The Drifter's Wheel

by Phillip DePoy

  “I thought I’d need it.”

  I got to my coat, found the picture there, nicely defined by its brown wood frame. I hurried back to the kitchen, taking the photo out of the frame.

  “Now, then,” I said, taking my seat again.

  Andrews remained standing. “What the hell—”

  “Shh!”

  I reached behind me for the box of kitchen matches on the counter next to the stove and brought it to the table. I pulled one out and struck it.

  “You’re not going to burn these letters and pictures,” Andrews said, a bit shocked.

  “Would you sit down?” I instructed him, staring into the match flame. “I’ll tell you what I’m doing.”

  I reached for the sage branches and lit several of the leaves. Instantly the scent of burning sage assailed the room. I held the smoking branch and touched it to the bottom of the photograph of Truck Jackson I had in my other hand. The smoke curled up around the picture; the burning part of the sage singed the border.

  “Come over here,” I whispered to Andrews, “if you’re not going to sit down. You should probably see this anyway.”

  He moved silently, as if he might disturb some malevolent creature.

  “Watch the face,” I told him.

  As the smoke continued to rise up in tiny silver-gray columns, the face in the photograph seemed to change—he seemed to breathe, to exhale. The expression became relaxed; the image blurred slightly. Truck Jackson even appeared to look upward for a moment, almost sighing. Then the face dulled, grew lifeless and gray.

  “Done.” I nodded once. “Did you see?”

  I tossed the photo onto the tabletop.

  “It looked like … his whole aspect seemed to … what the hell was that?” Andrews was barely audible in the bright kitchen.

  “Simple would tell you that the sage smoke has released any remaining spiritual content from the photograph. That’s why his expression changed. His spirit was leaving the image. Anything left of that person that might still have been clinging to the picture has now been set free, and won’t need to return over and over again looking for bits of itself.”

  “What do you believe?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’m with Simple,” I assured him, “but another explanation, much less reliable because it is merely scientific, has to do with the way the sage smoke affects the oxides coating the picture—something about removing a thin layer of something. But, I mean, did it look like his face changed or not?”

  “It did,” he agreed, but the skepticism had already returned to his voice. “Nice trick. Nice parlor gag.”

  “If you say so.”

  We performed the magic on every single piece of paper and every last photograph. It took over an hour, and we’d both had several cups of espresso by the time we were finished. Each thing that Simple had given me bore a singe, a brand from the spice—and smelled like burnt sage.

  The fact that every face in every photograph was the same—the very image of Boy Jackson—was left unspoken. Or perhaps Andrews simply hadn’t notice the resemblance as much as I had.

  “I’ll give these back to her somehow,” I told Andrews, sitting back with my fifth espresso. “She’ll see them and smell them and her mind will be at ease.”

  “Good.” Andrews sipped from his cup. “Maybe you could hand them over to Hovis and he could smuggle them into her house. I wouldn’t want you going back in to speak to Mrs. Jackson again anytime soon. Not unless you had a crucifix and some holy water.”

  “Agreed,” I replied serenely.

  “It’s nice about Simple and Hovis,” Andrews announced in an uncharacteristic bit of romanticism, “don’t you think?”

  “I do.” I wondered what was on his mind, feared he might be leading to some odd discussion of my relationship with Lucinda, a relationship I could not possibly have conveyed in human language.

  “I was just thinking,” he mused, staring down into his cup. “Hovis has his girl, you have yours—where’s mine?” He looked up, grinning.

  “Good,” I sneered, “I thought for a second there you might actually be thinking of someone besides yourself.”

  “Me?” he protested.

  “But as it happens,” I told him, holding up an index finger, “I may have the perfect person for you, and I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before now.”

  “Wait.” His face clouded. “I was mostly kidding, you realize. I’m not exactly the mountain-girl type.”

  “In the first place, you have no idea what that type is,” I assured him, “and in the second place, you’re an idiot.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m telling you,” I said, standing and going to the kitchen phone, “I have the perfect girl for you. I’m calling Lucinda. We’ll go for a late lunch. She doesn’t eat until two on Fridays.”

  “Stop, now.” He was verging on panic. “I do not, emphatically, want to be set up on a blind lunch date with one of Lucinda’s crook-tooth cousins!”

  “I repeat my assertion,” I sighed, dialing the phone. “You’re an idiot.”

  “Fever!”

  “Hey!” I said into the phone, “you answered. Let’s go to lunch. Yes, twice in one week. I have a lot to tell you. But look, Andrews is coming along, so I’m wondering if you could invite the redoubtable Nurse Chambers to come along with us?”

  “Nurse?” The hint of a smile touched Andrews’s lips. “She’s a nurse?”

  “Yes,” I said into the phone, “I thought you’d agree it was a good idea. Since Etta’s will be closing soon, do you just want to—all right, see you in a bit.”

  I hung up the phone.

  “All set,” I told Andrews. “I’d clean up if I were you. We’re to meet at one of Blue Mountain’s finer eateries.”

  “Will she be wearing her uniform?” Andrews asked with an expression generally reserved for adult films.

  “You’re a troubled man.”

  “Rule, Britannia,” he answered.

  Little more than half an hour later, we were stomping out of my house and into the bright autumn afternoon. Crawdad, true to his word, had left my truck right where I usually parked it, with the keys in the ignition. Though the air was crisp and the sky was decidedly autumnal, we were bound for a more springtime assignation: romance and fine dining.

  Thirty-one

  The employees’ cafeteria at the hospital was nearly empty by the time Andrews and I arrived. Lucinda and Nurse Chambers were waiting for us. Andrews exhausted a great many jibes at the expense of the concept of cafeteria food—much to the delight of Nurse Chambers.

  We spent a pleasant fifty minutes talking and dining on warmed-over canned corn and stringy Salisbury steak. Ultimately, the company made the food inconsequential, according to Andrews.

  “No perfect meal can rescue an awkward moment,” he declared, in a fit of poesy, “but fine companionship can save even the worst cuisine.”

  Nurse Chambers beamed.

  “Well, then,” Lucinda announced, standing, “I’m back to work.”

  “I’ll walk you,” I said immediately, picking up my tray.

  We left the two combatants locked in mortal flirtation. As we placed our trays on the moving conveyer belt that led to the kitchen, Lucinda cast a surreptitious glance their way. They were equally matched players, and it was a wonderful game to observe.

  “Hard to tell which one’s worse,” she whispered.

  “I know,” I said proudly. “I think they’re perfect for each other.”

  “It was a little embarrassing to watch.”

  “A little?” I asked loudly. “They set up a flurry of libidinous intentions that is eating a hole in the ozone layer high above our planet even as we speak.”

  She nodded, heading for the elevator. “That was really something about Simple—her wanting you to burn out the spirit from those letters and photographs.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  The elevator came. It was packed; we were barely able to squeeze on. Someone com
plained loudly that the elevator had gone down instead of up. No one else commented, but the crowd prevented me from telling Lucinda everything I was thinking. Still, I couldn’t hold back the most troubling item in my array of worries.

  “Every single face in every photograph,” I told her softly, “looked exactly the same. I don’t mean there was a strong family resemblance. It was the same person.”

  “Who?”

  “The man who was in your kitchen on Monday night.”

  The elevator door opened and several people pushed by.

  “I don’t know,” she said vaguely, her mind already back at work. “Old photographs—they don’t really give you much to go on. I have a picture of my great-aunt Rose that looks exactly like me in high school.”

  We arrived at her floor, stepped out, and I kissed her on the cheek. “We’ll talk about it more tonight?” She smiled very comfortingly.

  “All right.”

  She was off.

  I decided to take a moment to myself instead of going back down to the cafeteria right away. In the first place, the prospect of watching Andrews and Nurse Chambers bat the ball of innuendo back and forth was thoroughly unappealing, but more than that, I wanted a chance to think about what Boy Jackson had whispered to me just before he’d been carted up the hill the night before.

  I took the stairs down to the front door of the hospital but realized there was no happy place outside to go with my thoughts, the hospital being located on a highway and surrounded by a parking lot. After a moment of disconcertion, I remembered that there was a small chapel on the first floor.

  I found it in short order; it was empty and still—perfection.

  I took a seat on a firm wooden pew with a burgundy cushion. At the front of the chapel there was only a translucent window, no pulpit or altar, and light was pounding through, battering the floor with white clues, hints of celestial observation.

  I sat there for a moment. The sound of my breathing was loud in all that silence. I did my best to reconstruct exactly what Boy had said.

  “A womb in Blue Mountain, a classroom at university, a distant star, a brothel in Chicago, a battlefield, a gold mine in a small Georgia town—they’re all distractions. You have to stop being distracted if you want to get off the wheel of birth and death.”

  And Boy had made his bid, earlier that morning, to climb off.

  Perhaps my knowledge of his suicide was making his ideas haunt me. I’d always thought that after all was said and done, when the play of this life was over, we only had to take off the costume, rid ourselves of the bloodlike rouge on our faces, turn out the lights in the theatre, and go home—to our true home and rest.

  But suppose we bought Boy Jackson’s ideas, thoughts stolen from dozens of world religions. Suppose that when the course of any particular life is done, we do find ourselves wandering down the corridors of Eternity. What is it that we should do in order not to be distracted, as Boy had said, so that we won’t be sucked into a womb somewhere and be born again—another time around the wheel? How could we be swept, instead, onward toward light, toward God, toward our true home, a place not made by human hands? How are we released from the wheel of death and rebirth?

  The answer in most religions, I thought, is simple—you just have to be willing to let this life go, once and for all. You have to refuse the distractions.

  That’s a great secret in those dozens of religions. If you want to leave this world behind, all you really have to do is say good-bye, and really mean it—and you will be released.

  But there’s the rub, I thought. If Boy Jackson kept coming back, maybe he didn’t really want to leave at all.

  As for myself, I started thinking about all the things I’d miss in this life, a few of the things that would distract me, keep me, coming back. They, too, were surprisingly simple.

  I would like, just one more time, to see a certain maple tree in the autumn of the year. I also need one more meal of poulet sauté à la provinçale; one more hearing of the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony; one more night in bed and talking with Lucinda; and five more minutes of light on the waters of the Seine. Maybe then I’d be able to say good-bye and go away from the beauty of this earth for good.

  But not today.

  My first realization as I sat there in the hospital chapel was that if I really wanted to be released from an endless cycle of cause and effect, I would have to stop causing things to happen, and to stop being affected by other things. I would have to genuinely want to get off of the wheel.

  My second realization was a little disturbing but also, for some reason, profoundly warming. Obviously I was someone who understood the way off the wheel of time. I just wouldn’t do it—not yet.

  Apparently, I was enjoying the ride.