The Adventures of Flash Jackson (28 page)

Also, I hadn't the slightest idea what was expected of me.

Apparently, not much. After perhaps a minute of his pushing, I felt him explode in a great burst of moisture, and his seed trickled deep. Then he collapsed in a moaning, heaving heap on my chest. I still hadn't done anything other than lie there, my legs first hoisted up onto his shoulders, now spread out wide on the ground with him between them. I became aware that I, too, was breathing hard. A warm glow had come over me during what I would come to think of later as The Event, and I knew that this was something I could eventually enjoy, once I learned more about it.

But that wasn't going to happen just now. We were slick and overheated, and I wanted him to get up off me. I pushed on his shoulders. He stirred and mumbled something. I tried to wiggle out from under him, and only now did I feel the first faint rumblings of fear: What if he didn't let me go? What if he decided to keep me there, as his prisoner? I still had my knife and scissors in my belt, and one hand strayed down to feel the haft of the knife, just for reassurance. If he didn't get up off me, I would cut off his head. I would carry it around by those fine, blond hairs, as a warning to men everywhere.

But he got up, brushing his bowl-cut hair out of his eyes, leaving a smear of dirt on his forehead. His chest, freckled and broad, pink and nearly hairless, was wet with our mixed sweat.

“Jesus, Haley,” he said. “That was amazing.”

I shot to my feet. So he
did
know it was me. Well, of course he would—we'd known each other forever, and sooner or later he would have figured it out. You might even say that sooner or later, something like this was bound to happen. Him and me having sex, I mean. Him penetrating me. Us mating. I had been physically ready for some time now, after all. I was of an age.

“Why are you going around like that?” Adam asked.

He was kneeling now, naked from the ankles up, his shrinking penis dangling between his thighs, still dripping the last remnants of his essence into the dark earth. Wood chips from the tree he'd been cutting littered the ground, and a few of them had adhered to his legs. I could feel them on my back, too, stuck there by the sweat that was like glue.

I couldn't answer. Answering would have been ridiculous. I had said everything I'd had to say to him with my actions. I hadn't fought him off. I had come closer. It was as if I had urged him onto and into me, and that was as clear as anything I could ever say. What else could I possibly tell him that would be clearer than that? We were animals, and animals didn't have to explain themselves.

So I got up and ran.

I had no fear of him tracking me. His pants were down around his ankles, and he had exhausted himself with his efforts, whereas I had done almost nothing. He did call after me—“Haley, wait!”—but I was already gone by then, invisible in the protective cover of the woods. I ran the entire way, not to the grove of oaks but to the rock face, where I sat in a small pool and let the cool water soothe my bruised self, what Mother referred to as my womanly parts.

It occurred to me only then that I had never thought of my own name for my genitalia. I had always used hers. I would have to change that. A woman should have her own names for things, especially things that were uniquely hers.

Should I give it an actual name?
I wondered.
Why not? Something silly
, I thought.
Vaginas were taken all too seriously.

I know. Henrietta.

I giggled out loud at that. “Henrietta” was stupid enough that it would have to remain a private joke forever. But at least I had named it, and made it my own. That removed the image of Mother from the equation. Because I could hear her already, as if she'd been there watching me. And the things her image was saying were horrible. My womanly parts had been ruined, she was saying. I had been polluted, I hadn't saved myself for marriage. The temple had been desecrated, its doors battered down, bucketfuls of milky fluid emptied on its floors. I had been fucked but good…and I liked it.

Since becoming an animal, Mother's notions had been revealed to me for what they were: pure, ridiculous convention, nothing more. Women believed in saving themselves for marriage because it kept things orderly, a lot more so than if we were all slutting around like a bunch of Jezebels, which if you want my opinion was probably the natural state of things before we started living in cities and so forth. Already, though I had committed the act just one time in my life, I was eager to learn more, and to experiment. What if we had done it such-and-such a way, for example? These were questions that would have to be answered.

Quiet, Mother
, I thought.

I spread my tender lips with my fingers and the water ran into me and cleaned me out. Then I lay there on my back, letting the stream run through my hair and into my ears, muffling all sounds except for the beating of my heart.
Good Lord
, I thought.
I only set out on a mission of mercy, and I ended up getting poked like a pincushion. Life certainly was unpredictable in the forest
.

How had it happened? There was really nothing to think over, nothing to analyze. I heard the sounds of mating animals at different times of the year, from the very small to the very large. No ceremony
was involved in the act, though there was often plenty of foreplay, in the form of singing or dancing. There was nothing unnatural about two people doing it that way. I had been aware for some time before I left home that I was at an age where sex was becoming more significant, if not necessarily for myself then for those who looked at me—like Adam. Even Chester Burgess had looked at me a certain way, although he was an old man and I could hardly have been appetizing in my filthy, ankle-length dress. Fine. So I had stumbled across a male of my species, and the most natural of all things had taken place. If we had met in a museum, or a bar, the courtship ritual would have been much longer, more drawn out. Out here, away from the society that dictated such behavior, there was no need to get fancy. One simply got down to business.

Perhaps some might think it odd that I hadn't thought about sex more than I did before The Event. To them I would say that I can offer no reasonable explanation for that, except that that is the way I am. I never had an aversion to it, but I never sought it out, either, like some girls did. I rarely talked about it with anyone, especially Mother. I had a vague foreboding from the time I got my first period that someday something of significance would happen in connection with the blood that spotted my underwear, but that had more to do with motherhood than copulation. I'd always had the feeling that when it happened, that would be the proper time; and who it happened with would be the proper person. Well, it had happened now without warning, and it was over in a blink. I was no longer a virgin. And Adam had turned out to be the one.

Another thought occurred to me then, as the stream splashed between my legs and I drifted lazily, hovering scant millimeters above the streambed, barely floating:
Would it, perhaps, happen again? And with who?

Thoughts for another day. This was more excitement than I had seen in months, and I was suddenly beyond tired. I was used up, exhausted, depleted. I roused myself from my always-running bath and
stepped out of the water, letting the air dry my skin, tying my hair up with a piece of leftover twine. My mind was gradually settling. I went to my bed underneath the rock face, taking care to leave a fresh spot of urine in three or four randomly chosen spots all around—certain local residents had been getting a little too curious lately. Adam's semen dripped out of me as I peed. I wondered what the animals would make of
that
. Then, with the sun still peeking over the tops of the trees, I went to sleep, and slept more deeply than I had in a long time.

F
or the previous few months, since the arrival of spring, it seemed that no matter where I buried my tampons, no matter how deep, something always got them. I put them in a different place every time, and I tried to hide them better—putting a large rock over them before burying, crushing pine needles to release their fragrance and spreading them over the freshly turned earth to hide the scent. But it never worked. Something out there had an insatiable appetite for my blood. I never found the actual tampons themselves. There was only ever a clawed-open hole, the pine needles brushed carefully away, the rock tossed disdainfully aside.

This, in a word, was gross. Even in my near-animal state I was astonished at the sheer intimacy of the act. Were the tampons being swallowed, like some kind of medicinal capsule? Was my blood now coursing through the digestive tract of some wild beast, filling its nostrils as it calmly chewed the soft cotton, sucking the last drops of juice from it like a delicate morsel of meat before finally gulping it down? And who, among the endless directory of forest residents, was responsible for this outrage? Who was drinking my blood?

Once I set my mind to figuring it out, it didn't take long to realize that it was Bear. His tracks were easy to spot in the soft soil, and he left a tunnel of broken branches everywhere he went, as obvious to my eyes as a series of flashing Men at Work signs on a highway. Often as not the broken ends of these branches were festooned with tufts of his fur, snagged and torn from his thick hide as he lumbered along. Bear was big. Bear was massive. And Bear knew me better than I knew him.

That was what was most terrifying about it: With my blood in his memory, he would know my scent anywhere, and if he chose to track me down and eat me, there was little I could do about it. I was terrified that he had gained an appetite for
me
in particular, that my tampons were only an appetizer. Bears have a very large territory, and they operate methodically, always moving into a new sector before they've managed to exhaust the food supply in the old one. If I knew where he was on any given day, I could make sure not to be there. This meant being constantly on guard, always listening, turning my head upwards at every breeze to read the odors that were written on it like a telegram: Here we have angelica, borage, pine, birch, squirrels, something dead, but no Bear. Always a relief. Yet I was always on guard.

I was most on guard, of course, when I was about to menstruate. And I think that Bear had become as attuned to my cycle as I myself was. Two weeks before my encounter with Adam, when the blood was about to flow, I'd heard him not far off, too far to cause immediate flight but close enough that I did not sleep at all that night. He had stopped within smelling range—
his
smelling range, I mean. He was much better at smelling than I was. I couldn't get a whiff of him at that distance, no matter how hard I tried. Yet I knew he was there.

But he didn't come closer. The cramp-induced trickle began towards the wee hours of the morning, as I crouched in paranoia under my now-cool rock face, wrapped in one of Chester Burgess's blankets. I put in a tampon and thought about the moon, which was going to be full that night.

I was far more aware of the moon now than I had ever been before. Even though Mother and I had bled in synchronized three-day blocks—mine heavy with assured fecundity, hers already beginning to dwindle as she approached the end of her childbearing years—I had never thought that the moon was in charge of such things. Every woman knows that some secret, mysterious rule regulates this kind of tandem effusion. Women who live together bleed together. I suppose there's some kind of scientific explanation for it, but scientific explanations, with their ten-dollar words and their flashy-sounding Greek and Latin derivations, are of little use in real life, and they usually end up expressing the same thing anyway. I checked the moon every night like someone consulting a clock on the wall, and it was a source of satisfaction to me that I could tell from its expanding shape when the blood would come.

Next morning, I trekked far away from my rock face to a spot I'd never been before and buried the evidence. I suppose it did no good that I was leaving a trail of blood scent behind me, for I knew Bear could follow it as easily as if I had been sounding a bicycle bell. I buried each tampon from that particular cycle in places far distant from one another, and when the flow was finished I went back to each place to check on them. And at each one, I found the same results: They were gone without a trace.

Bear had my number, all right.

Yet he never came after me. He haunted me, he trailed me, he sent me telepathic messages in Bear talk:
I am here
. But when the cycle was ended, he simply vanished.

I began to think of him not as an enemy but as a protector. I fancied that he had a fondness for me, not for my taste but for my presence. Why else did he leave me unmolested? Perhaps he felt sorry for me, in some obscure, Bear-like way. Perhaps he liked having me around and wanted to make sure that nothing else got me, though in truth he was my only potential predator. I invented a new ritual: I prayed to Bear, that he be well, that he always have enough to eat. I drew a picture
of him on the rock face with the burnt end of a stick, not to summon him but to acknowledge his existence. I understood that I was really nothing more than his guest, and I began to leave parts of the animals I killed as offerings to him, so that he might always protect me. I was his child. I was his girlfriend. I was his wife. I was also in his body.

Next cycle, I vowed, I wouldn't bother burying the tampons. I would leave them all in the same place, a feast of proto-placenta and corpuscles for him to savor like so many candies on a coffee table. Thus we would exist in harmony, for as long as the forest permitted us to live.

Only problem was, when the next cycle was due, it didn't come. I watched the night sky at first with calm expectation, then with anticipation, then with nervousness as the first and second nights passed. When the third night was over and the sun had risen, and still there was no blood, I knew what was going on.

It was predictable, of course. I had been led to Adam as directly as though a string was attached to my belly, pulling me abdomen-first, like a fish hooked in the gut. Before I'd even finished calculating backwards, I realized I'd been ovulating during our encounter on the forest floor. I had been thinking with my eggs. If only someone had told me that eggs had a mind of their own, perhaps I could have outwitted them. You heard this about men, but never about women, this business of making decisions with the reproductive apparatus. I was learning the truth of it too late.

Shit.

I was pregnant.

How was I supposed to have a baby in the woods, all by myself? I became, all at once, a panicked rabbit. What would happen when I was too big to move? How would I catch my food with no one to help me? It was impossible. I was fond of my image of myself as alone, independent, solitary. Yet I understood at that moment why women were doomed to be dependent on others, at least during childbirth, and that fiercely proud image came crashing down and burst into flames before
my eyes. I watched it burn with loathing and fury. For a brief moment, and for the first time in my life, I wished I was a man.

Part of me said:
You can do it. You might die, and the baby might die, but you can try and do it. It's your right.

Another part said:
You have every responsibility towards the baby and none towards yourself. You have to go home. There is no point in dying alone, not now.

If there was one thing I hated, it was having decisions made for me. I would put it off a while longer, until the need for a choice became inescapable. Then I would decide what to do.

Days passed. I pretended nothing had changed. I went on with my daily routine, conscious of having broken my promise to Bear. I had wanted to offer him the tampon treats he loved, so that our relationship might continue. As a poor substitute I nicked my arm with my scissors and let the blood drip onto a tattered and muddy piece of blanket. When this was good and soaked I left it in the offering place, but the next morning it was untouched. This was inconceivable: Had
no one
wanted it? Not even Fox, not even Raccoon? It was unbelievable. Yet there it sat, the evidence of my rejection. Tears stung my eyes. My blood was not good enough.

He knows I'm going to be a mother
, I thought.
He can smell it. He can tell
.

Fine
, I thought.
When the baby is born, he can help me raise it. He can be his uncle. He's not getting rid of me
that
easily.

I went to sleep that night and dreamed of a meadow a half mile to the north, a good place to gather dandelions. I dreamed I walked along and talked to the flowers, and as I passed they bowed their yellow heads in greeting. This was how simple my mind had become: At night I dreamed that I was awake, and found it every bit as pleasant as the real thing.

 

I awoke at sunrise the next morning filled with foreboding and fear, jerked out of sleep by some inner warning system, already alert and
on guard for an attack. My first thought was that I had been discovered; somebody was watching me. That was what it felt like, at least. That, or something somewhere was happening again, this time much more serious than someone cutting down a tree. There was something strange afoot, something dangerous. Every nerve in my body knew it.
Watkins?
I thought.
Watkins and his evil band of postgraduate elfkins!
But I didn't smell him, nor did I hear his clumsy feet kicking through the leaves and snapping branches that weren't even in his way. Watkins knew nothing about silence. If ever he had to survive out here on his own, where camouflage skills determined longevity, he wouldn't last a week.

All right—so it wasn't him. But it was definitely something. In a relatively short time, my instincts had been developed—I should say dusted off and tuned up—to the point where they bypassed my brain completely, and caused my body to act at once. I didn't stop to think about what I was doing. There was no need. When you live in the woods like I did, there is only one level of danger, only one degree of warning. I wrapped my twine belt around me, making sure the knife was secure, and headed for my oak grove as quickly as I could, stopping only to take a few mouthfuls of water at the stream.

Ironically, it wasn't animals I was afraid of, not really. It was the other bipeds of the world I feared, and not for any rational reason, either. I could outrun and outhide anybody. But humans are clever and devious—I offer myself as an example—and I knew that if enough of them made up their mind to find me one day, they would do it. You couldn't beat the resourcefulness of my species.

I had never bothered to consider whether Adam would tell anyone he'd seen me, but now this suddenly seemed like a horrible oversight.
Of course he'll tell
, I thought now.
Or at the very least he's going to come back for more
.

But then I changed my mind. We'd had sex on the ground, in the woods, like a pair of animals. Would he mention that? Of course not. I knew Adam. He would be more embarrassed than proud, unlike some
males. He would not brag—and you know why? Because eventually his mother would find out. Sex between animals was a daily part of life on the Shumacher farm, just like on all farms, but the family did possess a high degree of modesty about their personal lives that I had noticed more than once. And Adam wasn't very good at lying, which meant if he announced he'd discovered me and someone asked him exactly
how
he had known it was me, he wouldn't be able to keep from blushing and stammering and generally making an idiot of himself until the truth came out.

All right. So whatever it was out there wasn't Adam, or anything to do with him. That was a relief, at least. I had a soft spot in my heart for him, and I would have hated to have to kill him just to shut him up.

But I would have.

Maybe.

 

The branches of the oaks were too far to reach from the ground, but I had figured out a way to climb one of them: Its knots and burls provided sufficient handholds to allow me to scale it like a monkey, and to pull myself up into the lower limbs. At this point I was already fifteen feet above the ground, far enough to hurt myself badly, perhaps even die, if I fell. This thought didn't cheer me. For a wild forest woman, I spent remarkably little time in trees. I left that to those creatures who were better suited for climbing. Tree climbing had once been my trademark, it's true, but that was before my fall through the barn roof; that experience had left me paranoid, and if I fell out here I would never be discovered. The animals would eat me first, poor helpless, shattered me. Even Bear, my old buddy, wouldn't be able to resist the blood he loved so well if it was spilling out all over the ground. But an ancient, protective instinct had been awakened in me by whatever was out there, and I needed a safe place from which to view things until I had figured out what was going on. I was now the guardian of these woods. And the thing lurking in the forest this morning presented a greater danger than falling from a tree.

An hour in the oaks, and nothing. No sounds, no untoward smells. But, even so, the other animals in the forest were strangely subdued. So it wasn't just my imagination—they had noticed it too. The birds were still, and not even the squirrels had bothered to scold me for entering their leafy realm.

Slowly, ever so slowly, I let myself out of the tree, hugging the bark close at the expense of my skin. When I landed softly on my feet I could feel where the oak had scraped me along my breasts and ribs. I would have to wash myself carefully, using the bark of the elder tree, which sudsed nicely if you beat it with rocks beforehand. It was easy to get an infection out here.