The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “I do not,” I confessed, staring at the painting.

  In the painting, a young woman in a full-length dress was walking across the surface of a lake under a full moon’s light, and everywhere she had stepped a water lily, red and white, had appeared. The painting hung over the marble mantel of a modern fireplace.

  “May I offer you some sort of beverage?” she asked briskly. “You don’t appear to be a brandy-this-early sort of a person, but one never knows.”

  I tore my gaze from the painting and found her eyes equally disconcerting.

  “What are you having?” I asked.

  “I’m having just the tiniest bit of mimosa. The champagne is very crisp—though it’s only Saint-Hilaire.”

  “What sort of a person would I be, indeed,” I told her, rallying, “if I didn’t keep you company.”

  “That’s the spirit!” She moved toward the kitchen immediately.

  The kitchen was a tiny galley affair, built for efficiency. Hers was stocked with gleaming chromium appliances and dazzling All-Clad cookware, which hung from a rack attached to the ceiling over a sort of breakfast bar.

  “We’ll talk in the living room, if you don’t mind,” she said as she poured a full glass from a pitcher on the counter. “You can set up your tape recorder in there.”

  I turned toward the sofa. There was a very nice burled coffee table upon which several fine magazines were displayed. I fanned out three copies of Better Homes and Gardens and set the Wollensak on them. One of her lamps was close by, and I plugged in next to it. The multidirectional microphone was placed at the other end of the table, atop a recent issue of Gourmet, and I was set.

  She glided in with a glass in each hand, handed one to me, and planted herself just right of center on the sofa, legs crossed, arm out, ready for anything.

  I took one of the wing chairs, sipped, smiled, and nodded my thanks.

  “And they say Southern hospitality is dead.” I saluted her with the glass.

  “Who would say a thing like that?” Her eyes were blazing into mine.

  “Mrs. Jack—”

  “Polly,” she insisted.

  “Would you mind if I said that you’re not remotely the person I expected to find?”

  “I pride myself on making a career, Dr. Devilin, of confounding expectations. As you may well know, I sang with Benny Goodman after Peggy married Dave Barbour, the guitar player, and she left the band. By 1950 she was in Mr. Music at Paramount, with Bing. My point is that no one believed I could hold a candle to my greatest rival. But I had the last laugh. Peggy had so many face-lifts toward the end there that her gob was stuck in a perpetual grimace. I suggested that she play the Grinch on television, but nobody would listen. I, on the other hand, remain to this day as God made me—well, God, collagen, and Botox, but let’s not quibble. Whose countenance reigns supreme today, I ask you?”

  “If by Peggy you mean Goodman’s singer Peggy Lee,” I said slowly, “you are the undisputed queen—though I risk being ungentlemanly if I am forced to point out that she is, in fact, dead.”

  “There you are!” Her hand gestured so wildly that I feared a mimosa shower, but not a drop escaped her glass. “Who’s lasted and who hasn’t, that’s my point. Let her try to sing with anyone now. It’s almost impossible to get a recording contract once you’re dead. Whereas I will shortly release my newest CD, which I’m now, in your honor, going to call I’m Alive and Peggy Lee Is Dead So Who Would You Rather Have Singing to You in Your Living Room?”

  “It’s a long title.” I sat back and sipped again.

  “Well, that’s what these kids today go for.”

  “I see.”

  “All right.” She set her drink down on a side table and leaned forward. “I think I’ve charmed you enough, at least for the moment.

  What’s this all about?”

  “I am, believe it or not, a folklorist,” I said evenly. “I collect and preserve all sorts of things—”

  “No.” She folded her hands. “You may be a folklorist or you may be a used car salesman, but neither occupation applies, exactly, to the reason you’re here.”

  Her face was filled with light.

  “Yes.” I set down my drink as well, midway between tape recorder and microphone. “I’ve come to ask you about your husband.”

  “Really.” It wasn’t a question, it was more an accusation.

  “Was his name Truck Jackson?”

  “It was.” She sighed. “And it wasn’t.”

  “Sorry?”

  “How much do you know about his exploits during World War Two?” Her lips thinned. “Are you from the government?”

  “God, no,” I assured her, reaching for my wallet.

  I produced my card from the society. She glanced at it, the soul of skepticism.

  “When I was sixteen I acquired a cabaret license that said I was twenty-two.” Her voice had grown cold. “You don’t really expect me to believe this one, do you?”

  I sat back. I wondered what secret she could be hiding that would make her so suspicious.

  “I was on the faculty of the university that exists just five minutes from here.” I put my card back. “If you like, you can call over there and ask them why they shut down their folklore department, and what ever happened to Dr. Devilin, that nice man who used to go around asking people all those quaint questions. Or you could call Dr. Winton Andrews, who still works there, and ask him to vouch for me. Or you could call the ex-governor and ask him how his mother is doing, the one whose stories are mentioned in Dr. Devilin’s book Ancient Wisdom for the Twenty-first Century. His local number is 404-345—”

  “I should call your bluff,” she said, “but I don’t have that many gentleman callers anymore, and I like a certain level of delusion with my mimosas or they don’t taste as good. So let’s say for the moment that you’re fascinated by me, and you’re trying to loosen me up by making me think the subject is my husband, Truck.”

  “You’ve found me out.” I picked up my drink. “Why maintain the charade? I’m a fan, and will always be. I heard you once at the Rainbow Room in New York.”

  “There you go.” She sat back, flashing a Buddha smile. “That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for—ignoring the fact that I never sang at the Rainbow Room. I’m not quite ready for my close-up yet, Mr. DeMille.”

  “Let’s take this tack, then,” I countered. “You couldn’t have been much more than sixteen years old when you met Truck Jackson, who had just returned from, I believe, Paris, where he fought for the resistance. He was fairly young himself.”

  Her eyes instantly acquired a haze, a bit of saltwater, and a faraway look. “He saw me at the Egyptian Ballroom at the Fox theatre on New Year’s Eve, 1945.”

  Her cheek tinted ever-so-slightly red. After more than sixty years, the thought of that night made her blush. I had, once again, the same sensation I’d had when the man in my kitchen had been talking: that time was more malleable than I ordinarily thought; that a fond enough memory was only a yesterday away, no matter what the calendar said.

  “He was a young soldier,” I prompted.

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, her eyes still lost in a vision of the past. “He was dressed in a blue double-breasted suit. He knew Dag, one of the trumpet players in the band, and after midnight he convinced Dag to let him sit in. He played beautifully, and I told him so. He told me he’d only done it to catch my eye.”

  She looked down at her mimosa as if she had no idea what it was.

  “It worked, then,” I said softly.

  “You haven’t turned on your tape recorder,” she answered, looking up at me.

  “I usually ask first.” I cleared my throat. “Would you mind if I turned it on now?”

  She nodded once. Before I had a chance to adjust the microphone, she started talking again.

  “Do you know about his parents, Truck’s parents?”

  “His parents?” I glanced up at her.

  “They lived in Paris; that�
��s where Truck was born. When they heard that their son had been captured, they flew without a second’s thought straight to the detention hall where the boy was held. His father told the Nazis, ‘I’m an American citizen. This isn’t our war. This boy is just a little simple. He was just exploring the sewers for fun. There’s no need to keep him here.’ That’s where Truck was captured, in the sewers. He was trying to blow up a munitions dump. The Nazi lieutenant who was in charge of the boys-in-sewers division of Nazi headquarters disagreed. The Nazi lieutenant arrested them all—Truck and his parents. Truck tried to get his parents off by saying they were just protecting him, trying to shield him—that they didn’t know anything about his activities. But in the end, they were all arrested. His mother, Truck’s mother, made an unusual plea. She asked the Nazi to keep the family together. The lieutenant told her he would ask—but what happened wasn’t up to him. He had his orders … like everyone else. That, of all things, made Truck’s mother angry, but her voice was not defiant. It was kind—even sympathetic. ‘I don’t take orders from anyone,’ she said. ‘I’m fighting to keep my home and my family. You’re fighting because someone orders you to. I’m fighting because I’m in love in Paris.’ Isn’t that wonderful? Don’t you just love her?”

  I nodded.

  “The next few weeks were a nightmare,” she continued, increasingly in a sort of trance. “The lieutenant had, in fact, seen to it that the Jackson family were not separated. But his higher-ups were convinced beyond any doubt that this was a famous saboteur family, and they must be publicly executed to curtail further instances of such nuisance. There was even a trial, of sorts. The Jacksons were not allowed to speak. The Nazi judge was clear on that subject. ‘Paris is now a German city, and as such only allows German citizens the rights normally accorded in a court of law. As you three are not German citizens, you have no voice in my court.’ The three were sentenced to be shot, along with about fifty or so other resistance fighters, on November first, La Toussaint, All Saints’ Day. The prisoners were taken to the outskirts of the city at noon on November first. They were forced to dig trenches. They all knew what the trenches were for. When the digging was finished, the prisoners were lined up in a neat row with their backs to the trenches. Young Nazi soldier boys lined up opposite them—only a few feet away—and were given orders to fire their guns into the prisoners.”

  She took a long gulp of her drink, not looking my way, and continued.

  “The second before the rifles exploded, at the last possible moment, like a dance, or a curtain call, Truck’s parents both stepped in front of their son—simultaneously, gracefully. It was a final, sweeping Tango step. Bullets ripped their bodies and they were dead before they fell backward, on top of their son. Bulldozers moved in and shoved the bodies into the trenches, then covered them with a little dirt. But the Nazi in charge of the mass execution of the innocents had forgotten to bring the lime, so the burial activity was ordered to cease for the moment. They left the dirt loose and the grave shallow, deciding to come back the next day with the lime. By sunset the Nazi troops were gone.”

  She took another healthy drink and closed her eyes. This was obviously an often-told tale—the words were part of a script that had long since been set in her mind, but the emotion with which she was saying them was disturbingly immediate.

  “Then—after it was certain that absolutely no one else was around—Truck began to move. He could barely breathe. The dirt choked his lungs. The tangle of dead limbs and bloody faces seemed to beg him to stay, almost tried to hold him in the grave. But he wrestled upward, into the light of the setting sun, red on the western horizon. He was not thinking. He was only moving. When he found himself free of his tomb, he noticed that a bullet had grazed his left thigh. The blood had already dried. He tried to stand, but found he could not. He tried not to cry, or to scream or to dig into the ground in the hope of finding his mother and his father also, somehow, miraculously alive. He knew better. All he could do was sit on their grave and watch the sun set. Some time after dark, he dragged himself into the woods nearby and fell asleep under a pile of leaves. When he woke up he looked all around, got his bearings, took a deep breath, and walked to Spain. I met him three months later in the Fox theatre in Atlanta, Georgia.”

  Tears were running down her cheeks. Both our drinks were gone.

  “We were married the next May—May Day, in fact.”

  No note I could take, no description I could imagine, not even the tape recorder could hope to capture the absolute melancholy in her voice. During the course of her story she had turned from autumn’s sunlight to winter’s rain.

  The gentle objectivity in which I’d been trained forced me to derail the mood in order to keep the information flowing.

  “You don’t have a picture of him, do you?” It was the first thing that came into my mind.

  “Surely.” She stood and moved quickly, hand outstretched, to the marble mantel, snatching a small wood-framed photograph.

  She didn’t look at it. She thrust it in my direction.

  “That’s him, holding his trumpet.”

  I flashed to my feet and reached for the picture. Maybe it was the mimosas, or the fact that I stood too quickly, but I lost my balance when I saw the face in the photograph and nearly came down onto the coffee table.

  She reached her hand my way, absently, much more a gesture of help than an actual attempt to catch me. I steadied myself like a tightrope walker and looked down at the picture again.

  There he was: the man who had been in my kitchen. His hair was different, and the look in his eye was … what? More innocent? Still, they were both obviously related—closely related.

  “Would you mind if I borrowed this?” I managed to ask.

  “I would mind.” She shook her head. “You can’t have it.”

  My head was swimming. To keep from appearing a complete idiot, I ran over the details of her story in my mind, looking for anything that might mean something to my current inquiry, something to hold on to. I found something quickly, even though it was absurd.

  “You described the parents’ final gesture,” I said in tones as warm as I could manage, trying to clear my head, “as a Tango step.”

  “I did?” She returned to her seat.

  “Why would you, I’m just curious, use such a description?” I was thinking about the way the stranger had talked to me about the invention of the Tango.

  She shrugged, struggling to rally from the story.

  “Didn’t the Tango figure into the death of his father, Jacob?” I asked carefully.

  “Jacob wasn’t his father,” she said quickly, hand flying in the air. “That was his brother.”

  The second she finished her sentence I could tell she regretted saying it. She opted for the perfect hostess response.

  “Another mimosa?” She stood.

  “I’m fine, thanks. The story you told me is one you’ve told hundreds of times, I can tell that. Sometimes you use a certain phrase and it’s just a part of the rhythm and you hardly think about the origin of the phrase, but I’m wondering about it, since I know that Truck’s mother was quite the Tango expert.”

  It was a gamble. Even though the things the stranger told me in my kitchen could not have been completely accurate, I had decided to use them as a factual basis out of which to ask questions. The risk was that things the strange young man had told me were not at all related to the things that Polly Jackson knew.

  “Truck never talked about his mother.” She’d clamped down. Her voice was iron, and she moved with great deliberation into the kitchen to renew her drink.

  “So when you said Tango—”

  “Tango, Charleston, Peppermint Twist. Damn, I could have said anything! It was a story, a touching story from long ago. Why are you harping on the details?”

  “Professional hazard.” I tried to make it sound like an apology. “Unfortunately the gold, for me, is often in the details. Sometimes my interest in them can be taken for rudeness. Please b
elieve me when I say that I’m fascinated, even if I seem obnoxious. I want to hear everything.”

  She stopped her movements in the kitchen, set down her glass, leaned on the breakfast bar, and glared out at me.

  “Well, I’m done. You’re pretty good at this. Better than the others. I can usually drag out the old stories and turn on the tears and have them running for the hills. Nobody ever caught the Tango thing before.”

  I knew I had to be very careful with my response: I really didn’t know what she was talking about, but I had to answer her as if I did, or the conversation would likely be over. I decided, inexplicably, to employ something very much like the truth.

  “I had a visit from Truck on the night before last—Monday night, late.”

  She was a statue. She didn’t even blink.

  “He told me about his mother’s interest in the Tango, and even discussed a man named Discépolo, sometimes referred to as the Tango Philosopher.”

  A Cheshire smile appeared on her face.

  “Some of the others tried this,” she said sweetly, “deliberately trying to confuse me. Truck’s been dead for more than fifty years. And you were doing so well with your odd manners and your folklore disguise. Now I can dismiss you. Still, you got farther than most.”

  “A man who told me his name was Truck sat in my kitchen Monday night and talked to me about a murder in Chicago—the murder of his father.”

  She stayed where she was, preferring to keep the kitchen island in between us—and some heavy, skull-crushing pots close at hand, I imagined.

  “Well, that’s a different story.” She had mustered a bit of dramatic irony, it seemed. “How old was he?”

  “Perfect question,” I answered. “Couldn’t have been more than thirty.”

  She exploded in a coughing sort of laughter for a moment or two.

  “You know, I don’t look it,” she managed after the laughter had subsided a bit, “but I may be a touch older than that. And Truck was older than me—not by much, but still.”