The Adventures of Flash Jackson

by William Kowalski

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said. Suddenly I had the feeling that I was going to really lose it, either start screaming or crying or something, and I wanted to get away from her fast. “I’m going to lay down.”

  “We’ll talk later,” said Mother. She was shaking now. “When we’ve both calmed down.”

  I didn’t think I ever would want to talk to Mother again. But after I lay in bed for a while, waiting for the ache in my cheek to subside and staring angrily at the ceiling, she came into my room and sat at the foot of my bed.

  “You don’t know the first thing about it,” said Mother. Now she sounded resigned. “You think it’s some kind of holiday.”

  “I do not,” I said.

  “It’s hard. She’s hard. She’s cruel.” As if I had already forgotten about the story of my mother as a child, left alone in the woods to fend for herself. I wondered what she had taken from that time. The more I got to know my mother the more I realized that her life was not about experiencing anything. It was just about getting through it. I didn’t have much to say to a person like that.

  “Maybe that’s what I need, is all I’m saying,” I told her, still looking up at the ceiling. “Something hard. Something challenging. And it can’t be any crueler than this.” I gestured around me, not at our house or at her but at the world that encompassed us, the empty house next door and the memories of Frankie that flooded me every time I glanced absentmindedly up at his vacant cupola. It was the same world, after all, mine and Grandma’s. The same sun shone on it, the same moon circumnavigated us. It was cold comfort, but it was true. I knew I wasn’t running away from anything. “Besides,” I said, “I thought you wanted me to get to know her better.”

  “Not that well,” said Mother. “I want you to visit her once in a while. Be nicer to her when you see her. Not become her.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, disgusted. “I’m not going to become her. I’m not her. I’m me.”

  “Watch your language,” said Mother, halfheartedly. “You don’t know what’s going to happen out there. You don’t know anything about it.”

  I waited for her to say something else, something that might help me make some sense of things, that would make it unnecessary for me to leave home to seek wisdom and understanding elsewhere—something that would perhaps allow me to discover miraculously that I had been living in the bosom of knowledge all along. But the most unforgivable betrayal our parents commit is that they don’t know everything. They can kiss away the cuts and bruises, but they can’t bring back the dead, and for that we damn them, at least when we’re young. And Mother was abandoning me to the world even while trying to keep me close to home. She didn’t see that by her own ignorance she was pushing me further away instead of welcoming me into the same pathetic little shelter she’d been living in for years. Just wait, it’ll blow over, she seemed to be saying. Let enough years go by and it will be just like it never happened. Certainly this was the philosophy that had kept her going all this time, ever since my father died. She didn’t understand that if she had welcomed death, it would have made her richer. She would have been familiar with it then, and would never have been afraid again. And, more to the point, she could have taught that secret to me.

  But this was not the way it was going to be with Mother, not ever.

  “How does it work?” I asked, sitting up. “I mean, do you have to let her know ahead of time, or what?”

  “No,” Mother said. “You just go.”

  “I can just show up?”

  “You’re her blood, Haley,” said Mother. “You don’t need an appointment.”

  As if she was a doctor, or a shrink. Well, I wasn’t going for an hour-long session. I was going to stay for as long as it took.

  “She won’t mind?” I asked.

  “She’s beyond minding,” Mother said. “She doesn’t mind anything. Your grandmother is not like ordinary people.”

  Well, that I already knew. That was why I was going out there in the first place. But I had to be sure that this was the right thing, and the only person who could tell me this was the person whom I least trusted in the world, yet the only person I knew who knew her.

  “She’s enlightened, like,” I said. “Isn’t that it? Holy?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” said Mother. “It has other names.”

  “Like what?”

  Silence. What else was I expecting?

  “Mother?”

  “You won’t be the same,” she said. “Ever. I just hope you’re ready for that.”

  “Bloody hell,” I said, exasperated. “Don’t you see that’s what I want?”

  Mother told me there was no way she was going to mind Brother for me when I might be gone for a long time, so the next morning I took him up to the Schumachers’, promising to pay them whatever I could in return for taking care of him. They had plenty of stall space, and they had boarded him for me before, so I knew it wouldn’t be a problem. Mr. Shumacher looked at me kind of funny when I said I didn’t know when I’d be back, but he had enough manners not to ask me any questions. I didn’t tell him where I was going, either. I didn’t want anyone to know. I wasn’t ashamed or anything like that—it was just my business, is all. Then I had Mother take me down the county road in the truck and drop me off at the beginning of the fire trail.

  “Be careful,” said Mother. “And be respectful.”

  “All right, all right,” I said.

  “When will you come home?”

  “For the ninetieth time, I don’t know,” I said. “Just let me go, will you? I’ll be home when I’m ready.”

  I took my backpack out of the truck and turned to say good-bye to her, but she was already taking off down the road, without another word. So she’d had enough of me too. I felt a little pang when I realized that it was possible Mother was as sick of me as I was of her. Mothers weren’t supposed to get like that, not where their children were concerned.

  It was a week to the day after Frankie died. I hadn’t been on that trail in a long, long time. I remembered things I’d seen before, like a ship-sized log, downed and rotting, and some kind of nest up in a tree—a nest so big it looked like an eagle could have lived in it, or even a pterodactyl. Things grew large out here where people never came. Everything out here was just the same as it had always been, and already I felt relieved. Still a log on its way to unbecoming a log, still a nest being a nest. Me still me, and yet not quite.

  My leg was still weak and the going was slow. I came to the end of the trail after a couple of hours, and there was the shack, just like I remembered it. Grandma was sitting on a stool outside, hands on knees. Her sparse white hair was hidden by a bonnet, and the wrinkles in her face were as deep and dark as canals. You couldn’t see her eyes from that distance because they were hidden in the shadow of her craggy forehead. I hadn’t sent her any word—how could I?—but it looked as if she knew I was coming. She was waiting for me. I pulled up a chunk of wood, and sat down on it without saying anything. I could feel her looking at me, so I looked back at her. It was simple: We just looked. We didn’t have to talk.

  There was a little fire going in a ring of stones. I watched the flames dance around, almost invisible in the daylight. When we had sat long enough and it was time to eat, Grandma went into the shack and came out with an apronful of potatoes. She sat down again and started to peel them with a knife. I took the bucket down to the creek to get some water.

  Funny, I’d never thought about it before—but it was the same creek that ran through the swimming hole, then wended its way through town and eventually blended in with the lake. It was way back here where Grandma lived that the creek had its beginnings, where ancient trees decomposed in peace and mysterious giant birds made their homes. I crouched down and watched the water bubbling up from the soil, at first barely noticeable as it pushed its way up from whatever dark spring gave birth to it, through the rocks and dirt and leaves that were somehow what made it p
ure, filtered it, gave it virgin birth. If you went down along just a hundred feet or so it ran deep enough for you to put your bucket in. So I filled my bucket up with this newborn water and carried it back up to the shack, an act I was to perform perhaps five thousand times more before I was done staying with my grandmother.

  PART TWO

  The Mother of the Woods

  8

  Paying Attention

  Looking back on it now, years later, it’s clear that the hardest thing about living with Grandma was the sheer amount of work involved in our simple day-to-day existence. That and the god-awful smell—but you can get used to that after a while, especially when you start turning pretty ripe yourself. Nevertheless, at first I could barely stand it when she got close to me, or whenever I entered the little cabin I was to share with her for the better part of the next year. The stench of unwashed old woman-flesh was like rotten skunk cabbage.

  Once, early on in my sojourn in the woods, she sent me down to the creek to wash her dress for her while she sat there on her stool, buck naked, smoking a pipeful of wacky tobacky and humming a little tune. Well, I just about dropped that dress and ran. The thing was practically crawling with vermin. But within a week or so I didn’t smell anything unusual, and before too much longer I was probably at about the same level as her, scentwise. So everything in life really is relative, you see. You can even get used to bugs crawling around in your clothes.

  It was a shocker to realize just how much work there is to maintaining one miserable little existence when you try and do everything for yourself. Grandma and I didn’t have any money to speak of. Therefore, either we made the things we needed or we did without them. Mostly we just did without. We had no cow—therefore, no beef. We didn’t grow wheat, so no bread. And so on. The list of things we didn’t have was so damn long it covers just about every item in existence. It’s easier to make a list of the things we did have:

  potatoes

  water

  herbs

  wild greens

  rabbit

  squirrel

  wood

  knife

  ax

  mud

  leaves

  …and anything we could make.

  Sometimes, once in a great while, Grandma broke down and bought things, with whatever funds she’d earned from working her cures on the odd visitor. She hoarded a few dollars in a Mason jar under the floorboards. That would have been the first place a felonious hiker or escaped convict would look for it, I told her, but she said she’d put a spell on it so that no one could see it, and in point of fact the couple of times I did try to seek that jar out I never could find it, though she could always put her hand to it immediately. That jar-money was where she got her clothes, for example. We had to buy some things. I don’t believe it’s really possible to be completely self-reliant—not in a place where there’s winter, anyway. You have to contrive ways to be warm, and even Thoreau used to leave his little pond-side house and go to his aunt’s place for lunch every day. Maybe if we’d been on an island in the South Pacific, we could have run around naked all year—then clothes wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference. But complete self-reliance wasn’t the point, anyway. Not for me.

  What the hell was I really doing there, then? That’s a question I’ve begun to ask myself only recently. At the time, I didn’t bother to analyze it, because I was too damn busy working. Work, of course, was just what I needed. It’s easy for me to answer now, when I’m older and have some perspective on the matter. I can see perfectly clearly that my heart was broken in about thirty pieces, and that it wasn’t ever going to be totally whole again. I needed to get away from things that reminded me of Frankie. I needed to move on, and I didn’t know where else to go.

  There were three big days in my life, really: the day Frankie died; the day I went into the woods; and the last—and probably most significant of them all—the day my father turned himself into a human rocket ship.

  I hold that particular day up sometimes like a strange shell I might have found on the shore of the lake, and I examine it in detail, the way the light penetrates its various chambers and illuminates its colors. I have the dispassionate curiosity that the perspective of time permits. Something in me changed from that moment, even though I was just a little kid. Something hardened. I felt it happening, and I thought it was good, because it meant that the next time something bad happened it wouldn’t hurt so much. But what I didn’t know was, that was the day I stopped being a kid. It was too soon for me to be a teenager, and I didn’t want to be a woman—women got pushed around too much, I thought, and far too often they were the ones left holding the bag. All I needed to do was look at my widowed mother to verify that. No, I would be a stuntman, I decided. I would carry on the tradition that Fireball McGinty and Flash Jackson had begun, and I would never let that particular torch go out, no matter what. Not only would I be safe but I would be tough and fearless. People could drop dead left and right for all I cared—it would never make any difference to me.

  Except it did make a difference. Frankie’s going was a sliver of glass in the heart. Time to head out to the woods, where life was stripped down to the bare essentials. Time to learn something that meant something, instead of the stupid shit they teach you in school that you’re never going to use. Time to grow up. Time to become who I was.

  I stopped fighting the fact that Grandma and Mother and I were all witches—or should I say, Ladies Extremely Gifted in the Healing and Telepathic Arts: LEGITHATA, for those of you who are fond of acronyms. It’s a more accurate word than witch, and has less negative social connotations. I couldn’t tell you when I started accepting the fact that I was a legithata, not exactly. But it started happening because Frankie and his parents passed on, and also because of that strange little interlude down at the creek with Letty and Miz Powell. There was something legithatic—something witchy, that is—about them too, all right—not like me and Grandma, not quite as, oh, shall we say professional, but like they had sort of tapped into something on their own, some kind of energy or whatever. I think I understood that I didn’t have anything to be afraid of then. If those two could crawl into that creek with no clothes on and stand there holding hands and chanting in a secret language, and still hold their heads high the next time they saw me, well, then I didn’t have anything to be ashamed about, did I?

  Certainly not.

  Grandma didn’t seem glad to see me when I showed up, but she didn’t seem annoyed either. Fact is, she never showed much emotion about anything. She just kind of took everything all in stride. Who knows what the hell was going on in her mind? She was the strangest person I’ve ever known. She smoked a pipe, she talked to herself, she got stoned and ate bugs (yes, bugs—extra protein, she said), she could disappear for entire days and reappear silently and suddenly, without any explanation of where she’d been. She never treated me like other grandmothers treat their granddaughters—she never gave me presents, never told me she loved me, never bragged about me at Bingo on Friday nights. She didn’t even know how to play Bingo, of course. But that’s what I mean. She didn’t do anything like other people did. It wasn’t that she was nasty hearted. It was like she didn’t care one way or the other if I was there or not, like there were plenty of things in life more important than having me around. Not much of a boost to old Flash Jackson’s ego, but then maybe that was partly what I was there to learn—that there were more important things in life than just me.

  Part of the problem I’d always had with her was that generation gap. I didn’t know exactly how old Grandma was, and whenever I asked her she merely shrugged her shoulders, as if she herself didn’t know. Entirely possible that she didn’t, I thought, since I knew that back in the old days people weren’t always careful about writing down birthdays. Still, I figured she couldn’t have been more than eighty. Even so, with her approach to ladies’ dress and manners, it seemed more like she was born somewhere around 1600. She was of the sort who believed that
to bathe on a regular basis was to court serious illness and death, and that a woman ought at all times to cover every part of her body except her hands and face—never mind the fact that she’d sit there naked as a jaybird while I was washed her dress, with no apparent embarrassment. She was a walking contradiction. Anyway, there was no way she was going to put up with me dancing around the place in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I was going to dress like a woman should. I had brought a little money with me as well, and with that she sent me back to town to get myself some fabric—the plain, dark kind. Then I had instructions to take this fabric to a certain house, way out of town, and drop it off. I wasn’t supposed to knock on the door, or say hello—nothing. Just drop it off and leave and come back in two days, and whoever was inside would already know I’d been there and would have gauged with their eye what size I was, because they would have seen me long before I knew I was being watched. So I did exactly that, trying to ignore the creepy feeling of someone’s eyes crawling all over me, and when I came back two days later there was a package tied up in brown paper waiting for me on the front step.

  I snatched it up and stepped back from the porch to see if I could look in any of the windows. The bottom-floor ones were all curtained up, but the top ones were open.

  “Hello!” I called. “Thank you!”

  There was no answer. I still couldn’t see anyone.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “You wanna have a little chat?” Because by then I’d been with Grandma three days, and I was already going a little stir-crazy. But there still wasn’t any answer. Amish, I figured. There weren’t any wires going into the house, no tire marks anywhere around, no antennae, no phone lines. I opened up the package and my suspicions were confirmed—ankle-length dress, wrist-length top, and a bonnet and apron. It had Amish written all over it, just like what Grandma wore, though she wasn’t even Amish, for crying out loud. She was trying to turn me into a little clone of herself. It was all a little too much.