Read Online The Adventures of Flash Jackson by William Kowalski - Free Book Online Page A

and they can get onstage and telleveryone their story, and then things will be okay again. People will understand each other.”
    Well, you can’t have a proper conversation with someone when they’re rambling on like that, but all the same there was something to what old Frankie was saying. I don’t know how he got this idea about Indians, or about people in general—I mean, what is a theater of the human spirit? Don’t ask me, though I liked the sound of it. As far as I knew, Franks didn’t know any Indians, and I couldn’t imagine he knew much about their history either. I wasn’t even sure whether Frankie had ever been to school. I knew a fair bit about the whole story myself, about relocation and reservations and the way Indians had been outright hunted—and he was right. They had been silenced. I’d never thought of it that way, but that was what it was.
    There were a few Natives left around this area. Seneca, mostly. I imagine that once upon a time they had whole villages with lots of people, but now they just ran a few souvenir-and-discount-cigarette stores and held referendums every year on whether or not they should build a casino. They kept to themselves, pretty much. If you didn’t deliberately go out and look for a Seneca, you’d never see one. That was the way it had been ever since I could remember, and certainly it had been that way since my mother’s time—probably not even my grandmother remembered a time when there were still Seneca villages. It had been at least a couple hundred years since they’d lived according to the old ways around here. Probably more.
    But there was something, some kernel in Frankie’s idea, that made sense. Not on an everyday kind of level, but a more…I don’t know, a spiritual level, I guess. I don’t usually think along those lines. I’m a practical, down-to-earth sort of guy—I mean, woman.
    But that was how it was talking to Frankie. Just when you thought he’d finally gone off the deep end, he’d say something that rang true somewhere inside of you, and you had to rethink the whole question of whether or not he was as crazy as he sounded. Who was crazier,anyway—a man who wanted to help people, or a society that didn’t care much one way or the other?
    Frankie never remembered his episodes once they were over, but all that business about a theater had stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, and though I hadn’t thought about it in a while I mused it over again as I watched him ride Brother around and around the corral. Frankie hadn’t mentioned his theater idea since that day. Fact is, he disappeared for a week or so after that, and when he came back he was acting normal again, or at least as normal as it was possible for him to be. I don’t know where he was taken or what they did to him there, but now that I thought about it, it seemed a little spooky. Where did they keep people who weren’t making sense to the rest of the world? And what did they do to them to get them to act right again?
    I’d have to find out, I decided, if only to satisfy my own inquiring mind. I wouldn’t be able to ask Frankie, though. I’d have to ask someone else.
    Then I passed from this subject to Miz Powell. All kinds of questions about her began to pop up. For example, why did she still have her maiden name, if she’d been married for so long? Had she gone back to it after her husband died? And why was she interested in what kind of binoculars Franks used? And why was Flash killed by the East Germans? And why did someone as dramatic and exciting as her want to be friends with me?
    It was times like that I wished I had someone my own age to talk to about things. I felt some kind of excitement surging up in me from somewhere I couldn’t name, the same feeling that had made me climb the barn. It was killing me to have that broken leg; sometimes, back when I was