The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “Well, believe it or not, that visitor is the reason I’m here.” I folded my arms and sat back, expression serene.

  She cocked her head in my direction.

  “I don’t know what it is about you,” she said slowly, “but you’ve got a thing.”

  She sighed heavily, pushed herself away from the breakfast bar, and motored back into the living room, sans glass.

  “So here’s the short of it, Dr. Devilin.” She crashed down into her place on the sofa. “Truck Jackson was, without a doubt, the love of my life. We were married for five years almost to the day—never an hour apart—when he got news that there was trouble at his home. He was from the North Georgia mountains, but he never talked about his relatives there, or his home.”

  “I thought you said his parents were from Paris.” I instantly regretted interrupting her.

  “He was only interested in me, and our life together!” she exploded. “I sang, he played trumpet; we did all right—and we wouldn’t have cared if we didn’t.”

  “So, he heard from his family in the mountains,” I said as soothingly as I could muster.

  “He got a telegram, believe it or not. There was no phone in his ancestral manse. Something about the fact that since his parents were dead—in Paris—there were questions about an inheritance from the older branch of the family. He told me he had to go, but he’d be back as quickly as he could. There was a train that went from Brookwood station here in Atlanta up to someplace called Pine City, the town next over from his. How he got from Pine City to his house in Blue Mountain—that’s his hometown, not just a mountain—I have no idea. But he walked in the front door, called out to his great-grandmother, heard a noise on the porch, and before he could even turn around his brother shot him dead. Shot him with an army pistol he’d gotten in the war. Don’t know why. Never found out. Wasn’t invited to the funeral, if there was one. I’m not even certain that they knew we were married. That was in 1950. Since then I’ve been married four more times—even though, as you see, I kept the last name of my first and only real husband—and outlasted every one of them. When the last one died, I came to live here. It’s my version of giving up.”

  She cast a disdainful eye about her place.

  “I have so much to ask you.” I turned off the tape recorder. “And I would like to talk to you about your singing, and your ancestry—I’m quite familiar with the Hutchinson Family and dying to know more about them. But at this moment I have to know who it was that sat in my kitchen who told me his name was Truck.”

  “Why?” It was a simple, obvious question.

  “Because that man, I think, killed his brother Monday night.”

  She pasted me with a withering glance.

  “Nice trick.” She smiled. “Better than most. Not falling.”

  “You seem to think I’m one of a group of people who’ve visited you before.” I smiled back. “The thing is, I’m telling you the truth, however ridiculous it may sound. It’s my only weapon. So I am genuinely wondering who all these other people to whom you refer—”

  “Government!” She spat the word. “Truck was involved in some top secret work after he almost died in Paris. Every couple of years since he actually died, someone like you comes to ask me questions. Once it was the pest control man, that was a good disguise. Once it was even a little girl trick-or-treating. Don’t know how they got her to pester me. That was before I moved here, of course. We get no trick-or-treaters here.”

  Her demeanor had changed so radically from the time I’d walked in the door to that moment that I had to take stock. It gradually dawned on me, as she played with the starched creases in her pants, that she was revealing the true reason she was living at Suncrest Village.

  “Why does Bob the security man keep letting them in?” I asked, fearing the answer.

  “He’s in on it!” She stared out the window. “He doesn’t talk to me in person, but I get these calls from him every now and again. They seem innocuous, but I know the score. He called me just before you came.”

  “Now I’ve upset you,” I told her, “and I hate that. I really just wanted to get some of your stories on tape.”

  “Oh, I know what you want.” She stood, not looking at me. “Time for you to go.”

  “Mrs. Jackson—”

  “Polly!” she shrieked. “How many God-damned times do I have to tell you?”

  She was on the verge, it was clear, of a blistering hysteria. The last thing I needed was to spend the rest of the morning explaining what I’d done to upset poor Mrs. Jackson in Villa 680.

  I managed to lift the photograph of her husband without her seeing, and stood, winding up the microphone cord.

  “I’m very sorry that I disturbed your morning.” I hurried as quickly as I could. “I had no intention of upsetting you, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart.”

  I pulled the tape recorder’s plug out of the wall with a rude jerk. The cord flew my way, and I caught it.

  Polly Jackson was breathing with great difficulty and staring at her carpeting.

  I lifted the Wollensak and pocketed the microphone, holding out my free hand to shake hers.

  She did not take it.

  “Did I offer you a mimosa?” Her eyes lifted in my direction, but did not meet mine.

  “I really ought to be going.” I backed toward the door.

  “I’m not certain … ” Her gaze drifted out the window.

  There was no telling what she was or was not certain about.

  I opened the door. She followed a few steps behind. I stumbled toward my truck and knew she was standing in the doorway watching me leave.

  “Do come again,” she said, draping the words in the sprightly overgarment of Southern courtesy. “And next time be certain to ask me about my favorite subject: me!”

  Her arms flared and one knee crooked, the parody of a showgirl.

  “Indeed.”

  I laid the tape recorder on the passenger seat, and when I turned to wave good-bye, she was gone and the door was closed.

  Ten

  As I drove out through the gates of Suncrest Village, waving at the security men, I tried my best to piece together what had happened. I’d dealt with Alzheimer’s patients before, and there were certainly hints of that in Polly Jackson’s behavior: the strange confusion of facts, the immediacy of the past, the notion that trick-or-treating children might be government spies. But I found the more lucid moments particularly haunting. I felt compelled to discover just how much of what she had told me was true.

  The trouble with my research in general is that it almost demands digression. I had a nearly overwhelming passion to find out more about the through line from the radical protest singers of the 1800s to this big-band singer who replaced Peggy Lee. What an article that would make. I also wanted to know more about Truck Jackson’s exploits in Paris, how his parents came to be there, so far from Blue Mountain. And what happened to Truck when he left Polly. Did his brother actually kill him?

  But as I pulled out onto Ponce de Leon, I realized how little sense any of it made. The man in my kitchen could not possibly have been Polly’s husband, or even her son.

  Damn, I thought, I forgot to ask her if she had children. That’s a pretty important fact of the matter. How could I have let her throw me off my game to such an extent? Damn.

  All the way back to Andrews’s house I tried to untangle the knot of evidence and information, lay it out in straight lines, make sense of it.

  I failed.

  Andrews’s house appeared before me just as I was deciding that everything Polly had told me was a lie, or at the very least a confused truth. I pulled into his driveway uncertain how to proceed. I’d been so sure I would get some kind of weird clarity out of talking to Polly Jackson, though I couldn’t have said why, exactly.

  I climbed out of my truck. The day had turned, quite nicely, into the dazzling sort of autumn morning: high clouds brushing a cobalt sky; rust-colored leaves dancing in the air; a warm m
oment in sunlight colliding constantly with a cold moment of shadow. I clutched the key ring, tried not to be distracted by the impossible beauty of the day, and made it to the door before it struck me that the question of inheritance had been, at least in Polly’s troubled mind, the reason for her husband’s death. As far as I knew, the Jackson clan scarcely had two roosters to rub together, let alone anything to pass on to progeny. What possible inheritance could have been worth murder?

  But mostly I was wondering if I might be able to find photos of the Jackson family online, or would I have to wait until I got back home? The man in Polly’s photograph was so much like the man who had visited me, I got a chill turning the key in Andrews’s door.

  The living room was comforting somehow, a bit warming. I went immediately into the kitchen to fix a bit more coffee for myself, clear away the mimosa. Unused as I was to drinking in the morning, I felt very disoriented, and the events in Polly’s home had made that sensation much worse. I was just beginning to calm down when the telephone rang and jangled my nerves once again. It seemed to ring ten times before the machine answered.

  After the audible mechanical answering message and the beep, I heard the voice of Andrews.

  “Fever? If you’re there, pick up.”

  I reached for the phone instantly. “You’re calling me?”

  “How did it go at the place? You didn’t get in to see her, right?”

  “Alas, as it happens,” I sighed. “I did. And it was a very weird encounter.”

  “You did see on their sign that the primary group who live there are what they euphemistically refer to as memory impaired.”

  “Yes,” I sneered, “and thank you so much for telling me that.”

  “I thought it would be more jolly for you if you discovered it for yourself.”

  “Right,” I grumbled. “Thank you again.”

  “Still, you got in. All’s well.”

  “But you won’t believe the scene that ensued.” I sniffed.

  “Look,” he said quickly, “if you can wait until I’m done today, I could go back to the mountains with you when I get home this afternoon. If you like.”

  “I thought you had—”

  “I handed in my tenure portfolio, I’ve finished meeting with all my advisees, and my seminar class could use a day to discuss things among themselves. I never cease to be amazed at the discoveries they make when they talk to each other instead of listen to me.”

  “Yes, that is amazing.” I failed to keep derision from invading the syllables.

  “Okay, shut up. Do you want me to go with you to the mountains or not?”

  “The fact is,” I admitted, “I really could use—”

  “All right, then, it’s settled. I should be home by three thirty.”

  “You don’t mind if I use your computer here in the meantime, do you?”

  “Of course not. See you in a bit.”

  He hung up.

  I only paused a moment to consider that there must be some ulterior motive in Andrews’s change of heart. That would come to light by and by. I had more important issues to investigate.

  How, for example, could the same man have fought in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II—and then visited my house in the first decade of the twenty-first century? I was very excited to see if I could find photos of all these men, even more adrenalating to think that they might all be of the same face.

  By the time Andrews got home, I’d spent a very frustrating five hours, on and off, going from one Web site to another without finding anything of use. It had only exacerbated my primary objection to Internet research: a million miles wide and half an inch deep.

  I’d found plenty of gruesome photos of the battle at Gettysburg, many more than the Mathew Brady lot I’d expected. No familiar faces had appeared. I’d also found that the Jackson family had, indeed, seen family members in all three wars in question, including the anticipated bit of information that during the Civil War, Jacksons had fought on both sides of the conflict. After that I’d spent a relatively heartbreaking half an hour contemplating the brother-against-brother notion of that war, and another ten minutes wondering if wars had always been fought for a combination of lofty ideals and venal greed. It proved a very depressing exercise, so I turned to a bit of research concerning the singing Hutchinson Family.

  Originally known as the Tribe of Jesse (after the founding sire), they split into two organizations just before the Civil War (Tribe of John and Tribe of Asa), both billing themselves as the Hutchinson Family and touring soldier encampments. Brother against brother again.

  I tried to escape into more modern times, hoping to find Polly Hutchinson’s picture with the Goodman band. Alas, according to all the research I could dig up, no one named Polly Hutchinson had ever sung for that organization. Peggy Lee replaced Helen Forrest, but that was the only information I could find. The sad business of searching for Polly Hutchinson yielded only private genealogical Web sites that had nothing to do with my Polly, pioneer women who had died in the 1800s, a swimming pool supply company. Of the woman I had met, the vast electronic ocean yielded nothing, and was silent.

  So by the time Andrews arrived, I was lying on the sofa in his living room trying to sleep.

  “Well, this is fine,” he grumbled, coming in the door. “I’m out slaving over a hot stove all day while you’re here sleeping in your nice cool sewer.”

  I opened my eyes.

  “Are you actually trying to quote The Honeymooners to me? Have you completely lost your entire English sensibility?”

  “It’s a funny line.” He closed the door behind him. “Catching a nap?”

  “Keeping depression at bay,” I corrected him.

  “Ah, Internet research,” he deduced immediately, “I know how you despise it. Fortunately for you, I am a proud citizen of the twenty-first century and have waded the waters for you. This so-called Truck Jackson whom you seek? His family was from your neck of the woods, as you people say up in, well, your neck of the woods.”

  “You know that I already knew that, right?”

  “You did?” He stopped midmotion. “Did we talk about this? I’m telling you, this semester is so absolutley insane I barely remember what I’ve told one person before I’m making something up for the next. Damn it. You knew this? Of course you knew this. He was from Blue Mountain. I wasted hours of valuable time helping you find something you already—”

  “Hours, Gracie?”

  “All right, minutes, George,” he admitted, “but I don’t have any to spare.”

  “Not a minute to spare?”

  “Are you mocking me?” He scowled.

  “As much as I can in my present state. I’m depressed. Polly Jackson, the woman I met this morning, is … ” What, exactly, was she?

  “She’s one of your famous reverse ghosts,” Andrews answered my unspoken question. “She’s a woman whose body is still here with us, but whose spirit, or most of it, has already gone. That’s your theory I’m quoting.”

  “I know my theory.” I sighed heavily, trying to sit up. “That’s what I find so sad. I liked the woman I met when I first came into her home.”

  “But by the time you left,” he responded in a very somber tone, “that woman had vanished.”

  “Yes.”

  “My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and lived with us toward the end. One moment I was little Winnie and she was telling me about the good old days of England, a time when the Maypole had been the center of most towns, instead of the War Memorial. And the next moment she didn’t know who the hell I was and accused me of stealing her diamond earrings—which, of course, she had never possessed. My parents dealt with it fairly well, but I was only seven years old. It scared the bejesus out of me.”

  I let a second of reflection pass before forcing the mood to move on.

  “She called you Winnie?” I could not keep the glee from my voice.

  “It’s short for Winton, she only—”

  “But Winnie? Re
ally?”

  “God, am I sorry I—”

  “The Adventures of Winnie and Fever,” I intoned. “Brought to you by Bon Ami, the friendly kitchen cleaner!”

  “I’ll pay you twenty dollars to shut up.”

  “As it happens, I’m a bit strapped for cash.” I shut up and held out my hand.

  “I’m packing.” He headed for his room. “I’m going with you up to the hills of Habersham, but I’m not talking to you for the next three days.”

  “There’s a blessing,” I fired back. “Where’s my twenty?”

  “Perhaps you should look for it in your hat.”

  He vanished into his room.

  Half an hour later we were on the road. Alas, so was every other resident of the state of Georgia, and all seemed bent on killing me—me, personally. We achieved the downtown connector a little after five thirty and spent the next hour in parking-lot traffic before we were past the perimeter.

  “At this rate,” Andrews yawned, glaring at the setting October sun, “we’ll be in your house by midnight.”

  “Once we’re past the—”

  “At this time of day the traffic goes like this past Canton,” he snapped.

  “Um, okay,” I responded, “then why didn’t we wait at your place for a while?”

  “It’s like this until after seven!”

  “Calm down. Christ. You’d think that you were the out-of-towner, not me.” I started humming to myself, an old tune called “Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier.”

  “If you keep up that noise, I’ll sing ‘Henry the Eighth,’ loud as a bastard, over and over again—the Herman’s Hermits song. I can do it.”

  “You’re testy.”

  He slumped. “I really need this vacation.”

  “It’s not a vacation,” I warned him. “It’s a murder investigation.”

  “Pa-tay-toe, pa-tah-toe.” He rolled the syllables around in his mouth with great exaggeration.

  “All right.” I sighed. “Here, very briefly, are the facts. A man came to my house Monday night, told me a weird story, disappeared, and then either ended up dead on a back road the next morning, or ended up killing a man who looked almost exactly like him by the next morning.”