The Adventures of Flash Jackson (26 page)

“Who are you?” I asked. Had I not gone so long without talking, I more likely would have yelled at him, something like,
Who in blue blazes are you, you bastard son of a sewer rat?

“Didn't mean to startle you,” he said. “Aren't you Haley Bombauer?”

“I asked you first,” I snarled, stepping away from him—though in fact he had asked me first. Hell with it. I wasn't in the mood for social niceties. The man looked even more alarmed. I imagine I must have looked quite a sight, and smelled quite a smell, too. I hadn't showered since last fall, and I had given up trying to change clothes, because it
was pointless. My hair, I knew, was mostly dreadlocked, and I had a layer of dirt on my skin that I'd grown so comfortable with I would almost miss it when it was gone.

“Your mother sent me out this general way,” the man said. “And Chester Burgess told me where I could find you, too. I'm Professor Watkins—Andrew Watkins. From the University,” he added. “Sociology department.”

“Chester Burgess? You're lying,” I said. “He'd never do that. You followed him last fall. What are you doing out here?”

Though, if the truth be told—and the truth must always be told—I already knew what he was doing out there.

Some years ago, the county had taken an interest in the welfare of the woman whom I still chose to refer to as my grandmother. It had been a brief fling, beginning when some bored bureaucrat or do-gooding old dame had decided that Grandma didn't know as well as they did what was good for her, and that they would take her out of her miserable little house in the woods and put her into a nice, cozy old folks' home in town, where she could sit and watch television with all the other fossils and decompose in peace. Can you imagine? Needless to say, that plan got bogged down pretty quick in the endless mire of local-government red tape, compounded by the fact that when a few caseworkers toddled out this way to kidnap the poor old lady, she was nowhere to be found. They looked for days, but her little house had disappeared, and nobody had the slightest clue where it—or she—had gone.

Next step for the disappointed crusaders was to swing by Mother's and my place and ask if Grandma had moved in with us. I was just a child at the time, but I remember this. Mother was as mystified as they were, or at least pretended to be. She knew that Grandma had a few tricks up her sleeve. She hadn't seen her mother in weeks, she said, and wasn't particularly worried about it. Sometimes months went by between visits. Sometimes a year. She'd been living out in the woods all her life. It was her business if she wanted to keep on doing it.

All of it came to nothing, and eventually the county got tired of looking for her. But by then the university folks had gotten wind of what they referred to as a “living national treasure of folklore,” and the afore-described Andrew Watkins, chair of sociology at the University of Buffalo, had charged out here with a pack of graduate students, all of them armed with notebooks and tape recorders and their heads filled with theories of “cultural isolationism” and all kinds of other fluff. I remembered that phrase because I remembered them, too. The little snots had actually come out to the house to interview Mother and me, seeing as how they couldn't find Grandma either, and one of them had asked Mother how it felt to grow up in “cultural isolation.” I think Mother was kind of flattered at ending up as a piece of someone's dissertation, and they stuck around for hours, pumping her for information and leaving her blushing and dazzled. And when they'd gone away, we thought that was the end of that. Our fifteen minutes were over.

But they weren't. Here was Dr. Andrew Watkins, large as life and in fact several pounds heavier than I remembered him, standing right in front of me in the woods that I had come to think of as my own, poking his red nose into my family's business once again.

“You were just a little girl the last time I saw you, I believe,” said Watkins, not daring to take a step closer. “Do you remember?”

“Yeah,” I said. “What do you want?”

“Well, you know,” he said, looking around as if an answer was going to fall out of a tree, “I've brought some, ah, students of mine with me, and we were hoping that maybe this time—”

“You won't find her,” I said. “You couldn't find her last time, and you won't find her now.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” said Watkins. “Haley, may I ask you—why
is
that, exactly?”

Oh, how I would have loved to give him the straight truth. I would have loved to tell him it was because Grandma had the equivalent of a force field set up around her home, and she always knew when it was
about to be invaded. Don't ask me how she does it, I would have said, because truthfully I didn't know. I wasn't that far along in my training. But she had a way of making herself, well, not exactly disappear, but definitely become much harder to spot—almost as good as disappearing, really. Not even I would be able to spot her, though without meaning to brag I would have liked to add that I was making middling progress on the very same trick myself.

But of course, I couldn't say that. All I said was, “Maybe you need glasses.”

Watkins was about to say something back, but just then his herd of cavorting grad students found us and came trotting up, winded and eager. There were about six of them, and damned if they weren't carrying all sorts of electronic equipment with them again, a little more high tech this time: digital cameras, tiny tape recorders, et cetera. They all began babbling at once to their fearless leader, asking if I was the granddaughter they'd heard about; when Watkins announced that I was, as proud as if he'd created me himself, they turned their attention to me, pointing their tape recorders and video cameras and whatnot into my face. That was about all I could take of that. I did what I should have done in the first place: I disappeared, too.

I don't mean in a magic sense. I mean I took to my heels and ran like a gazelle on amphetamines. I dove right through their midst and out the other side, and I moved faster than a moon shadow, putting on a full burst of speed so that I knew there'd be no way they could catch me. Even if they were fast, they didn't know these woods like I did. By now I had an excellent sense of the terrain, where the high and low spots were and where the ground got soggy. I headed back for Grandma's, but I took a zigzag path to throw them off, at one point skirting a small bog in the hopes that they'd blunder in there and get stuck forever.

Then I headed at full steam for the little clearing where Grandma's house was. I was pretty well bushed by this time—I'd been running
for a while, and my winter of inactivity, combined with all the time I'd been holed up with my busted gam the year before, was working against me. I still felt a little unsteady on the wonky one, and I was afraid if I kept running I would stick it in a hole or under a fallen log or something and end up having to spend another summer in a cast. So I decided I'd given them enough of a shake, and I turned towards Grandma's place.

Except when I got there, of course, it was gone.

I stopped, gasping for air, and looked around frantically. There was the creek, right where it was supposed to be; there was the remnant of a fire, a circle of charred earth and blackened stones. But that was it. She'd pulled her disappearing act again.

That could only mean one thing: One of them had stuck to me like glue, and again I hadn't known it. I turned slowly and looked behind me, and up at the top of a small rise stood one of the grad students, a fit young fellow who had dumped his equipment and kept on my tail the whole way. I hadn't even heard him. He was standing there staring at me with something like awe, probably because I looked like Medusa, my dreadlocked hair flying out like snakes—the irony!—and my face dark with dirt and streaked with sweat.

That was why she was gone—because otherwise he would have seen her. She was not a curiosity, not there to teach the uninitiated, not interested in being part of anyone's study. The things she knew were not for public consumption. They were for a select few, and they knew who they were. So did Grandma. And this yahoo from the university was not one of them.

Defeated and heartsick, I stood there catching my breath, waiting for him to go away. But of course he didn't. Gradually he snuck closer and closer, until he was maybe ten yards away. I let him come, pretending I was still out of breath. When he was too close to dodge me, I launched myself through midair and knocked him to the ground. Then I sat on his chest and let him have a couple, right in the kisser. He
screamed, I am sorry to say, like a girl. And it hurt my hands like hell—I hadn't punched anyone in years. But that was nothing compared to how I felt inside. I only hoped she knew that I hadn't meant to betray her, and how much it was killing me that I hadn't been able to say good-bye. I realized, too late, that I had started to love her, whiskers and wrinkles and all. And I knew that this was also her way of telling me that it was time to move on. I was not going to be seeing the Mother of the Woods again anytime soon. That much I knew for certain.

“Richard!” came a man's voice from behind. It was Watkins. “Richard, are you all right?”

The guy under me whimpered and tried to sit up. I got off him and sat down under a nearby tree. Watkins approached, crouching down as though expecting another attack. Richard struggled to his feet and looked at me in amazement, blood streaming down his chin.

“You bith!” he said. “Thee hit me!” he said to Watkins.

“Here,” said Watkins, handing him a handkerchief. To me he said, “Was that absolutely necessary?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I'm thuing her!” said Richard.

“You chased me,” I said. “You tried to touch me. You all ganged up on me. I was almost raped.”

Richard and Watkins stared at each other in disbelief, and then at me.

“It was self-defense, and if you ever say any different I'll come after you,” I said to Watkins. “That's a promise.”

A look of panic crossed his face. Watkins knew enough about my grandmother to know that he was probably outmatched by me. The other grad students had caught up with us by now, and they were huddled in a knot, staring solemnly at us. Watkins put his arm around Richard and helped him away.

“Watkins!” I said.

He turned.

“Never come here again,” I said. “If you do, you won't like what happens.”

He didn't say anything. I guess he knew I was serious. The whole lot of them turned and headed back to wherever they'd left their cars, and I was alone under the tree, left to ponder the sudden emptiness of the space that Grandma and I had called home.

N
ear the spot where our little house had been, looking towards the southwest, was an overhanging rock face that caught the sun's warmth from late morning throughout the afternoon, gathering heat like an upturned cat's belly under a stove, and giving it away again bit by bit in the evenings. On top of the overhang was a flat, slightly concave spot where I could sit and ponder the forest, and at night I rolled up under the rock and was almost cozy in the damp, cool gloom. It was the best seat in the house. I wasn't the only creature that knew about this place, but I was the biggest. I staked my claim by urinating around the perimeter, as a warning to the raccoons, mice, rabbits, and others who might otherwise have been tempted to burrow in the soft soil under the rock, or simply to stop awhile and rest there, availing themselves of my hospitality whether I liked it or not. The laws of the forest are generally cordial in nature—excluding the ones that allow for the consumption of one's neighbors—but they're strict where matters of personal boundaries apply, and one is within one's right to get testy if these zones are violated. I had seen it happen a thousand times before.

If you were to compare an acre of New York City—a place I admit I've never been—to an acre of virgin forest, counting each living thing
in each place equally and regardless of size, the city acre would seem like an empty, desolate wasteland in comparison to the forested one. We may think of New York as crowded, and if you consider the preponderance of our species there, it is. People exist in the city in such numbers that were you to spread them out according to natural laws, tribewise, they would probably take up many tens of thousands of square miles. But there are few other creatures in that urban environment besides humans. Pigeons, cockroaches, worms, dogs and cats, squirrels—hardly a diversity of wildlife, not when compared to a forest in the temperate climate of northeastern North America. There, within that same acre, one would find an average of one hundred fifty insect species, at least fifty kinds of plants (not including mosses and lichens), roughly twenty-five kinds of birds (either permanent residents or visitors), an unknown number of snakes, a plethora of mammals ranging in size from tiny to medium (mice, voles, moles, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, raccoons, and muskrats, to name a few) and a handful of larger ones. Including myself.

For a human to move into this hypothetical acre, a great readjustment has to be made by the rest of the population, and, as would be the case in any other community, this is not accomplished without a great deal of grumbling and resentment. Animals are not in the habit of banding together and forming committees, but if they were I would have been visited daily by outraged woodland representatives, demanding that I unhand their resources, cease consuming their kin, and move on to bother some other sylvan municipality. Once I had become attuned to the various meanings of birdsong, I understood what the birds said to each other every time I passed by: not some glorious ode to romantic, unspoiled Nature but “There goes the neighborhood.”

I couldn't bring myself to leave the forest, and I couldn't make up my mind to stay. I was alone now. It had been weeks since Grandma disappeared, and there was no hint that she might ever come back. I could sometimes sense her presence, if I searched for it, in the same way that small children can sense God. But this was always fleeting, and it
brought me little comfort, just as my brief forays to church had always left me feeling vaguely unsettled and cheated of something that was just out of reach, that I was unworthy of grasping.

The animals were small help, but at least they kept my mind on the here-and-now. I was engaged in a running feud with a family of coons, notorious bandits, over my small cache of berries, pine nuts, and roots. Most of my time was occupied in thinking up ways to thwart them, and finally I went so far as to kill one of the younger ones, an adolescent. He was delicious. But this provoked such an outcry among the other members of his clan that I took to wandering in giant circles around my camp, exploring as I had never explored before, because their shrill cries of revenge had begun to haunt me even while awake. Despite the fact that the forest laws were in my favor (I was bigger, hence I was in the right) I began to suffer from a guilty conscience. This is why mankind will never again be at home in the wild; we have not left it so much physically as spiritually, and the prospect of a return journey is not a pleasant one. Conscience, when it exists, is a powerful master.

I was looking, I can see now, for a more permanent place to live. Not one that was set apart from prying eyes and curious little hands (the only thing that bothered me about eating raccoons was their hands, which have four fingers plus a thing that, if not precisely a thumb, looks enough like one to make me a possible cannibal). But such a place doesn't exist in the forest, which is the least private of anywhere. I guess I was really only looking around. Now that I had no herb-gathering errands to go on, I felt like a girl who'd been let out of school early. Mixed with my sadness at Grandma's—what? death? disappearance? evaporation?—was a sort of elation at being allowed, finally, to indulge my natural urge to move at random. I spent entire days in tracking the movements of the stream, following it to pools where the fish were large enough to eat. I developed a relationship with a fox, who enjoyed barking at me and then running when I chased him; when I'd finally give up, he would reappear, yapping delightedly at his
superiority. I had known similar dogs. I passed by the same grove of ancient oaks again and again, until something about them seemed to beckon me, and when one day I stood in their center and raised my face to their canopy, I remembered Grandma telling me about the Tree People, and I realized with a shock that these were them.

The last Tree People, she'd said, believed that they were the children of the forest, descendants of trees who had gotten ambitious and yanked their own roots from the ground. Using them like feet and legs, they tried to explore the world, but they found that they were better suited for standing still than walking. When they tried to return to their natural state, however, they found it was impossible. They had succeeded in defying the laws of nature, which is never as hard as it seems, but always carries some terrible price. In this case, the price was loss of home. The newly mobile trees had to learn how to live all over again, and gradually they lost all similarities to their relatives and turned into people, with no hard feelings on either side.

For the Indians, who believed this story, living in the forest must have been like living among a host of conscious monuments to the past. For myself, who also believed this story, I understood that I had been surrounded by thinking, living beings all this time, the wise and immutable trees, whose ill-fated children were long gone but who themselves continued to exist, unperturbed.

Consider this: Me walking through that forest in that day and age, once home to many people and now empty of all but me, was as it would have been for an Indian to wander through Manhattan if everyone there had died of war or disease, and there were only empty buildings to peer at. This forest was their city; these oaks were their skyscrapers. I was existing in a ruined world. A terrible thing had happened here, and it echoed still in the living wood.

Grandma remembered everything from those days, and she told me what had happened to the Tree People with the authority of one who had seen it with her own eyes. First there had been wars with other kinds of People—Rock, Mud, Frog, Deer—but these were nothing
new. Then whites had come, and brought disease. The numbers of Tree People quickly diminished. Of those who were left, a number fell victim to alcohol and went to live where they could get it more easily. Many were killed outright by men with guns. The rest of them moved on, eventually, to a reservation near the lake, where they live today, selling discount cigarettes and lottery tickets and toying with the possibility of putting in a casino.

“I'm sorry,” I whispered upwards. There was some response—moaning trunks, branches rubbing together, rustling leaves. Up high, there was a breeze blowing. On the ground, it was still.

 

If you spend enough time in the company of a tree, you can get to know it, just like a horse or a man or a dog. Trees have personalities, moods, and opinions; their modes of expression are subtle, which means you have to pay careful attention. I made a point of visiting these oaks as often as possible. It required patience to figure out what they were about. I had deduced by then that these trees were not just alive but conscious. I wanted to learn whatever it was they had to teach me. This became my new goal. I couldn't just live in the forest and do nothing, like a nymph. I needed to continue my training.

By this time, I was going around completely unclothed. Chester Burgess had reappeared in late spring to retrieve the sacks of empty cans from Grandma and me, and to offer more supplies, but his load contained no new dresses, and for that I was extremely grateful. Had he seen me, perhaps he would have offered to return with some, but I stayed hidden the day he came and watched him from several yards off. I wasn't in the mood for conversation.

He knew I was there, of course. He was exceptionally nervous, old Chester was. Moving as quickly as he could—I could see that he was suffering from mild rheumatism—he kept looking around, waiting for me to pop out at him. Or perhaps someone else. I wondered if he knew that Andrew Watkins and his team of researchers had followed him out here last time, and that he was responsible for Grandma's
flight. I had considered confronting him with that information, perhaps even suggesting that he take a few lessons in spycraft from Miz Powell, but I let him go on his way, unharassed. Poor old Chester. I wondered how long he would go on paying his dues to a woman who no longer existed. Probably until he felt that whatever debt he owed to her was paid off. Or until he showed up one season and saw that the previous year's offering was still untouched, at which point he would be forced to draw his own conclusions about what had happened to us.

I wondered, too, how I would explain Grandma's absence to anyone who came looking for her. It was not unthinkable that Mother herself would traipse out here to check up on us, and when she found that Grandma's house was gone, there was no telling how she would react. And what would I say when she saw me?
Hello, Mother—yes, I've given up clothes. Don't need them. And Grandma—well, she just sort of vaporized herself, and she took the house with her. It's all the university's fault
.

I didn't even know how to think about Grandma now. I understood the proper place of reverence one reserved for the dead, but I wasn't sure if she fit there yet. In any case, the place she occupied in my mind and in my imagination far exceeded the level of anyone else I'd ever known. Was she a goddess? Was she a spirit? These questions to me were more of degree than credibility. It would never occur to me to dispute that goddesses and spirits existed. Of course they did. What I didn't know was whether or not she was one of them. And really, this was only a distinction—a formality, nothing more. If she wasn't actually a spirit, she was as close as one could get.

When Chester was gone I sorted through his boxes to see what goodies they contained. More food, enough for two; he couldn't have known that Grandma was gone. No one did. I buried most of it right there, hoping the cans wouldn't rust through, intending to come back for it in the fall, when food was scarce. A new knife, a very welcome gift indeed. Some twine, always handy. Matches. Soap—hah! That was a good one. A small camp shovel. Two small cooking pots. A couple of
blankets. Scissors. Various other sundry items, most of them no longer relevant to someone like me. I left most of the stuff sitting right there, knowing that the brighter items would be picked up by scavenging animals, and that the rest would be scattered by the curious bear. There was a bear, I knew, though I'd never met him, nor hoped to. I knew the laws of the forest too well.

I fashioned a sort of belt out of the twine, wrapped it around my middle, and stuck the knife in it, having first created a scabbard out of bark. This took a while, but I had nothing but time. On the other side of my waist I carried the scissors, though I had no idea what I was going to do with them. They just seemed to complete me, somehow. Then I pretended to examine myself in a full-length mirror. Hair longer now, well past the shoulders, knotted and matted. Breasts definitely smaller since I had lost all that weight. I could see my own hipbones, count my ribs. A weapon at my side for the first time in my life. Well, why not? Everyone else in the forest had one. Bear had teeth and claws. Fox, the same, plus cunning. Crow had wings. Mouse had smallness. Haley had a knife and scissors, and the gift of reason. With those things, I could do almost anything.

 

I guess it's not too far of a stretch to say that by now I had become more than half wild. Unlike my mother, I had been accepted by the forest. I was adept at tracking and trapping any animal I felt like eating, and I had learned to skin and cook an astonishing variety of creatures, none of which I would have considered edible in my former life. With Chester's pots, I fried and stewed and made soup, and, adding these to the variety of herbs available to me, I ate much better than I had with Grandma. When undergoing the strenuous kind of boot camp she had put me through, a sparse diet was the most conducive to clear thought. The more distanced one was from the body, the closer to the spirit one became. I sometimes think that she prepared food only to humor me, as if she had already learned to subsist on almost nothing
except water and air and moonlight, and was impatiently waiting for me to do the same.

But there had been a shift in my purpose. I had mastered a certain level of whatever-it-was, witchcraft or Zam or the legithatic arts or Flash Jacksonism. I was now onto a whole new field. I intended to raise survival to a fine art, to live in the woods not as if I'd landed there by accident but had gone there on purpose. Thoreau came to mind again, and for the first time since leaving home I wished that I had brought a book; his book about pondside living, to be precise. But there was nothing to do about it. I couldn't very well place an order with Chester Burgess and hope he got around to filling in within the next nine months or so. No point. I would do without even that much human company.