The Adventures of Flash Jackson Read online

  “Just got back,” I said. “He’s not doing too good.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Miz Powell said.

  “Poor boy isn’t quite right, I take it?” Letty asked sympathetically.

  “He’d be better off at home, if there was anyone left to take care of him,” I said. “He can’t really handle things as serious as this. He’s too fragile. They’ve got him all dosed up now, and tied to the bed. He was trying to scratch his own eyes out.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Miz Powell.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said about oracles, Miz Powell,” I said.

  “You can call me Elizabeth, dear,” she told me again. “What about them?”

  “That’s really what Frankie is,” I said. “He’s a visionary, isn’t he? There’s nothing wrong with the way he sees things. It’s just that he sees them differently.”

  “You must keep in mind that I don’t know him as well as you do,” Miz Powell reminded me. “It’s entirely possibly that a long time ago, you would have been right. But the modern world doesn’t permit such things. It flouts our own sense of superiority to the ancients.”

  “You sort of know him, though,” I said. “He stayed with you for a while.”

  Too late, I remembered that we had promised each other never to bring that up in front of other people, lest Miz Powell get in trouble. I turned beet red and looked down at my shoes. Letty looked curiously at Miz Powell.

  “Isn’t he the young man who was missing?” Letty asked.

  “Sorry,” I murmured.

  “Nonsense,” said Miz Powell. “I don’t care what Letty knows about me. I never had any secrets from her before.”

  “We don’t have any now, either,” said Letty.

  “Frankie stayed with me because he was in need, and I was pleased to be able to help him,” she announced. “I would do the same again if it was required of me.”

  “Well, he needs something different now,” I said. “He needs my help. And I don’t really know how to give it to him. I have some ideas, but they’re all going to take too long.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well…never mind,” I said. I was too embarrassed to bring up my grandmother in front of Letty, who was still a stranger to me. I hadn’t known she was going to be there. “I’ll work it out on my own, I guess. Not to change the subject any, but…the other night, when we were all down at the creek?”

  I was half expecting them to be ashamed when I brought this up, but they weren’t. Both of the old ladies looked straight at me, peering at me through their glasses like a pair of gophers.

  “Yes?” said Miz Powell.

  “You were, ah—well. Can I ask what you guys were doing?”

  For a moment I could see them as they must have looked when they were fifteen years old, two girls with a million secrets between them and no desire to share them with an undeserving world. I never had a friend like that. It was like the last fifty years and more had never happened—as if a clock had stopped when they separated and started up again when they came back together. As if the two of them had their own kind of time.

  “Wasn’t it obvious?” said Letty.

  “No,” I said.

  “We were Zamming you,” said Elizabeth.

  “Zamming me?”

  “You’re one of us now,” said Letty.

  “We thought you understood,” said Elizabeth.

  “I see,” I said.

  “It’s nothing serious,” explained Letty. “It’s a fun thing.”

  “Well, it’s partly serious,” said Elizabeth. “We are the only two left, you know. Or rather we were, until you came along. All the rest of us are dead. It’s time for us to look for new members.”

  “We had a club,” said Letty. “We didn’t really have a name for it. A Zam club, I guess you might say. There were lots of girls in it. But they’re all gone now.”

  “Gone, indeed,” said Elizabeth. “We needed fresh blood.” She smiled.

  “I see,” I said. “You Zammed me?”

  “You don’t mind, do you, dear?” asked Elizabeth. “We were saying a Zammish prayer for your protection. And to help your leg get better.”

  Was this the same iron woman I’d met in the stable just several weeks ago? The same one who’d worked for the CIA all those years, the one who’d run spies in and out of countries all over the world? In the short time she’d been back in the Greater Mannville Metropolitan Area, Miz Powell had changed a lot, kind of slipped backward into the kind of person she must have been before she left—more carefree, open, silly. I wondered what had caused this change in her. I liked it—even though I still hardly knew her, I liked this side of her better. It was less…formidable, I guess.

  “In what language?” I asked.

  “Why, in Zammish,” said Letty. “It’s not hard to learn. We can teach it to you.”

  “Rather like pig Latin,” said Elizabeth. “Hard to figure out if you don’t know what it is, though. Quite useful. I actually used it once in my work, many years ago.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Letty. “You did? With the spies?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Elizabeth. “It was perfect for meetings on the street. Anyone who overheard us would have thought we were speaking something Slavic.”

  “How do you do it?” I asked. “What’s the rule?”

  “There’s more than one, dear,” said Letty. “Don’t worry. We’ll explain it all to you.”

  “It might take you a while,” said Elizabeth. “But don’t get discouraged.”

  “She won’t get discouraged,” said Letty. “Not this one.”

  “Maybe another time,” I said. “I was also wondering—did you see anyone else down there?”

  “Anyone else?” The two of them cocked their heads like a couple of spaniels.

  “You mean—someone was spying on us?” said Letty. “A pervert?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I just…thought I saw someone.”

  “Who, dear?” asked Elizabeth.

  “An old lady,” I said. “My grandmother.”

  “She wasn’t at the party, was she?” asked Letty.

  “Hell, no,” I said. “She doesn’t believe in Fourth of July.”

  “I certainly didn’t see anyone,” said Elizabeth.

  “Me neither,” said Letty.

  Well, that settled that. It meant either I was seeing things or they had missed seeing her, and of course I already knew the answer: Somehow, my grandmother had made herself appear to me. I’m not flat out saying magic was involved. It wasn’t beyond her to walk all that way just to scare the hell out of someone. I knew it wasn’t my imagination. The fact that Letty and Elizabeth hadn’t seen her didn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me. I just wanted to check.

  “Thanks, then,” I said. “I better get going.”

  “Good luck,” said Elizabeth. “Drop in as soon as you can.”

  “Ta,” said Letty, who seemed to be experimenting with sounding English, now that Lizzy was sounding more like her American self.

  When I went home Mother was still asleep, so I made myself some dinner and then brushed and curried Brother. Poor old sad sack—he hadn’t been getting much attention from me lately. He gave me the cold shoulder when I first came in, and it took me a while to warm him up to the point where he’d stick his soft mouth in my neck. But eventually he came around, and we snuggled up and chatted just like old times. The sun was going down, and a few stray rays shot in the stable door and lit up his coat like he was a model walking down a runway.

  “Haley,” said a voice.

  I whipped around fast. It was Mother, standing in the doorway.

  “Flaming frog farts, Mother!” I said. “You scared the lights out of me!”

  She didn’t say anything. She just stood in the doorway, leaning on it and looking down at the ground: the classic bad-news posture.

  “Mother?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  She had that old look on her face aga
in, too, the same sort of look she’d had when Fireball McGinty was called to the Great Workshop in the Sky. She’d been wearing it a lot lately, what with the Grunveldts passing on like they did. It was her death look. And she had it on again.

  “What is it?” I asked again.

  The fact that she hadn’t said anything yet told me how bad it really was.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He’s dead,” she said.

  I knew she was talking about Frankie. Who else? You get a sense sometimes of the order in which people are going to leave you, and you know who’s next on the list. My spirit floated out of me once again, just like that, without warning, and it stood off to one side watching myself have this conversation with her. I was a whole other person, one who’d just walked into the stable by chance and was witnessing this event unfold between two strangers. That was good. That way it wouldn’t mean anything to me. It had nothing to do with me at all—it was these other two people, some kind of problem that was totally separate from my own. I could just walk away at any time. What a relief, I thought. I don’t think I could handle this type of thing right now myself. How interesting other people’s problems are.

  I heard Haley ask, “How did he do it?”

  Mother couldn’t speak. Mother didn’t want to say it. But Haley had to know.

  “He killed himself,” she said.

  “How?” Haley pressed her.

  “He…got loose, somehow,” said Mother. “And he beat his head against the wall.”

  “Then he can’t be dead,” said Haley. “You can’t beat yourself to death. You’d pass out first. Right?” Oh, she sounded hopeful, this Haley girl. She sounded desperate. I felt sorry for her.

  “He knocked himself out,” said Mother. “But then…they think he had an aneurysm. Or something.”

  “And he’s dead?” Haley asked. “They’re sure? He’s not just unconscious?”

  Mother nodded.

  “Are they sure?” she pressed. Boy, did I feel bad for that girl. She looked like she was about to collapse. I got the idea she’d had strong feelings for this guy, whoever he was. I got the impression she’d wanted to marry him or something. Poor dumpy broad—she’d have a lot of trouble finding another guy. Look at her, I thought. Her ass sticks out too far, and her hips are too wide, and if she wasn’t wearing a skirt I bet you could see her thighs rubbing together. A girl that big ought to be big on top, too, but not this one—she is all out of proportion.

  “Okay, Mother,” said Haley. “Thanks for telling me.”

  Mother’s eyes were hollow. “I’m so tired,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

  “Why don’t you go back to bed,” said Haley.

  “What are you going to do?” Mother asked.

  “I don’t know,” Haley said.

  I was just standing there by an empty stall, watching this whole thing. I think the horse knew I was there. He looked at me, and I could swear he winked—but of course I could only see one of his eyes at a time, so maybe he was just blinking. Haley turned and put her arms around the horse. She buried her face in his long, warm neck and smelled him. I could tell that if that horse hadn’t been there she would have fallen straight over into the muck, and that she wouldn’t have cared enough to pick herself up again. And I didn’t hear the woman called Mother walk away, but when I turned a moment later to see if she was still there, she was gone.

  Poor people, I thought. Poor, sad, sad people.

  7

  Epilogue to Part One

  Just like that, the entire Grunveldt family had been wiped off the face of the earth, all three of them gone in a matter of days. Their house was dark and cold, the For Sale sign that Mr. Grunveldt had never gotten around to taking out of the yard standing like a coded message telling the world what had happened. You never could tell what a For Sale sign really meant when you saw one. It might mean We Hate It Here and We’re Going Back to Where We Came From, or possibly There Was a Terrible Divorce, or even, as in this case, Everyone Here Is Dead. It never just means For Sale.

  Funerals are the worst of life, boiled down and condensed into a ceremony. I’ll never forget old Fireball’s service, though I’ve tried to many times. We cremated those bits of him we could find and put them in an urn. I was not allowed to touch the urn itself, but I put my ear close to it to listen. He was a big man, but I knew they had squeezed my father in there somehow. For years I had nightmares, imagining him trapped inside that little container, pleading to be let out and nobody listening.

  A triple funeral is more than three times worse than a single one. It’s three to the power of ten times worse, maybe three million to the power of ten million times. No—it’s three lives ended, no more and no less, and that is plenty bad enough. So let me not dwell on the end of things but rather on the beginnings.

  A few weeks after Frankie was buried, my thigh cast was taken off and replaced with one that only came up to my knee. I felt like a whole new person. My leg had gotten skinny, and hair was growing on it like I’d never seen before, but it was my leg, my old leg returned to me. It would take me a long while to get the thigh muscles back. I would have to exercise it a lot. I would have to make a point of moving around.

  The good thing about the new cast was that it finally made it possible for me to ride Brother again. I saddled him up and rode out into the countryside, a knapsack on my back, a cane strapped to the saddle, and my bad foot wrapped in a plastic bag to keep the mud out. I’d given up my crutches, and the pain was considerably less now. It felt good to have all that horseflesh moving under me, indescribably good. You never realize how much you love to move until you can’t do it anymore. I’d forgotten about wind in the face, about certain sounds that were accessible only when away from other humans: bird arias, for example, and the secret songs of trees, rubbing against each other in the wind.

  I spent hours perusing the landscape on Brother, remembering how much I loved it in the woods. It gave me what I needed most: quiet. My mind was like a turbulent river, and I wanted it to settle down again.

  It was in these moments that a plan came to me. Life, obviously, could not go on as it had been. The thing for me to do, I decided—and I had to do something—was to go to my grandmother’s for a while, and not just for a short visit, either. I was going to stay for a while. It sounded crazy even to me, but I needed a long time in the woods. I needed to get over losing Frankie that way. I needed to figure things out.

  “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?” Mother asked, when I told her. “It’ll be a hard life.”

  “I’m not planning on living there forever,” I said. “Just…a while.”

  “Every day there is a trial,” said Mother. “Believe me. I know.”

  “I know you know,” I said. “I want to know too. That’s why I’m going.”

  “Well, what, exactly, do you think you’re going to learn from her, anyway?” said Mother. “And what about school? Are you just going to drop out?”

  That was a hard one, the part of this conversation I’d been dreading. I had the brash confidence of a youth who assumes that the wisdom of the world can be parceled out and handed over on demand, if only the right person is asked. And I certainly didn’t give a damn about school, which had never been kind to me. Dropping out seemed like a great idea. Also, I had reversed my original position on Grandma. I no longer cared if she smelled bad or talked funny. I no longer cared about any of the things I used to care about. All I cared about was getting away for a while. I couldn’t stand it around here anymore.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m going to drop out.”

  Mother put her face in her hands. After she had been silent for a few moments, I realized she was crying.

  “What?” I said. “It’s not a national tragedy, Princess.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said into her hands. “You won’t until you have children of your own.”

  “Don’t understand what?”

  Mother sat up and took her hand
s away from her face, revealing it to be bright red and wet. “Every mother’s worst fear,” she said, “is that her daughter is going to drop out of high school. Because you know what happens next?”

  “What?”

  “Pregnancy.”

  “Oh, please!” I shouted. “What do you take me for, some kind of trailer-park bimbo? How am I going to get pregnant out there when it’s just me and Grandma?”

  “You’ll find a way,” Mother said grimly. “I know the statistics. First comes the dropping out, then the drugs. Then the sex.”

  “I cannot even believe I’m hearing these things from you,” I said. “You’re worse than insane. You’re—”

  “Don’t you dare say that to me, Haley Bombauer,” said Mother. “I’m still your mother, and I’ll smack that smart little mouth of yours.”

  “You’re the one who needs a smack,” I said. “When was the last time you had an original thought? One that didn’t come out of a women’s magazine?”

  “You shut up,” said Mother.

  “You shut up,” I said, and then she did it. She got up and smacked me across the face, just like she said she would. I literally saw stars for a moment, bright pinpoints of light that danced across my field of vision. I shook my head to clear it. Mother already looked like she couldn’t believe she’d just done it.

  “Ow,” I said. “That really hurt.”

  “Are you going to smack me back?” she asked.

  “What? I—”

  “Answer me. Are you?”

  “No, I just—”

  “Then be quiet and listen to me,” said Mother. I had never heard her sound like this before. Her voice was quiet and low, almost murderous. “Something’s telling me this is my last chance with you, Haley. You’re not a little girl anymore. If you’re bound and determined to ruin your life by dropping out of school, there’s really nothing I can do about it. But I can certainly let you know how I feel.”

  “Well, that’s what you did, all right.” My jaw felt like it had been popped out of place.

  “I’m sorry,” Mother said. “Sometimes, Haley, you just don’t know when to close your mouth.”