The Adventures of Flash Jackson Page 15

  It was what they call a sympathy death. You hear about them from time to time, how when one member of an old couple goes the other follows close behind. Sometimes it happens in downright spooky ways—like, they both die at the same moment but in separate rooms, or something like that. This one wasn’t that spooky, but still it was the kind of thing that made everyone shake their heads in a knowing way and say to each other, You never can tell, can you? A thing like a sympathy death makes everyone stop and wonder if there isn’t more going on underneath the surface than anyone cares to admit, whether our fates aren’t all written down in some moldy old book somewhere, and whether our souls are tied to each other by real but invisible bonds.

  As strange as it sounds, the whole thing was kind of a warning to me. Not about potato chips—about falling in love. It was safer never to get so close to someone that they could drag your soul along after them—this is what I decided. It seemed to me like if you gave someone that kind of power over yourself, then you didn’t have control anymore, and that scared the hell out of me. I was still red-faced after my little fling with Adam that didn’t take place, thanks to the foul temptress Roberta Ellsworth, and I had a new resolution: no more men, ever. I’d never leave myself open like that again.

  But Adam was actually the furthest thing from my mind. I had an even bigger problem. The thing I’d feared most had come to pass not three days after I’d said it out loud: the Grunveldts were dead, and Frankie was on his own. I couldn’t shake the idea that somehow I’d caused this whole thing to happen by talking about it. Even though I’d sworn off Veil Lifting, I knew it was still inside me. Just because I didn’t want it didn’t mean I didn’t have it anymore. I was cursed. Could I kill people just by talking about their death? I wondered. Should I lock myself up somewhere so I didn’t hurt anybody else ever again?

  “They’ve had to take Frankie away,” Mother told me, the afternoon of the day Mrs. Grunveldt followed her husband into the Great Beyond. “I just got off the phone with Edna Bing. She sat up with him all night, and she said he was just uncontrollable.”

  “Where’d they take him?”

  “The psychiatric wing of Mannville General. They had to sedate him. He was so upset, they want to keep him under observation for a few days. They’re afraid he might hurt himself.”

  I knew the place, of course—not the psychiatric wing but the hospital. It was where I’d gone after the barn roof caved in under me. For a small town, Mannville had a great hospital. It was built a long time ago by the town’s founder, William Amos Mann III, whose name everyone had to learn in school because he was such an all-fired great guy, and the only hero Mannville ever had. Well, that’s not quite true: His great-grandson Eddie Mann was some kind of fighter-pilot ace in Vietnam. Just about everyone around here can recite the history of old Willie by heart. There was even a statue of him on horseback near the school, which seemed to be as much a monument to the amazing shitting power of pigeons as it did to the man himself. Willie Mann found some money after the Civil War, and he used it to build all kinds of things, the hospital being one of them. The hospital was so big it looked like it belonged more in a regular city, not a small lakeside town that had never amounted to anything. I hadn’t known there was a psychiatric wing, but it didn’t surprise me. That place had a wing for everything you could think of.

  “As long as they don’t plan on keeping him any more than a few days,” I said. “If he starts thinking he’s back in Gowanda, he’s gonna lose it for sure.”

  “He knows where he is,” she said. “He knows it’s not Gowanda.”

  “Can he have visitors?”

  “No,” she said. “Well—they might let you in if he tells them it’s okay, but then he might not even remember you.”

  I was shocked. “Not remember me?”

  “This has triggered something,” said Mother. “He’s having delusions, Haley. Bad ones. He doesn’t seem to recognize anything or anybody right now.”

  We were having this conversation in my bedroom, where I was propping up the old leg again. It had been throbbing in a strange way ever since my little sojourn out to the creek with Elizabeth Powell and Letty. It didn’t hurt, exactly. It was just kind of pulsing, like there was something in there trying to get out. I had it up on some pillows, hoping to drain the blood out and back up to my heart, where it could get recharged—according to my personal medical theories, that was the best way to treat it. But so far all that had happened was my leg was falling asleep. As a matter of fact, though, it hadn’t really hurt much lately. It was finally starting to get better.

  “I have to go see him,” I said.

  “Well, Haley, I—”

  “I don’t care if he remembers me or not,” I said. “I have to see him and tell him everything will be okay. Has anyone bothered to tell him that? That things will be okay?”

  “I don’t know what they’ve told him,” said Mother. “I’m sure they’ve tried. But—”

  “He won’t believe them. Not the doctors. He hates doctors. I have to see him myself.”

  “He’s been given medication,” Mother said. “He won’t be able to talk to you.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “Those monsters.”

  “Haley!”

  “Why can’t they just talk him through it? Why do they have to dope him up?”

  “Haley, now just hold on. It’s for his own good.”

  “He has a right to be awake, at least.”

  “They do it so he doesn’t hurt himself. That’s why,” she said.

  “Well, he can still listen, can’t he?” I said. “He can hear, right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mother. She was sitting on a chair next to my bed, and she was bone tired. She’d been up all night at the party and all day at the hospital, and now that it was getting on into the afternoon she looked like she was ready to keel over and take a snooze right there on the floor. But Mother was the kind of person who couldn’t rest if she thought she was missing a chance to be a martyr, or in fact if any kind of drama was unfolding anywhere within her world.

  “Will you take me to see him, please?” I asked.

  Mother rubbed her face. “I’m so tired,” she said.

  “Do you want to sleep for a while first?”

  She shook her head. “That’s not going to happen,” she said. “I won’t be able to sleep. Not yet.”

  “Well, then, can we go?”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes.” I gave my voice as much firmness as I could. “Right now. Please.”

  It wasn’t the whiny me or the troublesome, willful me that was asking. It was the real me, and she saw that.

  “All right,” she said. “Get yourself out of bed and I’ll go warm up the truck.”

  Turned out that calling it the psychiatric wing was a little grandiose, after all. It was only a bunch of rooms at one end of a hallway, closed off from the rest of the hospital by thick glass doors. The nurse at the desk was a tough cookie. It took some work to convince her that letting me see Frankie was the right thing to do, that hearing my voice would be a good thing for him. She said we could have five minutes, and that I couldn’t be in there alone; she’d have to come in with me. Mother would have to wait in the hall.

  We said that was fine. I knew right off this was not your arguing kind of nurse. This was the kind you listened to. She led us along the hall to Frankie’s room. Mother sat herself down in a chair outside the door, and the nurse beckoned to me. But then she stopped me at the door.

  “You’re not going to like this,” the nurse said.

  “Excuse me,” I said. I dodged around her and went in.

  I wished right away I hadn’t come. Poor Frankie was trussed up like a calf, his arms and legs tied to the bed with leather straps. It was all I could do to keep from screaming out loud at the sight of him. His eyes were open, and he stared at the ceiling and moaned quietly to himself, moving his head slowly from side to side. Spittle leaked from the side of his mouth. They
’d taken away his clothes and put him in a dressing gown, and it had hitched up somehow over his crotch so that his private parts were plainly visible. I looked away while the nurse pulled the gown down again.

  “Why is he tied up like that?” I asked.

  The nurse pointed to scratches on his cheeks and arms. They were deep and ragged, as though he’d been mauled by some kind of wild animal.

  “He did that to himself,” she said. “We had to tranquilize him. He can probably hear you, but I’m not sure how much he’ll understand. You can talk to him, if you like.”

  The nurse stepped back and I sidled closer to the bed.

  “Frankie,” I whispered. “You hear me?”

  Frankie moaned. He turned to look at me, like he was moving in slow motion. Eventually his eyeballs pointed in my direction, but they weren’t focused on me. They were like two soft, brown marbles, rolling independently in their sockets.

  “Franks,” I said. “It’s Haley.”

  He just stared. Jesus, I thought, they gave him horse pills.

  “You know where you are, buddy? It’s not Gowanda. It’s just the hospital.”

  “Mmf,” said Frankie.

  “You’re not going to be here for long, Franks. Just a little while. Just until things calm down and get back to normal.”

  Now, why the hell did I go and say that? I wondered. Things were never going to be normal again. Don’t lie to him, I cautioned myself. Tell it like it is, but tell him he’s not going to be alone.

  “I’ll help look after you, Frankles,” I said. “I’m on your side. And there’s Miz Powell, and my mother, and everyone. Okay? So don’t worry. You won’t be alone.”

  Frankie didn’t answer. His eyes just stayed pointed in my general direction, but looking at something very far away, something that possibly wasn’t even there. It was creepy to see him zoned out like that. I even looked to see if something was there, but of course there wasn’t. There was just this puke green wall that looked like it hadn’t been repainted since dinosaurs were roaming New York State.

  “All right,” I said. “That’s all I wanted you to know. I’ll come see you as soon as you’re out. That’ll be in just a couple of days, okay? Don’t be upset, Franks. Everything will work out.”

  Nothing. There was a strange bump from the hallway, but I ignored it.

  “We can look through your binoculars together,” I said. “We can spy on the whole world if you want. Whaddaya say? That sound fun?”

  Nothing.

  “All right,” I said to the nurse. “I guess that’s it.”

  “This way,” she said. She opened the door and we went out into the hall. Mother had fallen asleep in the chair. That bump I’d heard had been her head lolling back and smacking into the wall, and it hadn’t even woken her up. I jiggled her shoulder until she opened her eyes.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Time to go home.”

  “All righty,” she said. She stood up, groggy, and we headed out of the hospital and back to the parking lot. “Can you drive, Haley? I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep behind the wheel.”

  I was alarmed. “With my leg?”

  “It’s an automatic,” she said. “You only need one leg.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. So we headed home with me at the wheel, proceeding mighty slow and hoping we wouldn’t run into Madison, Mannville’s police officer. I knew how to drive, but I’d never bothered to get my license. Out in the country you didn’t need one—kids start driving tractors when they’re around ten or eleven, or even younger sometimes, and you never see cops out in our neck of the woods. It was impossible to bend my leg, of course, and the seat wouldn’t go back hardly at all because it was a pickup. So I sat at a sort of cockeyed angle and did the best I could, and I guess my guardian angels must have been watching over me, because we made it home safe and sound with Mother snoozing away in the passenger seat.

  It was good that I had driving to concentrate on. I knew I’d be seeing Frankie in my mind for a long time, tied down and drugged, drool coming out of his mouth. That was a part of Frankie I’d never believed existed—and yet it was real. All the time I’d known him, there had been two sides to Frankie—the calm side when he was living at home with his parents and checking out our little corner of the universe through his binoculars, and the crazy side when he would disappear for weeks or sometimes months. I never knew what happened to him during those times, but now I’d seen it with my own eyes, and I understood that Frankie had done time in hell.

  Damn it, I thought. He was like a brother, even more than I’d realized. I loved the helpless little bastard. I really did. And all I could think about was what Miz Powell had said about oracles, back in the old days in Greece. Once upon a time, according to her, we had known what to do with people like Frankie. Today, almost no one knew how to deal with him, except maybe someone like my grandmother. So he needed calming down every once in a while? Well, I was no herbalist, but one thing I did know was that for every pharmaceutical kind of medicine out there, there was a natural one that did the same thing. There were herbs you could take to relax, to clear your mind, to make your passage through the world seem a little smoother. She could help him, though I didn’t think I’d ever get Frankie all the way out there to see her. Not him. He’d get too scared out there in the woods.

  Now, if I knew the secrets my grandmother knew, I thought, then I could treat him myself. He would be free to do his thing.

  It had been bugging me a little, the fact that Grandma was probably going to die soon without having had the chance to teach me anything. Much as she freaked me out, the old hag had some good qualities too. I felt better every time she worked me over. If I could do that myself, I could save a lot of money on doctor bills down the road. And I could help other people, too. Especially Frankie.

  Maybe, I thought, I should make the most of her while she was still around. Like it or not, she was all I had left—besides Mother, that is, and Mother didn’t seem to know a blessed thing that was worth passing on. If Grandma had ever taught her anything in her youth, she seemed to have forgotten it.

  I looked at Mother, sleeping away next to me, her head bobbing against the windowpane with a gentle tump, tump. I had the idea in my head to visit Grandma now, but I wasn’t going to tell Mother about it right away. If ideas were airplanes, she was an antiaircraft gun: bang bang, she popped away at them until they came crashing down in flames. She had done it to me a hundred times. I had mentioned college to her once or twice in the last year, and all she’d had to say about it was that I would be better off learning a trade a woman could really use, such as cosmetology or hairstyling. Better yet would be to marry a wealthy man and let him take care of me. That was her idea of how to live. Even though she seemed to have had a change of heart lately and thought it might be good for me to get to know Grandma, that was because it was her idea. If it had been mine, rest assured she would have thought of a dozen different arguments against it.

  We pulled into the driveway and rolled to a stop. “Wake up, Mimsy,” I said. “We’re home.”

  Mother roused herself. “Oh, dear,” she said, yawning. “How long was I out?”

  “A hundred years,” I said. “It’s the future, and everyone we knew is dead. Look! There goes a rocket ship.”

  I pointed out the window. Mother looked in spite of herself and then smacked me on my good leg.

  “You stop it,” she said. “It’s not funny, joking about people being dead.”

  “Why not?” I said. “We’re all gonna die anyway. Might as well laugh about it.”

  We got out of the car and I reached in the back of the pickup for my crutches. She walked ahead of me as I poled my way up to the house.

  “I swear, I don’t know where you come up with the things you say,” Mother said over her shoulder. “But you’re not funny. Not funny at all.”

  “Not trying to be funny,” I said. “Just real.”

  But m
y meaning was lost on her. She went into the kitchen without even holding open the door for me, and started directly upstairs.

  “You going back to bed?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do with myself?”

  She didn’t answer. At least she didn’t slam her bedroom door.

  I wasn’t tired. I had to talk to someone about Frankie, and about Grandma. And I still had the truck keys in my skirt pocket. So I went back outside and started up the truck, and headed up the road to the Powell house.

  I found Miz Powell and Letty sitting in the parlor, chatting away, as pleased as penguins who’d come back to their home iceberg. Miz Powell looked about ten years younger than she had when I met her, and both their faces were flushed with laughter when I walked in the door.

  “Look who it is, Letty,” she said, after letting me in. “Isn’t that a coincidence?”

  “Not really,” said Letty. “We were just talking about you, Haley.”

  “We summoned her,” said Miz Powell, which was good for a burst of giggles from both of them. I couldn’t believe my ears. Giggles? From these two fossils? “Come in and sit down, dear.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I had the feeling that I’d just interrupted something, but neither seemed unhappy to see me. Miz Powell offered me a cup of her ever-ready tea, and they moved over to let me sit between them on the sofa.

  “What a horrible shame about Jimmy Grunveldt,” said Letty. “Ain’t it, Lizzy?”

  “Certainly it was,” said Miz Powell. “How is Frankie, Haley? Have you been to see him?”