The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “Not always.” I was quite deflated. He had never refused to help me before. “We went fishing that time—nothing happened then.”

  “That’s right,” he countered. “Nothing. I did not catch a single fish—not fish one.”

  “Well, which is it: There’s too much going on when you visit me,” I demanded, “or not enough? You can’t have it both ways.”

  “I can’t have it at all, is what I’m trying to tell you.” He swallowed loudly. “It’s Tuesday.”

  “But,” I stammered, “I have to … Didn’t you hear the part about my having to find the man by Thursday?”

  “Fever,” he said sternly, “I can’t help you with your little mystery novel moment right now. I’m up to my armpits in students who can’t spell Shakespeare.”

  “Shakespeare couldn’t spell Shakespeare,” I grumbled. “He signed his name differently on different documents. You showed me that.”

  “And I’m trying to get my tenure portfolio together this year, you know. I have to put it all in some new Web program called Sedona that takes forever to—”

  “Andrews—”

  “No! Final! I can’t leave my office; I can’t even go to my house. I’m too busy to breathe.”

  I stood for a moment in stunned silence.

  “I could come up on Saturday,” he ventured after a moment. “I’ll need a break—”

  “Saturday will be too late!” I insisted.

  “Well, there it is.” He sniffed. “If there’s anything I can do for you from my lonely little office here on the second floor of the Arts and Sciences Building, then I’ll try to squeeze it in between three and four in the morning. Otherwise, include me out.”

  “But …” I trailed off.

  He took the phone away from his mouth and I heard him say, obviously to someone coming into his office, that he’d be right with them.

  “Look, Dr. Devilin,” he said into the phone, “on top of everything else, I have advisees. One of my students is here now for her advisement appointment, so I have to go.”

  “But.” It was a complete sentence.

  “Um,” he said, completely distracted. “Okay. Well.”

  “I’ll let you know how it comes out.” I sighed.

  In the moment of silence that transpired, I could hear the student in his office say that she wanted to graduate by Christmas.

  “No weekend invitation?” Andrews said to me at last.

  “Let me see how everything goes.”

  “Right, then,” he said cheerfully, and hung up.

  I stood holding the phone a second, staring at it, a bit stunned.

  I barely heard the door creak behind me.

  “Put that phone down, boy,” the voice said, “and turn around, or I’ll just shoot you in the back.”

  I stood frozen for another moment before my mind allowed me to recognize the voice.

  “Hey, Hovis.” I hung up the phone and turned slowly to face him.

  He was pointing his hunting rifle directly at my heart.

  “What’d you tell that sheriff?” His eyes were slits; his voice was a snarl.

  “Since I talked to you? Nothing. I went and had lunch with Lucinda at Miss Etta’s. The game birds were really good today.”

  “Then why’d he come to arrest me?” Hovis stood like a statue.

  “Skidmore came to arrest you? After I left?”

  “He did.” His voice softened a bit. “You didn’t know?”

  “I did not.” I held up one hand. “Would you mind lowering your rifle? If it goes off and messes up this kitchen, are you going to pay for it?”

  “I don’t have any money,” he objected.

  “So—” I motioned for him to lower the gun.

  He would not.

  “Why he to come and take me away? Again.” Hovis stared out the window.

  “How did you get here?” I knew he didn’t have a car. “For that matter, how’d you get away from the sheriff?”

  He grinned. “I got my ways.”

  “There’s no place to hide in that shack.”

  “I got my ways,” he insisted, grin gone.

  “Right. So—what? You came to shoot me because you thought I’d told the sheriff—”

  “I thought you told him I was crazy again.” He sniffed. “I’m not. Just because I told you about that boy that visited us last night. What I said.”

  “Yes. Well. There was something strange about him, I’ll give you that. I’m not as convinced as you are that he’s a character from the Bible.”

  “He’s a traveling creature,” Hovis said softly. “He’s not real. He walks up and down the hallways of time, and he comes to visit now and again, as a warning to other men.”

  “All right.” I nodded once.

  “This is a nice kitchen,” he said thoughtfully, looking around. “I really would hate to mess it up.”

  “Right.” I stared at the barrel of the gun. “Then you ought to stop pointing that thing at me.”

  “I’ll stop pointing this thing at you when you stop lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying to you, Hovis.” I tried edging my way into the kitchen, but that made him nervous.

  “Where you think you get to?” He lifted the barrel. “I don’t want to shoot this thing, but you make me nervous. I don’t like to be nervous. I shot up that man from the hospital when he jumped at me. You’re not about to go jumping at me.”

  The expression on Hovis’s face was one I’d seen before: a combination of fear and confusion. He wouldn’t mean to shoot me, but if something startled him, he might pull the trigger. Skidmore had told me about the man from the county hospital who’d rushed into the little shack on the Jackson property and gotten a chest full of bird shot. His lungs still hadn’t completely healed.

  I didn’t know what Hovis had in the rifle he was pointing at me, but I felt that I would be needing my lungs in top working order, so I stopped moving into my kitchen.

  I noticed that his worn brown construction boots were covered in sticker burrs from a certain weed that grew on the eastern side of the mountain. That meant he had come along a fairly difficult slope to get to my house, but it was a straight shot and he could have scrambled quickly—under ten minutes—to my front door. It would take a car on back roads nearly twice that amount of time to travel from his shack to my house. How he’d escaped his shack if Skidmore had been standing at his front door was a tougher nut to crack.

  “Listen, Hovis,” I began slowly, “I’m just guessing, here, but don’t you think it’s possible that the sheriff considers you a suspect because the body was found fifty feet from your home? Not to mention the fact that the deceased visited you the night before.”

  “He visited you, too.” The gun twitched.

  “And if the body had been found in my front yard, the sheriff would have come to talk to me about it, don’t you think?”

  “First off,” he said, his throat tightening, “sheriff didn’t come to talk, he came to arrest. Said so. Second, he don’t treat me same as you. A crazy old man don’t have the same kind of legality as a good friend of the law does. You know I’m right.”

  Alas, I did know. Skidmore would be fair with Hovis, but the county would not, given his record, afford him the same consideration.

  “All right.” I folded my arms. “So what’s your plan? If you shoot me, you know the law will put you away.”

  He looked away from me for an instant, then snapped back to his cold stare.

  “I can’t go back to that county nut house.” He sniffed. “I ain’t got that many more good years left, and I sure as hell don’t want to spend them in that place.”

  “Then don’t shoot me.” Simple.

  “Yeah.” He took in a huge breath. “I guess not.”

  He lowered the gun, but only a little.

  “You want some coffee now?” I offered.

  “The thing is,” he said, not hearing me, “I don’t know what I did last night. I recall speaking with the boy. He tol
d me his stories, I told him mine for a mite. We had a drop. I don’t take that much anymore, but Ms. Jackson’s cousin Red? He makes some fine private cider.”

  I didn’t know Red Jackson, but I’d heard of him. I bought my illegally distilled apples elsewhere. Red’s was made quick and priced to move. I preferred a better-crafted beverage, though mine did cost at least three times what Red charged.

  “You drank with the stranger?” I moved cautiously toward my stove.

  “One thing led to another.” Hovis had still not set down his rifle. It remained primed; his finger was still on the trigger.

  “And you’re not certain how the evening ended.”

  “I know I didn’t kill him!” The gun was right back where it had been, pointed directly at my chest.

  “Not that I want to add any further confusion to the issue,” I said slowly, freezing, “but you and I both know that the body Skidmore found this morning did not belong to the man we talked to last night. Remember?”

  “I remember,” he snarled resentfully.

  “Well, don’t you think that’s strange?” I thought perhaps if I got him thinking about something else other than shooting me, I might have a chance of getting him to set down the gun. “I mean, you talk to some strange young man, and the very next morning a dead body is found on the road behind your place?”

  “Wait.” His mind was swimming, obviously, and his eyes were unfocused. “The dead one ain’t the same as the one … Wait.”

  The gun went down again. Hovis closed his eyes. A single tear escaped from between the lids of his left eye.

  “Hovis?” I ventured.

  “I’m confused.” He didn’t open his eyes.

  “Maybe you should sit down.” I didn’t move. I didn’t want to startle him.

  After a second his shoulders relaxed, and he set the gun against the door frame again. This time he opened his eyes and sailed straight for my kitchen table.

  “I believe I will have a swallow of your coffee, if you’re a mind to make some.”

  His hands were shaking, and his voice was suddenly hollow sounding. He sat at the table, staring straight ahead.

  I knew better than to make my espresso and got out the French press instead. Hovis was used to watery, rust-colored brew. I started a kettle and pulled out the coffee grinder.

  “What’s that?” he asked, sounding very tired.

  “Coffee grinder. I buy fresh beans and grind them myself. It tastes better.”

  “I know.” He sat back. “Before the war, the Big War, I used to have a hand-crank coffee grinder. That’s when I lived up top of Devil’s Hearth, you know—that part of the mountain. Had a nice place.”

  He’d told me about his cabin several dozen times, but I thought it best to allow him to reminisce about better days.

  “It’s pretty this time of year, when all those old oak trees start to turn colors.” I poured beans into the grinder.

  “I still hike up there from time to time.” He sighed. “Sit where the cabin used to be. If I close my eyes and hold my head just right, I can hear Barbrie’s voice.”

  He rarely mentioned his wife, long dead. I didn’t know if it made me feel safer or sadder.

  “Little Barbrie.” He was speaking to himself.

  She had died when an epidemic of influenza had torn though the Appalachian Mountains in 1956. They’d been married for five years and had saved enough money to buy a larger farm. Barbrie, her name a diminutive of Barbara after the ballad “Barbara Allen,” had miscarried twice owing primarily to bad nutrition and hard work. The new place would have meant an easier life and, in all probability, a family. But when she’d contracted the flu, Hovis stopped all his work to take care of her. He’d once told me that he had tended the body for three days after she had died, hoping she was only asleep. In the end he came down off the Devil’s Hearth with the body in his arms. Mrs. Jackson, some vague kin of Barbrie’s, had taken Hovis in, tended to him for a time, then put him to work on her farm. The old-timers in Blue Mountain who were inclined to kindness said that she did it from the dictates of her Christian heart. Those more inclined to a harsher view said that she did it to keep Hovis nearby so that she could chastise him for letting Barbrie die. She was often heard to say that the girl had most likely died because Hovis kept her apart from her family. Hovis was burdened, nearly daily, by the concept that he’d killed the woman he loved. A few of the worst gossips in town blamed that guilt for the collapse of Hovis’s mind.

  “Do you take sugar?” I asked him softly.

  He opened his eyes. “I could use some.”

  The afternoon had turned golden. Autumn light burnished the clouds, and a chevron of geese arrowed its way through them, headed south. The wind picked up, and showers of red and brown leaves decorated my lawn, my porch. It seemed to me that the earth had joined me in a moment of relief: Winter, like a gun, had been laid aside for a while, despite the fact that it was so obviously nearby. It just wasn’t time for its blast—yet.

  Alas, like most moments of such repose, that one was short-lived.

  With no warning whatsoever, there was a thud on my porch as if a sack of apples had been dropped, and the front door flew open. Sheriff Skidmore Needle appeared, pistol in hand.

  “Swear to God, Hovis,” he growled between clenched teeth, “if you reach for that rifle, I’ll put a bullet in your arm and take my time getting you to the hospital.”

  Hovis was twitching, but he did not reach for his gun.

  Deputy Mathews appeared to Skidmore’s left. She had come in the back door, pistol pointed toward Hovis and—because I was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time—also toward me.

  I set down the coffee mug I had chosen for Hovis and took a step away from him.

  “Don’t you move, either, Fever.” Skidmore’s eyes were locked on Hovis. “I don’t want to be distracted wondering which way you’re going to move in case I have to shoot my gun.”

  Hovis turned slowly to face Skidmore, breathing with some difficulty.

  “What in hell you want with me, Sheriff?” he asked. “What’s so important you and your deputy have to point your guns at a crazy old man?”

  “Well, Hovis,” Skidmore answered, appearing absolutely at the end of his patience, “I tried coming up to your house over there and just talking with you, but you disappeared somehow, and when a man runs from me, I get to thinking he may have done something I won’t like. So I’m bound to ask: Have you done something wrong recently—you crazy old man?”

  “No.”

  “There’s my point.” Skidmore took a step toward Hovis. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, why did you run?”

  “From the police?” Hovis’s face seemed to crack, and he was suddenly laughing. “Are you serious? Sheriff Maddox used to put me in his trunk and leave me there overnight. And every time I see a uniform, I end up in the county nut house. I ain’t had a good experience of your kind, and once burnt is twice shy.”

  It wasn’t that hard to see his point.

  “Well, then, let me tell you why I came to talk with you, and why I’ve got my firearm out.” Skidmore took another step. “I found a dead body not fifty feet from your front door early this morning, and he was shot with a pistol like the one you used to have, a gun from the Big War.”

  Hovis looked over his shoulder at me. “You tell him about that?”

  “I haven’t seen—”

  “Hovis!” Skidmore demanded. “You tell everybody about that gun. I don’t believe there’s a person in this county who doesn’t know about your World War II pistol.”

  “And that’s what killed the man you found—” I began.

  “Fever, would you mind staying out of this?” Skidmore whined. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

  “Sorry.” I leaned back against the counter.

  “So, see, Hovis,” Skidmore continued, a bit more reasonably, “I wanted to ask you about that. But after you vanished from your house—which you’ll have to
tell me how you did that one day—I went through all your things. And I couldn’t find that pistol anywhere. Unfortunately for you, a policeman’s mind works this way: The murder weapon is missing, that means the killer got rid of it. You see it on the television shows all the time.”

  “Ain’t got no television,” Hovis grumbled.

  “No, that’s not the point,” Skidmore sighed, lowering his gun half an inch. “What I’m saying is that you were a pretty good suspect in a murder investigation, and then you fled the scene—which makes you a great suspect.”

  “Suspect?” Hovis demanded.

  “We found a man murdered—” Skidmore answered at double his previous volume.

  “What possible motive could Hovis have had,” I said, baffled, “for killing a stranger in the middle of the—”

  “Fever, damn it!” Skidmore’s gun was aimed right at Hovis’s head, and he took another step forward.

  It scared me almost as much as it did Hovis.

  “They do talk a lot about motive in those television shows I was telling you about,” he said softly to Hovis. “In this case I believe it has something to do with a bit of evidence Dr. Devilin is unaware of.”

  “What?” I couldn’t help taking a step forward; it was practically involuntary.

  It was also very unfortunate.

  When I leaned toward Skidmore, he looked up at me. When he looked up at me, Hovis leapt up from his chair. When Hovis leapt up, he reached for his rifle. When his hand went to grab it, Deputy Mathews shot her gun. When she fired her gun, a bullet came out and went into Hovis Daniels’s hand—the very hand that was on his rifle. The bullet went though the hand and right into my refrigerator, where it damaged, I was later to learn, my eggs. Not to mention the mess that Hovis made by bleeding onto my floor and my counters.

  Skidmore turned in a motion too fast to see and had the muzzle of his gun right on Hovis’s forehead. Without a word he motioned to Deputy Mathews and she moved, again faster than I could quite make out, to put handcuffs on Hovis while Skidmore kicked the hunting rifle to the floor and away from us, into the living room.