like a warrior, as the Tree People had once moved through these same woods, fleeing the white pursuers who hunted them for bounty and sport. Whenever I found a spot hidden in deep shadow I entered it, waiting for as long as it took my heart to quiet and for any stray sounds to come to me. But there was nothing. I kept moving, always in the same direction. The smell of fuel became stronger, though it was still so faint that I never would have noticed it had my nose not become so keen and finely tuned in recent months. My muscles were taut and ready, like bowstrings. My breath came easily, and I knew I could
keep up this pace for hours if I had to. I never felt so alive as I did in those days.

Then I came across an object partly buried in the leaves. I almost didn't see it, but its shape was out of place in the forest and my eye was drawn to it immediately. It was a small, oblong thing, the size of a man's shirt pocket, made of plastic. I picked it up and turned it over, marveling at it as Prometheus must have exclaimed over fire. Yet I wasn't pleased to see it, for it spelled trouble, and possibly an invasion.

It was a cell phone.

I stuck it in my belt and headed for cover immediately. Once safely hidden under a small pine, I took it out and opened it. A small screen greeted me, as blank as a fish's eye, and rows of tiny buttons barely big enough to press with a finger. A small antenna in the back telescoped out, and I played with that for a while. I hit a button that said PWR and the phone emitted a startling beep. I hit another one that said PRG and pressed a number, and the phone beeped several more times, as if singing to itself. It was almost beautiful. I held it to my ear and heard the sound of a phone ringing on the other end.

“You make it all right?” said a male voice in my ear.

I snapped the phone shut in a hurry. Glory, that had scared me. A voice out of nowhere had just spoken in the forest, invading my quiet. It would take days for the sound to stop echoing in my head, just as I could still hear Adam's
Why are you going around like that?
There was no way I was going to have this thing around. I had no idea how it had gotten there, but I knew it boded evil. I dug a hole in the loam and tossed the phone in. Then I covered it back up and rearranged the leaves on the surface so it didn't look disturbed.

A cell phone, out here in the middle of nowhere. Well, obviously, someone had dropped it. That much was clear. And that was even more disturbing than the phone itself. Who would bring a cell phone out in the woods? And under what circumstances would they lose it without noticing?

Who was out there?

There was still the smell of fuel to consider. It was strong and immediate, and I could tell now that whatever it was, it wasn't simply exhaust but the fuel itself—that is, it hadn't been burned but spilled. Something bad had happened in the forest once again. I was beginning to suspect that there had been an accident.

I forgot about being careful now. I started jogging towards the smell, feeling my breasts jolt painfully—it wasn't often that I flat-out ran anymore. Looking up, I could see that the trees had been parted here, like hair by a comb. The tops of them were shorn off in a line that descended gradually toward a point on the ground, as if someone had come along with a giant razor and lopped them off. I slowed to a walk, my heart pounding urgently, and stepped behind a large family of pines to stare at the spectacle that suddenly presented itself.

There, in a tiny clearing that hadn't existed a day earlier, was a small plane, or what was left of it. It had come in low and slow—obviously the pilot had been trying to land, even though he must have known it was hopeless with all the trees. I didn't know anything about planes, but this one looked like it might hold two or three or four people. The wings had broken off and the front end was badly crumpled, and the whole thing looked like a dragonfly that had been tortured by small boys and left to die. The reek of fuel now was so strong to my animal nose that I knew my sense of smell would be ruined for weeks. I nearly fainted from it, but I forced myself to stay conscious.

There was a stunned silence all around, as though none of the animals could believe this kind of catastrophe could occur here. So that was it. Word had spread, and forest creatures everywhere were still trying to cope with the immensity of it. That, and they had left the area as soon as they could. No one in their right mind would put up with that kind of odor.

I crept closer. The only really recognizable part of the plane was the tail. The rest was badly damaged, smashed in like a soda can. The eerie silence hung over all.

“Hello?” I called. My voice, rusty, sounded odd to my ears. I cleared my throat and stepped closer.

“Hello?” I said again.

Eventually I was going to have to look inside the cockpit, and though the fuel smell had blanketed everything there are some spoors that simply cannot be hidden, and the smell of death is one of them. I already knew what I was going to find. No one had survived this crash. There were people inside—dead ones.

Better get this over with
, I thought.

It's funny how certain old habits will kick into gear, even in the mind of someone who considers herself more animal than human. I had been trained from early on, just as every other person is, that when one comes upon the scene of an accident one calls for help. People need you, and you cannot let them down. It's more than a custom. It's a very ancient, ingrained instinct. My two instincts were now at war with each other. One half of me was screaming
Help them!
and the other was instructing me to run far, far away.

The helping instinct won out. I edged closer to the cockpit, unwilling to look but unable to bear the suspense. I simply had to see. I put one hand on the jagged metal hole where I guessed the door had been, stepped up on one of the splayed-out wheels, and looked.

There were two of them, both men. The pilot, the one on the side farther from me, was sitting upright, in an attitude of rapt attention, as if he'd been receiving serious instructions in his last moments. In the brief second I allowed myself to look at his face I saw that one eye was bulging open, and his jaw had fallen so that his mouth gaped in surprise. I couldn't see a specific injury, but there was a lot of blood. It had all dried.

The one near me was leaning far forward, still supported by his seat belt but already in the process of sliding out of it, like the loose bag of bones and flesh that he was. He, too, was covered in blood, and one of his arms was at a funny angle, as if the impact had broken or dislocated it. I could not see his face. I didn't want to. I looked for less
than three seconds, long enough to determine that they were both dead. Then I stepped back.

Jesus Hopalong Cassidy
, I thought.
Tell me this isn't happening. Tell me I don't have to deal with this
.

But of course it was, and I did.

I found a rock and sat on it. This was bad, very bad. There was nothing I could do for these two—nothing. I couldn't even give them a decent burial. I wasn't about to handle their corpses, and besides, they were in the forest, which had its own way of performing funerals. If I left them alone for, say, several weeks, they would be mostly gone when I came back. There were plenty of scavengers around who would not turn up their noses at such a tasty treat. In fact, I was surprised they hadn't started work already. Must have been the smell of fuel that kept them off so far. It was everywhere.

My heart skipped a beat as I realized how lucky we were that all that fuel hadn't caught fire. There would have been a mighty conflagration then. We
all
would have had to relocate, and maybe even my beloved oaks would have been lost. The forest gods were certainly keeping their eye out for us. Maybe Grandma was spreading her hands over her forest like some kind of divine being. Or maybe it was just luck.

Shit
, I thought. I already knew I couldn't pretend this hadn't happened. These men had families, no doubt. Somewhere in the world, someone was worried about them. I began to feel sorry then, not for them—they were beyond help, and I have never felt sorry for the dead, only for the dying. I felt instead what their children would feel, if they had children. I knew how hard it was to lose a father and not even be able to point to anything concrete and say,
That is what used to contain him, that is what he used to be
. They had to at least have a body to bury. It would make things much easier, at least from my perspective. And their wives, too. Their parents. Everyone had parents.

I would call someone on the cell phone I'd found. That was it. I could still hide that way. I could tell them roughly where the plane
was, and then I could scurry back to my own territory, safely out of sight and out of earshot. They would come with their equipment, and do what they had to do, and then leave.

I dug up the cell phone, glad that at least I'd taken the time to make a note of where I'd left it. Obviously it had belonged to one of the men in the plane. Perhaps it had been thrown that far, though it hardly seemed possible. Perhaps it had simply fallen out when they started hitting the trees—as if the doors had been ripped open by the branches.
If I started hunting around
, I thought,
I would probably find other things that belonged to them too.
But I decided that the less I knew about them the better.

I brushed the dirt off the cell phone and blew into the mouthpiece. Then I turned it on and pressed those three magic numbers, 9–1-1. A voice answered almost immediately.

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

“Plane crash,” I croaked.

“What? Hello? What did you say?”

“Plane crash. Two men dead.”

“Can you identify yourself?”

“Haley,” I said. Then I punched myself in the leg. Why did I tell them that?

“Where are you calling from?”

“A cell phone. In the woods.”

“You say there's been a plane crash?”

I sighed. “Yes,” I said.

“Is anyone hurt?”

“Two. Men. Dead.”

“Okay, hold on.”

There was a brief pause while this person did something, somewhere far away. Then her voice came back on the line.

“Caller—Haley—where exactly are you?”

“Ah,” I said. I looked around. This would have been easy to explain to a squirrel, for example, but to some random emergency operator it
posed a formidable challenge. One mile west of the big oak grove? Half a morning's walk from the stream?

“Take the county road east out of Mannville,” I said. “Go about ten miles, to the fire road across from a pond. Take it into the woods as far as you can go.” My voice gave out on me suddenly.

“Caller? Are you injured?”

“No,” I said. “Just don't talk very much, is all.”

There was a brief pause.

“I see,” said the operator. “Go on.”

“Plane's about another two miles from the end of the road, I'd say northwest,” I told her. “Two-seater. Both guys dead. That's all I can tell you.”

“Caller, do not leave the scene,” said the operator. “Okay, Haley?”

“No,” I said. “Not okay.”

“Haley, do not leave the scene,” she repeated.

“I have to leave. I don't belong here. I'm only calling.”

“It's a crime to leave the scene of an accident. Do you understand?”

“I don't care,” I said. “You'll have to find me. These are my woods.”

“They'll find you,” she said.

I hung up.

That is to say, I not only hung up, I clapped the phone shut again, regarded it for a moment as it sat in my palm like some kind of artificial, space-age clam, and then threw it as far as I could. It disappeared in the trees without a sound.

They wouldn't find me. It was impossible. I could hide better than they could look. I could live out here forever, and no one would ever know. So it was a crime to leave the scene of an accident? Big deal. I didn't cause the damn plane to crash. That would be obvious even to the thickest of sheriff's deputies.

But then I would be hiding forever
, I thought glumly. They wouldn't give up. Their official curiosity would be aroused. These people, these law-enforcement types, took themselves even more seriously than Andrew Watkins of the university took himself. My peace and quiet
would be ruined, and I would live in a constant state of paranoia, even more so than I did now. Oh, these bastards. Why did I make that call? Why?

I went back to the plane then, not right up to it but to a safe distance, where I could look inside and see the two men. I wanted to get a better look at the people who had ruined my life. I could just see the head of the passenger jutting out from behind a trunk.

“I hope you two are happy,” I said. “Because now you're causing trouble.”

Well, as Mother used to say, if you can't make up your mind about something sooner or later, you're going to get it made up for you. I hadn't been able to decide whether I belonged in the forest or not. Never mind that since having that thought I had become more comfortable here than I'd ever been anywhere in my life. I had had that time of doubt, and that had planted the seeds for this to happen. Maybe I did want to go back. That was what had led me to make that phone call.
A real forest woman
, I thought disgustedly,
would have let them sit there and rot
. Forest women do not have time for compassion. They are always on the move. But I had caved in and called the police, like a sissy. And now I was going to pay the price.