The Adventures of Flash Jackson (17 page)

By now the sun had begun to dip below the horizon. The world was covered in orange-and-gold light, and it seemed to reflect with equal intensity off every individual leaf and twig, and especially the white bark of the birches, so that the whole place seemed like some kind of spangly fairy world. The three of us sat down in the grass and dangled our toes in the chilly water. I could only dangle half my toes, of course. But Letty and Elizabeth took off their shoes and stockings and dipped their feet right in.

For the moment, we weren't talking. I lay back on the grass and looked up at the purpling sky. I had managed to sneak myself enough of that beer to feel it, and I started to drift off a little bit. The whole day and night began to feel kind of like a dream, and I watched the clouds overhead catch the last offerings of the sun and hold them in their wispy arms until it was time to let them go.

I guess I did fall asleep, for a few minutes. When I was next aware of anything, it was of two old-lady voices talking in unison, in some strange language. I didn't feel scared, and I wasn't curious enough to sit up and look. I just listened. It took me a while to realize it was Letty and Elizabeth, chanting to each other. I heard the splashing of water. They were in the creek.

Then I sat up. The two of them had taken off their clothes and were standing in the water. They were facing slightly away from me, the water coming up to their middles, and their hands were pressed in prayer position in front of their withered old breasts, eyes closed, aged bodies swaying back and forth like metronomes.

They ignored me, so I sat quiet. I was pretty sure none of what I saw was actually happening. I was sleeping, I reasoned, and this was some kind of strange dream.

Then I looked up across the creek and the dream got stranger. I saw my grandmother standing there, arms folded across her chest,
staring straight at me. For the first time in my life, I looked directly into her eyes, and read not anger or hardness or mistrust of the world I lived in but something softer and kinder, almost an invitation. I didn't bother to wonder how the hell she'd gotten this far from home by herself, or how she managed to be at the creek at exactly the same time I was. We just looked at each other for what seemed like a very long time. Then I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again she was gone—nothing there but deepening shadow, playing tricks on the eyes.

I laid back down on the grass. Letty and Elizabeth had fallen quiet now, and I closed my eyes again.

Some time later I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Haley,” said Elizabeth. “Haley, dear. You've fallen asleep.”

I opened my eyes. It was full dark.

“Good gravy,” I said, sitting up. “How long was I out?”

“Not too long,” she said. “Half an hour or so.”

“We'd best be heading back,” said Letty. “I wouldn't want to turn an ankle walking around in the dark.”

“My goodness, no, not at our age,” said Lizzy.

“I was dreaming,” I said.

I grabbed my crutches and stood up. I lost my balance for a moment, and I put out one hand on Elizabeth's shoulder to steady myself. Her blouse was soaked through and I could feel her skin under it, leathery and as cold as a clam.

“Were you, dear?” said Elizabeth. “What did you dream of, if I may?”

In the darkness, all I could see of their faces were two white blurs. We were far from the party now, too far to hear it, but there were crickets and frogs singing all around us, and the night was alive with sounds.

“Zam,” I said.

They didn't say anything, but I could hear their smiles.

Suddenly there was a tremendous boom in the sky. We turned to see a white mushroom of light appear out of nowhere and blossom
into brilliance, lighting up everything like lightning during a storm. For several moments I could see both of their faces clearly. The fireworks had started.

“There,” said Letty. “As long as that keeps up, we'll be able to see our way home.”

 

We made our way back along a tractor path through someone's field, pausing when it was too dark to see and moving ahead when the sky lit up again. It took us a long while to get back to the party, and none of us spoke along the way. I was trying to remember: Did I really see my grandmother, or was I dreaming? What were those two doing in the water, chanting away and praying like that? And what did it all mean?

“It seems something has happened,” said Elizabeth suddenly. “I see a group of people standing around someone on the ground.”

She had mighty good eyes for someone so advanced in years. I looked during the next explosion, and sure enough there was a knot of folks standing around the way they might after an accident.
Probably someone bashed their head in playing football
, I thought. I felt a chill of panic—I hoped it wasn't Adam, even though he deserved it.

The fireworks had been going for a long time, but they showed no signs of slowing. Mr. Shumacher had gone all out this year. He'd hired pyrotechnic professionals to come in and give the folks a real show, and the sky was filled now with fantastic eruptions of light, and tremendous bangs of manmade thunder. It was the finale. We came to the edge of the yard and headed directly for where the people were standing all together. A hush had fallen over the whole gathering, and nobody was paying any attention to the fireworks. I was pretty sure by now something bad had happened.

As we got closer I could hear a high-pitched wail, a sick-animal sound as though something was having its heart ripped out. I'd heard a sound like that once before, when a stray farm dog had gotten hold of a rabbit and was shaking it to death in its teeth. The rabbit had
sounded just like what I was hearing now. We came to the group of people and pushed our way in to see what had happened.

The noise was coming from Frankie. He was on his knees, crying, leaning over someone stretched out full-length on the ground. As the last eruptions of the finale lit up the sky, I got a good look: It was his father, craggy profile in shadow, eyes two dark recesses, as dead as the proverbial doornail.

A
fter surviving four years of World War II, roughly five decades of marriage, and a lifetime of subsistence farming—when it seemed that he'd weathered everything life could throw at a man, including also the birth of a less-than-perfect only son whose mental development had not progressed one inch in seventeen years—Mr. James H. Grunveldt was done in by something as simple as a potato chip. These are the kinds of cruel jokes life plays on us. It was like those poor guys in that German submarine movie who almost get killed about a hundred times and finally make it all the way home, only to get blown up five minutes later. The fact seems to be that your life probably isn't going to end anything like the way you think it is, and Mr. Grunveldt was living proof of that. Or dead proof, I guess. Depends on how you want to look at it.

Mr. Grunveldt had always had a weakness for potato chips, even though the doctors had told him they were bad for him. They never could have known just how bad they would turn out to be, of course. It was one of the very chips for which Frankie had abandoned me at the fossil rock that killed him, later that night—stuck in his airway like a golf ball in a vacuum-cleaner hose, and nobody could manage to
get it loose, though I heard later that Mr. Shumacher had broken a couple of ribs trying. Mr. Grunveldt's ribs, I mean, not his own.

Mr. Grunveldt never actually meant much to me. He was already old when I was born, and I didn't see him much, or know him very well at all. I was saddened by his passing, but I was more worried about how Frankie would take it.

My fears were justified. Frankie pretty much lost what marbles he had left. It took three men to carry him away from his father's body just so the attendants could lift him into the ambulance. When it pulled away, Frankie made a noise that ran through everyone there like a knife. The fireworks had stopped by then, and the only light came from a few flashlights, and a sliver of moon. It was ghostly and weird, everyone as quiet as church—almost like a murder scene, really. People acted strangely guilty, even though nobody had done anything wrong.

Those same three men later took Frankie home in the back of a pickup truck, where they had to hold him down to keep him from jumping out. He was flopping around like a fish, biting and kicking and hollering at the top of his lungs. Mrs. Grunveldt followed in Mr. Shumacher's car.
She
didn't make a sound. She was quiet and tight-lipped—
fatalistic
, as Miz Powell would say. I suppose when you get to be that age, death hardly comes as a surprise. Still, she was taking it harder than anyone knew. I heard from Mother the next day that she had to go into the hospital herself, from complications of an old illness she'd once had that everyone thought was licked; and only a few hours after that, she died, too.

It was what they call a sympathy death. You hear about them from time to time, how when one member of an old couple goes the other follows close behind. Sometimes it happens in downright spooky ways—like, they both die at the same moment but in separate rooms, or something like that. This one wasn't that spooky, but still it was the kind of thing that made everyone shake their heads in a knowing way and say to each other,
You never can tell, can you?
A thing like a sympathy death makes everyone stop and wonder if there isn't more going on
underneath the surface than anyone cares to admit, whether our fates aren't all written down in some moldy old book somewhere, and whether our souls are tied to each other by real but invisible bonds.

As strange as it sounds, the whole thing was kind of a warning to me. Not about potato chips—about falling in love. It was safer never to get so close to someone that they could drag your soul along after them—this is what I decided. It seemed to me like if you gave someone that kind of power over yourself, then you didn't have control anymore, and that scared the hell out of me. I was still red-faced after my little fling with Adam that didn't take place, thanks to the foul temptress Roberta Ellsworth, and I had a new resolution: no more men, ever. I'd never leave myself open like that again.

But Adam was actually the furthest thing from my mind. I had an even bigger problem. The thing I'd feared most had come to pass not three days after I'd said it out loud: the Grunveldts were dead, and Frankie was on his own. I couldn't shake the idea that somehow I'd caused this whole thing to happen by talking about it. Even though I'd sworn off Veil Lifting, I knew it was still inside me. Just because I didn't want it didn't mean I didn't have it anymore. I was cursed.
Could I kill people just by talking about their death?
I wondered.
Should I lock myself up somewhere so I didn't hurt anybody else ever again?

 

“They've had to take Frankie away,” Mother told me, the afternoon of the day Mrs. Grunveldt followed her husband into the Great Beyond. “I just got off the phone with Edna Bing. She sat up with him all night, and she said he was just uncontrollable.”

“Where'd they take him?”

“The psychiatric wing of Mannville General. They had to sedate him. He was so upset, they want to keep him under observation for a few days. They're afraid he might hurt himself.”

I knew the place, of course—not the psychiatric wing but the hospital. It was where I'd gone after the barn roof caved in under me. For a small town, Mannville had a great hospital. It was built a long
time ago by the town's founder, William Amos Mann III, whose name everyone had to learn in school because he was such an all-fired great guy, and the only hero Mannville ever had. Well, that's not quite true: His great-grandson Eddie Mann was some kind of fighter-pilot ace in Vietnam. Just about everyone around here can recite the history of old Willie by heart. There was even a statue of him on horseback near the school, which seemed to be as much a monument to the amazing shitting power of pigeons as it did to the man himself. Willie Mann found some money after the Civil War, and he used it to build all kinds of things, the hospital being one of them. The hospital was so big it looked like it belonged more in a regular city, not a small lakeside town that had never amounted to anything. I hadn't known there was a psychiatric wing, but it didn't surprise me. That place had a wing for everything you could think of.

“As long as they don't plan on keeping him any
more
than a few days,” I said. “If he starts thinking he's back in Gowanda, he's gonna lose it for sure.”

“He knows where he is,” she said. “He knows it's not Gowanda.”

“Can he have visitors?”

“No,” she said. “Well—they might let you in if he tells them it's okay, but then he might not even remember you.”

I was shocked. “
Not remember me?
”

“This has triggered something,” said Mother. “He's having delusions, Haley. Bad ones. He doesn't seem to recognize anything or anybody right now.”

We were having this conversation in my bedroom, where I was propping up the old leg again. It had been throbbing in a strange way ever since my little sojourn out to the creek with Elizabeth Powell and Letty. It didn't hurt, exactly. It was just kind of pulsing, like there was something in there trying to get out. I had it up on some pillows, hoping to drain the blood out and back up to my heart, where it could get recharged—according to my personal medical theories, that was the best way to treat it. But so far all that had happened was my leg
was falling asleep. As a matter of fact, though, it hadn't really hurt much lately. It was finally starting to get better.

“I have to go see him,” I said.

“Well, Haley, I—”

“I don't care if he remembers me or not,” I said. “I have to see him and tell him everything will be okay. Has anyone bothered to tell him that? That things will be okay?”

“I don't know what they've told him,” said Mother. “I'm sure they've tried. But—”

“He won't believe them. Not the doctors. He
hates
doctors. I have to see him myself.”

“He's been given medication,” Mother said. “He won't be able to talk to you.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Those monsters.”

“Haley!”

“Why can't they just talk him through it? Why do they have to dope him up?”

“Haley, now just hold on. It's for his own good.”

“He has a right to be awake, at least.”

“They do it so he doesn't hurt himself. That's why,” she said.

“Well, he can still
listen
, can't he?” I said. “He can
hear
, right?”

“I don't know,” said Mother. She was sitting on a chair next to my bed, and she was bone tired. She'd been up all night at the party and all day at the hospital, and now that it was getting on into the afternoon she looked like she was ready to keel over and take a snooze right there on the floor. But Mother was the kind of person who couldn't rest if she thought she was missing a chance to be a martyr, or in fact if any kind of drama was unfolding anywhere within her world.

“Will you take me to see him, please?” I asked.

Mother rubbed her face. “I'm so tired,” she said.

“Do you want to sleep for a while first?”

She shook her head. “That's not going to happen,” she said. “I won't be able to sleep. Not yet.”

“Well, then, can we go?”

“Right now?”

“Yes.” I gave my voice as much firmness as I could. “Right now. Please.”

It wasn't the whiny me or the troublesome, willful me that was asking. It was the real me, and she saw that.

“All right,” she said. “Get yourself out of bed and I'll go warm up the truck.”

Turned out that calling it the psychiatric wing was a little grandiose, after all. It was only a bunch of rooms at one end of a hallway, closed off from the rest of the hospital by thick glass doors. The nurse at the desk was a tough cookie. It took some work to convince her that letting me see Frankie was the right thing to do, that hearing my voice would be a good thing for him. She said we could have five minutes, and that I couldn't be in there alone; she'd have to come in with me. Mother would have to wait in the hall.

We said that was fine. I knew right off this was not your arguing kind of nurse. This was the kind you listened to. She led us along the hall to Frankie's room. Mother sat herself down in a chair outside the door, and the nurse beckoned to me. But then she stopped me at the door.

“You're not going to like this,” the nurse said.

“Excuse me,” I said. I dodged around her and went in.

I wished right away I hadn't come. Poor Frankie was trussed up like a calf, his arms and legs tied to the bed with leather straps. It was all I could do to keep from screaming out loud at the sight of him. His eyes were open, and he stared at the ceiling and moaned quietly to himself, moving his head slowly from side to side. Spittle leaked from the side of his mouth. They'd taken away his clothes and put him in a dressing gown, and it had hitched up somehow over his crotch so that his private parts were plainly visible. I looked away while the nurse pulled the gown down again.

“Why is he tied up like that?” I asked.

The nurse pointed to scratches on his cheeks and arms. They were deep and ragged, as though he'd been mauled by some kind of wild animal.

“He did that to himself,” she said. “We had to tranquilize him. He can probably hear you, but I'm not sure how much he'll understand. You can talk to him, if you like.”

The nurse stepped back and I sidled closer to the bed.

“Frankie,” I whispered. “You hear me?”

Frankie moaned. He turned to look at me, like he was moving in slow motion. Eventually his eyeballs pointed in my direction, but they weren't focused on me. They were like two soft, brown marbles, rolling independently in their sockets.

“Franks,” I said. “It's Haley.”

He just stared.
Jesus
, I thought,
they gave him horse pills
.

“You know where you are, buddy? It's not Gowanda. It's just the hospital.”

“Mmf,” said Frankie.

“You're not going to be here for long, Franks. Just a little while. Just until things calm down and get back to normal.”

Now, why the hell did I go and say that?
I wondered. Things were never going to be normal again.
Don't lie to him,
I cautioned myself.
Tell it like it is, but tell him he's not going to be alone.

“I'll help look after you, Frankles,” I said. “I'm on your side. And there's Miz Powell, and my mother, and everyone. Okay? So don't worry. You won't be alone.”

Frankie didn't answer. His eyes just stayed pointed in my general direction, but looking at something very far away, something that possibly wasn't even there. It was creepy to see him zoned out like that. I even looked to see if something
was
there, but of course there wasn't. There was just this puke green wall that looked like it hadn't been repainted since dinosaurs were roaming New York State.

“All right,” I said. “That's all I wanted you to know. I'll come see you as soon as you're out. That'll be in just a couple of days, okay? Don't be upset, Franks. Everything will work out.”

Nothing. There was a strange bump from the hallway, but I ignored it.

“We can look through your binoculars together,” I said. “We can spy on the whole world if you want. Whaddaya say? That sound fun?”

Nothing.

“All right,” I said to the nurse. “I guess that's it.”

“This way,” she said. She opened the door and we went out into the hall. Mother had fallen asleep in the chair. That bump I'd heard had been her head lolling back and smacking into the wall, and it hadn't even woken her up. I jiggled her shoulder until she opened her eyes.