The Adventures of Flash Jackson (20 page)

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 pure, 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.

L
ooking 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:

…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.

“I'll be damned to motherfucking hell if I'm wearing this, you old Amish cunthead,” I said, very quietly—whispering, in fact, because if she'd actually heard me there would have been no end to my mortification. I just had to let it out. Then I wrapped everything back up again and headed back to Grandma's. Who did she think she was, anyway?

 

But of course I ended up putting on the dress, because by then my own clothes were already starting to take on a bit of a peculiar odor, and the new things were clean. I put my foot down at wearing the apron and bonnet. Thankfully, Grandma didn't push it. She knew the
dress was a big enough stretch. Ordinarily dresses embarrassed me, but there was no one else around to see my discomfort, and I soon realized how much cooler it was in hot weather than jeans, and how much freer it felt to move around.
This
dress wasn't designed for cool, of course—not when it was dark blue. And I would have preferred it if it wasn't quite so long. But I solved that by tying it up around my thighs in a big side knot. I could tell Grandma didn't approve, but she didn't say anything about it either. I suppose by then she'd already realized there were going to have to be some compromises made if we were going to get along for any length of time.

We didn't talk much. Grandma had probably already been toothless when King Arthur was romping around Merrie Olde England on his horsie, and that made it pretty hard to understand her. Plus, as I mentioned before, her English was never that great to begin with. I'm not even sure, to tell the truth, if she was speaking English mixed with proper High German, or Low German (which was what the Amish spoke), or if it was a language that had been taught to her by a bunch of drunken squirrels. It sounded that garbled. She taught me the names of the herbs she used, but I could never figure out if those were her words or real words. I guess it didn't matter much. I wasn't going to be presenting papers on the legithatic arts at any major universities. It didn't amount to a hill of beans whether anyone else knew what we were talking about. I just did my best to follow along, and filled in the blank spots with whatever words seemed most likely to belong.

We started our days early, before sunrise. First I carried water: buckets and buckets of it, over and over, until my arms felt like they'd been stretched about two inches longer. Then I chopped a little wood, which seemed like fun for about a day but after that was about as exciting as wiping your butt. Then we ate breakfast—usually potatoes, greens, and whatever we had managed to trap. Grandma was an expert in making squirrel traps and rabbit snares, which were her main source of meat. Needless to say, I learned how to skin and clean
a critter right away. She made me. I never have been the squeamish type, but I have to say that at first it made me never want to eat meat again. Take your average rabbit, for example, just a cute little bunny. First you slice the belly open and clean it out, and then you rip the skin off in as close to one piece as possible. Then you're left with a steaming gutpile, a sad little empty fur hanging there like a recently discarded coat, and a pathetic-looking creature with no skin and no guts and two big googly eyeballs staring back at you. I started losing weight almost immediately. Grandma's idea of cooking something was to scorch it until it was blackened and crunchy, regardless of what it was. I guess this was the best way of preventing disease, but what you gained in hygiene you lost in taste. Everything we ate tasted like charcoal. Later, I would learn that even this was efficacious in preventing upset stomach, since charcoal coats the lining of your gizzards and absorbs acid better than anything else. Try it sometime, next time you're camping—help yourself to a little chunk of it, no bigger than your fingernail. Just make sure it's burned all the way through and it's cooled down enough to put in your mouth. You think it's going to be gritty, but it feels as smooth as silk and has no bad taste at all. You swallow it down, and voilà—no more upset stomach.