The Adventures of Flash Jackson Page 9

  “Haley?” she said. “Are you unwell?”

  I tried to answer her, but I couldn’t say anything. Then I heard footsteps on the stairs then, and someone came into the living room. I turned, feeling like I was dreaming, to see who it was.

  “Oh, hi, Haley,” said Frankie, as casually as though we’d last seen each other five minutes earlier. “What are you doing here?”

  4

  Celebration Cake

  What are you doing here indeed—it was just like Franks to be acting casual when he was the subject of a manhunt. Seeing him in Miz Powell’s house was so strange and unexpected that I was having a hard time figuring out whether the world was still humming along okay or whether things had gone screwy and the clouds were about to come crashing down around my ears. So I took my cue from Frankie himself, who in spite of his craziness was always the best indicator of whether anything was really wrong. You know how they say animals can tell an earthquake is coming long before people can? Well, Frankie was the same way. He always seemed to know ahead of time if something really big was going to go wrong—not earthquakes, I mean, but other things—and if you weren’t sure what was happening, all you had to do was look at him to check it out. He was like a human seismograph. And what did Frankie do now but sit down on the couch next to Miz Elizabeth Powell and lean against her like they were the oldest friends in the world, as if he was a little kid and not a hundred-and-eighty-pound man. Elizabeth nearly toppled over from the weight of him, but she righted herself and smiled, patting him on the head like you would a large dog. So I knew things were all right, for the time being.

  “Sit up straight, Frankie,” said Miz Powell. “We have company.”

  “It’s not company,” he said. “It’s only Haley.”

  “Well, thanks a lot, beanbrain,” I said. “Nice to see you too. You know the whole town is out looking for you right now?”

  “I know,” he said. “I saw myself on TV. Elizabeth, can I have a Popsicle?”

  “Help yourself, dear,” she said.

  Frankie got up and went into the kitchen. He came out with not one but two Popsicles, one chocolate and one green. I thought he was going to give one to me, but instead he sat down again and began licking both of them, switching to one when he got tired of the other. Elizabeth looked at him fondly, like a favorite grandchild.

  “Well, my dear, I imagine you’re wondering what’s going on here,” she said to me.

  “Not just a little, either,” I said. “How do you know Frankie?”

  “Our acquaintance is the result of a fortuitous encounter,” she said. “We met in the garden just the other day, didn’t we, Frankie?”

  “I was hiding in the roses,” Frankie told me, as if he was proud of himself for doing it. He held out an arm, the green popsicle still clamped firmly in his hand, and said, “Look. I got scratched.”

  “You can’t do this,” I told Miz Powell. My brain had been whirling around, trying to figure out what she was up to, and I hadn’t come up with anything. So I decided to be blunt. “What, are you hiding him or something? His parents are losing their minds.”

  “They’ll be told very soon that Frankie is safe,” said Miz Powell. “Don’t worry, Haley. I do understand how upset they must be.”

  “But?”

  “Well, we do have Frankie to consider, too, you know,” she said. “One must ask the question of what Frankie wants. He is nearly thirty years old.”

  “I’m twenty-eight and a half,” said Frankie.

  “Which means he is an adult,” Miz Powell went on. “If he chooses not to go home, then it’s really up to him, is it not? Nobody has the right to force him to do anything he doesn’t wish to do.”

  “He’s not like most adults,” I pointed out, needlessly—nobody would ever confuse Frankie, who now had a chocolate mustache and a lime green goatee, with a regular adult.

  “I know that, dear,” said Miz Powell.

  “I’m a very special kind of guy,” said Frankie.

  “Yes, you are,” said Miz Powell.

  “But,” he said, his face darkening, “I don’t want to go away from home.”

  “You’re away from home now,” I observed.

  “I mean Gowanda!” said Frankie. He stood up on the sofa, still clutching his now-melting Popsicles, waving his arms in the air so that little brown and green drops spattered all around. “I’m not going back to Gowanda! I’m not going back to Gowanda!” He started jumping up and down on the couch, and tears began running down his face. “I’m not going!” he screamed at me.

  “All right, all right, Frank,” I said, in my most soothing voice. I’d never seen him lose it quite like this before. To tell the truth, it was a little scary. He might have had a child’s mind, but he had a man’s body, and if he was going to hurt somebody—even accidentally—we would have had a hard time stopping him. “You’re not going to Gowanda. Nobody’s going to send you there.”

  “That’s right, Frankie,” said Miz Powell. “Listen to Haley. Nobody’s sending you anywhere.”

  Frankie sat down again, but now he’d managed to discombobulate himself. He tried to cross his arms and ended up jamming the Popsicles into his armpits. He was wearing a light T-shirt, and now he had one green circle under one arm and one brown circle under the other.

  “Oh, look what I did,” he said distractedly, all traces of anger gone. “Honestly, will I never learn?”

  That was what his mother said to him sometimes—Honestly, will you never learn? Miz Powell looked at me sideways, her eyebrows arched. I could tell she was trying not to laugh.

  “Go clean yourself up, Frankie,” I said. “I want to talk to Miz Powell here for a minute.”

  “I want to listen,” he said.

  “No. You can’t.”

  “Are you going to talk about me?”

  “Yes, we are,” I said, “and I don’t want you around to hear it. Now get your butt out of here before I twist your arms off.”

  “Sheesh,” said Frankie. He stood up and stalked off into the kitchen, where I heard him throw the Popsicles in the trash and run water over his hands. Then he came through the living room again and stomped up the stairs. “You’re not my mother,” he told me pointedly.

  “Thank God for small favors,” I said.

  He went into some room or other up there and slammed the door. Miz Powell looked at me again, this time in astonishment.

  “The only reason he listens to me is because he thinks I’m bigger than him,” I explained. “I’ve known him all my life. We’re friends, as much as you can be friends with someone who’s about three hearts short of a flush.”

  “He’s told me all about your friendship,” said Miz Powell. “He has quite a high regard for you, Haley. But how did you know he was here in my house?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. I wondered whether I should tell her about the sunflowers, but I didn’t know yet whether Elizabeth Powell was the kind of person who believed in things like that or not. It was no good telling people about mysterious visions from other dimensions unless you were sure they would understand. So I said, “I was really only out walking around, or crutching around, I should say.”

  “At this hour?”

  “My mother and I had an argument,” I said. “I was blowing off some steam.”

  Miz Powell was way too well-mannered to ask what Mother and I fought about. Chalk one up for her, I thought. Most of the old broads around here would have perked up at the first mention of an argument—anybody’s argument, didn’t matter who, as long as it was a good one—and tried to figure out who was right and who was wrong, and just about talked it to death. That’s life in the country. You know that song “There’s No Business Like Show Business”? Around here they oughta sing “There’s No Business Like Other People’s Business.”

  But Miz Powell just leaned back against the sofa, and said, “Well, I don’t mind saying that young man nearly frightened me to death when I found him in the garden. Your horse was nearby, of c
ourse, and I recognized him—what is his name again?”

  “Brother.”

  “Oh, yes. Curious name for a horse.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Frankie was very upset,” she went on. “At first I thought someone had been chasing him. I brought him inside and gave him some tea—tea works wonders on the nerves, don’t you find? May I refill your cup?”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  “And he related to me in great detail what he was running from.” She poured us two more cupfuls as carefully as if we were a couple of Japanese dames having ourselves one of those tea ceremonies.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked.

  “That some bad people had come to the house, that they were going to throw him out and send him away to an institution. Ordinarily, in such circumstances I should have telephoned the police at once. Before I’d spoken to him, that is. Imagine finding a fugitive in the garden! Really. But there was something about him that was so…plaintive. So wounded. After I heard him out I couldn’t turn him away. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.”

  “Even if it got you into some hot water yourself?” I asked her. “Because if anyone finds out you’ve got him up here, you’re going to be in the bullpucky up to your knees. Maybe even your elbows. Pardon my French.”

  It occurred to me then that sometimes Elizabeth Powell must have had as much trouble understanding me as I did her. She sat there looking at me like I’d been spouting off in Greek, and I could see her mind working as she tried to piece together what I’d just said.

  “I mean, you’re going to be in trouble,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Miz Powell. “I thought that was what you meant. You do have some colorful ways of expressing yourself, Haley.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I shan’t worry about trouble,” she said. “I have great respect for the laws of the state, but sometimes I have more respect for the laws of decency and kindness. Since Frankie is too scared to go home, and since he long ago attained his majority, then he’s more than welcome to stay here. At least until I have a better idea of what the consequences are of returning him. Which is where you might be of some help, Haley. I heard the story from him, but I have no way of knowing how much is true. What exactly is he running from?”

  I thought about the best way to put it.

  “His parents are about sixty thousand years old apiece, and they’re selling their house and farm because they’re too rickety to take care of it anymore,” I told her. “So Frankie, who really doesn’t follow everything with complete accuracy, thinks that means he’s going to get locked up again while his parents go live in an old folks’ home.”

  “Is that in fact what’s going to happen?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “They’re moving to an apartment over in Angola and Frankie is going with them. That’s all.”

  “I am so relieved to hear it,” said Miz Powell. But she frowned and tapped one spindly finger on her knee. “But he has been to an institution before, hasn’t he?”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Do you have any idea what that experience was like for him?”

  “Pretty bad, I’ll wager,” I said.

  “I think so too,” she said. “He’s alluded to it constantly. Isolation, uncleanliness, overdosing him on mind-altering drugs. I think they weren’t very kind to him there. I haven’t known Frankie very long, but he seems the sensitive type.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” I said.

  “And there is the matter of his…behavior,” she said. “I’m not an expert, but I don’t believe it’s really common schizophrenic behavior, Haley.”

  “No,” I said. “I think he’s got more than one thing wrong with him, though. I’m told he was a normal enough kid, but he started taking some kind of pills when he was around ten or eleven that stopped his development upstairs. I think it was a mistake—it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. And they ended up taking those pills off the market a little later, because they had side effects. But it was too late for him.”

  You might remember the big Fanex scandal in the news a long time ago—I didn’t remember it myself, since it happened when I was real little, but I heard all about it from Mother. Fanex was some kind of drug they used to give to kids with behavior problems, meaning kids that acted up more than normal, I guess. Frankie, of course, was one of those kids. He was having problems even before they knew he was schizophrenic—the deck was stacked against the poor guy from the start. The drug worked pretty well, but this was before they had as many testing rules as they do now, and nobody had bothered to figure out the long-term effects of Fanex on children before they started giving it to them. I guess they probably only tested it on rats, or something like that. Anyway, turned out that Fanex caused a lot more problems than it fixed, namely that it stopped these kids’ brains from growing the way they were supposed to. I don’t know the details of it, but I did know that all across America there were maybe five or ten thousand people Frankie’s age who acted like they were still whatever age they were when they started taking the drug. It was a national tragedy. Most of them were boys, too. There were lots of lawsuits, and the makers of Fanex were of course up shit creek after that, and they had to stop making it—but no amount of money would ever fix what was wrong with those kids, not even millions and millions. That was the real reason Frankie acted like he did—not schizophrenia but Fanex. And the worst part about it was that the Fanex people got out of the whole mess somehow without having to pay anyone a dime. I guess they must have dove headfirst through the first legal loophole that presented itself.

  One of the stronger side effects of Fanex was that it stopped these kids from dreaming. Now, everyone knows dreams are important. I don’t mean goals and ambitions but the actual dreams we have every night. Even dogs have to dream about rabbits and whatnot. Even Brother dreams—I’m sure of it. I’ve heard him talking to himself in his sleep. And if your dreams are gone, that means they’ve reached into your head and stolen something no person should ever lose. As if poor Franks didn’t have enough working against him already.

  “Just imagine,” murmured Miz Powell.

  “Oh, I’ve imagined many a time what it must be like to be Frankie,” I said. “And it’s never any fun at all.”

  I flashed back then to Frankie telling me about his theater. I don’t know why I thought of it then—it just came to me. It’d been one of those many moments when it seemed like Frankie was tuned into a different channel than the rest of us, one that broadcast ideas only he could understand. I’d never been able to forget the day he drew those plans in the dirt, because I’d never been able to explain it. On the spur of the moment, I told Elizabeth all about it—his idea for a “theater of the human spirit,” and how even though he’d never mentioned it again, at the time it had seemed like the most important thing in the world.

  She listened with a sort of faint half smile of fascination, and when I was done, she said, “The Oracle at Mannville.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “I was thinking of the Oracle at Delphi,” she said. “Have you ever heard of that?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “The ancient ones all had their oracles, and for the Greeks it was Delphi,” she said. “It was where they went when they had questions about the future. Some say the Oracle was a schizophrenic personality, someone who spoke in riddles which people would then try to piece together. Nowadays we take our oracles to the hospital, but back then they were valued as seers. Delphi was dedicated to Apollo, if I remember correctly. And a very important part of Greek culture oracles were, too. Some say the temple was a holy site even before the Greeks came—part of an even older culture, one that the Greeks themselves had taken over. Possibly the Etruscans.”

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t really see at all.

  “If Frankie had been born in Greece three thousand years ago, that’s where he would have ended up,” said Elizabeth. “People
would have come from miles around to ask him questions, and he would have gone into a trance and answered them.”

  “A trance?”

  “What they call now an episode,” she said. “That’s a very interesting story, Haley. Thank you for sharing it with me.”

  This comment had a kind of air of finality about it, and I looked up at an old clock on the mantelpiece to see that it was nearly ten. I hadn’t realized it was so late—time had been getting away from me all day. I reached for my crutches and stood up.

  “I better get going,” I said. “Thanks for the tea, and the conversation.”

  “You’re most welcome, Haley,” said Elizabeth. “You’re a very mature young lady, you know. I have enjoyed speaking with you. Are you going to tell anyone where Frankie is?”

  I liked that—she wasn’t telling me not to tell anyone, she was asking what I was going to do.

  “Not yet,” I said. “You’re right. It is up to him. But his parents are near the breaking point, so I think the sooner they know he’s all right the better.”

  “I understand completely,” said Elizabeth. “We’ll have a talk in the morning, he and I, and we’ll decide what to do.”

  She let me out onto the porch and helped me down the stairs, watching as I headed across the dewy lawn toward the road. There was a half-moon up, casting a gauzy white light over everything like a thin film of spiderweb. I love moonlight on a clear night such as that. You can almost feel it in your hair, like wind.

  “Safe home, Haley,” she called after me.

  “Thanks, Miz Powell,” I said.

  I thought about the Oracle at Delphi as I headed back toward the old Bombauer domicile. What Elizabeth didn’t know was that I came from a long line of oracles myself—not the schizo kind but the witchy kind. I was still tingling with weird energy from my little experiment at the kitchen table that afternoon. I wondered what she would make of that.

  I had completely forgotten to ask her about the old Flash, the one the East Germans got—and now on top of that little mystery there was the matter of that old Nazi pistol in her bathrobe pocket. She was a curious one, she was. I made up my mind to get back there as soon as decency and good manners would allow, maybe after all this business about Frankie was resolved, and then I would ask her some more questions. She would be a wealth of good stories, old Elizabeth Powell. I just knew it.