The Adventures of Flash Jackson Read online

  She had reason to be careful of outsiders, too. Another thing about my grandmother that I don’t mention much, for obvious reasons, is that she had a big old patch of marijuana growing out there in the woods. She’d been using it medicinally for decades. I don’t think she even knew it was illegal. She smoked it herself once in a while in an old pipe, but mostly she burned it over her patients, whoever they might happen to be, and chanted the little “spells” that she’d learned when she was a girl—I don’t know if they were really spells or not, but they sure sounded like it, and stuff like that didn’t help her reputation any.

  There was another kind of person who went out to see my grandmother: those who had someone sick at home, and who needed her to come take care of them. You’d be surprised how many people still have more faith in the old ways than they do in the new. Grandma didn’t trust many people, but if there was somebody in a bad way somewhere she’d always agree to go out and see them, after hearing a description of their symptoms and bringing along the things that sounded right. Often as not that included a little box full of dope. She’d smoked me up good a few times before, when I was sick—though I was rarely ill as a child, except the one winter when I got pneumonia, and the odd cold.

  My grandmother, the pothead. I don’t know how many plants she had out there, maybe ten or twelve. The law had never given her any trouble, but sometimes high school kids snuck out there and tried to help themselves to her stash. I guess it probably would have been the kind of thing boys dared each other to do. I know some boys who were likely to do such a thing, and to tear up her garden besides, just out of plain meanness. It had happened before.

  So I knew what was in store for me when Mother got back with the old lady. I’d have to drink some nasty brew that made your tongue want to curl up and die, she’d burn a little of the green stuff, and that would be that. Strange thing was, it always worked. She’d put her hands on me to find out exactly where the problem was—not the leg, for sure, that being the obvious one. No, it was more likely she’d say there was something out of whack with my liver, or my kidneys, or my humors weren’t in the right balance. She’d have been laughed right out of every hospital in the western hemisphere, but every time she put her hands on me I felt better right away. You could feel something coming out of her and into you, and when it stopped it was like she’d reached into your guts and shifted things around just a little bit, just enough to set things right again.

  I was asleep when they came back. I could hear Grandma mumbling to herself like she always did, clomping across the floor in her big black shoes. Ma whispered something to her and dragged a chair over to my bed. I heard the old lady wheeze as she set herself down in it, and I got a whiff of her breath, and then of the rest of her. That woke me up, I can tell you. Jesus H. Wilson, but she was rank. I guess bathing is a trial when your only source of water is a creek. Grandma probably washed herself once a year, if that.

  I just laid there with my eyes shut. I wasn’t faking being asleep—it was dark now, but what little light there was in the room hurt my eyes, and I kind of felt like I was dreaming. I felt her run her hands over me to see where the problem was. That woman wasn’t shy, either. She gave my hooters a good squeeze and rummaged around my personal area for a moment or two, probably trying to sense whether or not I was still pure down there and when my monthly visitor was coming, waving his little red flag. That was all part of the cure, and you just had to lay there and take it. Then she kept her hands on my abdomen for a long while, and I could tell she’d found whatever it was she was looking for.

  “Blocked,” she said to my mother—only she said it in German. I can never remember German words off the top of my head, but when I hear them I know what they mean.

  Mother said something back to her, and then they left the bedroom and went out into the kitchen, where they talked a while longer. I guess they were arguing about where she would sleep that night—Grandma would want to go back home, and Ma wouldn’t want to drive her until morning, since it was already dark out. Finally they settled it, which means Mother won, and Grandma thumped her way up the stairs to the spare bedroom. Mother came in again to see how I was doing.

  “Haley?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “How are you?”

  “I feel as chipper as a corpse.”

  “Don’t joke about things like that,” said Mother.

  “Sorry. Did she say what it was?”

  “Yes. You’re constipated, that’s all.”

  I knew it. Seven times out of ten, there’s nothing wrong with you that a good crapola won’t cure.

  “What’d she say to take?”

  “Just eat a big salad. That should get things moving again. All that medication they gave you in the hospital slowed your system down. She said she could smell it coming out of your skin.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Thanks for getting her, anyway,” I said. I still had my eyes shut.

  “A cup of coffee might help, too.”

  “All righty.”

  “You want me to fix it for you now?”

  “Won’t it keep me up?”

  “You slept all afternoon, didn’t you?”

  So I sat up and Mother made me a cup of coffee and brought me a bowl of greens from our garden, and sure enough about an hour later things got moving again. I hobbled my way into the bathroom and just let nature take its course, and almost immediately I could feel the fever lifting as all that poison left my body. God bless Thomas Crapper, who perfected the indoor toilet. I would have hated to be using an outhouse at a time like that, what with the snakes that might be crawling around under there.

  Not that I’m afraid of snakes, you understand. You just have to be in a certain kind of mood to appreciate them.

  Next morning, early, Mother got up and drove Grandma back out to her place. Soon after that I got up and levered myself into the kitchen, where I made some toast and another cup of coffee. I set the little pond frog out on the back step—“The pond is thataway,” I told him, but I figured he already knew that, being an animal. Animals are born knowing what’s most important for them, and they don’t bother with anything else, which is something about them I’ve always respected.

  I was feeling about ten times better by then, and was even starting to feel like a busted leg didn’t necessarily have to mean that my entire life was ruined. It’s hard to be gloomy on a morning such as that, with the sky a bright blue and the first rays of the sun poking their way into the kitchen. Our house is a cheerful place, I must say. Ma had it fixed up very nicely, with hand-sewn curtains in all the windows and the whole place always in a dust-free state. A number of my dear departed dad’s creations could be found throughout the place, too: furniture, lamps, a clock. Dad was very handy with a set of tools. He’d built the addition on our house, in fact, and also Brother’s shed, as well as his own workshop, which used to stand where the pond is now. That workshop was where he came up with his inventions. Most of his gadgets weren’t useful for anyone except us, but there were a few things he managed to patent. That was partly how we lived, in fact. Royalties were still coming in from one of his widgets. It wasn’t millions, but since we owned the house and land, that and his life insurance was plenty to keep us going, as long as we didn’t suddenly develop a taste for designer clothes.

  Mother came back around ten. I could see right away she was in one of her snits—something Grandma’d said to her about the way she was raising me, no doubt. The two of them got along like dogs and cats most of the time. I just let her be. She went upstairs to her bedroom and closed the door. I knew sooner or later she’d get worked up enough to the point where she’d have to come down and give me a lecture, and then it would be out of her. It always came down to something I’d done wrong, somehow. In this case it was climbing the barn. All right, I admit that was one of my more boneheaded moves. Every little escapade of mine was like a miniature nuclear explosion: There was always fallout, sometimes lastin
g months. And this was definitely the biggest bomb yet.

  When, oh when, are you going to learn? she’d wail. I tried so hard to turn you into a lady, not a man. If only your poor father were still alive—it’s too much for one person to take on by herself, this child-raising business. And I would point out to her that it was mostly Dad’s fault I turned out the way I did, if fault was even the right word, which I didn’t think it was. He was the one who taught me how to ride, how to climb, how to fish and hunt and swim. If I didn’t know better I’d think Dad would have preferred a boy instead of a girl. Matter of fact, he would have been more suited to a son, but we never held our personal shortcomings against each other, and they never slowed us down any. He’d been my best friend up until the day he died—we did everything together. I know he’d been looking forward to having a kid, period. Even if he was disappointed on the day I popped out, he never showed it. He just went ahead and did all the things with me he would have done with a boy, and we had high old times. That was a long time ago, but there wasn’t a day that went by when I didn’t remember some little thing he’d done or said, or for that matter that I didn’t use something he’d made with his own two hands. Poor old Dad. Poor old Mother. Poor old everyone except me. I don’t waste time on self-pity, thank you very much. I do what I want. Life is too short to while away sitting around in parlors with your legs pressed neatly together so no one can see your coochie, like some kind of lady-in-waiting, fretting about what’s happened to you. There’s too much to do.

  Which reminded me that old Brother would be expecting me about now. I made my way down to his shed again and gave him a good brushing, talking to him all the while.

  “Now, what’s this I hear about you making a break for it yesterday? What’s the matter—you don’t think you have it good enough? Free room and board, and all the attention a horse could want. All you have to do is let me ride you once in a while, and hell, you like that. Yes, you do, you old horse. Now, I can understand you being despondent over this whole business about my leg. You think it means that’s it for us, that our riding days are over. And I know you don’t like Mother feeding you and brushing you and traipsing around in your own personal barn. Well, let me tell you something, horse. This is only a minor setback. A dip in the road. That’s all it is.”

  Shobbety shoo, said Brother. Plbbbbbt.

  “You’re just an ingrate, that’s all. Soon as things get tough, you want to hit the road. Now, you listen up good—we’re in it for the long haul, you and me. If you broke your leg, I wouldn’t just give up on you, now, would I? Some folks would take you out back and give you a bullet in the brain. A hot lead cocktail. Execution, gangland style. Shame on you, you old fleabag. And just where the hell were you going, anyway? Where were you headed when you hopped the fence?”

  “I believe he was showing quite an interest in my geraniums,” said a voice behind me.

  I was so startled I forgot I was only working on one gam, and I spun around too fast for the laws of physics to catch up with me. Plop—down I went, into a nice big pile of Brother’s poo. I let loose a streak of words so blue that even I was shocked at myself. A bolt of pain shot up my leg and out the top of my head, or so it felt, and when I managed to get to my feet again I was ready to tear whoever it was a new one. You don’t sneak up on Flash Jackson, not if you want all your limbs to stay in their original places.

  It was a little old lady wearing a tweed skirt suit and an old-fashioned hat. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, and she was standing in the doorway of the shed, looking for all the world like some kind of elf.

  “My goodness,” she said mildly. “I haven’t heard those kinds of words since the war, and then it was usually from a man, not a young lady.”

  That was about all I could take.

  “Listen, Broom Hilda,” I said, “I don’t know who the hell you think you are sneaking up on a guy like that, but you have a few things to learn about manners!”

  The old lady pursed her lips and stared at me. She wasn’t much to look at in terms of size—I mean, she was a tiny little thing—but those eyes took on a steely glint, and suddenly she seemed to grow about three feet. She took in a big breath of air, and I was expecting her to give back to me as good as she got, but she only let it out again. There was a very long moment of silence that she was the first to break.

  “‘Guy’?” she said. “Do young ladies in this part of the world refer to themselves as ‘guys’ now? My goodness, I have been away a long time, haven’t I?”

  She had an English accent, or at least what I thought was an English accent. The only English people I’d ever heard talk were on television and movie screens, so she could just as easily have been from Botswana and I wouldn’t have known the difference. But everything else about her seemed English too—her clothes, her little hat, even the way she carried herself. I just knew she was the kind of person who drank tea with her pinkie sticking out. And even though she was at least six inches shorter than I was, she didn’t act short. Her personality was ten feet tall.

  “And I do seem to recall there being certain restrictions on the kinds of language one uses in speaking to one’s elders, when I was your age. Have those, too, fallen by the wayside?”

  This lady spoke like the books I read sometimes, in my quieter moods; she was like a character in one of them. Something about her made me calm down right away, and I began to feel something I hadn’t felt in a long time: embarrassment.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “They haven’t.”

  “I am so relieved to hear it,” said the tweedy lady. “You must be Haley. I met your mother yesterday.”

  “You’re—you’re the lady who brought Brother back home?”

  “Yes, my dear,” she said, smiling for the first time. She stepped forward and held out a hand. “My name is Elizabeth Powell, and I’ve been away for a long time, but I’m home to stay. I do apologize for startling you. I thought you’d hear me come in. And may I say what a great pleasure it is to meet you?”

  We shook hands, me making sure first that mine was clean. She was that kind of lady—so well pressed I felt dirty just looking at her, and it didn’t help that my hind end was covered in horse shit.

  “Put ’er there,” I said. “Flash Jackson’s the name. Most folks just call me Haley, though.”

  “Then that’s what I shall do, if it’s all the same to you,” said Elizabeth Powell. “By coincidence, I knew a fellow named Flash many years ago. He was an excellent runner. I’m afraid speaking his name aloud brings up painful memories.”

  “Why? What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He was shot dead by the East Germans,” said Elizabeth Powell.

  Well, that was about the last thing I’d been expecting to hear. I must have looked like a fish, standing there with my mouth opening and closing while I tried to think of something to say, but she saved me the trouble.

  “You are a sight. It’s my fault, too,” she said. “I’m afraid you look as though you’ve been fertilized, my dear. Shall we take you up to the house and clean you?”

  “Yes indeed, we sure shall,” I said.

  I had only known Miz Powell for two minutes, you see, but already she was rubbing off on me.

  2

  The Man Who Wanted to Help People

  Miz Powell turned out to be the sister of another neighbor of ours, a neighbor I haven’t mentioned yet because she kicked the bucket about a year ago—that was old Emma Powell. Until recently I never even knew Emma’s last name, though I knew her all my life. We just called her Emma. That was unusual, considering how big folks around here are on Mister and Missus and other terms of respect-for-your-elders. Emma was kind of a recluse. Although she’d lived just up the road, I only met her a handful of times. Mother was always sending me up there with a few ears of corn or some raspberries from the garden, or whatever else we had too much of. Usually I just rang the bell and left them on her porch, because I’d learned from experience that Emma didn’t l
ike to answer the door. I shoveled her out a few times in the winter, too, but I never stuck around to ask her for any money—you didn’t do that with neighbors, and besides I knew she probably didn’t have any money to speak of. Nobody around here does. It’s what you might call a depressed economy.

  There hasn’t been any money in farming for a very long time, as anyone can tell you who’s tried it, unless you happen to be a big farmer with hundreds of acres—and then you usually rely on government subsidies to get you through the rough spots. We don’t have any big farmers around here anyway. The Shumachers have a decent-sized dairy herd, but even that wouldn’t have been enough to support all the people living in that house. It would be hard enough to support just two people with dairy money, and at one time there had been as many as twelve or fifteen Shumachers, though some of them were only temporary—foster children, you see. The remaining Shumacher boys mostly had jobs in town, and the girls made quilts to sell to tourists. Most folks around here have about three different things going at once, just to make ends meet—they might sell vegetables and eggs at roadside stands, or deliver the newspaper, or whatever you can think of. Small wonder most young people hit the road once they leave high school and head for more exciting places, like Erie or Buffalo or Pittsburgh. I was getting to the age where I might start thinking about leaving myself, since I’d be graduating in another couple of years. But bored as I was, I couldn’t see myself leaving town for good. Sure, I might wander around the world for a year or two just to see how things were done in other countries, but Mannville was home, and home reminded me of Dad…and as much as I hated to admit it, I was pretty attached to Mother, too, God bless her incompetent ways. If I left, there was no telling what would happen to this place, or to her.

  Anyway, old Emma never did thank me for anything I did. From time to time I’d see her peeping at me from behind her curtains, and she’d wave and I’d wave back, but that was the extent of it. She never married, which in my opinion shows that she had more going on upstairs than most folks, and as far as anyone knew she didn’t have any relations—until the day Miz Powell showed up.