The Adventures of Flash Jackson (4 page)

Which reminded me that old Brother would be expecting me about now. I made my way down to his shed again and gave him a good brushing, talking to him all the while.

“Now, what's this I hear about you making a break for it yesterday? What's the matter—you don't think you have it good enough? Free room and board, and all the attention a horse could want. All you have to do is let me ride you once in a while, and hell, you like that. Yes, you do, you old horse. Now, I can understand you being
despondent
over this whole business about my leg. You think it means that's it for us, that our riding days are over. And I know you don't like Mother feeding you and brushing you and traipsing around in your own personal barn. Well, let me tell you something, horse. This is only a minor setback. A dip in the road. That's all it is.”

Shobbety shoo
, said Brother.
Plbbbbbt
.

“You're just an ingrate, that's all. Soon as things get tough, you want to hit the road. Now, you listen up good—we're in it for the long haul, you and me. If
you
broke
your
leg, I wouldn't just give up
on you, now, would I? Some folks would take you out back and give you a bullet in the brain. A hot lead cocktail. Execution, gangland style. Shame on you, you old fleabag. And just where the hell were you going, anyway? Where were you headed when you hopped the fence?”

“I believe he was showing quite an interest in my geraniums,” said a voice behind me.

I was so startled I forgot I was only working on one gam, and I spun around too fast for the laws of physics to catch up with me. Plop—down I went, into a nice big pile of Brother's poo. I let loose a streak of words so blue that even I was shocked at myself. A bolt of pain shot up my leg and out the top of my head, or so it felt, and when I managed to get to my feet again I was ready to tear whoever it was a new one. You don't sneak up on Flash Jackson, not if you want all your limbs to stay in their original places.

It was a little old lady wearing a tweed skirt suit and an old-fashioned hat. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall, and she was standing in the doorway of the shed, looking for all the world like some kind of elf.

“My goodness,” she said mildly. “I haven't heard those kinds of words since the war, and then it was usually from a man, not a young lady.”

That was about all I could take.

“Listen, Broom Hilda,” I said, “I don't know who the hell you think you are sneaking up on a guy like that, but you have a few things to learn about manners!”

The old lady pursed her lips and stared at me. She wasn't much to look at in terms of size—I mean, she was a tiny little thing—but those eyes took on a steely glint, and suddenly she seemed to grow about three feet. She took in a big breath of air, and I was expecting her to give back to me as good as she got, but she only let it out again. There was a very long moment of silence that she was the first to break.

“‘Guy'?” she said. “Do young ladies in this part of the world refer
to themselves as ‘guys' now? My goodness, I have been away a long time, haven't I?”

She had an English accent, or at least what I thought was an English accent. The only English people I'd ever heard talk were on television and movie screens, so she could just as easily have been from Botswana and I wouldn't have known the difference. But everything else about her seemed English too—her clothes, her little hat, even the way she carried herself. I just knew she was the kind of person who drank tea with her pinkie sticking out. And even though she was at least six inches shorter than I was, she didn't
act
short. Her personality was ten feet tall.

“And I do seem to recall there being certain restrictions on the kinds of language one uses in speaking to one's elders, when I was your age. Have those, too, fallen by the wayside?”

This lady spoke like the books I read sometimes, in my quieter moods; she was like a character in one of them. Something about her made me calm down right away, and I began to feel something I hadn't felt in a long time: embarrassment.

“No, ma'am,” I said. “They haven't.”

“I am
so
relieved to hear it,” said the tweedy lady. “You must be Haley. I met your mother yesterday.”

“You're—you're the lady who brought Brother back home?”

“Yes, my dear,” she said, smiling for the first time. She stepped forward and held out a hand. “My name is Elizabeth Powell, and I've been away for a long time, but I'm home to stay. I do apologize for startling you. I thought you'd hear me come in. And may I say what a great pleasure it is to meet you?”

We shook hands, me making sure first that mine was clean. She was that kind of lady—so well pressed I felt dirty just looking at her, and it didn't help that my hind end was covered in horse shit.

“Put 'er there,” I said. “Flash Jackson's the name. Most folks just call me Haley, though.”

“Then that's what I shall do, if it's all the same to you,” said Elizabeth Powell. “By coincidence, I knew a fellow named Flash many years ago. He was an excellent runner. I'm afraid speaking his name aloud brings up painful memories.”

“Why? What happened to him?” I asked.

“He was shot dead by the East Germans,” said Elizabeth Powell.

Well, that was about the last thing I'd been expecting to hear. I must have looked like a fish, standing there with my mouth opening and closing while I tried to think of something to say, but she saved me the trouble.

“You are a sight. It's my fault, too,” she said. “I'm afraid you look as though you've been
fertilized
, my dear. Shall we take you up to the house and clean you?”

“Yes indeed, we sure shall,” I said.

I had only known Miz Powell for two minutes, you see, but already she was rubbing off on me.

M
iz Powell turned out to be the sister of another neighbor of ours, a neighbor I haven't mentioned yet because she kicked the bucket about a year ago—that was old Emma Powell. Until recently I never even knew Emma's last name, though I knew her all my life. We just called her Emma. That was unusual, considering how big folks around here are on Mister and Missus and other terms of respect-for-your-elders. Emma was kind of a recluse. Although she'd lived just up the road, I only met her a handful of times. Mother was always sending me up there with a few ears of corn or some raspberries from the garden, or whatever else we had too much of. Usually I just rang the bell and left them on her porch, because I'd learned from experience that Emma didn't like to answer the door. I shoveled her out a few times in the winter, too, but I never stuck around to ask her for any money—you didn't do that with neighbors, and besides I knew she probably didn't have any money to speak of. Nobody around here does. It's what you might call a depressed economy.

There hasn't been any money in farming for a very long time, as anyone can tell you who's tried it, unless you happen to be a big farmer with hundreds of acres—and then you usually rely on government subsidies to get you through the rough spots. We don't have any big farmers around here anyway. The Shumachers have a decent-sized dairy herd, but even that wouldn't have been enough to support all the people living in that house. It would be hard enough to support just
two
people with dairy money, and at one time there had been as many as twelve or fifteen Shumachers, though some of them were only temporary—foster children, you see. The remaining Shumacher boys mostly had jobs in town, and the girls made quilts to sell to tourists. Most folks around here have about three different things going at once, just to make ends meet—they might sell vegetables and eggs at roadside stands, or deliver the newspaper, or whatever you can think of. Small wonder most young people hit the road once they leave high school and head for more exciting places, like Erie or Buffalo or Pittsburgh. I was getting to the age where I might start thinking about leaving myself, since I'd be graduating in another couple of years. But bored as I was, I couldn't see myself leaving town for good. Sure, I might wander around the world for a year or two just to see how things were done in other countries, but Mannville was home, and home reminded me of Dad…and as much as I hated to admit it, I was pretty attached to Mother, too, God bless her incompetent ways. If I left, there was no telling what would happen to this place, or to her.

Anyway, old Emma never did thank me for anything I did. From time to time I'd see her peeping at me from behind her curtains, and she'd wave and I'd wave back, but that was the extent of it. She never married, which in my opinion shows that she had more going on upstairs than most folks, and as far as anyone knew she didn't have any relations—until the day Miz Powell showed up.

The story, as she told it, goes like this. Way back in the dark days of World War II, Elizabeth joined the WACs and went away to England to do some work for the war effort—that's the Women's Army Corps,
you know. She liked England so much that after the war was over she decided to stay, and there she'd been all these years, until her English husband died almost at the same time as her sister back home did. Then she decided to come on back to New York State to revisit her old girlhood stomping grounds, and to take care of business—Emma having left behind an old farmhouse, and an acre of two of land that would need to be disposed of.

Of course, Miz Powell would never have used a phrase like
stomping
grounds herself. It was too ungenteel.

After I got myself cleaned off and had put on a fresh skirt—ironically, I was going to be wearing skirts for a long while, at least until the cast came off—I listened as she rattled off her story. We sat in the parlor chatting, me with my leg propped up on an ottoman. I hate chatting—I even hate the
word
“chatting”—but I felt like I could afford to lower myself a bit if it meant I could learn more about her. A person like Miz Powell did not come along every day, after all. She was fascinating, like a walking, talking museum exhibit plopped down in our very own living room. And things were going along just fine until Mother heard us talking and had to get in on the action herself. She made us some tea and broke out the sweets, and just like that I was trapped in the middle of a regular old hen party.

Now, this was not what I'd intended. Under normal circumstances, I would've busted out of there faster than you could say Nat King Cole. I'd rather sit in a bathtub of acid than hang around with a couple of yappy old broads. But being in the condition I was in, I was forced to sit there and take it.

“What an
interesting
life you must have led!” Mother kept saying, in a voice so high and sweet and full of fake politeness it just about made me ill. It was the same voice she used with the minister. She was a great one for laying it on thick, especially if she was talking to someone who acted like they were better than the rest of us—which I must say I thought Miz Powell was doing. I guess it was the English accent. If she was born here, which she was, then she would have talked like a
regular person, now, wouldn't she? But there she was, ripping out one “rawthah” after another, saying things like “jolly good” and “brilliant show,” which try as hard as I might, I couldn't imagine anyone actually saying outside of a book—and all of it in this strange kind of pronunciation. She was practically talking through her nose, and you had to watch close if you wanted to see her lower jaw move, because it seemed like the object was to hold it as still as possible. The worst part was that Mother started trying to imitate her, in her own pathetic way. “
Do
have anothah cookie,” she kept saying. I wanted to smack her. Even I knew that English people didn't say “cookie.” They say “biscuit.”

But Miz Powell just went along with it. I'm not sure she even noticed Mother's cheeseball attempts to sound English herself. “
Thenk
you,” she said. “De
light
ful.” She took a tiny, mouse-sized nibble of a Nabisco vanilla wafer that I knew for a fact was about six thousand years old. Then she took a sip of tea, and damned if that pinkie didn't come flying out. I knew that for the rest of her life Mother would hold her pinkie exactly that way whenever she drank anything, even water.

“Whatever happened to your leg, Haley?” Miz Powell asked me.

“Oh, well,” I said, “that's a funny story. I was just—”

“She fell down the stairs,” Mother interrupted me. “Just slipped and fell. A
dreadful
accident.”

“Oh, dear,” said Miz Powell. “Did it hurt very badly?”

“It hurt like a thundering bitch,” I said, fuming. Oh, Lord, I was about ready to blow a gasket. First of all, I hate being interrupted. And second, I knew why Mother was lying: because climbing barns was unladylike, and above all she wanted us both to appear like a couple of proper misses in front of this fancified, stuffed old specimen.

But I learned long ago how to fight my battles with Mother. It didn't work to attack in the open, like an army would, because she just started sniffling and crying and then she would run upstairs and slam her door, and if that happened in front of the Queen here, we'd both look like a couple of idiots. I would use guerrilla tactics instead. I'd
take potshots at her from behind bushes and trees, when she was least expecting it. That was how I would get my revenge. Later.

The two of them went on nattering at each other for a while longer, and I learned more of Miz Powell's story, which as much as I hated to admit it to myself sounded kind of interesting. She had all kinds of tales about bombs falling on her, or near her at any rate, in London during the war, and others about how tough the English folks had it with rationing, much worse than it had been here in the States. Even years after the war was over, she told us, an English person couldn't get a bag of sugar or some butter without having to move heaven and earth. Mother made sympathetic little noises at that, because she was old enough to remember those days. I myself was underwhelmed. Like I said, history is not one of my strong points, and neither is cooking—though I did like the stories about the bombs.

Miz Powell didn't have any children. She and her husband, who she called the Captain, seemed to have traveled a lot. She mentioned about six countries in one breath. Though I wanted like crazy to hate her for being a show-off and a priss, the fact was I couldn't. She was too damn interesting. For one thing, Brother had trusted her enough to let her lead him back into his stall. Now,
that
was something. It told me she must have been all right, because Brother was an excellent judge of character. For another thing, she'd been everywhere. She'd gone to places I hadn't even heard of before—where the hell was Kuala Lumpur? Where was Singapore?—but she didn't talk about them like a regular tourist would. She just
mentioned
them, as casual as if she was talking about going to Buffalo. And I couldn't forget that fellow she'd talked about earlier, the one she'd called Flash, who ended up getting shot by the East Germans. Now, how on earth did she even know someone who would find themselves in that kind of predicament? I barely knew what an East German was. I knew that once upon a time there'd been a wall dividing Germany down the middle—the good ones lived on one side and the bad ones on the other, or so I heard it, and the wall ran the length of the country. I figured they had
to put it up after Hitler came along, to keep all the Nazis in line. They'd taken it down since, though. If I thought about it, I could recall hearing stories about people trying to escape from the bad side onto the good side, and sometimes getting shot at. I wondered if this Flash fellow had been an East German himself and was trying to make it over to the West. I made up my mind to ask her later, when Mother wasn't around. Mother had a way of taking a conversation over and making it sound stupid, no matter what it was about.

After about eighty years of us sitting around and making nicey-nice with each other, Miz Powell said she had to be getting along home. I hopped up on my crutches and said I would walk her out the door. I said it fast because I didn't want Mother coming along.

“Rawthah
delighted
to meet you, Ms. Powell,” said Mother. “Do come by again.”

Oh, Lord, just shoot me now
, I thought.

But Miz Powell nodded and smiled. If she'd picked up on what a fruitcake my mother was, she didn't let on. “I shall, my dear Mrs. Bombauer,” she murmured. “I shall.”

“Let's skedaddle,” I said, and I headed through the screen door and down the steps as fast as I could.

“Thank you, dear,” said Miz Powell, when we were outside. “It's not necessary for you to walk with me, though. Your leg must be quite painful.”

“It ain't that bad,” I said.

I usually never said ain't. I prided myself on speaking better than most of the yahoos in this pisswater burg, because of all the reading I'd done. But Ms. Powell's speech and accent and everything else about her were so dandified and high-toned that it kind of brought out the worst in me. “I didn't fall down no stairs, neither,” I said.

“You didn't?”

“No, ma'am.” I picked my way down the porch steps and crutched along the driveway to the road, Miz Powell walking beside me. “I fell through the roof of that there barn.”

“You fell through the—” She cut herself off as she looked at the barn. “Why did your mother tell me you fell down the stairs?”

“She gets kind of embarrassed at me,” I said. “I'm too boyish for her liking, I guess. Doesn't want to admit she has a daughter who likes climbing things.”

“Why, it must be fifty feet high!”

“At least,” I said. I dropped my local-yokel act. It wasn't lost on her, but suddenly I felt pretty stupid.

“What were you
doing
up there?”

“Just looking around,” I said. “I was bored.”

“Ah, yes. I see.”

“You see what?”

“I mean, I understand how easily one grows bored around here. Don't forget, I grew up here myself…although that
was
a very long time ago.”

Miz Powell was starting to sound less foreign and more normal, though maybe that was just me getting used to her. She took a moment to look around the countryside. From our house, you could see three other houses—the Grunveldt place, Emma's house up on a slight rise maybe half a mile away, and then in the other direction the Shumacher farm, which at that distance was just a dark cluster of buildings on a hillside. That was it. It was all pastureland and cornfields around here, with a couple of vegetable patches thrown in for variety. If you stopped and listened, you wouldn't hear a blessed thing. Maybe a tractor belching somewhere, or a cow fart.

“When I was your age,” she said, “there were times I thought I would go absolutely mad if something exciting didn't happen to me.”

“Yes, indeed!” I said. “Lord a'mighty! I know exactly what you're saying.”

“The country is peaceful enough,” she said. “Heaven knows there have been times in my life when I missed it terribly. But if it's all you've ever seen, it just seems like…”

“Slow death by roasting?” I suggested. “About as much fun as a mouthful of pins?”

Miz Powell laughed. Not a prim, proper laugh with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, but a good, open hearty chuckle.

“You do have a way of saying what's on your mind, don't you, Haley?” she said.

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“I think we understand each other perfectly,” she said.

By now we'd only just passed Frankie's house, but my hands were already getting sore. I still wasn't used to walking on those crutches.