The Adventures of Flash Jackson Read online

  That’s where the pond came from. After a while, it looked like it had always been there. Reeds and other water plants grew around the edges, and soon ducks and geese included it in their yearly flight plans. I even got the bright idea of putting some goldfish in it, and they’ve been living there happily ever after, growing and reproducing. It’s only a tiny little thing, as far as ponds go—maybe ten feet deep and fifty feet across. But what I like about it is that it’s alive. There wasn’t enough left of my father to bury, as you might imagine. I was too young to be told such things, but I heard later that they were finding little bits of him for weeks, in the most unlikely places. You can understand if I prefer not to go into that.

  There’s a headstone for old Fireball in the cemetery, but there’s nothing under it. This pond, though—now that’s the kind of memorial I want when it’s time for me to take the Big Sleep. It’s a living, breathing ecosystem, and by now a whole generation or maybe even two generations of fish have grown up there and called it home. Mother won’t go near it because it reminds her of him, but I love to spend time at it, or sometimes in it, with my snorkeling mask on—just looking at all the bugs and plants and little fish in there, and thinking about old Fireball McGinty and the good times we used to have.

  Anyway, that’s how I got the name of Flash Jackson. After he died, I got pretty attached to thinking of myself that way, because it was his name for me. I guess by now it’s more than a habit. It’s become the real me.

  I had gotten kind of lost in the clouds for a minute there watching Elizabeth head down the road, so I roused myself and headed back for home. But then I remembered Frankie, who was still hanging out of his window. I waved at him to come on down. He just stared at me through those stupid lenses of his until I shook my fist at him and pointed to the ground in a threatening manner, meaning if he didn’t get down here right now I was going to knock his block off. He came running downstairs and across his yard to the road.

  “What?” he said.

  “Haven’t you got any manners?” I said. “That lady was Miz Elizabeth Powell, and I think there are nicer ways for you to welcome her to the neighborhood than to ogle her like she was an exhibit in a museum.”

  “What lady?” he said.

  “You numbskull,” I said, pointing down the road at Miz Powell’s rapidly retreating back, “that lady.”

  “I wasn’t looking at her,” said Frankie. “I was looking for a car.”

  “What car?”

  “I don’t know what it looks like,” he said. “Not yet. But I’ll know when I see it.”

  I noticed then that old Franks seemed pretty nervous about something. He was wringing his baseball cap in his hands again. He only did that in two situations: when he was sitting and talking, or when he was worried. “They’re coming today,” he said.

  “Who’s coming?”

  “Some people. Some buyers.”

  “Oh,” I said. I understood everything then. “You mean, buyers for the house?”

  He nodded. He looked so miserable I thought he was going to cry, so I stretched out my arms and gave him a big hug. Franks was not the greatest hugger in the world—I don’t think he really understood what it was all about. He kind of leaned forward at the waist and let me put my arms around his shoulders for a minute, but that was as into it as he would get. Ordinarily I never hugged him, but he looked so upset I couldn’t help myself.

  “Don’t worry about it, Frankie,” I said. “Let’s go pet Brother. Shall we?”

  “Pet Brother?”

  “Yes. Take your mind off of things.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a wise idea,” he said. He was dancing around, wanting to get back to his window. “They might come while I’m gone.”

  “Who cares?” I said. “It’s not healthy for you to get so worked up. Besides, you can see the road from my house just as easily. Come on, let’s go.”

  “Not a wise idea, Haley. Not a wise idea.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Oh, all right,” he said; because when it came down to it, Frankie was more like the brother I’d always wanted than anything else, and he always ended up doing what I told him.

  We headed back to my house, Frankie trailing behind me. My leg was aching by then and I would have liked nothing better than to go prop it up somewhere for a while, but I didn’t like the idea of old Franks sitting up there in his room all day, fretting himself to pieces. I had a soft spot for the old fruitcake. Brother liked him too, and I knew Franks would calm down if he had something to do, so I let him brush the old horse all over again and then saddle him up and take him for a jog around the corral. Brother needed a good run anyway.

  Franks was a good rider, his insanity notwithstanding. There were some things he did just like anybody else would do them—most things, in fact. You only knew he was nuts when you started talking to him, or when he forgot to take his medication. I didn’t know what kind of pills he was on, but I did know that if he didn’t take them he started hearing voices in his head, telling him to do things.

  It wasn’t like the voices told him to kill people or anything. I asked him about it once, but Franks wouldn’t tell me what they talked about. He said they just flat out bothered him, the worst thing about it being that they wouldn’t shut up. When the voices were on, he felt like there wasn’t a safe place in his entire head for him to go.

  “Like, I can plug my ears, but I still hear them,” he said. “Sometimes I try to drown them out with noise, but that doesn’t work either.”

  “That sounds terrible,” I’d said.

  “It is terrible,” he said. “Mostly. You ever read the Bible, Haley?”

  “I guess,” I said warily. I tend pretty quick to drop out of conversations that involve religion. But it was usually my grandmother who was starting them up, not Franks.

  “You know after Cain killed Abel, and God said his blood was crying out from the ground?”

  “I know that story,” I said.

  “I think Cain must have heard voices too,” he said. “He was trying to pretend he didn’t do anything wrong, and he was hiding from God’s voice. But no matter what he did, he could still hear him.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d never heard Frankie talk about the Bible before. I hadn’t even known he could read, to be honest. I mean, I figured he could, but I didn’t know he actually did. I stayed quiet, just listening to him.

  “Sometimes I feel like Cain,” he said. He had a sad look on his face, sadder than I’d ever seen before. “I run and run from these voices, but they always find me. Only thing is, I didn’t do anything wrong. Did I, Haley?”

  “No, Frankles,” I said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “All I did,” he said, “was be born. And I couldn’t help that.”

  I don’t mind admitting I got a bit choked up then. Even at the best of times Frankie seemed confused by the world, kind of like if he had his druthers he’d hop on the next spaceship off this rock and go where people understood him. I never realized until that moment what a trial those voices were, how they hounded him, like a criminal. They mocked him, they poked fun at him, but worst of all they stole his peace of mind. And when that kind of thing is coming from inside you, well, what can you do about that?

  But the other thing the voices did was to give him ideas. I’d seen Franks during one of what they called his episodes, which happened sometimes even when he did remember to take his pills. He was a different man then—wild-eyed, talking a mile a minute. The big one was about a year ago.

  I’d noticed him from the house, walking up and down the road, waving his arms and jabbering on and on. Sometimes he would stop and point at something that wasn’t there, or at least nothing that I could see, or he would throw his arms out at the fields like he was welcoming crowds of people. Mother told me to leave him alone, but I went out and talked to him anyway. I think she was a little afraid of him when he was like that, just like she was afraid of everything. But me—well, you’d
have to do worse than act crazy to scare me off.

  “Hi, Frankie,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  He stopped in midsentence and stared at me, his mouth hanging open.

  “Franks!” I said. “It’s just me, Haley. You know me. Remember?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course I remember you.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making plans,” he said.

  “Plans, huh?”

  “Yes. Plans.”

  “For what?”

  “I can’t talk about it,” he said. He started shuffling around in the dust of the road, muttering to himself and kicking up big clouds. “This one can go here,” he said, “and this one can go here, and this one can go here….”

  “Don’t you trust me, Frankie?” I said. “Don’t you want to tell me what you’re planning?”

  “No.”

  “C’mon. Please? Please?” I didn’t mean to bug him, you see—I just was a little worried about him, and I thought it might be a good idea for him to talk through whatever was on his mind.

  “All right!” he yelled, throwing his arms up in the air. “All right, all right, all right! Just shut up!”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Not you,” he said. “Them.”

  “Who?” I asked, though I knew who he meant—the voices.

  “My head hurts,” he said. “Okay? It hurts, so don’t be loud.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “The pillars can go right here, along the road,” he said, pointing to where he’d been shuffling around in the dirt. I looked. He’d marked out a big X with his feet. “One here, and one over there, and one down there, and so on. Got it?”

  I followed where he was pointing and saw that he’d made a whole line of big X’s in the road, about fifty feet apart.

  “And the front doors will go over there,” he went on. “The stage can be where that field is—we’ll have to level it out, but I think it will work. And the dressing rooms will have to be on the second floor, or maybe in the basement. If we even have a basement. I’m not sure if we can, because it depends on whether I can get John Fitzgerald to loan me his backhoe. But it’s going to be a big one, see? A really big one.”

  “A big what?” I asked, thinking meanwhile, Note to self: Call John Fitzgerald and tell him to keep an eye on his backhoe.

  He sighed. “A theater, Haley,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people, but nobody listens. A theater of the human spirit.”

  I was impressed, though I had no idea what he was talking about. Whatever he had in that unraveling little mind of his, it certainly sounded grand.

  “Who’s this theater for?” I asked.

  “Anyone who’s human qualifies as a performer,” he said. “It’s automatic. You can get up onstage and do whatever you want. But first, I want it to be for the Indians. They get first shot at it.”

  I had to pause a minute to be sure I heard him right.

  “You’re building a theater for Indians?” I said. “Here, in Mannville?”

  “It’s not just for them,” he said. “It’s for everyone. But they should have the first chance, because they haven’t been allowed to tell their story yet. This will be a place where people can come and tell their stories. They’ve been silenced, Haley. It’s not right. Someone has to help them get their voice back, and I’m going to do it.”

  “My goodness,” I said.

  “You think I’m crazy,” he said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Frankie…”

  “Look,” he said. He jammed his cap on his head and looked at me. His expression was wild and haunted. There was a kind of desperation in his eyes, and that look he normally had—the look of being homesick, soulsick—seemed to have spilled over his whole being. “I know how to raise money for it and everything,” he said. “You don’t have to help. I don’t need you. I can do it alone. It’s important, Haley. Someone has to give them their voice back, or I don’t know what will happen. But it’ll be bad. It’s already bad. And it’s going to get worse.”

  “What’s going to get worse?”

  “The state of communication,” he said. He looked up at the sky and licked his lips. Then he took his hat off again and started twisting it. “The state of communication in the world today,” he said, “is very, very bad.”

  “How are you going to raise the money?” I asked him.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said. “It’s classified. But when I get it, I’ll build the theater and they can come from all over. People from the whole world can come right here, and they can get onstage and tell everyone their story, and then things will be okay again. People will understand each other.”

  Well, you can’t have a proper conversation with someone when they’re rambling on like that, but all the same there was something to what old Frankie was saying. I don’t know how he got this idea about Indians, or about people in general—I mean, what is a theater of the human spirit? Don’t ask me, though I liked the sound of it. As far as I knew, Franks didn’t know any Indians, and I couldn’t imagine he knew much about their history either. I wasn’t even sure whether Frankie had ever been to school. I knew a fair bit about the whole story myself, about relocation and reservations and the way Indians had been outright hunted—and he was right. They had been silenced. I’d never thought of it that way, but that was what it was.

  There were a few Natives left around this area. Seneca, mostly. I imagine that once upon a time they had whole villages with lots of people, but now they just ran a few souvenir-and-discount-cigarette stores and held referendums every year on whether or not they should build a casino. They kept to themselves, pretty much. If you didn’t deliberately go out and look for a Seneca, you’d never see one. That was the way it had been ever since I could remember, and certainly it had been that way since my mother’s time—probably not even my grandmother remembered a time when there were still Seneca villages. It had been at least a couple hundred years since they’d lived according to the old ways around here. Probably more.

  But there was something, some kernel in Frankie’s idea, that made sense. Not on an everyday kind of level, but a more…I don’t know, a spiritual level, I guess. I don’t usually think along those lines. I’m a practical, down-to-earth sort of guy—I mean, woman.

  But that was how it was talking to Frankie. Just when you thought he’d finally gone off the deep end, he’d say something that rang true somewhere inside of you, and you had to rethink the whole question of whether or not he was as crazy as he sounded. Who was crazier, anyway—a man who wanted to help people, or a society that didn’t care much one way or the other?

  Frankie never remembered his episodes once they were over, but all that business about a theater had stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, and though I hadn’t thought about it in a while I mused it over again as I watched him ride Brother around and around the corral. Frankie hadn’t mentioned his theater idea since that day. Fact is, he disappeared for a week or so after that, and when he came back he was acting normal again, or at least as normal as it was possible for him to be. I don’t know where he was taken or what they did to him there, but now that I thought about it, it seemed a little spooky. Where did they keep people who weren’t making sense to the rest of the world? And what did they do to them to get them to act right again?

  I’d have to find out, I decided, if only to satisfy my own inquiring mind. I wouldn’t be able to ask Frankie, though. I’d have to ask someone else.

  Then I passed from this subject to Miz Powell. All kinds of questions about her began to pop up. For example, why did she still have her maiden name, if she’d been married for so long? Had she gone back to it after her husband died? And why was she interested in what kind of binoculars Franks used? And why was Flash killed by the East Germans? And why did someone as dramatic and exciting as her want to be friends with me?

  It was times like that I wished I
had someone my own age to talk to about things. I felt some kind of excitement surging up in me from somewhere I couldn’t name, the same feeling that had made me climb the barn. It was killing me to have that broken leg; sometimes, back when I was seventeen, I felt like I could run around the whole world twice just to burn off extra energy. And I wanted someone to share that energy with. But one thing about where I lived was that there was a great shortage of people to talk to. I had a few friends from school, but most of them were boys, and during the summer they all had jobs and couldn’t be bothered to come visit poor old gimpy me. I didn’t have one female friend that I could think of, not any good ones, anyway. Most of the girls at Mannville Junior-Senior High School thought I was weird, which I guess compared to them I was—but I took that as a compliment, considering who it was coming from. They were the lipstick set, the hair curlers and makeup wearers who thought the main purpose of their existence was to attract attention to themselves. Lord knows I’d tried, when I was younger, to be more like them, but it never felt right.

  Before my accident I’d never missed having friends much. There was always Brother, who I rode all over God’s green earth whenever I’d a mind to. We went exploring everywhere, through the woods and across fields and way out into Amish country—now, those folks were really isolated. It seemed like you passed through some kind of invisible barrier whenever you entered their territory, and you went back a hundred years or so. They kept to themselves most of the time, which was what I liked about them. I could go a whole day without exchanging a word with another human being, and considered myself richer for it, not poorer. But now that I was stuck leaning against the corral fence, watching and wishing, I started kind of taking stock of things. My life was flat-out dull, I realized. Something would have to be done about that.