The Adventures of Flash Jackson
A Novel
William Kowalski
In memory of W. S. “Jack” Kuniczak,
who taught me how to stand at ease.
Contents
Part One
Summer
1 Off the Barn
2 The Man Who Wanted to Help People
3 Lifting the Veil
4 Celebration Cake
5 Miz Powell and the CIA
6 Sympathy and Protection
7 Epilogue to Part One
Part Two
The Mother of the Woods
8 Paying Attention
9 The Mother of the Woods
10 The Tree People
11 The Bad Thing
12 Say Hello to Lilith
13 The Hardest Thing
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by William Kowalski
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Summer
1
Off the Barn
On my very last day of being sixteen years old, I fell through the roof of our barn like a stone through ice and broke my leg in three places. Don’t ask what I was doing up there to begin with—I couldn’t give you a straight answer. It had never entered my head to go up there before. I was just in a roof-climbing kind of mood, I guess—the kind of mood that can overtake a farm girl sometimes on a hot July day, when she’s bored out of her mind and thinking that if something wonderful and glamorous and exciting doesn’t happen to her immediately, right that minute, she’s going to go crazy. Like I said, it was my last day of being sixteen, and I guess I was feeling my oats a little. That’s the only way I know how to explain it. Even a half-wit like my neighbor Frankie Grunveldt would have known better than to climb that barn. My great-great-grandfather built it about a thousand years ago, and the passage of time had turned it into one of those ancient, leaning weathered things that tourists and Sunday drivers think are so wonderful and quaint, but are really only eyesores and death traps.
I was still in my good clothes. It was one of those rare Sundays when Mother had insisted I go to church with her. She got that particular bug up her butt about three times a year. I fought her hard on it, but she always won. Church was the one and only reason in the world I would wear a skirt. I had to, or Mother got upset. I think she had skirts and salvation kind of mixed up in her mind—you couldn’t get one if you weren’t wearing the other, at least if you were a girl. I had compromised by wearing my ratty old canvas high-tops, the most comfortable things I owned. I never wore socks. I was always taking off my sneakers, tree climbing being an art best performed barefoot, and socks just had to be balled up and stuffed somewhere. One time I stuck them in my bra and forgot they were there. That got me a lecture, I can tell you—but not the kind you might expect. Mother said, “If you’re going to stuff yourself, young lady, at least do it in a way that won’t let the whole world know you’re doing it.”
That’s Mother for you. I guess she was relieved, thinking maybe I was trying to catch the eye of some slack-mouthed idiot of a farm boy. She had pretty much given up on me becoming a normal girl, but occasionally she was still given to flashes of hope—or random moments of insanity, as I prefer to think of them. Well, she had another think coming, as they say. I wasn’t interested in farm boys, with their ropelike arms and their beetle brows. I wasn’t interested in any boys. I was just interested in being me, whatever that entailed. If that happened to involve a boy, okay. If not, I wasn’t going to shed any tears.
Climbing trees is hard work, and according to Mother it’s not very ladylike, but neither of those things have ever posed much of an obstacle to me. I like getting a little sweaty, and there isn’t a tree within two miles of our place I haven’t climbed at least once. None of them seemed as challenging as our barn. Yet once I got up on the lower branches I swung across to the overhanging roof, and that was it. I was up.
I crawled up the roof on all fours until I arrived at the peak, where the weather vane that looked like a bear had kept watch since the barn was erected. I couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been rusted in place. I decided I was going to get that weather vane pointing right again. I worked it around until it creaked free, and I spit into the socket a couple of times until it moved without screeching. Then, feeling mighty satisfied with myself, I stood up and took a look around.
From that distance I could just see the town of Mannville, founded first as Clare Town sometime in the early 1800s, then renamed after our Great Benefactor, the Almighty William Amos Mann, Hero of the Civil War, a raggedy old bastard we all had to learn about in school. Mannville at that distance was a few rooftops and a church spire. I could also see Lake Erie, a thin blue smudge that hung over the town like smoke. My last conscious preaccident memory is that I’d finally managed to accomplish something interesting and useful in my life by getting up higher in the world than ever before, when damned if the roof didn’t give way and I woke up later that afternoon in the hospital.
That’s life, my father would’ve said. You can work and work to get to the top, but you still never know when everything is going to collapse under you.
I don’t remember falling, which I guess is probably a good thing. Otherwise, I might have come out of the whole mess with a fear of heights. I’d never been afraid of heights before, you see, so it would have been a real shame if I’d started then. Oh yes: my name is Haley Bombauer, I am now twenty-something years old (not to be rude, but I’m already getting to the age where it’s none of your business) and I’m not afraid of a blessed thing on this earth, no man or woman or beast or barn. Well—actually—I do admit snakes make me squeamish, but I have since learned from a certain Miz Elizabeth Powell that fear is a useless emotion, one that will map your life out for you if you let it.
The secret, of course, is not to let it.
It was Frankie Grunveldt who found me, the crazy guy from up the road. I shouldn’t call him crazy, but since he was always forthcoming about the fact that he was a schizophrenic I guess there’s no harm in me stating it for the record. That’s what this is: a record of my seventeenth year, which was when things finally began to happen in my boring life, or maybe it was just when I learned to see through slightly wiser eyes that there was already a lot going on around me. That was the year I learned the answers to some things I’d always wondered about, and forgot about other things that up until then had seemed mighty all-fired important—such as dolls, which are about the only really girly trait I can lay claim to, and kissing movie stars, and shit like that. Seventeen was a big year for me, bigger than for most folks if I may be so bold, so I figured I might as well write it all down. If you’re not interested in this sort of thing you better stop reading right now. I’m writing this for myself, thank you very much. It’s important. There’s a lot to remember, and a lot to get straight; plus, writing is what my friend, Miz Elizabeth Powell, would have called “cathartic.” As near as I could figure, cathartic meant like when you rammed a snake through a drain—not a real snake, but a plumbing snake, which is a metal coil about forty or fifty feet long that’s used to get rid of clogs. Your mental pipes tend to get clogged up after a while too, just like the pipes under your kitchen sink. Writing is something you can use to jostle everything up and get it moving again.
Anyway, Frankie, who was ten years older than me but acted about ten years younger, saw me go through the roof. He ran and got my mother, who called an ambulance. We live so far out in the country, the nearest town being Mannville, New York, that it took them a good long while to get there. No ambulance had ever come to
our farm before. But then again, nobody’d ever broken a leg in quite so many places before either. My poor old bone snapped in three. Or I should say seven, because you actually have two bones down there in your lower leg, which was something I did not know until I busted mine all to hell. I’m told also that my femur—that’s the thigh bone—was sticking out of the skin. Now, that’s something I regret not seeing. It must have been quite a sight. I imagine my skirt probably flew up over my waist, too, which means Frankie most likely saw parts of me he was not intended to see. I was wearing panties, for those of you who are wondering.
Frankie gave most people the creeps, but he never bothered me any, and I’m comfortable with the fact that he saw my underwear. Frankie was not the sort of fellow to take advantage. He had a bad habit of spying on me, but that was nothing personal—he spied on everyone. It was only because he was bored. He wasn’t a pervert. I never minded it much before my accident, not even when I happened to see the sunlight glinting off his binoculars, and afterwards I was downright grateful for it. If it hadn’t been for him, I might have lain there in the barn for days. My mother never went in there anymore. Nobody did, in fact. I kept my horse, Brother, in a smaller shed that my father built a few years before he died. Brother’s shed led into a corral, where he could stretch his legs if he was so inclined. That shed, our house, a little pond, and four acres made up the Bombauer property. It wasn’t much, but as my mother was always pointing out, it was a lot more than the poor people in Africa had, and so we ought to be grateful—which I guess, in some ways, I am.
I was doomed to spend the summer in a cast, indoors. It was a cruel blow, I can tell you. I’m a country girl, and I grew up outside—running around with some of the more civil local boys, fishing, swimming, riding Brother. In summer I’m as brown as a nut, and wintertime doesn’t slow me down much either. The snow gets deep around here in January and February, sometimes drifting up as high as my head. When that happens I shovel us out, and sometimes I ride Brother out to my grandmother’s place and shovel her out too. I like snow, I must say. It has a way of quieting things down, nice and peaceful—not like someone yelling at you to shut up, but like they’re whispering that you should sit down and relax for a while. Some of my happiest memories are of those long rides out into the woods with a big wide shovel strapped to my back, the snow three or four feet deep and unmarked except for the tracks of birds and rabbits, and Brother pushing his way through the drifts as though he was part Alaskan husky. You wouldn’t see a single car on a day like that, and if an airplane happened to pass overhead it looked so small and far away you could hardly believe there were a couple of hundred people in it, sipping coffee and reading the paper as though they were in their very own living rooms.
That’s winter around here, white and perfect. But if I had to pick a favorite season, it would be summer, the time of birds and rumbling thunderstorms. Back then if I felt like stripping down to nothing and taking a dip in the pond, I just did it. Still do, as a matter of fact. Frankie isn’t around anymore to spy on me, and my mother has by and large given up on telling me what’s ladylike and what isn’t. Of course, I’m old enough now to know better. That much about me is different. But summer itself has stayed unchanged.
I was in the hospital almost a week. When I came back I had a cast up to my hip and a metal rack sticking out of it that was so big you could have used it to dry your laundry. The rack was there to hold the pins in place—I forgot to say they pinned my bones together, to keep me from coming unraveled, I guess. The doctor said I’d be in that state for about eight weeks, and then they’d take the pins out and put a shorter cast on, and then when that was done there would be some kind of a brace, just to make sure everything stayed straight. All in all, I’d be out of action for months. I’d already decided I was going to get better faster than anyone in medical history, but for now I was about as useful as a doorstop, and the idea of being stuck inside all summer was enough to make me lose my mind.
This accident was so bad it caused Mother and me to have words.
“Maybe this will teach you not to be such a tomboy,” she said to me.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Will you go buy me a pack of cigarettes?”
She started, putting a hand to her throat. “I will not!” she said. “What on earth’s gotten into you?”
“I have to do something,” I told her. “I can’t just sit here and cogitate all summer, can I?”
Mother got an annoyed look on her face. She sidled out into the living room, where I could hear her rustling through the dictionary. I shouldn’t have teased her like that, I know, since she barely had any real schooling and I was going to be a junior in high school next year, but sometimes I just couldn’t help myself. She seemed to know so much, I got a zing sometimes out of springing something on her she didn’t know. A minute later she came back in.
“A little bit of cogitating might do you some good,” she said, looking mighty smug. “You could cogitate about why young ladies shouldn’t climb trees and barns, especially when they’re wearing dresses.”
“I’m not a young lady,” I said. “My name is Flash Jackson, and I’m a stuntman trapped in a female body.”
Mother rolled her eyes and left the room. I could tell I’d upset her, asking for cigarettes—it was only a joke, but I remembered too late that cigarettes had been my father’s undoing, and hearing them mentioned always brought a little shimmer to her eye. Well, screw it, I thought. That was almost eight years ago now. And I was the one who had her leg wrapped in rock-solid plaster. That entitled me to a little orneriness, I guessed. But still I felt bad, so I reached under my bed for my plastic tub of paper, got out a few sheets, and set about making her an origami crane. She had about a hundred of them already, but one more would perk her up a bit. They always did.
Frankie was my first visitor—he came the next day.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “I brought you a frog.”
“So you did,” I said. “Thanks. Set ’im right there next to the bed, wouldja?”
Frankie put a margarine container on my nightstand. It had holes punched in the top to let air in. I looked inside, and there was a tiny little pond frog, along with a few tufts of grass and the lid to a jam jar. The jar lid was filled with water. I guess Frankie thought the frog could take a bath in it.
“I caught him in your pond, so he’s already yours,” said Frankie. “But I thought he could keep you company while you get better.”
“Thanks for saving my life, Frankie,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
He perched himself on a chair next to my bed, his baseball cap getting a workout in his hands. Frankie was about the most nervous fellow I’d ever met. He couldn’t handle talking to most adults, and even other people my age usually scared him off—he didn’t know how to take them, nor they him. Frankie had taken a few knocks in his time, on account of being so different, and it had left him a little touchy. But he liked me all right. He’d been allowed to hold me when I was a baby—that was how long we’d known each other—and I was about the only person who never made fun of him. He didn’t look crazy, but he did look different, I guess because it’s true what they say about the eyes being a window to the soul. You could tell that his soul was confused and unsure of itself, maybe a little homesick. Frankie had green eyes, and sad. You always got the feeling around him that he didn’t quite belong on this planet, in the same way saints didn’t fit in, which is why they all got martyred. There are some people who just aren’t meant to be here for long, I guess. Frankie’s eyes were the most different thing about him—that, and the fact that he acted like a ten-year-old most of the time. He watched as much of the world as he could from his third-story bedroom, where he hung out the window all day with a pair of binoculars, staring and staring. He claimed he could see Canada when the sky was clear enough. I asked him once what it looked like over there and he looked at me like I was the crazy one.
“Same as here, more or l
ess,” he said. “Buildings, trees, ground, sky. Whadja think, they all walk around on their hands or something?”
That was Frankie. You never knew when you asked him something if he was going to answer like his crazy self or his regular self.
Frankie lived with his parents, who were already pretty old when he was born. The unkinder wits in this town used to whisper that his sickness was punishment for them fooling around and having a baby so late in life, but I put that down to small-minded gossips who don’t have enough going on in their own lives. There’s a lot of that in this town—believe me, I know. I’ve borne the brunt of it more than once, because of my ungirly ways. Pretty soon the Grunveldts were going to sell their house and little bit of property. It was already listed, in fact. They were too old to take care of it anymore, and nobody believed that Frankie could take care of himself—except me and Frankie, that is. I thought he would be just fine, if only everyone would leave him alone. And Frankie believed exactly the same thing.
“So,” said Frankie. “You’re seventeen now.”
“Yup,” I said.
“Got any plans for the future?”
I could see pretty easily what mood Frankie was in—he only had about three. This was his Serious Conversation mood.
“None to speak of,” I said. “I’m thinking about running away to Europe, soon as my leg is better.” This was not true, of course—but the beauty of talking to Frankie was that it didn’t matter what you said. None of it made sense to him anyway.
He nodded and pursed his lips. “I see, I see,” he said. “That sounds like a fine place, Europe. My father was there in the war. It’s a good idea, Haley. A very good idea.”
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