The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  Just to see what answer he’d offer, I smiled as wryly as I could and asked Red, “How’s business?”

  “Good.” He smiled back. He had all his teeth. “We’re in five states now. And the stuff you buy that you like so much, from those people up behind Hek’s church? You know they buy it from me, don’t you? I’m the only one who crafts in bulk on this mountain. I make three grades, you buy the best.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Don’t let it get out, hear? I need a certain reputation. The fact is, I am a state-licensed distiller. I’m ashamed to admit it, but all this is squeaky legal. I don’t know what my granddad would say.”

  “I can’t believe—” I began.

  “Have a look,” Toby told me, “at www.jackapple.com. Even got us a kind of a theme song I guess you’d call it. I wrote it.”

  Temporarily at a loss, I finally managed to say, “It certainly is the twenty-first century.”

  “Sad to say,” Red agreed, nodding. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, if you can.”

  Red and Toby turned without further ado and headed back up the ridge.

  Twenty-one

  I watched the Jackson family distillers vanish into the darkness at the top of the rim. For a moment I was transported back into the long past, a time when the Jacksons still remembered what their homes in England or Scotland had looked like; I despaired that every bit of the folklore I loved was gone from the hills of my home. Then I heard Andrews calling.

  “Are you coming or am I going?”

  I ran after, and arrived at his side not so far from the fence we’d toppled.

  The prisoner was babbling, barely audibly, and seemed to be quoting Heidegger’s Being and Time, but I could have been projecting—most of what he said was incoherent.

  Andrews made it to the truck and shoved the poor man in while I managed to restore the portion of fence we’d knocked down. I couldn’t fasten it to the rest of the fence, but I leaned it very neatly and called it a job well done.

  I was in the truck in a matter of minutes, only to find our companion dead asleep.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Andrews said nervously as I climbed in behind the steering wheel. “He just conked out like this. In a flash, honestly.”

  “I believe you,” I told him, cranking the ignition. “He did this in my kitchen on Monday night. Although it could be a ploy. When I called Skidmore because I thought he was asleep, he vanished.”

  “Right.” Andrews eyed the snoring man with intense suspicion.

  The drive back to my place was bumpy and silent after that. I decided not to tell Andrews the horrible truth about Red’s business. I knew that Andrews would enjoy his beverage infinitely less if he knew that it was all legal—not to mention available on the Internet. Which, of course, was what made Red’s performance so spectacular: the knowledge that his clientele relished a certain romantic image. It was good for business. So much of American advertising is a game of playing to reductive stereotypes in the general television psyche, in fact, that Red’s behavior may well have been essential to his sales.

  That’s what kept me silent on the drive home. Andrews used the time to perfect his seething mechanism. The third of our unholy trio appeared to dream his way through that short portion of the night.

  The truck’s headlights blared onto my front porch in no time, and I pulled closer than usual. I had the intuition that our prisoner might try something once Andrews opened his door.

  “Here we are!” I announced happily, nudging the sleeping man with my elbow. “Wake up!”

  He seemed to drag himself from the arms of nepenthe with great difficulty.

  “Your house?” He licked his lips and swallowed. “I thought we were taking me to the sheriff.”

  “We’re calling him from here.” I opened my door. “I want to get some answers before he gets ahold of you.”

  “I see.” He seemed to be waking up.

  “Don’t let go of him, Andrews,” I cautioned, climbing down out of the truck.

  “Not to worry,” Andrews answered, clamping a vise-grip hand onto the man’s arm.

  “Oww,” the man complained.

  I hurried to the front door. The air had become bitter, and the moon was gone again. For some reason I was eager to turn on lights, start something on the stove, make noise.

  I threw the door open with a jarring rattle and flipped several switches at once. Artificial daylight flooded the porch, the living room, and the kitchen.

  “The kitchen seems the right place,” I told Andrews.

  In a relatively small number of steps, Andrews had marched the man into the house and seated him, rather roughly, at the kitchen table.

  “There,” I said, pleased, “just as you were on Monday night.”

  “But it’s not Monday night,” he said, grinning. “Even if you can’t see Time’s water move, you still can’t step in the same stream twice.”

  “Yes, about that,” I told him, taking a chair on the other side of the table. “If you think you can outcrazy me, think again. Ask anybody. I’m pretty much the acknowledged master in this state.”

  “But to be fair,” Andrews added, “Dr. Devilin’s had training from childhood. His parents were monstrous lunatics, at least in his mind, and they bathed him in crazy from an early age.”

  “Look,” the man said, leaning into the kitchen table, “you don’t believe I’m Truck Jackson. That doesn’t matter to me. It’s only a name. I know who I am. What’s got you nervous is that you don’t know what to believe about me.”

  “Whereas it’s not so difficult for me.” Andrews took a seat at last. His face was red, and his hair was a crown of golden flames. “I know you’re a lunatic, and a killer. You’re about to be put far away, and I’m glad.”

  “No.” The man sat back in his seat, face absolutely serene. “I won’t be here much longer. Later tonight I’ll lose my grip on this illusion, and I’ll be back where I belong, in my own part of the River of Time—long before any of this happens.”

  “Oh.” Andrews slammed an exasperated hand down hard on the red tabletop. “Now you’re a time traveler? Jesus God in Cleveland—”

  “Not now,” he snapped. “Always. I’ve always been—”

  “Stop!” I demanded. “I don’t care about any of that. I need a few specific answers. If you give them to me, everything will be fine. If you don’t, Dr. Andrews is liable to take one of my kitchen knives and see to it that you return to your own time with much less equipment than you had when you arrived here.”

  “With great glee,” Andrews assured us all.

  My kitchen was an odd setting for such a violent insinuation, and I was forced to reflect that perhaps the spilling of blood, specifically from Hovis Daniels very recently, had somehow contaminated the spirit of the room. I found myself distracted, suddenly, by the fact that I had threatened a man with a gun—a gun that was still in my pocket. There had been, I realized then, a very strange atmosphere in my entire house since Monday night when the stranger had first paid a visit. I felt the merest sliver of ice in my veins; the faint smell of gunpowder assailed my nostrils.

  “Let me explain something to you,” the man told Andrews suddenly, daggers in his eyes. “Time is easy to travel. Everyone does it.”

  Andrews was so startled by the force in the man’s words that his head snapped back and he was instantly on the defensive.

  “It can be something as simple as mowing the lawn,” the man said, his demeanor changed again—he was filled with overflowing agape. “The smell of fresh grass, the way the air plays with that smell. One second you’re mowing your own lawn and the next you’re a boy at your parents’ house in Indiana, lying on your back watching white horses made out of clouds race each other toward the end of the afternoon. Most people only experience it for a breath or two, because they can’t hold on to it. They’re afraid to. They’re afraid they’ll drown in the River of Time. But if you linger, if you grab a fistful of grass and forget, for just the b
link of an eye, what you are, then you can better grasp where you are. And where you are is primarily a question of where you want to be at any given moment—in my experience. And these experiences are not novel.”

  “Yes, look,” Andrews stammered extremely impatiently, “you’re not Billy Pilgrim and this isn’t that kind of novel.”

  “Billy Pilgrim?” the man said, confused.

  “Isn’t that the guy in the Vonnegut novel who came unstuck in time?” Andrews asked, turning my way. “I have to teach it next week.”

  “Slaughterhouse-Five,” I confirmed. “But I’m not certain—”

  “You don’t know squat!” the man exploded at Andrews. “Not everything is in a book. Most things are in the human mind. I’m here in this kitchen because I chose to be, because I picked this time to wander in.”

  “But—” Andrews began.

  “Why?” I asked the man suddenly. “Why this time? Why here; why now?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” Andrews snapped at me. “Seriously,” I said to the man, ignoring Andrews. “What are you doing here?”

  I had learned many times that the more you try to get people to deny their illusions, the stronger the illusions can become. But if you indulge those delusions instead, they often fall apart all on their own.

  For a moment my trick seemed to be working. The man was at a loss for what to say. Andrews nodded, slowly understanding my ploy.

  “I’ve come to stop the cycle.” His voice had gone ghostly quiet.

  In fact, his demeanor had shifted so dramatically that Andrews let go of him and drew in a shaky breath.

  The man sat at my table, staring into space.

  “Cain slew Abel,” he began, “brother against brother. Ever since the world began, men have been killing their brothers. I can’t stand it anymore. It has to stop. I have to kick the cogs of Time—kick the wheels until they come loose.”

  “So you said.” I sat with him at the table. “But that’s not what you did. You didn’t stop anything. You killed a man.”

  Andrews took a few steps back, still wary.

  “I guess I did.” His face was snow.

  “Why?”

  “I am the one who murders his brother time after time. I’ve killed so many men. I was just in a war—just now.”

  “But why do you keep doing it?” I stared.

  “The moon shivered behind a thick cloud, and there was a darkness over all the earth.” He wasn’t talking to me; he was reciting something. “Then, like black wings plummeting to earth, my hands darted to grab his shirt. I threw him sideways, hard, to the ground. I knelt on top of him, my knees in his stomach and chest, so he could not move or breathe. My face was nearly touching his. My teeth could have gnawed out his eyes. I had to know, why did he leave me?”

  “He left you?” I whispered.

  “To fight for strangers.”

  “The Civil War?” Andrews asked.

  “Why did he kill our land and tear up our spirits and leave us all for dead?” the man raved on. “Why did he send me out into this world to be a wandering spirit? I was shaking him so violently that I thought his neck might snap. He tried to talk, but I cut him off. He was a traitor and a coward, and I wanted not one word from him. Not one! He ruined this land. He destroyed his own home. No crops, no land, no money, no food, no work, no clothes, no books, no music, no joy, no life, no health, no heart, no hope. Only rage and desolation. He left his family in their deepest time of need. He was my brother. God Almighty-damn-damn-damn, I ought to kill him a hundred times! A million times! He was my brother. I loved him so much.”

  Whatever the man was seeing in his mind’s eye provoked tears.

  “But what happened Monday night?” I insisted. “This Monday night?”

  “Suddenly the moon broke free and a shower of silver light bathed his face. It was radiant. It was holy. It was beaming brighter than the sun and moon and stars. He threw his arms around me and pulled me so close to him I thought he’d crush all the life out of me, and I could not move. His voice was like small white wings beating close to my ear. ‘I loved you too. I loved you too. I loved you too.’ He kept saying it to me over and over again.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I asked him my question: ‘Then why did you leave?.’”

  “What did he say?”

  “He nearly crushed me, holding me to him, but his voice was gentler than ever, and he said, ‘Christ Almighty, brother—why did you stay?’ And I only realized the answer to that question as I was saying it to him, in the moment I heard myself speaking the words. I said, ‘You weren’t the only one with a conviction. I stayed for this. This land—the ripe and growing fields. My God.”

  “Is he talking about Cain and Abel,” Andrews whispered, “or the Civil War?”

  I just shook my head.

  “The wind picked up for a moment,” the man continued, “and all about us a sort of rustle—the whisper of the healed land—rose up to my ears. I heard, at last, on Monday night, how the land had been reborn. I had, in a single terrible moment, veered wildly out into the yawning chasm of God’s Footprint, a chasm so wide and deep I could have been swallowed up again by it, as I had, I supposed, in lifetimes before. But then, because my brother had held me fast, I had not fallen downward, and I was saved. Because my brother had held me fast. The land had already been reborn. It was only waiting for me to join it. Then, like God’s Own Grasp opening up, we released each other from our mutual embrace. Time gave us up to its more ordinary slipstream: a world where we were essentially strangers and a little startled to be standing so oddly close in the autumn night. We were actors again, standing outside our characters for the moment, wondering at the strange scene we’d just played out. And in our wonder, we just stared. I have no idea what our laughter must have sounded like at a distance—demon curses or angel wings—but to us it was the sound two rivers make coming together again after long and separate journeys over many a rock and stone.”

  “So,” Andrews hissed, unable to grasp it all, “you reconciled?”

  “We did.” The man nodded once, and a look of great beatification came over him. “Now I can go back home.”

  “But—” Andrews began.

  “Who killed the man, then?” I asked bluntly.

  “You don’t understand,” the man said sweetly, looking into my eyes with a Buddha’s compassion. “He’s not dead; he went home. That husk you found? That’s just a conveyance. I just pulled away the husk and let the spirit go free. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing?” Andrews was on the verge of exploding. “You sling around all this bleeding talk about ending the cycle of violence by killing someone? This is American thinking at its finest.”

  “All young people go through a period of naive idealism,” the man snapped. “It’s one of the things that keeps the wheels of Time well oiled, also one of the things that makes God laugh out loud.”

  “Fever!” Andrews demanded. “I renew my original request: Would you please shoot this man in the head? I don’t want to kill him, because I think that would be playing into his little game, somehow, but I would like to shake him up a little—and give him a scar like he gave me.”

  “Look,” I said to the man, “I’m a little in the mood to agree with Dr. Andrews here. I don’t care about time travel or your cosmic mission. Since you don’t seem to think you killed a man, I want to know what you thought you were doing coming to my house on Monday night—and to Lucinda’s.”

  “Research, my friend.” He pounded the tabletop. His aspect had shifted again. He was hearty and boisterous. “Pure and simple. I’m something of a folklorist, like yourself, and wanted to gather a bit of interesting information before I went home. I talked to Hovis because he was right there where my brother was. Hovis got me to Lucinda. She got me to you. That’s about all I had time for. I had to get ready to go home myself after that.”

  “No.” I sat back. “In the first place, you did all the talkin
g. You didn’t ask any questions. And in the second place, we found you hiding out in a cave, not getting ready—”

  “Linear time,” the man said, laughing and shaking his head as if he were amused by a child’s inability to grasp an adult concept.

  As he was laughing, he relaxed. As he relaxed, he leaned back in his chair. As he leaned back in his chair, his coat fell open. As his coat fell open, his clothes were revealed.

  He was wearing a tattered Confederate army uniform from the Civil War.

  Twenty-two

  Our visitor seemed unaware of what he’d uncovered, that he’d revealed such a startling costume, but Andrews saw it, and shot me a glance that could have knocked me out of my chair.

  “You can’t tell me,” the man went on, apparently oblivious to us, “either of you, that you haven’t ever experienced some kind of time travel. I mean, just talking with Hovis Daniels, now, there’s a human who travels time, don’t you think? I listen to his stories and I’m taken out of the regiment of linear time and slapped down into whatever story that old man is telling. Aren’t you?”

  I could tell that Andrews was thinking a bit favorably about the concept—considering how he’d reacted to Hovis Daniels in the jail cell.

  The man could see it, too: a look of confused concentration on the face of Dr. Andrews.

  “So,” the man said, very satisfied with himself, “what now?”

  “Now,” I told him firmly, getting up from the table, “Andrews watches you like a hawk while I call Sheriff Needle.”

  “Fine.” The man seemed perfectly self-satisfied. “Call anyone you like. I won’t be here much longer anyway.”

  “Call him now,” Andrews said haltingly. “He’s starting to make me very nervous.”

  I went to the phone, dialed, and turned back around to keep an eye on the man, half-wondering if he might vanish from my kitchen—again. The kitchen clock tried to make me believe it was only 7:05 in the evening. It seemed more like midnight. I dialed Skid’s office, hoping he’d be there so I wouldn’t have to call him at home. I was surprised to find a great relief in the sound of his voice. “Sheriff,” he sighed into the phone.