The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  It all happened in less than three seconds, and Hovis was on the floor, in handcuffs, bleeding and moaning.

  “God damn it, Hovis,” Skidmore muttered.

  “She shot me!” Hovis apparently couldn’t believe that someone as nice as Melissa Mathews could have fired her pistol into his hand.

  “Jesus.” I blinked and leaned backward again.

  From nowhere Melissa had produced a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a roll of gauze. She was dabbing the wound she had made, cleaning it. In under a minute, it seemed, she had bandaged the hand and gotten Hovis to his feet.

  “I guess we’ll take you to the hospital after all,” she sighed. “I’m sorry I had to shoot you, Hovis. But you were reaching for your rifle. I’m supposed to shoot you if you do that.”

  She said it as if she were explaining to a student why she’d handed out a bad report card.

  Hovis seemed to accept it with a degree of resignation, however, nodding silently. Then he looked up at me.

  “Sorry, Fever,” he managed hoarsely. “I guess your kitchen got messed up after all.”

  “It’s okay.” I tried to smile at him.

  “You know I didn’t do this.” His eyes burned into mine. “You know who did. You have to help me. How many times I told you a story that you used to make good for yourself? How many things I taught you about over the years? You got to do this one thing for me now, Fever. I need help and ain’t nobody else on this earth to do it but you. I got no one and nothing. You’re the onliest one can do it. I’m saying, you have to help me.”

  I rubbed my forehead.

  “Seriously, Skidmore, what possible reason could you have … I mean, you know that the man you found this morning—”

  “I’ll tell you what I know,” Skid shot back, tight as a drum. “I heard from Donny Deveroe that you took Lucinda to visit the deceased. Neither one of you believes that the dead man is the same as the one who visited you’uns last night, but I don’t agree. Deputy Mathews is right: A man looks different dead—different enough to confuse you both. I also know that Hovis Daniels has or had the pistol that I believe killed the man I found this morning. And here’s what I know that you don’t, because, despite what you’re always telling me, you actually don’t know everything: Donny found a locket in the dead man’s coat. It’s a pretty little piece of jewelry that used to belong to Barbrie Daniels—but it now has her picture inside.”

  “That boy stole Barbrie’s locket?” Hovis appeared about to explode. “Where is it? Give it to me!”

  Hovis was suddenly wild. Absolutely ignoring his wounded hand, he grabbed Skidmore by the arm and shook him.

  “Give me Barbrie’s locket!”

  Skidmore flailed his arm and Hovis fell backward; Melissa caught him.

  “Take him out to the car,” Skidmore snarled.

  Melissa nodded and, with surprisingly little effort, dragged Hovis out of my house in a heartbeat, stopping only to scoop up his rifle off my living room floor. He was struggling and mumbling, but apparently no match for Melissa’s youthful vigor.

  “The locket is the motive, wouldn’t you think?” Skidmore finally put away his pistol. “You see the way Hovis is about it.”

  “Look,” I began, “that old man didn’t kill anyone, and you know it.”

  “Once again,” he said, more calmly than before, “I’m happy to tell you what I know. I have now arrested a suspect in the murder of a young man I found on the road in back of the Jackson place early this morning. That is the report I’m about to file with the county. And after I do I’m going to tell Millroy I have a man in the jailhouse and have filed said report.”

  “But—”

  “What that buys us is a bit more breathing room,” Skidmore said, turning to head out the door. “Millroy can’t very well file a suicide if I’ve already put in a murder suspect. So you can go find the actual murderer—if you think it’s different from Hovis Daniels.”

  I couldn’t ever remember having heard the phrase “a twinkle in his voice” before, but Skidmore certainly had one.

  “Do you mean—” I began.

  “It’s nice to leave you astonished at my work,” he said over his shoulder, “for a change.”

  I followed him through the living room to the front door. I decided against berating him for using Hovis in such a manner—unless he actually did suspect Hovis. I opted instead for the academic choice: making fun of his diction.

  “You know,” I told him, gathering my wits, “you said ‘you’uns’ a minute ago, when you were excited.”

  “I did not.”

  “You can make a boy a sheriff,” I insisted, “but you can’t kick the country out of his mouth.”

  “Shut up.” He clattered down the steps. “You got work to do.”

  I watched him move deliberately toward the police car. Hovis was settled in, and Deputy Mathews was climbing in up front. Skidmore didn’t look back, but I knew he was smiling.

  Seven

  The phone rang for a long time before Andrews picked it up. “Sorry,” he began, “what?”

  “It’s me again,” I said quickly, “and in fact I did figure out a way you could help me between three and four o’clock this coming morning.”

  “Hello, Fever,” he sighed. “I’m really—”

  “You have access to Galileo at the university,” I fired back. “All I want you to do is look up Polly Hutchinson, around 1865, from the famous singing Hutchinson Family, and tell me who, if anyone, she married.”

  In the silence that followed my request, I had a moment to reflect on how odd a task it must have seemed to him. Meanwhile, I gathered up a handful of paper towels, dabbed a bit of water on them, and began wiping up Hovis’s blood. A lot of things seemed normal to me in contrast to that.

  “This will help you find out who killed somebody this morning in your little town?” he asked at last.

  “It will set my mind at ease about something,” I told him hesitantly, “so that I can pursue other more probable avenues.”

  “You’re trying to entice me with your vague suggestions and your weird request,” he accused, “but it won’t work. I don’t care what happened up there, I can’t help. Look her up on the Web yourself.”

  “I’ve done a bit of research on the Hutchinsons over the years, and I barely remember Polly. Sister Abby was one of the important family members, but Polly? I think she might have been a granddaughter or a younger member. See, there ended up being two groups, and during the Civil War they popularized tunes like ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom’ and ‘Tenting on the Old Camp Ground’—they were the precursors of the Weavers in the early 1960s.”

  “The Weavers?” He was growing irritated, I could tell.

  “Protest singers,” I told him. “Songwriters that influenced—”

  “Stop!” he demanded.

  “A normal Web search is two inches deep.” I tried as hard as I could to sound angry about it. “I need heartier genealogical information.”

  “Damn it.” Andrews countered my invented anger with the more genuine item of his own. The worst had happened: He was curious.

  I could hear papers rustling, then scratching.

  “Polly Hutchinson,” he sighed, “1865.”

  “You’re a wonderful person,” I told him in only slightly mocking tones.

  “I’m not spending more than ten minutes on this,” he warned, “and I mean it when I say I won’t get to it until after midnight.”

  “Wonderful person,” I insisted.

  He hung up.

  The sun was low, hanging over the tops of the trees, but at that time of year night would come on quickly. I knew Lucinda wouldn’t be coming home until later, but I thought we might have dinner together. I wanted to talk things over with her, say out loud all the puzzling things in my head where our visitor was concerned. A slant of dying light filled in places all over the oak trees where leaves had been only hours before. Red illumination seemed to set the limbs on fire—and seemed an echo o
f the blood on my floor.

  I finished cleaning, trying not to think too much about the way Hovis had told me I had to help him. Even though he’d pointed his rifle at me, I decided he hadn’t really intended to shoot me.

  I sat in my living room, staring out the front window past the rockers on the porch at the beginnings of a sunset. I tried to make my mind connect the three stories the visitor had told, but I soon discovered that waking up at six in the morning and having your life threatened before sunset actually makes for a better nap than any kind of thinking.

  The phone woke me. I had no idea what time it was; the night outside had fallen black and moonless because of the cloud cover. I swam upward from a deep pool of sleep, fighting my way to the surface. The phone kept ringing. I managed at last to turn on a light beside my chair and stagger into the kitchen to make the phone stop bothering me.

  “Hello?” It didn’t even sound like my voice.

  “Fever?” Andrews even thought he might have dialed the wrong number.

  “What time is it?” I mumbled.

  “Two in the morning.” He was impatient. “I told you.”

  “You’re just doing this to prove a point,” I sighed, waking up a little.

  “Do you want to hear what I found out or not?”

  I turned on the kitchen light, which proved a mistake. It blinded me. I had to feel my way to a kitchen chair—noisily.

  “Okay,” I said, clearing my throat, “shoot.”

  “So to the point of my investigation: Either you’re screwing with me,” he sneered, “or someone’s screwing with you.”

  “Um.” I couldn’t think of anything better to say at that moment.

  “There was a Polly Hutchinson, all right, in your famous singing Hutchinson Family, but she died when she was eleven, of influenza, on tour with the family during the Civil War. There was also, however, a Polly Hutchinson who was a young singer in 1945 in Atlanta. She was a descendant of the patriarch of the singing family, Jesse Hutchinson, and she was married to a man whose name, whose given name—believe it or not—was Truck.”

  That woke me.

  “Truck?” I sat straight up.

  “I know,” he said, mistaking my response. “Even someone with a name like Fever can afford to make fun of the name Truck.”

  “What was his last name?” I held my breath, for some reason.

  “Truck? Wait … here it is. Jackson. Truck Jackson.”

  It would be an exaggeration to say that my brain exploded, but there were certainly all manner of facts and ideas colliding with enough force to give me a stirring headache.

  “Jackson.” I managed to repeat the name.

  “Why?” Andrews asked. “Is that important?”

  “Did you happen to find out anything more about that Polly Hutchinson?”

  “Like what?”

  “When she died?” I ventured.

  “Wait.” He shifted the phone to his other ear, and I heard papers rattling. “She’s still alive. Living in a granny high-rise close to the university, in fact. All of eighty-two years old. She was a large contributor to the opera when the Met—”

  “She’s still alive? Polly Hutchinson?”

  “Polly Hutchinson Jackson. Yes.”

  “I’ll be down there in the morning,” I said instantly. “I’ve got to get a few things straight in my mind, and make a few calls, but I’ll be there by eight this morning at the latest.”

  Right then I couldn’t have explained why I felt such great urgency, but I had to talk to this woman, ask her about Truck Jackson.

  “Wait, you mean you’re coming to my house?”

  “Would you mind? You don’t have to do anything more, except point me in the direction of the place where this woman lives.”

  “Do you want to stay here?”

  “As many times as you’ve stayed in my house,” I snapped, “you’re going to begrudge me—”

  “I’m not begrudging anything,” he groused, “but you usually invite me to stay, I don’t invite myself.”

  “You just did!” I insisted. “Earlier this very evening on the phone, you invited yourself up here.”

  “After—”

  “Right! After you turned down my invitation.”

  “Sort of.” He was losing steam. He hadn’t had a nap the way I had.

  “Look, I’m just saving us a few steps. Can I come stay with you or do I have to get a hotel room?”

  “Damn, Fever, of course you can stay here. Damn.”

  “You’re working too hard,” I told him. “It’s making you grouchy. You should go to bed.”

  “You know,” he said weakly, “you’re really … ”

  He couldn’t quite seem to verbalize what I was, really, so he just hung up.

  I stood there with the phone in my hand for, perhaps, a full two or three minutes, listening first to the dial tone, then to the sirenlike noise it made to warn me that it was off the hook, and finally to a recorded message that insisted I hang up. I did not. I stood listening to the silence afterward, because I liked the metaphor: After a good conversation, like a good life, there is a calm moment of the dial tone, followed by the panic of the moment of death, the final words from some professional, and finally … silence.

  I only took another three seconds after that to realize I was standing in my kitchen after two o’clock in the morning thinking about how peaceful death must be.

  I stood, touched the button, got a dial tone, and called Skidmore. Surely he would be used to people waking him up in the middle of the night.

  The phone rang for a good while before he answered.

  “Damn,” the gravel-gargling voice muttered.

  “Skidmore?” I whispered.

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Fever.”

  The night was so black that my kitchen window was a mirror. I couldn’t see anything outside; I only watched myself talking on the telephone.

  “What—” But he couldn’t form any more words.

  “I’m really sorry to call you at this hour, but I’ve just gotten some important news. I mean, news that might mean something to your current investigation.”

  “What time is it?” he managed.

  I glanced at the kitchen clock.

  “Two fifteen in the morning.”

  “What?”

  “Listen. Jesus. I had no idea you were such a sound sleeper. You might think that a person in your line of work—”

  “Fever!” He seemed a bit more awake.

  “The man who visited me last night said his name was Truck,” I reminded Skidmore.

  “He did?”

  “I told you that. Anyway, here’s the thing.” But at that moment I couldn’t quite figure out how to tell him I’d come to the conclusion manifested by my strange information.

  A man from the Civil War married a woman who lived in 1945 who was married to the thirty-year-old man I’d spoken with the night before who was the man from the Civil War. Suddenly I wasn’t certain I’d done the right thing in calling him.

  “Fever?” he growled into the phone. “You said, ‘Here’s the thing.’ So can you tell me ‘the thing’? Please.”

  “Yeah,” I grumbled, “the short of it is this: I believe that his last name was Jackson. Truck Jackson.”

  “Wait.”

  I could hear him sitting up in bed. I could even hear his wife, Girlinda, asking him what he was doing on the phone in the middle of the night.

  “Jackson?” he asked. He was nearly awake.

  “And while we do not have, I believe, that person at hand, we do have someone who looked an awful lot like him in the back room at the Deveroe Brothers’ Funeral Parlor. And you might be able to at least find out if he was a Jackson. Wouldn’t that seem to be an important—”

  “I’ll get Ms. Jackson first thing in the morning,” he said, clearing his throat. “Have her to look at the body.”

  “Although if he was a relative,” I ventured, “you’d have to wonder why she didn
’t report him missing.”

  “It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours yet.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Some of these Jackson boys,” he told me, “I mean some of her nephews that live up on the Bald? They can get on a pretty good drunk and be gone for a week, God knows where.”

  “Okay, but she would know if the dead man were a Jackson. And I’m going to Atlanta in a minute to follow up on something there, maybe somebody who knew the murderer.”

  “In Atlanta. You call Dr. Andrews?”

  “I did. All right, then. Sorry, again, to wake you.”

  He sighed. “You did the right thing. I’ll only be a little mad if Ms. Jackson says she don’t know who the dead man is. And if she does know him, I guess it might make some things easier to figure out.”

  “Tell Girlinda I’m sorry, do you mind? Your being mad at me is one thing, but the last thing in this world I need is to have Girlinda Needle upset with me.”

  “That’s the truth,” he agreed, and I could hear the grin in his words.

  We hung up, and I dialed Lucinda.

  She answered crisply on the second ring: “Lucinda Foxe.”

  “You don’t even sound like you were asleep,” I told her, only a little surprised.

  “Fever.” Her voice relaxed a bit. “You know, I get calls in the middle of the night all the time. And I’m kind of a light sleeper, as you are well aware.”

  “Yes.” I may have blushed a little. I thought I even sounded a little blushed. “So. I’m going to Atlanta in a second, I just wanted you to know.”

  “You found out something.”

  “Yes. I think it’s possible that the man we talked to last night was named Truck Jackson.”

  “Jackson? Oh my. That would be important. But remember he told me his name was Jacob.”

  “Jesus.”

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Jacob Jackson.”

  “Oh my God.” She understood.

  Someone named Jacob Jackson had been a young boy of sixteen in July 1863. At one o’clock on a hot afternoon, two Confederate signal guns fired to begin the worst artillery battle in the history of warfare—to that date. Jacob had come from a small town in Georgia called Blue Mountain, and was killed in Pickett’s Charge on that battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, but there was no mention of him anywhere in our town’s history—no statue, no notice, not even a grave marker in the Eden Cemetery.