The Adventures of Flash Jackson (25 page)

It was a long, bitter, cold winter, but it didn't bother me. I loved the silence of it, and the white.

Sometimes memories of Frankie would come galloping up to me and thrust themselves in my face, demanding to be recognized. Anything could trigger them. Now it was snow—he and I used to have fierce snowball fights. My favorite thing to do was to peg him when he was leaning out his spying window, because he was never expecting it. He would shriek with rage, come down and rub my face in it. Sometimes, when he forgot himself, he was strong—much stronger than me. But he never hurt me, or any other living thing on this planet.

Ah, poor Franks
, I thought.

Because I loved him. I did.

 

Before I knew it most of the season had passed. We had no visitors and did not celebrate Christmas. We celebrated something else, and I had the distinct impression it was a holiday a lot older than Christmas—but that was one thing I didn't learn much about, because Grandma didn't go into detail. Mostly she chanted over an armful of evergreen branches. But none of it was explained to me, and when it was over she threw the branches on the fire, and we were nearly smoked out.

About halfway into January the weather seemed to ease up some. The cold lessened and we didn't get any more snow for a while. Not that it would have mattered by then, since we already had so much—a total of maybe five feet had fallen, and none of it had melted. Maybe in town it would have been swept up and gotten rid of by now, but out here in the woods it was settling in under its own weight, gradually acquiring the gentle inscriptions left by rodents and birds. Snow in the woods reads like a diary of every minor drama that has taken place there in preceding days. Here are the tracks of four little feet skittering along, then suddenly stopping where the creature sat up, sniffing, sensing danger—what? Everything all right? Okay then, but suddenly there's a big swoosh! where an owl's wings have stirred the surface like a helicopter's prop wash, and that's the end of one more mouse. Or rabbit. Or, hopefully, snake—but of course snakes didn't have feet. Maybe if they had, I could have related to them a bit more.

One day Grandma asked me what my intentions were as far the future was concerned. Did I want to stay with her? she asked. She still had never paid me a single compliment, never told me I was a quick study or a good student. Sometimes she tested me, asking me obscure questions about something she'd told me weeks before—and I always answered correctly, because by this time I'd opened my mind completely to her teachings, resisting nothing. But there was no sign from her that I'd done a good job. Yet one day in what must have been February
she gave me the look that meant she was about to ask me a difficult question, and she from her side of the shack fixed me with her sharp eyes, and said: “Vat you do?”

Typically understated, it took me a moment to decipher what she was talking about. What was I doing? What would I do? What did I do? Grandma only had command of one tense, the present—you had to fill in the blanks yourself. I took this to be referring to the future, that is: What do you plan to do with yourself?

“When?” I asked.

“Spring,” she said. “Stay? Go?”

I sat looking back at her, directly into her eyes. This no longer made me uncomfortable. Sometimes we communicated solely in this way, for minutes on end.

“Vat you want?” she asked, after a while. “Vat you neet?”

“A theater,” I said.

It wasn't often I could surprise her, but I did this time. She blinked in mild astonishment and let a smile flicker briefly across the topography of her face, like a small earthquake.

“Eh?” she said.

“I want to build a theater,” I said. “For people to come to. Where they can tell their stories.”

“Hm,” she said.

She did not speak again for some time—hours later, when dark had fallen and we were preparing to go to sleep, she said:

“Vy?”

I was lying on my back on my little bed, looking up at the ceiling. Without looking at her, I said, “I made a promise to Frankie.”

“Frankie?”

“The guy who…you know, Frankie? Next door. Frankie Grunveldt.”

“Boy who die?”

“That's the one,” I said, though I knew I hadn't told her about Frankie's death—nor had anyone else. Things like this no longer surprised me about her. It wasn't that she was psychic, exactly. I had the
impression that all the news of our part of the world was brought to her by the trees, that she could interpret the sound of the wind in the branches and know with near certainty everything that had happened nearby.

“Vell,” she said, and that was all she had to say about that. We didn't discuss it again, but I had the sense that something had been decided for her. She had wanted to know if I intended to stay there for the rest of my days, studying and learning. But I didn't want to. It would have been a farce. I had needed to spend this time with her, but I didn't see myself becoming an old lady of the woods like herself. I belonged in the world. I belonged around people. I had come out here to heal myself, and now that had mostly been accomplished—the pain of Frankie's death had receded to a dull ache, then to a minor soreness. Now it hurt only if I chose to make it hurt, like a loose tooth that you prod with your tongue. I would always carry it, it would always be part of me—but that was better than me being a part of it.

“You mad at me?” I asked her at some point. “Do you want me to stay?”

She shook her head, squinting at me through her pipe smoke—plain old tobacco this time. I found myself wondering when, in the preceding centuries, she had taken up smoking, and who had taught it to her.

“You know vat you do,” she said, pointing her pipe stem at me. “Not me.”

Which was, when I thought about it, probably the nicest thing she'd ever said to me.

 

More weeks passed, and the vernal equinox was only days away—the first day of spring, the day when the earth tilts ever so slightly towards the sun again, like a jilted lover consenting to try it one more time. The sun was beginning to make regular appearances, and after months of gray and darkness let me tell you it was about the most welcome sight of my whole life. My skin had become pure white from spend
ing all that time inside, and I was so weak from inactivity it was all I could do to traipse over to the creek through what snow remained to gather buckets of fresh running water. The good news was that my leg had been totally healed. Once I got back up to speed, I was pretty sure I could run on it again like nothing had ever happened. I couldn't wait to try.

There was another ceremony the night that spring was reborn, again one that I could sense had been repeated time out of mind, since long before Grandma herself walked the earth. Since I understood so little of it, I won't go into it here—except to say that Grandma chanted and sang in a language I'd never heard her speak before, one that sounded ancient. Maybe this was one of the advanced lessons, something she'd learned from her own mother, who had learned it in turn from the forest people back where they came from. Once, she'd told me, forest people lived everywhere.

After she'd carried on for a while she produced her special bowl, the simple clay one that she kept hidden in a corner of the shack, and made me go to the stream and fill it. This was one of the things I'd been learning about, and believe it or not most of it was pretty simple. The first step was in learning how to fill it completely full and walk back to the shack without spilling a single drop. Once I had developed the concentration necessary to pull that off, I was judged ready to learn the rest—but it had taken me days just to get to the point where I could do even that. It took forever, walking slowly, holding it level. By now I understood that the whole point of it was to teach me to focus. It took almost twenty minutes to reach the shack walking that slow, and once I made it I was already in a deep state of concentration, which was of course the whole point of making me do it.

I set the bowl in front of her, going into a low, deep bow as I did so. Then I sat down on my side of the shack and folded my legs under me. Grandma leaned over the bowl and looked down into the water, mumbling under her breath. This had become a matter of routine by now. There was no longer anything about this process that mystified
me. It would be years before I was expert at it, of course. It still took me a long time to quiet my mind enough to see into the water. Grandma could do it within mere moments. Now she was doing it on my behalf—scanning the depths, as it were, to see what the future might hold. She had no need of mirrors, or any of the other accoutrements that I had used the first time I'd tried it, back at home. I would almost venture to say she didn't even need the bowl of water either.

And within another few moments she had her answer. Whatever it was, it appeared to concern her. She gave me a shrewd look and shook her finger at me.

“Pay 'tention,” she said. “Und no break rules.”

Most of her pronouncements were so cryptic that by the time I'd figured them out they'd already come to pass, and usually they were nothing dire or consequential. But this one had an air of gravity about it. She was seeing me in some future situation, knowing even before I did the course of action I would consider taking to remedy it, and whatever she saw me doing was making her uncomfortable. I, of course, had no idea what she was talking about. Pay attention, don't break rules—well, they teach you that in school, don't they? It's the basis of living in modern society.
Fine
, I thought.
I wouldn't break any rules. I would be a good girl once again
. Not that I hadn't been for the last few months—possibly my longest uninterrupted stretch of virtuousness ever. I hadn't had a chance to be headstrong, or willful, or any of the things that had caused me so much misery in my life. Or should I say that had caused Mother misery, which she in turn had passed on down to me in the form of hysterical headaches that were always declared to be My Fault. Don't break rules? Fine. I could live with that. Which rules exactly she was talking about would have to be determined later. I wouldn't even bother to ask.

Grandma motioned me to pick up the bowl again, and I began the same eternal process of carrying it back to the creek. The water had to be poured back in, along with a brief murmur of thanks. That was the way it was done.

 

Now the thaw was in full swing, and snow remained only in shady patches that never saw the full light of day—behind large rocks, on the north side of trees, in ravines and gullies. I began to wander around. Grandma made no attempt to stop me. She understood that I was still young and needed to stretch my legs, that sitting still for hours on end was not, after all, a natural activity for someone my age. I explored the woods, examining the changes that the weather had wrought. You can become intimate with a piece of the earth as though it was a person, and after a time you can detect minor alterations in its facade, just as you can see the signs of aging in someone you haven't bumped into for a while. That was how it was—like I was revisiting an old friend. I knew I would soon be making the long walk back home, and I rambled farther and farther afield, becoming acquainted with the world once more and building up my muscles, and my endurance. I found treasures—patches of early wildflowers, a family of fat raccoons, a small meadow where only ferns grew. One morning a robin dropped dead at my feet from the lower branches of a tree—a terrible omen if ever there was one, that is, for the uninitiated. To me, however, it meant only that the robin's spirit had flown on without its body. I carried it back to Grandma and showed it to her, but she was uninterested, so I set the bird under a tree for the first predator to come along.

The sun grew warmer. April had presented its calling card at the door, and was waiting to be admitted. The dead robin was gone the next day, presumably made quick work of by some hungry forest dweller. But that afternoon I saw a live robin near our shack, which meant the warmth was here to stay. I hoped to get home before the frequent day-long rains came. Otherwise I would be in for a long and soggy hike.

It was just two days before the day I'd determined I would leave when, during one of my perambulations, I heard sounds I hadn't heard in a while: people talking. They seemed to be chattering away so loud
you could have heard them from the next solar system. I froze in my tracks, then dove behind a large sycamore. There were a bunch of them, from the sound of it—male and female, youngish, energetic, crashing through the branches like a herd of bulls, maybe just a hundred yards off. I was shocked at how bloody loud they were. Compared to them, I was as woodsy as they came. I was practically an Indian. A pack of high school kids out for a romp, maybe. One thing I knew was that it wasn't the “bet boys” who came a-raiding every so often. Those kind never brought girls with them. That, I told myself snidely, is because girls would know better than to behave like that; and I thanked God once more that I was a member of the superior sex.

Of course, if I hadn't been so busy being smug, I would have heard the footsteps behind me, and I wouldn't have been taken by surprise by the hearty male voice that boomed out from somewhere over my left shoulder, “Why, you must be Haley Bombauer!”

I just about jumped out of my skin. I shot to my feet and whipped around to see who it was. There before me stood a beefy, red-faced giant of a man in camouflage clothing and military-style hiking boots, wearing one of those Tyrolean mountain hats with a little feather sticking out of it. He looked harmless enough—I could see that right away—but nonetheless he had scared the life out of me, and it was all I could do to keep from tackling him and giving him a good pummeling. The old, irate Flash Jackson surged up in me again. You do not sneak up on the world's greatest stuntman like that, not if you value your hide.