But before this year’s party, I had to go back into the hospital and get that big old stabilizing rack taken off my leg, the pins inside me having settled well enough by now so that they could stay put on their own. This meant another operation, which meant they had to knock me out again, which meant that I was laid up in bed once more, getting addle-headed and clogged up from all that medication. But things went a little smoother all in all, since this time around I knew what to expect. Even so, I spent the next couple of weeks just taking it easy. The doctor told me I’d done too much moving around, and that I should just lay low for a while and let nature take its course. So I didn’t see anything of either Frankie or Miz Elizabeth Powell until the Shumacher’s party.
The Shumachers were the kind of typical farming family that used to be more common than it is now, by which I mean I don’t think even the Shumachers themselves knew for sure how many kids they had. Most of them had grown up and started families of their own by now. Amos Junior was the oldest. He married and bought a small farm about ten miles away, where he’d begun reproducing himself as fast as possible, in true Shumacher tradition. He had a number of younger brothers and sisters, most of who were married, and one—Marky, I think—was in agricultural school somewhere. There were twin girls, one married and the other not, but I forget which was which. Adam was the youngest, and strictly speaking he wasn’t a Shumacher—he was one of the temporaries, a foster kid from a troubled home. Some folks take in dogs, some take in cats—well, once upon a time the Shumachers used to take in every stray kid that came along, and keep them safe and warm until they’d plucked up the courage to head out into the world again. That farm used to look like Kidville, U.S.A., population ten thousand. They didn’t do it anymore, I guess because it wore them out. But Adam never left, so they must have adopted him somewhere along the line.
I remember when Adam first showed up—he was a year or two older than me, but I can still see him as a little kid. Back then he hardly talked at all, and when he did his voice was all ratchety and squeaky. I’d heard it was because his real father had done something to him to make him talk like that—something terrible. His voice had repaired itself now, but Adam was still the shy and quiet sort, which I guess was why I liked him. I never have cared much for your louder, more crude boys, which excuse me for saying so is what most boys are like anyway. Not Adam, though. He was a lot smaller when he was little—well, that sounds stupid, I mean of course he was smaller, but he’d been small even for a kid. But all these years of Shumacher cooking and farm work had turned him into a dead-on Shumacher look-alike, meaning he was tall and beefy and as strong as a mule. The only real difference between Adam and the rest of the whole clan was his hair, which was a kind of whitish blond; his eyes, which were deep blue; and his skin, which tanned like mine did. The others in the family were more on the pink side, with darker hair.
On July the second, I was just feeling like getting up and around again, hoping I might make it to this year’s party and wondering if Adam would talk to me. Not that I cared, mind you—I just wondered, is all. That morning Frankie, who I hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks, paid me a little visit. He was carrying something behind his back.
“Hi, Haley,” he said.
“What’s up, Frankie?” I asked. “Close the door, would you?”
Frankie closed the door, which I asked him to do so Mother wouldn’t overhear us.
“Does anyone know where you were?” I asked.
Frankie giggled. “Uh-uh,” he said. “It’s still a secret.”
“Good for you,” I said. “What’s that behind your back?”
Frankie showed me another margarine container.
“Another frog?” I said.
“Snake,” he said, opening it up.
“Jesus Baines Johnson!” I shouted, and before I knew what I was doing I whacked it out of his hand and sent it sailing across the room. I didn’t mean to react like that—I just couldn’t help it. The margarine container hit the wall with a big thwap! and the snake fell out of it and disappeared in an instant.
“Haley!” Frankie yelled. He got down on his hands and knees and began hunting around the floor. “Why did you do that?”
“Frankie Grunveldt, you know I hate snakes more than anything!” I said, breathing hard. My instinct in such situations is to draw my legs up under me, but I forgot that one of them was in a cast and wasn’t ready for moving, and pain shot through me like a million volts of pure, unadulterated electricity. For a minute or two I could only lay there whimpering, it hurt so bad.
“He’s gone,” said Frankie. “You probably killed him. Are you happy now?”
I still couldn’t say anything.
“Jeez LOUISE!” he yelled. “How could you hit a little snake like that?”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Can I have a pill, please?”
“A what?”
I pointed to the bottle of pills on the nightstand. I had hoped to sort of avoid them altogether, not wanting to end up a graduate of the Betty Ford Clinic, but I felt the occasion merited a little painkilling. Frankie handed them to me and I took one. It wouldn’t kick in for a while, but just knowing it was working in me made me feel a little better.
“Well, he’s loose now,” said Frankie. “Probably somewhere under your bed.”
“Find him.”
“How? He’s scared. He’s probably under the floorboards.”
“Frankie, you find that thing and get it out of here. I don’t care if it means you have to rip up the floor. You do it. Hear?”
Frankie looked from me to the floor and back to me. Then he looked at the floor again. Then he looked at me, and a devilish grin crossed his face.
“No,” he said. “I won’t.”
It was a Mexican standoff. The two of us just stared at each other, me wanting to jump out of bed and wring his neck, and him smug and secure knowing I couldn’t do it. He stood there with his arms crossed and stuck his tongue out at me.
“I will kill you,” I said calmly. “If you don’t get that snake, I will wait until I’m better and I will cut your throat like a pirate. And there’s nowhere you can hide.”
“It serves you right,” said Frankie. “First off, you shouldn’t hurt animals.”
“A snake is not an animal,” I said. “A horse is an animal. A snake is a snake.”
“Second of all, it’ll teach you not to be so mean to me,” said Frankie.
“I’m not mean to you, you shitbird,” I said. “I’m the only friend you’ve got, and if you don’t find that snake and relocate him fast, you won’t have any friends at all. Comprende?”
Frankie colored red and crossed his arms. “That’s not true,” he said. “Elizabeth is my friend too.”
“No, she isn’t,” I said.
“Yes, she is!”
“You scared her in her garden,” I said. I really was being mean now, but I was so mad at him for bringing that snake in I didn’t care what I said. “She told me she didn’t like that. She was scared of you.”
“Shut up,” said Frankie. “She knows I didn’t mean to.”
“She only felt sorry for you,” I said. “That’s the only reason she let you in. She doesn’t really like you.”
Frankie’s lower lip started to tremble and his eyes filled up. He picked up the empty margarine container and backed toward the door. I could see I had gone too far.
“Frankus, no,” I said. “I was only kidding.”
“No, you weren’t,” he said.
“I was too.”
“It sounded real.”
“It wasn’t. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said. And he turned and ran. I could hear his size thirteens clomping on the floorboards as he ran down the hall and through the kitchen, and then the screen door as it squeaked open and slammed shut, and my mother’s faint voice, saying, “Bye, Frankie, nice to see you.”
“Oh, shit,” I said.
I sat up in bed and swung my legs
over the edge, resting the bad one on a chair. I’d have to find that snake myself, because Mother sure as hell wouldn’t want anything to do with it, and I would not be able to think of anything else for the rest of my life until it was gone. I scanned around the floor until I saw something move underneath the window, just a little flicker of a tail. Then I saw it in plain sight, lying tucked in the crack between the wall and the floor. My stomach did about three flips, but I stayed in control of myself. I reached over with my crutches and prodded it once. It didn’t move. Frankie was right—I had killed it. That little movement I’d seen must have been its death shudder.
“Lord, you and I both know this snake deserved to die, but please don’t let Frankie know I really did kill it,” I said. “And let him know I was only kidding, because I shouldn’t have said what I said to him, amen.”
“Are you talking to yourself in there?” Mother hollered from the living room.
“Yes, I am, thank you very much!” I hollered back. And I went and hunted up an old pair of gloves and some tongs, ignoring the pain in my leg so I could safely get that abomination of nature out of my room.
5
Miz Powell and the CIA
Mother asked me if I wanted Grandma to come out again and check me over while I was recuperating from my latest visit to the hospital, but I said I didn’t care to see her anytime soon, not after the stories she’d been telling me about being abandoned in the forest. I went so far as to say that as a matter of plain fact I didn’t think I wanted to see that whiskery old sorceress ever again, but Mother said I shouldn’t take it that way. If anybody should have been mad about it, it was her, she said, not me. And she wasn’t mad about it, not anymore. She’d gotten over it a long time ago.
“You could learn a lot from your grandmother, you know,” she told me.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like all that information she’s got stored in her head, all about herbs and healing and stuff like that. Things that might get forgotten otherwise. I think she’s waiting for you to come ask her about it.”
“What makes you think that?”
“A feeling,” she said. “You’re old enough now, after all.”
“You change your mind or something?” I asked. “Seems to me just a few days ago you were ready to burn me at the stake for looking into that pot.”
“Don’t make jokes about being burned at the stake,” she said. “That really used to happen to us, you know.”
“Really?” I asked. “To us? Our family? Cool!”
“No, it was not cool,” she said. “I could tell you stories that would curl your hair.”
“Do tell,” I said.
But Mother shook her head. “Not until you can hear them without poking fun,” she said. “Maybe you’re not ready after all.”
“Please,” I said. “What good is all that stuff, anyway?”
Mother looked at me for a long minute. “You know the answer to that,” she said. “You were born knowing what good it is.”
“Well, she’s going to be waiting a long while,” I said.
I knew that upset Mother, but for some reason she didn’t say so. That was pretty unusual, because ordinarily she never held back when she was upset about something. She must have been turning all this over in her mind, thinking about whether or not she wanted me to learn Grandma’s secrets, thinking about what kind of person it would turn me into. And she must have realized that she did want me to do it after all. In fact, I began to think that she wanted me to do it so much she was afraid to push me into it, for fear I’d push back even harder. What gives with the sudden urge? I wondered. She’d left Grandma long ago—maybe even before she’d had a chance to learn much from her. Maybe she was sorry now that she did it. Maybe she wanted me to make up for her own mistakes. Well, fat chance of that happening, I thought. I don’t live other people’s lives for them. That’s not why I’m here.
Mother bit her lip, and said, “I know she’d like to get to know you better, Haley. Every time I see her she asks why you don’t come visit more.”
“That,” I said, “is a riot. Last time I went out there she smacked me on the ass because I was wearing shorts. On the ass. You do not slap Flash Jackson on the ass or anywhere else. Got it? You just don’t do it.”
“Shorts are unladylike, in her mind,” said Mother. “That’s why she did it.”
“Flash Jackson doesn’t give a flying fart what’s ladylike and what isn’t.”
Mother rolled her eyes. “I see we’re back on the Flash Jackson kick now,” she said.
“It’s not a kick,” I said. “It’s reality.”
“Haley,” she said, “she’s the only grandmother you have.”
Regardless of my grandmother shortage, I was done with all that oracle-witchery-healing stuff. If learning how to Lift the Veil meant I was going to have to be left out in the woods for days, or something else just as horrible, I wanted nothing to do with it. I’d be content never to have another vision as long as I lived.
And what Mother didn’t seem to understand was that Flash Jackson wasn’t a joke. He was a way of life, and one I intended to continue living to the fullest, just as soon as I was perambulatory again. Flash Jackson wasn’t really any more of a person than Bugs Bunny—I knew that full well. He was a state of mind, a way of looking at the world, a costume I could put on that kept me from getting shunted in with all the other simpering little hussies in Home Ec or the Future Housewives of America Club—believe it or not, there really was such a club at Mannville Junior-Senior High School, even though it had been phased out of every other school in the country thirty years earlier. Yes, old Flash Jackson was my religion and my drug, my Jesus of Nazareth and my little white painkilling pills. He was all my imaginary lovers that came at night and did things with me that I can’t even bring myself to put on paper. He was the feeling I got when I was soaring bare-assed naked from the topmost branches of a sycamore into the depths of the swimming hole. Nothing I knew about God came close to comparing with what I knew about Flash Jackson. And nobody in the world was even worth explaining Flash Jackson to, or so I thought—until I got to know Miz Elizabeth Powell better. She was the one who taught me that Flash Jackson had been around even longer than I had, that he’d had other names in other lifetimes—and he’d been known to other people besides me. I hadn’t discovered him at all. He discovered me.
But before I get into that any further I should probably back up a few steps, to when Frankie ran out of my room all upset and teary eyed because of the snake incident.
It was the same old story: me lying around after my latest operation, with too much time on my hands and only my own poor brain to amuse me. It was just like when I’d broken my leg in the first place—things started spinning around and around in my head, only this time instead of word games all I could think of was Frankie’s face. He was so upset about what I’d said that I got to thinking maybe he was going to run away again, and that it would be all my fault this time. I’m the first to admit it—sometimes I just don’t know when to let up on a soul. I don’t know why I have this mean streak in me, and why it always seems to hurt the people I care about most. It hasn’t always been there. In fact, I don’t remember ever feeling that way until after old Fireball McGinty passed on to the other side. I guess it has something to do with how hard it was on me to lose him. And part of me, a small and hidden part, was afraid that one of these days I was going to push someone so far away from me they’d never come back.
Which wouldn’t do at all, of course. I didn’t want to end up a lonely old lady with no friends and a herd of cats winding around her ankles. You saw plenty of that around here, if you kept your eyes open—there were as many abandoned people around Mannville as there were abandoned cars in the woods, old people whose children were sacrificed in war or else grown up and gone away to the cities. You ever get to feeling sorry for yourself and need a reminder of how good you actually got it, head over to the old folks’ home by the high schoo
l and spend an hour talking to the people there. The school choir used to go there at Christmas to sing carols, and I never went in but that I came out as depressed as a turkey on the last Wednesday in November. No, there was nothing for it but that I’d have to mend my ways. For the ten thousandth time in my life, I resolved to be good.
And for the ten-thousand-and-first time, I wondered how long it would stick.
I got to feeling so miserable I had to talk to someone. For obvious reasons that someone was not going to be my mother—she didn’t know Elizabeth had been harboring him, and if I had anything to say about it she never would. I felt sure that was going to come out if I unloaded myself on anyone but the right person. So what did I do but call Elizabeth Powell herself and ask her to come over—because when two people have a secret, it’s most natural for them to confide in each other about everything else.
“I’d come up to your place, but I’m still kind of laid up,” I said. “Just had another operation.”
“Shall we have tea?” said Miz Powell. “I’ve just had some Darjeeling mailed to me by a friend in India.”
“Sure,” I said, thinking Who the hell has friends in India? “But this has got to be a kind of personal conversation between you and me. Not Mother.” In a whisper I said, “It’s about Frankie.”
“I see,” said Elizabeth. Her tone didn’t change a bit. She didn’t even sound worried that someone might have discovered her part in the whole mess. She was as cool as ice. Man, but she had style. She had Flash Jackson written all over her. “Shall we say in one hour?” she said.