The Adventures of Flash Jackson Read online

  And within another few moments she had her answer. Whatever it was, it appeared to concern her. She gave me a shrewd look and shook her finger at me.

  “Pay ’tention,” she said. “Und no break rules.”

  Most of her pronouncements were so cryptic that by the time I’d figured them out they’d already come to pass, and usually they were nothing dire or consequential. But this one had an air of gravity about it. She was seeing me in some future situation, knowing even before I did the course of action I would consider taking to remedy it, and whatever she saw me doing was making her uncomfortable. I, of course, had no idea what she was talking about. Pay attention, don’t break rules—well, they teach you that in school, don’t they? It’s the basis of living in modern society. Fine, I thought. I wouldn’t break any rules. I would be a good girl once again. Not that I hadn’t been for the last few months—possibly my longest uninterrupted stretch of virtuousness ever. I hadn’t had a chance to be headstrong, or willful, or any of the things that had caused me so much misery in my life. Or should I say that had caused Mother misery, which she in turn had passed on down to me in the form of hysterical headaches that were always declared to be My Fault. Don’t break rules? Fine. I could live with that. Which rules exactly she was talking about would have to be determined later. I wouldn’t even bother to ask.

  Grandma motioned me to pick up the bowl again, and I began the same eternal process of carrying it back to the creek. The water had to be poured back in, along with a brief murmur of thanks. That was the way it was done.

  Now the thaw was in full swing, and snow remained only in shady patches that never saw the full light of day—behind large rocks, on the north side of trees, in ravines and gullies. I began to wander around. Grandma made no attempt to stop me. She understood that I was still young and needed to stretch my legs, that sitting still for hours on end was not, after all, a natural activity for someone my age. I explored the woods, examining the changes that the weather had wrought. You can become intimate with a piece of the earth as though it was a person, and after a time you can detect minor alterations in its facade, just as you can see the signs of aging in someone you haven’t bumped into for a while. That was how it was—like I was revisiting an old friend. I knew I would soon be making the long walk back home, and I rambled farther and farther afield, becoming acquainted with the world once more and building up my muscles, and my endurance. I found treasures—patches of early wildflowers, a family of fat raccoons, a small meadow where only ferns grew. One morning a robin dropped dead at my feet from the lower branches of a tree—a terrible omen if ever there was one, that is, for the uninitiated. To me, however, it meant only that the robin’s spirit had flown on without its body. I carried it back to Grandma and showed it to her, but she was uninterested, so I set the bird under a tree for the first predator to come along.

  The sun grew warmer. April had presented its calling card at the door, and was waiting to be admitted. The dead robin was gone the next day, presumably made quick work of by some hungry forest dweller. But that afternoon I saw a live robin near our shack, which meant the warmth was here to stay. I hoped to get home before the frequent day-long rains came. Otherwise I would be in for a long and soggy hike.

  It was just two days before the day I’d determined I would leave when, during one of my perambulations, I heard sounds I hadn’t heard in a while: people talking. They seemed to be chattering away so loud you could have heard them from the next solar system. I froze in my tracks, then dove behind a large sycamore. There were a bunch of them, from the sound of it—male and female, youngish, energetic, crashing through the branches like a herd of bulls, maybe just a hundred yards off. I was shocked at how bloody loud they were. Compared to them, I was as woodsy as they came. I was practically an Indian. A pack of high school kids out for a romp, maybe. One thing I knew was that it wasn’t the “bet boys” who came a-raiding every so often. Those kind never brought girls with them. That, I told myself snidely, is because girls would know better than to behave like that; and I thanked God once more that I was a member of the superior sex.

  Of course, if I hadn’t been so busy being smug, I would have heard the footsteps behind me, and I wouldn’t have been taken by surprise by the hearty male voice that boomed out from somewhere over my left shoulder, “Why, you must be Haley Bombauer!”

  I just about jumped out of my skin. I shot to my feet and whipped around to see who it was. There before me stood a beefy, red-faced giant of a man in camouflage clothing and military-style hiking boots, wearing one of those Tyrolean mountain hats with a little feather sticking out of it. He looked harmless enough—I could see that right away—but nonetheless he had scared the life out of me, and it was all I could do to keep from tackling him and giving him a good pummeling. The old, irate Flash Jackson surged up in me again. You do not sneak up on the world’s greatest stuntman like that, not if you value your hide.

  “Who are you?” I asked. Had I not gone so long without talking, I more likely would have yelled at him, something like, Who in blue blazes are you, you bastard son of a sewer rat?

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “Aren’t you Haley Bombauer?”

  “I asked you first,” I snarled, stepping away from him—though in fact he had asked me first. Hell with it. I wasn’t in the mood for social niceties. The man looked even more alarmed. I imagine I must have looked quite a sight, and smelled quite a smell, too. I hadn’t showered since last fall, and I had given up trying to change clothes, because it was pointless. My hair, I knew, was mostly dreadlocked, and I had a layer of dirt on my skin that I’d grown so comfortable with I would almost miss it when it was gone.

  “Your mother sent me out this general way,” the man said. “And Chester Burgess told me where I could find you, too. I’m Professor Watkins—Andrew Watkins. From the University,” he added. “Sociology department.”

  “Chester Burgess? You’re lying,” I said. “He’d never do that. You followed him last fall. What are you doing out here?”

  Though, if the truth be told—and the truth must always be told—I already knew what he was doing out there.

  Some years ago, the county had taken an interest in the welfare of the woman whom I still chose to refer to as my grandmother. It had been a brief fling, beginning when some bored bureaucrat or do-gooding old dame had decided that Grandma didn’t know as well as they did what was good for her, and that they would take her out of her miserable little house in the woods and put her into a nice, cozy old folks’ home in town, where she could sit and watch television with all the other fossils and decompose in peace. Can you imagine? Needless to say, that plan got bogged down pretty quick in the endless mire of local-government red tape, compounded by the fact that when a few caseworkers toddled out this way to kidnap the poor old lady, she was nowhere to be found. They looked for days, but her little house had disappeared, and nobody had the slightest clue where it—or she—had gone.

  Next step for the disappointed crusaders was to swing by Mother’s and my place and ask if Grandma had moved in with us. I was just a child at the time, but I remember this. Mother was as mystified as they were, or at least pretended to be. She knew that Grandma had a few tricks up her sleeve. She hadn’t seen her mother in weeks, she said, and wasn’t particularly worried about it. Sometimes months went by between visits. Sometimes a year. She’d been living out in the woods all her life. It was her business if she wanted to keep on doing it.

  All of it came to nothing, and eventually the county got tired of looking for her. But by then the university folks had gotten wind of what they referred to as a “living national treasure of folklore,” and the afore-described Andrew Watkins, chair of sociology at the University of Buffalo, had charged out here with a pack of graduate students, all of them armed with notebooks and tape recorders and their heads filled with theories of “cultural isolationism” and all kinds of other fluff. I remembered that phrase because I remembered them, too. The little
snots had actually come out to the house to interview Mother and me, seeing as how they couldn’t find Grandma either, and one of them had asked Mother how it felt to grow up in “cultural isolation.” I think Mother was kind of flattered at ending up as a piece of someone’s dissertation, and they stuck around for hours, pumping her for information and leaving her blushing and dazzled. And when they’d gone away, we thought that was the end of that. Our fifteen minutes were over.

  But they weren’t. Here was Dr. Andrew Watkins, large as life and in fact several pounds heavier than I remembered him, standing right in front of me in the woods that I had come to think of as my own, poking his red nose into my family’s business once again.

  “You were just a little girl the last time I saw you, I believe,” said Watkins, not daring to take a step closer. “Do you remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Well, you know,” he said, looking around as if an answer was going to fall out of a tree, “I’ve brought some, ah, students of mine with me, and we were hoping that maybe this time—”

  “You won’t find her,” I said. “You couldn’t find her last time, and you won’t find her now.”

  “Ah, yes, I see,” said Watkins. “Haley, may I ask you—why is that, exactly?”

  Oh, how I would have loved to give him the straight truth. I would have loved to tell him it was because Grandma had the equivalent of a force field set up around her home, and she always knew when it was about to be invaded. Don’t ask me how she does it, I would have said, because truthfully I didn’t know. I wasn’t that far along in my training. But she had a way of making herself, well, not exactly disappear, but definitely become much harder to spot—almost as good as disappearing, really. Not even I would be able to spot her, though without meaning to brag I would have liked to add that I was making middling progress on the very same trick myself.

  But of course, I couldn’t say that. All I said was, “Maybe you need glasses.”

  Watkins was about to say something back, but just then his herd of cavorting grad students found us and came trotting up, winded and eager. There were about six of them, and damned if they weren’t carrying all sorts of electronic equipment with them again, a little more high tech this time: digital cameras, tiny tape recorders, et cetera. They all began babbling at once to their fearless leader, asking if I was the granddaughter they’d heard about; when Watkins announced that I was, as proud as if he’d created me himself, they turned their attention to me, pointing their tape recorders and video cameras and whatnot into my face. That was about all I could take of that. I did what I should have done in the first place: I disappeared, too.

  I don’t mean in a magic sense. I mean I took to my heels and ran like a gazelle on amphetamines. I dove right through their midst and out the other side, and I moved faster than a moon shadow, putting on a full burst of speed so that I knew there’d be no way they could catch me. Even if they were fast, they didn’t know these woods like I did. By now I had an excellent sense of the terrain, where the high and low spots were and where the ground got soggy. I headed back for Grandma’s, but I took a zigzag path to throw them off, at one point skirting a small bog in the hopes that they’d blunder in there and get stuck forever.

  Then I headed at full steam for the little clearing where Grandma’s house was. I was pretty well bushed by this time—I’d been running for a while, and my winter of inactivity, combined with all the time I’d been holed up with my busted gam the year before, was working against me. I still felt a little unsteady on the wonky one, and I was afraid if I kept running I would stick it in a hole or under a fallen log or something and end up having to spend another summer in a cast. So I decided I’d given them enough of a shake, and I turned towards Grandma’s place.

  Except when I got there, of course, it was gone.

  I stopped, gasping for air, and looked around frantically. There was the creek, right where it was supposed to be; there was the remnant of a fire, a circle of charred earth and blackened stones. But that was it. She’d pulled her disappearing act again.

  That could only mean one thing: One of them had stuck to me like glue, and again I hadn’t known it. I turned slowly and looked behind me, and up at the top of a small rise stood one of the grad students, a fit young fellow who had dumped his equipment and kept on my tail the whole way. I hadn’t even heard him. He was standing there staring at me with something like awe, probably because I looked like Medusa, my dreadlocked hair flying out like snakes—the irony!—and my face dark with dirt and streaked with sweat.

  That was why she was gone—because otherwise he would have seen her. She was not a curiosity, not there to teach the uninitiated, not interested in being part of anyone’s study. The things she knew were not for public consumption. They were for a select few, and they knew who they were. So did Grandma. And this yahoo from the university was not one of them.

  Defeated and heartsick, I stood there catching my breath, waiting for him to go away. But of course he didn’t. Gradually he snuck closer and closer, until he was maybe ten yards away. I let him come, pretending I was still out of breath. When he was too close to dodge me, I launched myself through midair and knocked him to the ground. Then I sat on his chest and let him have a couple, right in the kisser. He screamed, I am sorry to say, like a girl. And it hurt my hands like hell—I hadn’t punched anyone in years. But that was nothing compared to how I felt inside. I only hoped she knew that I hadn’t meant to betray her, and how much it was killing me that I hadn’t been able to say good-bye. I realized, too late, that I had started to love her, whiskers and wrinkles and all. And I knew that this was also her way of telling me that it was time to move on. I was not going to be seeing the Mother of the Woods again anytime soon. That much I knew for certain.

  “Richard!” came a man’s voice from behind. It was Watkins. “Richard, are you all right?”

  The guy under me whimpered and tried to sit up. I got off him and sat down under a nearby tree. Watkins approached, crouching down as though expecting another attack. Richard struggled to his feet and looked at me in amazement, blood streaming down his chin.

  “You bith!” he said. “Thee hit me!” he said to Watkins.

  “Here,” said Watkins, handing him a handkerchief. To me he said, “Was that absolutely necessary?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m thuing her!” said Richard.

  “You chased me,” I said. “You tried to touch me. You all ganged up on me. I was almost raped.”

  Richard and Watkins stared at each other in disbelief, and then at me.

  “It was self-defense, and if you ever say any different I’ll come after you,” I said to Watkins. “That’s a promise.”

  A look of panic crossed his face. Watkins knew enough about my grandmother to know that he was probably outmatched by me. The other grad students had caught up with us by now, and they were huddled in a knot, staring solemnly at us. Watkins put his arm around Richard and helped him away.

  “Watkins!” I said.

  He turned.

  “Never come here again,” I said. “If you do, you won’t like what happens.”

  He didn’t say anything. I guess he knew I was serious. The whole lot of them turned and headed back to wherever they’d left their cars, and I was alone under the tree, left to ponder the sudden emptiness of the space that Grandma and I had called home.

  10

  The Tree People

  Near the spot where our little house had been, looking towards the southwest, was an overhanging rock face that caught the sun’s warmth from late morning throughout the afternoon, gathering heat like an upturned cat’s belly under a stove, and giving it away again bit by bit in the evenings. On top of the overhang was a flat, slightly concave spot where I could sit and ponder the forest, and at night I rolled up under the rock and was almost cozy in the damp, cool gloom. It was the best seat in the house. I wasn’t the only creature that knew about this place, but I
was the biggest. I staked my claim by urinating around the perimeter, as a warning to the raccoons, mice, rabbits, and others who might otherwise have been tempted to burrow in the soft soil under the rock, or simply to stop awhile and rest there, availing themselves of my hospitality whether I liked it or not. The laws of the forest are generally cordial in nature—excluding the ones that allow for the consumption of one’s neighbors—but they’re strict where matters of personal boundaries apply, and one is within one’s right to get testy if these zones are violated. I had seen it happen a thousand times before.

  If you were to compare an acre of New York City—a place I admit I’ve never been—to an acre of virgin forest, counting each living thing in each place equally and regardless of size, the city acre would seem like an empty, desolate wasteland in comparison to the forested one. We may think of New York as crowded, and if you consider the preponderance of our species there, it is. People exist in the city in such numbers that were you to spread them out according to natural laws, tribewise, they would probably take up many tens of thousands of square miles. But there are few other creatures in that urban environment besides humans. Pigeons, cockroaches, worms, dogs and cats, squirrels—hardly a diversity of wildlife, not when compared to a forest in the temperate climate of northeastern North America. There, within that same acre, one would find an average of one hundred fifty insect species, at least fifty kinds of plants (not including mosses and lichens), roughly twenty-five kinds of birds (either permanent residents or visitors), an unknown number of snakes, a plethora of mammals ranging in size from tiny to medium (mice, voles, moles, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, raccoons, and muskrats, to name a few) and a handful of larger ones. Including myself.