The Adventures of Flash Jackson (6 page)

“You know after Cain killed Abel, and God said his blood was crying out from the ground?”

“I know that story,” I said.

“I think Cain must have heard voices too,” he said. “He was trying to pretend he didn't do anything wrong, and he was hiding from God's voice. But no matter what he did, he could still hear him.”

I didn't say anything. I'd never heard Frankie talk about the Bible before. I hadn't even known he could read, to be honest. I mean, I figured he
could
, but I didn't know he actually
did
. I stayed quiet, just listening to him.

“Sometimes I feel like Cain,” he said. He had a sad look on his face, sadder than I'd ever seen before. “I run and run from these voices, but they always find me. Only thing is, I didn't do anything
wrong
. Did I, Haley?”

“No, Frankles,” I said. “You didn't do anything wrong.”

“All I did,” he said, “was be born. And I couldn't help that.”

I don't mind admitting I got a bit choked up then. Even at the best of times Frankie seemed confused by the world, kind of like if he had
his druthers he'd hop on the next spaceship off this rock and go where people understood him. I never realized until that moment what a trial those voices were, how they hounded him, like a criminal. They mocked him, they poked fun at him, but worst of all they stole his peace of mind. And when that kind of thing is coming from inside you, well, what can you do about
that
?

But the other thing the voices did was to give him ideas. I'd seen Franks during one of what they called his episodes, which happened sometimes even when he did remember to take his pills. He was a different man then—wild-eyed, talking a mile a minute. The big one was about a year ago.

I'd noticed him from the house, walking up and down the road, waving his arms and jabbering on and on. Sometimes he would stop and point at something that wasn't there, or at least nothing that I could see, or he would throw his arms out at the fields like he was welcoming crowds of people. Mother told me to leave him alone, but I went out and talked to him anyway. I think she was a little afraid of him when he was like that, just like she was afraid of everything. But me—well, you'd have to do worse than act crazy to scare me off.

“Hi, Frankie,” I said. “What are you doing?”

He stopped in midsentence and stared at me, his mouth hanging open.

“Franks!” I said. “It's just me, Haley. You know me. Remember?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course I remember you.”

“What are you doing?”

“Making plans,” he said.

“Plans, huh?”

“Yes. Plans.”

“For what?”

“I can't talk about it,” he said. He started shuffling around in the dust of the road, muttering to himself and kicking up big clouds. “This one can go
here
,” he said, “and this one can go
here
, and this one can go
here
….”

“Don't you trust me, Frankie?” I said. “Don't you want to tell me what you're planning?”

“No.”

“C'mon. Please?
Please?
” I didn't mean to bug him, you see—I just was a little worried about him, and I thought it might be a good idea for him to talk through whatever was on his mind.

“All right!” he yelled, throwing his arms up in the air. “All right, all right, all right! Just shut up!”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Not
you
,” he said.
“Them.”

“Who?” I asked, though I knew who he meant—the voices.

“My head hurts,” he said. “Okay? It hurts, so don't be loud.”

I stayed quiet.

“The pillars can go right here, along the road,” he said, pointing to where he'd been shuffling around in the dirt. I looked. He'd marked out a big X with his feet. “One here, and one over there, and one down there, and so on. Got it?”

I followed where he was pointing and saw that he'd made a whole line of big X's in the road, about fifty feet apart.

“And the front doors will go over there,” he went on. “The stage can be where that field is—we'll have to level it out, but I think it will work. And the dressing rooms will have to be on the second floor, or maybe in the basement. If we even have a basement. I'm not sure if we can, because it depends on whether I can get John Fitzgerald to loan me his backhoe. But it's going to be a big one, see? A really big one.”

“A big what?” I asked, thinking meanwhile,
Note to self: Call John Fitzgerald and tell him to keep an eye on his backhoe
.

He sighed. “A theater, Haley,” he said. “That's what I've been trying to tell people, but nobody listens. A theater of the human spirit.”

I was impressed, though I had no idea what he was talking about. Whatever he had in that unraveling little mind of his, it certainly
sounded
grand.

“Who's this theater for?” I asked.

“Anyone who's human qualifies as a performer,” he said. “It's automatic. You can get up onstage and do whatever you want. But first, I want it to be for the Indians. They get first shot at it.”

I had to pause a minute to be sure I heard him right.

“You're building a theater for Indians?” I said. “Here, in Mannville?”

“It's not just for them,” he said. “It's for
everyone
. But they should have the first chance, because they haven't been allowed to tell their story yet. This will be a place where people can come and tell their stories. They've been
silenced
, Haley. It's not right. Someone has to help them get their voice back, and I'm going to do it.”

“My goodness,” I said.

“You think I'm crazy,” he said.

“No, I don't.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Frankie…”

“Look,” he said. He jammed his cap on his head and looked at me. His expression was wild and haunted. There was a kind of desperation in his eyes, and that look he normally had—the look of being homesick, soulsick—seemed to have spilled over his whole being. “I know how to raise money for it and everything,” he said. “
You
don't have to help. I don't need
you
. I can do it alone. It's important, Haley. Someone has to give them their voice back, or I don't know what will happen. But it'll be bad. It's already bad. And it's going to get worse.”

“What's going to get worse?”

“The state of communication,” he said. He looked up at the sky and licked his lips. Then he took his hat off again and started twisting it. “The state of communication in the world today,” he said, “is very, very bad.”

“How are you going to raise the money?” I asked him.

“I can't tell you that,” he said. “It's classified. But when I get it, I'll build the theater and they can come from all over. People from the whole world can come right here, and they can get onstage and tell
everyone their story, and then things will be okay again. People will understand each other.”

Well, you can't have a proper conversation with someone when they're rambling on like that, but all the same there was something to what old Frankie was saying. I don't know how he got this idea about Indians, or about people in general—I mean, what is a theater of the human spirit? Don't ask me, though I liked the sound of it. As far as I knew, Franks didn't know any Indians, and I couldn't imagine he knew much about their history either. I wasn't even sure whether Frankie had ever been to school. I knew a fair bit about the whole story myself, about relocation and reservations and the way Indians had been outright hunted—and he was right. They
had
been silenced. I'd never thought of it that way, but that was what it was.

There were a few Natives left around this area. Seneca, mostly. I imagine that once upon a time they had whole villages with lots of people, but now they just ran a few souvenir-and-discount-cigarette stores and held referendums every year on whether or not they should build a casino. They kept to themselves, pretty much. If you didn't deliberately go out and look for a Seneca, you'd never see one. That was the way it had been ever since I could remember, and certainly it had been that way since my mother's time—probably not even my grandmother remembered a time when there were still Seneca villages. It had been at least a couple hundred years since they'd lived according to the old ways around here. Probably more.

But there was something, some kernel in Frankie's idea, that made sense. Not on an everyday kind of level, but a more…I don't know, a spiritual level, I guess. I don't usually think along those lines. I'm a practical, down-to-earth sort of guy—I mean, woman.

But that was how it was talking to Frankie. Just when you thought he'd finally gone off the deep end, he'd say something that rang true somewhere inside of you, and you had to rethink the whole question of whether or not he was as crazy as he sounded. Who was crazier,
anyway—a man who wanted to help people, or a society that didn't care much one way or the other?

Frankie never remembered his episodes once they were over, but all that business about a theater had stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, and though I hadn't thought about it in a while I mused it over again as I watched him ride Brother around and around the corral. Frankie hadn't mentioned his theater idea since that day. Fact is, he disappeared for a week or so after that, and when he came back he was acting normal again, or at least as normal as it was possible for him to be. I don't know where he was taken or what they did to him there, but now that I thought about it, it seemed a little spooky. Where did they keep people who weren't making sense to the rest of the world? And what did they do to them to get them to act right again?

I'd have to find out, I decided, if only to satisfy my own inquiring mind. I wouldn't be able to ask Frankie, though. I'd have to ask someone else.

Then I passed from this subject to Miz Powell. All kinds of questions about her began to pop up. For example, why did she still have her maiden name, if she'd been married for so long? Had she gone back to it after her husband died? And why was she interested in what kind of binoculars Franks used? And why was Flash killed by the East Germans? And why did someone as dramatic and exciting as her want to be friends with me?

It was times like that I wished I had someone my own age to talk to about things. I felt some kind of excitement surging up in me from somewhere I couldn't name, the same feeling that had made me climb the barn. It was killing me to have that broken leg; sometimes, back when I was seventeen, I felt like I could run around the whole world twice just to burn off extra energy. And I wanted someone to share that energy with. But one thing about where I lived was that there was a great shortage of people to talk to. I had a few friends from school, but most of them were boys, and during the summer they all had jobs and couldn't be bothered to come visit poor old gimpy me. I
didn't have one female friend that I could think of, not any good ones, anyway. Most of the girls at Mannville Junior-Senior High School thought I was weird, which I guess compared to them I was—but I took that as a compliment, considering who it was coming from. They were the lipstick set, the hair curlers and makeup wearers who thought the main purpose of their existence was to attract attention to themselves. Lord knows I'd tried, when I was younger, to be more like them, but it never felt right.

Before my accident I'd never missed having friends much. There was always Brother, who I rode all over God's green earth whenever I'd a mind to. We went exploring everywhere, through the woods and across fields and way out into Amish country—now, those folks were
really
isolated. It seemed like you passed through some kind of invisible barrier whenever you entered their territory, and you went back a hundred years or so. They kept to themselves most of the time, which was what I liked about them. I could go a whole day without exchanging a word with another human being, and considered myself richer for it, not poorer. But now that I was stuck leaning against the corral fence, watching and wishing, I started kind of taking stock of things. My life was flat-out dull, I realized. Something would have to be done about that.

Maybe I would give old Roberta Ellsworth a call. She and I used to be good friends when we were little, I mean
years
ago. But we had kind of gone different ways as we got older, if you know what I mean. Sometimes that just happens, for no particular reason. Sometimes I felt bad about not spending any more time with her, since it had been me that drifted away from her, not the other way around. Roberta had become a wallflower—but if she wasn't interesting, she was at least nice, and she'd be someone to talk to. Someone besides my mother and poor old Franks and my horse.

Old Roberta didn't have many friends either. She wasn't pretty enough, which if you're a girl means basically it's all over for you. That's not what
I
think, but it's the rule most people seem to live by, at least
in high school. Roberta had a tendency to pick her nose in public ever since we were in kindergarten, and she always sounded like she needed to blow her nose. Not exactly Miss Popularity material. But when you have a broken leg, and you're stuck inside all summer…hell, at least we could talk about something different for a change, and I could tell her all about Miz Elizabeth Powell from London, England. It might be good to catch up with her, and see what all had taken place in
her
life in the last six or seven years. Just for a change of pace.

I'm no raving beauty myself, you know. I haven't mentioned much about what I looked like back then, but the fact is I was pretty overweight—so is Mother, so it's genetic—and my hair has always been kind of stringy and thin, and my hips are almost as wide as my shoulders. I wasn't getting a lot of attention from the fellows on the football team. Which was fine with me, of course. The people I care about don't mind what I look like. But it's not pleasant being one of the plainer girls in school. Even if you don't put much stock in how much attention people pay to you, it's still kind of hard to get ignored all the time. It wears on you after a while.