The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “That’s part of the story,” I corrected. “A more significant element of the plot is that he came to my place with a loaded gun, and then he used that gun later to kill another man. That’s worth mentioning.”

  Of course I wanted to visit Lucinda first—right away, in fact—but Skidmore talked me out of it. I knew better, anyway. She was at the hospital, and nothing was ever serious enough to keep her from going to work. I knew not to bother her there until it was time for the lunch break. So when Skidmore took off, I walked around, got into my truck, and headed back to the dirt road behind the Jackson place.

  Four

  Hovis Daniels had lived in the little shack down the mountain from the Jackson home on and off for fifty years. It had no electricity or running water, only a wood-burning stove for heating and cooking. Hovis was a memory more than a man—something collectively recollected in our community. He was the last existing emblem, as far as I knew, of the way things used to be. He was also, as I had often said in articles about him, a living time machine. His stories were so vivid, so perfectly remembered, so clearly visualized, that he could take you with him when he went into the past. Alas, that perfect ability would occasionally overwhelm Hovis, and he’d forget which decade was supposed to be his home. When that happened, he’d be put away, as Skidmore’d said, in the county facility for the mentally disabled. Hovis had spent the last few years there. Skidmore warned me three times that Hovis was more unbalanced than he had been when I’d interviewed him before, that he was getting senile and gun crazy—obviously a bad combination.

  The day was warming nicely, approaching sixty degrees. The clear light across the meadows on that part of the Jackson property seemed to illuminate everything and bend around solid objects, leaving no shadows anywhere. My old green truck clattered up the road, bouncing in trenches and thumping over rocks until I saw the gray wood shack come into view. I pulled off the road as best I could, scraping paint from my passenger door on the wire of the fence. The shack was a quick jump over the fence and fewer than thirty steps across the field, but I moved slowly. Hovis was of the old school where visitors were concerned. Until he knew who was headed his way, he’d have his hunting rifle out, cocked, and pointed at the door. If he didn’t like the sound of his guest, he was liable to take a shot. He’d never actually killed anyone, that I knew of, but when he once wounded a teenager who was selling chocolate bars for his high school band trip, Sheriff Maddox, Skidmore’s late predecessor, had locked Hovis up and thrown away the key.

  So I headed toward the shack very slowly.

  In years long gone by, the custom was to “hello” the house, calling out from a good distance. That way you could let your host know who was headed for the front door. Hovis still appreciated the gesture. Feeling that a bullet in my arm or my leg might impede the progress of my work, and considering that we only had a short amount of time before Millroy filed his erroneous report, I thought it best to indulge in the tradition.

  “Hovis! It’s Fever Devilin coming up to your house. Okay?”

  “Saw you drive up.” His voice was muffled from within the hovel. There was only one door, and the lone window was on the other side of the place, but the spaces in between the wall boards were wide enough to see through. “Come on in the house.”

  It wasn’t a warm invitation, but I hadn’t expected congeniality from Hovis. He was absolutely unconcerned with the niceties of the world. His home attested to that, and the experience of his life had confirmed a less than sunny disposition.

  As I drew nearer to the front door, I heard a click. I stopped for a second, fearing he might have cocked his rifle, but decided he’d only unlocked his door and forged bravely ahead.

  “You’re not pointing your hunting rifle at the door, are you, Hovis?” Better safe than sorry.

  There was a long moment of silence followed by a gentle clatter.

  “Not anymore,” he answered, finally.

  I came to the front of his place and waited. After another heartbeat or two, the door swung open and he appeared.

  Hovis looked much older than the last time I’d seen him. He was in his nineties as it was, but he looked like he was made of papier-mâché. He had, perhaps, seven hairs on his head, all white wires. His skin was nearly the color of his cabin, the same as a pale rain cloud. His eyes were runny and rimmed in red, his hands were more vein and bone than anything else, and he hadn’t shaved in a while. He was dressed as I had always seen him, in a white cotton dress shirt and denim overalls, well worn but clean. His boots were old, and I imagined that there were holes in them. The part of the picture that made me take a breath was the fact that the clothes and the boots were the same as they had always been, but Hovis was smaller, so they looked huge on him.

  “You ain’t bring your tape machine.” It was an observation, not a question.

  “No.” Never give out more information than you need to, I reminded myself; let him do the talking. “I expect you come about that boy.”

  He stepped aside so that I might follow him into his cave. It was dark and Spartan, swept clean and remarkably fresh-smelling.

  The inside of the cabin was just as I remembered it. The woodstove on the wall opposite the door was warm, and something was simmering in a pot on top. To the right of it there was a cot piled high with quilts, perhaps ten. To the left of the stove there was a table and one chair; on the table, a place setting for one and a huge coffee mug beside an ancient tin percolator. The room was illuminated by two oil lamps, not daylight—the window’s curtains were pulled tight. On the floor at the entrance lay a rug someone had given him long ago, a scene of quails nesting in the middle of it. The rafters of the shack were hung with dried rosemary and eucalyptus, which accounted for the pleasant smell. I wondered if anyone had watched out for the place while Hovis had been away. It appeared to be in fair shape for a place so often abandoned.

  “What boy do you mean?” That was all I was willing to say.

  Hovis motioned for me to take the lone chair, and he collapsed backward into his bed, right next to his hunting rifle.

  “I saw you all out there this morning.” He wheezed a bit. “Old, but I ain’t stupid. Sheriff found a dead body. I saw it.”

  “Before the sheriff got to it?” It was a risky question that I regretted asking the second it escaped my lips. It was liable to put him on the defensive, build a wall between us that I wouldn’t be able to break through.

  “No.” He sat back against the wall, his arms falling limply at his sides, hand on his gun. “The car woke me up—police car. Looked outside. Saw Skidmore Needle. I always liked him. Forgot he was the sheriff until I could think about it better. I hated that Maddox. He was a mean’n.”

  “He was that,” I agreed, taking a seat.

  Sheriff Maddox had probably mistreated Hovis in ways that would have been legally actionable, but a fat sheriff in a small town can do just about anything he wants to a crazy old man. When Maddox died, no one in town went to his funeral. Skidmore, a longtime deputy, had been unanimously elected to the vacated post.

  “Wait.” I tried to think of how to ask my question. “The sheriff told me he came up here to talk to you when he first found the body, but you weren’t here.”

  “Maybe I was,” he rumbled, “and maybe I wasn’t.”

  “You saw him coming,” I assumed, “and hid.”

  He nodded once, but I looked around his single small room. There was no place to hide.

  “Hate to see that boy dead.” Hovis tapped his index finger on the barrel of his rifle.

  “You mean the one out on the road this morning.”

  “Who else is dead?” he shot back, irritated. “Course I mean that boy. He was confused, but he was all right. Being confused don’t make you wrong all the time.”

  “You knew him?”

  “I did not.” Hovis closed his eyes. “And I did.”

  “How’s that?”

  He sat in silence for a moment; then the wrinkles around his mou
th seemed to crack upward.

  “You ain’t bring you tape machine,” he said softly, “but you talk like you did. Your friend the sheriff send you?”

  Old, not stupid.

  “Sort of,” I admitted. “You and I have talked about a lot of things over the years, so he thought you’d talk to me about this. He wants to know what the boy said to you. That boy visited me last night, too, you know.”

  Hovis’s eyes snapped open.

  “He had a pistol,” I continued, looking at the floor.

  “That’s right.” Hovis leaned forward, and his hand clutched the rifle’s stock. “Nice gun.”

  “Really?”

  “Antique, I guess they’d call it now. Like the one I had in the big war.”

  “You had a pistol like that when you fought in World War II?”

  “Not certain what happened to it.” Hovis managed to stand. “I made some coffee. It’s still hot.”

  He ambled his way, shuffling more than walking, toward the percolator on the table. I knew he was offering me his hospitality, and it would have been rude of me not to take some, but I didn’t care for the way he looked, and he was using his rifle as a cane. It dragged along the floor of the cabin, then thumped down hard as he took another sliding step. His hand trembled a bit on the barrel.

  “All right, Hovis,” I sighed.

  He stopped in his tracks, turned, and locked eyes with me.

  The shadows in the room shifted as a flock of starlings shot by, headed south. The frantic activity of wings produced an unnerving contrast to the stillness inside the shack.

  “All right what?” Hovis pronounced each word with absolute clarity.

  “All right this: I won’t treat you like a crazy old man if you just quit acting like one.” It was another risky gambit, calling his bluff, but I was beginning to remember the way Hovis liked to treat anyone he didn’t trust.

  I had an instant image of my first encounter with him, in that very cabin. I couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. Skidmore and I had stolen some tomatoes from Mrs. Jackson’s kitchen garden, and nearly gotten caught. We’d run into what we supposed was an abandoned outbuilding, only to come face-to-face with Hovis Daniels and his rifle, which he had aimed right for Skidmore’s head.

  He seemed to have some vague notion that he was the caretaker of the Jackson property, though he certainly was not, and wanted to know what we thought we were doing stealing from the kindest woman on the mountain.

  Skidmore started apologizing, but I had the idea it would be best to tell Hovis my dark motivation. I explained to him that I wanted tomatoes to throw at the car that was parked outside my house—a car that belonged to a man who was seeing my mother while my father was out of town. Hovis nodded once, lowered his rifle, and offered to help carry the tomatoes.

  I’d made a great show, later that same week, of making certain Hovis saw me when I’d gone to confess to Mrs. Jackson and offer to work in her garden for as long as she thought would suffice as punishment.

  The point was that if I just told Hovis what I really wanted to know, he would stop playing with his gun and pretending to be senile.

  “Okay,” he said finally, voice steady. He stood halfway between his bed and the table where I sat waiting.

  “The man who was in my house last night talked about Chicago and World War I.” I sat back. “He thought he was from another time.”

  Hovis smiled. He tossed the rifle backward, and it landed neatly on the bed. He stood up straight and walked slowly but firmly to the table and sat down.

  “He told me he killed his brother during World War II,” Hovis offered, smiling bigger. “He’s crazier than me—and I’d admit that’s going a far piece.”

  “He said he killed his brother?” I turned my chair to face him. He was pouring coffee. “When he was at my place he talked about fratricide, but he said his uncle killed his father. Like Hamlet.”

  “Sometimes you have to tell a story a few times before it comes out right,” Hovis observed.

  There was a perfect truth.

  “Do you remember what time of day it was when he visited you?” I asked.

  “Late afternoon.” He narrowed his eyelids, concentrating. “He just come down from Ms. Jackson’s place. She run him off. I believe she called the sheriff on him.”

  “So he had this pistol, the visitor—you saw that,” I went on, trying to get him to the point, “and he told you about—what? His exploits—”

  “Said he was a spy in the Big War.” Hovis set the pot back on the table. “It was June 14, 1940, that German troops marched into the city of Paris.”

  I glared at Hovis, unable to decide if he was beginning a story or having some sort of breakdown.

  “Why do you mention that?” I thought it best to ask.

  “I don’t mention it at all,” Hovis countered. “He did. That boy last night. Do you know much about the Great War, Fever? Man your age, in my experience, has two general ideas about history. One is his own lifetime, and the other is anything that came before it. That’s the problem with you young people, the main one.”

  I could almost see the gears in Hovis’s head beginning to turn faster, the thoughts warming, the words coming unstuck from hidden places in his brain, places that hadn’t been used much during his … incarcerations.

  The primary reason I had always collected information from Hovis, and he had never disappointed, was that he was a near perfect authority on local genealogy. That ability, however, had also produced in him a rolling and expansive vision of history. If he got revved up—and he didn’t always—he could paint astonishing portraits of dozens of historical periods. That’s why I sometimes referred to him as a time machine.

  “Did you know,” Hovis continued, “that one of the big songs on the radio that year was called ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’?”

  It wasn’t a real question, it was a challenge. Hovis wanted to make certain I was going to be able to keep up with him, was able to understand the irony of that title.

  “You can see why it would be a hit,” I said quickly, taking up the gauntlet. “The last time most people in the world had seen Paris, it had been the City of Lights. But on June 14, 1940, it was plunged into darkness.”

  Hovis nodded.

  “And did you know,” I went on, perhaps a bit too immodestly, “that Ernest Hemingway had just published his book For Whom the Bell Tolls?”

  “‘Any man’s death diminishes me,’” Hovis quoted perfectly. “‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’”

  He seemed to be doing a bit of gauntlet gathering himself.

  “John Donne wrote that.” I nodded. “Hemingway took his title from it.”

  “If you say so.” He picked up his coffee cup.

  It was coming back to me, the thing that I’d always found disconcerting about Hovis: When he wanted you to think he was a pathetic old man, his accent and diction—even posture—were one way, but when he rose to his storytelling self, his entire demeanor was better, and his vocabulary improved to a frightening degree. There was no way to tell which one was the real Hovis Daniels, especially since one of the times he’d been at the county mental facility he’d been diagnosed—erroneously, in my opinion—with multiple personality disorder.

  “At the same time,” Hovis said softly, “in 1940, the caves at Lascaux were discovered—in a different part of France. You know what those are?”

  “They contain prehistoric wall paintings that, I believe, are over twenty thousand years old.”

  “The caves were discovered accidentally by two boys playing ball.” Hovis slurped a loud sip of coffee. “Their dog ran after the ball and disappeared into a cave. The boys followed. To see better, they lit matches, and suddenly, brilliantly, before their eyes, painted on the cave walls, they saw the most outstanding examples of prehistoric art ever discovered.”

  “Yes.” I knew he was coming to a point.

  “Some boys were playing ball and exploring
caves,” he continued. “The boy that visited me last night? He told me that he spent his younger days in Paris, sticking rocks the size of his fist into the runners of Nazi tanks so that the tanks would malfunction. So that the Nazis would have a harder time destroying the city he loved. He also said he was packing the artillery on those tanks with silt from the Seine. The silt would dry in the heat of the day, and then when some Nazi bastard tried to fire the artillery at the citizens of Paris, the gun would explode and do more harm to the tank and its occupants than to the citizens of the city.”

  “But Hovis,” I interrupted, trying to get past the boys story.

  “On the very same day the boys in Lascaux were discovering caves,” Hovis continued, as if he hadn’t heard me, “the boy we both talked to last night was crawling through the sewers of Paris. He was trying to find an underground route to a certain Nazi headquarters. When he lit a match to see where he was, suddenly what exploded before his eyes, painted on the sewer walls, was the most outstanding example of a swastika he’d ever seen. Two seconds later, he was standing, as best he could, in the glare of Nazi flashlights, with seven guns pointed at his head.”

  “But you could see that the man who visited you last night,” I insisted, “was probably not even born in 1940.”

  “I could see that,” Hovis agreed, however hesitantly. “Still. When you were talking to him in your house, didn’t you get the idea that he was describing things that had actually happened to him?”

  “Yes.”

  With a shock that snapped my neck I realized that the man in my kitchen last night had talked to me exactly the way Hovis always had—same flowing, oddly connected view of history and its seemingly random facts. The man had done an almost perfect imitation of Hovis, in fact.

  The question that unbalanced me at that moment was something like: Had the man copied Hovis, or had Hovis instructed the man?

  “Hovis,” I began slowly, “did you know this person, the one who visited us last night?”