The Adventures of Flash Jackson Read online

  Next morning around ten, Mother came home from the Grunveldts with her face all flushed with excitement. “He’s home,” she announced. “Frankie’s home!”

  “Is he?” I said. I tried to act surprised. “Where’s he been?”

  “He won’t say,” she answered. “The police are talking to him, but he won’t tell them anything. But the important thing is that he’s safe and sound.” She kicked off her shoes, and then she stopped and looked at me. “The poor dear thought he was going to be sent away to Gowanda,” she said. “That was why he ran away.”

  “Imagine that,” I said.

  “I don’t know why on earth Frankie would think he was going to Gowanda, unless someone had told him he was going to Gowanda,” she said, looking hard at me. “Someone who was trying to tease him, and ended up scaring the life out of him.”

  “Don’t even start with me,” I said. “I wouldn’t tease Frankie like that. I know how sensitive he is.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm what?” I said.

  “You’re sure you don’t know where he was?” she asked.

  “Sure I’m sure,” I said.

  “You would have said something, right?”

  “’Course I would,” I said.

  “All right, then,” she said. She was so relieved at the whole business being over that she just let it drop right there. “I think I’m going to bake a celebration cake.”

  I was glad she didn’t push me anymore, because lying like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I can only keep it up for so long before I start to fold. And her mention of a celebration cake made my stomach gurgle and shrink at the same time. Even at the tender age of seventeen, I’d already conditioned myself to stay off the sweet stuff—seems it went straight to my rear end without even stopping off in my gut first to say how-de-do. And now that I was leading a “sedentary lifestyle,” as they say in those magazine fitness ads, I was porking up a little more than I was happy with. But I never could resist Mother’s celebration cake. And she hadn’t made one in a long time, not since I was little—because we hadn’t had much to celebrate, you see.

  I sat with my leg propped up and watched as she took out the flour and baking soda and sugar and got down her favorite mixing bowl, an old piece that had belonged to my father’s mother—my other grandmother, who I never knew. She and my grandpop on my dad’s side both passed away before I was born, her of cancer and him of a heart attack. That’s what country living will do for you—not the clean air, mind you, but the food. Us small-town folks have never been noted for their dietary smarts. Eggs fried in bacon grease for breakfast, and in some families red meat for dinner five nights a week, which you can’t help because there’s so damn much fresh beef around here. And when you go out for dinner, it’s pizza or fried chicken or cheeseburgers. Trucker food, mostly—and I have never in my life seen a healthy-looking trucker.

  Mother popped out to the henhouse and swiped herself a couple of eggs, which she proceeded to break into the bowl. Then she stopped herself, and said, “Chocolate or vanilla?”

  “Oh, mercy,” I said. “That’s like the Devil asking Eve if she wants an apple or an orange.”

  “Very funny,” she said. “I think chocolate.” She melted up a few squares of the unsweetened kind of chocolate, and added some more sugar to the mixture.

  “Mom?” I asked.

  “Yes?”

  “What about what happened yesterday?”

  She put some butter on her fingers and started greasing up a pan.

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “Don’t you want to talk about it some more?”

  “Was there something more you wanted to say?”

  She wiped her hands on her apron, leaving a big streak of butter and flour. A little wisp of hair was hanging down over her forehead. She was going gray, I realized. I mean, grayer. Seems like she’d always had at least a little gray up top ever since I could remember. But for a moment there she looked more like her own mother than she did like herself, and I got a little twinge, thinking that someday she was going to be an old lady too, and that day was not as far off as it used to seem.

  “I guess I just wanted to know more about it,” I said. “Like, when Grandma taught you how to do it. What was that like?”

  She sort of smiled, not looking at me, but I could tell it wasn’t a happy smile. It was the kind of smile someone trains themself to show when what they really feel like doing is crying. My mother would always smile, even with an arrow in the gut. I guess it’s a generational thing. Me, I would always let the world know what was going on inside me, even if it wasn’t all sugar and spice. Tell you the truth, I think I must have gotten into the line for puppy dog tails and pails of snails instead, or however the hell that stupid song goes.

  “What makes you think she taught me?” she said.

  I was surprised. “Well, you were acting like—”

  “I learned the way you learned, Haley,” she said, “which is why I’ve decided not to be mad at you anymore. I didn’t really have any right to be mad in the first place.”

  “You didn’t?” I asked, thinking, Now, this is progress!

  “I’ve been thinking it over. I remembered the first time I tried it on my own. My mother found me doing it, just like I found you.”

  “Was she mad?”

  Mother kind of winced. She never told me too much about how it was growing up, other than that they didn’t have electricity and running water and all that, and I wondered sometimes if it had been rough on her in more ways than one. Grandma was pretty old now, but she was still tough, which of course would lead one to believe that when she was younger she was even tougher. Stronger. And out there in the woods like that, people get to making their own rules. I wondered what kind of punishment a religious fanatic—hate to say it, but that’s pretty much what my grandmother was—would use on her own daughter, out there in the middle of nowhere. She could have been doing just about anything to her. And the fact that Mother didn’t talk about it made me think that maybe sometimes some bad things did happen.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t tell if she was mad or not.”

  “What’d she do?”

  She stopped pouring the batter into the pan and just stood there, holding a spatula.

  “I always swore I’d never do things like that to my children,” she said. Her voice had gone soft now, so I could barely hear it. I stayed quiet and listened. “She sent me away,” she said.

  “Away where?”

  “Out. Into the forest.”

  “You mean by yourself?”

  She nodded.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “A whole day,” she said. “Sometimes two. She thought it would make me stronger. She really didn’t do it to hurt me, Haley. I believe that. It wasn’t punishment. It was supposed to be a teaching. But…I wasn’t allowed to bring any food or water.”

  “Two days with no food or water? Was she trying to kill you?”

  Mother was still staring at the cake batter.

  “Yes,” she said. “In a way, I think she was. She said if I was still alive when she came back that it would be a sign.”

  I felt shock settling over me like a cold, wet blanket. My mother, abandoned in the forest as a girl? By her own mother? I felt a kind of protective rage, almost. Like she was my daughter and not the other way around.

  “A sign of what, for crying out loud?” I asked.

  “Of my…connection,” she said. “A sign of whether I was fit to carry on her work. She must have gone through the same thing herself, when she was a girl. We all did.”

  “Who all?” I asked.

  “My mother, and her mother, and her mother,” said my mother. “It’s old, Haley. It’s ancient. You come from a long line of very gifted women.”

  Well, I guess that makes everything all right then, I thought. Child abuse wasn’t child abuse if it was a family tradition.

  “You have to be tested, a
fter all,” said Mother. “And you have to be found worthy.”

  “Those are the rules, huh?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Yes, Haley,” she said. “Those are the rules. And they’re very old rules. We might not like them, but we have to follow them.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Us. The women who decide to take this path.”

  “What path?”

  “The path you started on yesterday,” she said, calmly.

  Well, that gave me a case of the jumps. If I’d known I was letting myself in to be practically murdered, I certainly wouldn’t have gone ahead with my little whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

  “Couldn’t you find your own food and water?” I asked. “I thought you said you knew the forest pretty well.”

  “No,” she said. “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t have it,” she said. “I just didn’t have what it took.”

  “What do you mean? To survive?”

  She nodded. “I just sat there and cried,” she said. “She told me later she found me exactly where she’d left me. I hadn’t moved. Not an inch.”

  “Well, no wonder,” I said. “A little kid out there—how old were you?”

  “About six, I guess.”

  “Six! And she left you on your own in the forest!”

  “You have to understand,” said Mother. “She was testing me. Even children want to fight for survival. It’s an instinct.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “But I didn’t,” she said. “It was as if I didn’t care. Like I was waiting for someone to come along and save me. That’s just the way I am, I guess. Not like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a fighter, Haley,” said Mother. She was looking at me now. “You’d survive. You know something? You’re a lot stronger than I am.”

  For a moment I couldn’t speak. Mother had never paid me an outright compliment before, not that I could remember. I hardly knew how to react.

  “Well,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t be upset at her, Haley,” said my mother. “In the end, I survived.”

  “It does make me upset,” I said. I was starting to feel hot in the cheeks and moist around the eyes, but I held it back. “Did they come?”

  “Did who come?”

  “The spirits of the forest,” I said.

  Mother finished spooning the batter into the pan and began to smooth off the top with the spatula.

  “That’s a whole other story,” she said. “And it’s not the right time to tell it yet. It wouldn’t make sense, really. You’d have to have some experiences of your own before we could talk about that.”

  “What kind of experiences?” I asked. “Forest experiences?”

  “Nothing I care to push you into,” she told me.

  “You mean you don’t want to tie me up in the forest for two days? Well, I appreciate that.”

  “It’s not funny,” she said. “Don’t make a joke out of it.”

  “I wasn’t. I just meant—well, what kind of experiences?”

  “The kind you have when you’re on your own in the woods for a long time,” she said. “It’s hard, Haley. You get cold and scared, and you really do start dying. You can only go without water for so long. Not very long at all, really. And you start seeing things.”

  “You mean hallucinating?” I asked. “This is starting to sound like Indian stuff.”

  “What do you think the Indians knew that we didn’t know?” she asked me. “Do you think you have to be an Indian to know about the way nature works?”

  “I don’t know. Seems like they know an awful lot about it, though.”

  “Not just because they’re Indians. Because of the way they lived.”

  “Well, how did they live?”

  “Close to nature,” she said. “Close to everything. Not like us. We live far apart.”

  I knew what that meant—far apart from the real world, safe in our houses with our appliances and our televisions and our central heating. This wasn’t the first time Mother had brought that up. She’d lived on both sides of the fence, as it were, and she was more aware of the differences between the two worlds than most people. Living in the modern world made you soft—you relied on things outside of you to help you survive rather than things inside you. That meant you didn’t know yourself as well. But living in the old-fashioned way was a lot harder, and a lot…well, dirtier, I guess. It isn’t easy to stay clean when you don’t have running water, plus you’re bone-tired all the time from the sheer amount of work involved in keeping yourself going. That much I knew. If Mother had been that sold on living in the woods, then believe me the woods is where we would have lived. So obviously the modern world wasn’t all that bad in her eyes. But she would never be completely at home in it, either. She’d always be like a tourist on an extended visa rather than a citizen.

  “I don’t want to do it,” I said. “If that’s what it’s like, I’m sorry I ever started.”

  “That’s okay with me, Haley,” said Mother. “I realized yesterday it’s your decision, not mine. That’s my gift to you. I won’t push you into it. Not like she did to me.”

  I was quiet for a while, just thinking.

  “Mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ever mad at Grandma for pushing you into it?” I asked.

  Mother finished smoothing out the batter and put the pan in the oven. Then she took off her apron, hung it up, and washed her hands in the sink.

  “What good would that do?” she asked me over the sound of the running water.

  I could see steam rising up around her shoulders, and I wondered just how hot that water was. But she kept her hands in it, even though it would have burned the skin right off a normal person. My mother could lift cake pans out of a hot oven without mitts on—I’d seen her do it. Her skin was part asbestos, seemed like. Or maybe she’d just trained herself not to feel it anymore.

  “What good in the world would that do at all?” she asked.

  It was getting on towards the Fourth of July by then. Really it was still only June, but out here in the Greater Mannville Metropolitan Area, we take our holidays very seriously, and the Fourth most seriously of all. Us Mannvillians are a very patriotic bunch. On most holidays, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, you have your cousins and uncles and aunts and whatnot coming in from all over the place to sit down to a big dinner—a real family affair. But around here the Fourth was the time when one family in particular had a huge picnic, and everyone else could just drop in whenever they liked, as long as they chipped in with whatever they had to make it a party.

  Some years ago, the Shumachers had started throwing a bash that anyone and his dog could come to—didn’t even matter if they were American, even though it’s supposed to be the day we celebrate our independence from that nasty old King George we learned about in school. It was kind of funny that the Schumachers would be the ones to do it, considering that both the Mr. and Mrs. were from somewhere else, or at least talked like they were—but then, some folks that had been here for generations still had accents, so there you go. Anyway, Mr. Shumacher usually slaughtered a cow and a pig, and they barbecued it up over a pit big enough to park a truck in and let people eat until they busted. All you had to do was bring the potato salad, or the Jell-O mold with marshmallows floating in it, or whatever you made best. Last year there were almost a hundred people at their party, and this year there would probably be more than that—folks were gearing up in advance, planning what they were going to bring and maybe cooking it and freezing it up so that on the actual day of the party they wouldn’t have to waste valuable time.

  As far as holidays went, Christmas was the one where you could tell what kind of year it had been by how many presents were under people’s trees—lots of presents in a good year, and just one or two in a bad. But the Fourth was a holiday you could rely on, when everyone went all out no matter what kind of financial cond
ition they were in, and when everyone was in a good mood, even if things weren’t going all that well.

  The Schumachers threw the best parties in the history of the world. If they’d been in charge of the Last Supper, there would have been a lot more than thirteen guests, let me tell you—and the course of history would be completely different. Jesus would have turned the water into Schlitz, and Judas would have passed out, drunk and stuffed full of barbecued ribs, by about nine-thirty. Most likely the Romans would have been invited too—and they would have come, since nobody turns down a chance to go to a Shumacher party. It was the kind of event I could see being carried on a thousand years from now. It could become the sort of tradition that everyone keeps up without even remembering why, like that crazy running of the bulls in Spain that you read about in National Geographic.

  It was also the kind of deal where young folks, who were usually busy working on their parent’s farms or at their town jobs, could get together and cut up a little, and check each other out—and maybe sneak off into the barn for a while, if you get my drift. It was a big old barn, and it could hold many a couple without them having to give up too much in the way of privacy. I knew that for a fact: Last year, during a moment of weakness, myself and Adam Shumacher sort of got lost among the hay bales for a brief time, even though I have never considered myself to have much interest in members of the opposite sex—the whole business just seems too messy, if you want to know the truth. I am not opposed to men in general, lest you get the wrong idea, but I had heard enough football players sniggering to each other in school about their various so-called “conquests,” which if you ask me were mostly made up anyway, to allow myself to fall victim to their raging hormones. The most dangerous thing in the world is a randy male. Adam himself wasn’t a bad sort—he was nicer than most, always polite not only to me but also to Mother, even after our little tryst. To give him credit, I don’t think he ever told anybody about it. But I chalk the whole thing up to temporary insanity on my part. I had been sneaking sips of beer all afternoon, and the alcohol had worn away my defenses until, to my eternal mortification, I fell for his stupid ploy of going to look at the old dates carved on the rafters of the barn.