The Drifter's Wheel Read online

  “All right.” He sat down at the table once again. “Time to finish the story—and get to the punch line, the great reveal. Ready?”

  “I don’t know.” I started to say more, but he interrupted.

  “The pivotal year is 1914, when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. This acted as an excuse, of course, to engender World War I, which History began, at first, to call the War to End All Wars. The boy, Truck, decided to enlist. He was only thirteen years old. His mother was quite clear about her opinion. ‘You’re not going,’ she said. ‘It’s not our fight. What do I care if a bunch of foreigners kill each other. I only care they don’t kill you. You’re important.’ God’s sense of humor is so strange that it is often difficult to fathom. On the night He invented human nature, He laughed from midnight until sunup. He laughed so hard He could barely breathe, and refrained from creating anything else new in human beings for the next ten thousand years.”

  “But Truck went to war?” I prompted, a bit confused by his digressions.

  “Yes, and his mother went with him.”

  “What?”

  “She wanted to go to Paris to teach Tango lessons. Truck told her that the only popular dance in Europe was the dance of death. Can you believe it?”

  “He was a teenaged boy. You’re allowed to give out such dramatic pronouncements at that age, don’t you think?”

  Without warning, the gun appeared again. I froze. The visitor used it to crack a knuckle on his other hand.

  “You don’t understand,” he whispered with gripping reverence. “Ignorance had made the boy holy, the way innocence makes a newborn holy. He was an ignoramus, but he was St. Ignoramus of Chicago—the patron saint of all underage boys who enlist in an army to fight in a war. And now for the punch line. Ready?”

  “I suppose.” I had my hands on the underside of the table, ready to flip it toward him if he pointed his pistol at me and tried to shoot. It would knock him flat.

  “Here it is.” He smiled. It radiated across his face and into an aura several inches thick around his body. “That was me. That was I. That was the author of this story. I am Truck.”

  “So—you fought in World War I.”

  “Yes,” my visitor insisted, on the brink of exploding. “I fought in every war. The spirit wanders—only the body comes to have an end!”

  “I’m not certain what you mean when you say you fought in every war,” I began, ready to stand and fling the table.

  “You’re probably wondering why I visit you today, Dr. Devilin.” He seemed drowsy, ignoring my implicit question. His gaze was wilder than ever, and the smile had become a grimace. “You probably wonder how I know you. I do know you. You’ve recorded conversations like this with other people. My relatives. My brothers and such.”

  “I have?” I asked before I could think.

  “Yes. God. Are you deliberately dense?” His eyes were nearly rolled back in his head.

  He seemed on the verge of firing his gun.

  “Listen,” I said steadily, about to cave in on him, “you’re going to have to calm down, here—”

  Without warning, he twitched once, then slumped in his chair. “Damn—that coffee. It makes me tired. I have to sleep now.”

  Before another syllable passed his lips, he put his head down on the kitchen table and immediately began snoring.

  For a second I sat there, afraid to move. After a moment I looked under the table. The gun was in his lap. I moved my chair carefully so that I could stand up, afraid to wake him, but he was dead to the world.

  I thought I remembered something about a version of narcolepsy in certain schizophrenics; the memory came from a long-faded graduate psychology class.

  Then I realized I had to use his nap as an opportunity to call the sheriff.

  I stood as silently as I could, stopped the tape recorder with a click that should have disturbed him but didn’t, and stepped silently to the phone on the kitchen wall.

  The cord on the receiver stretched enough for me to tiptoe around a corner into the living room after I’d dialed.

  It rang seven times before a voice said, “Police.”

  “Skid?” I whispered.

  “Fever?”

  “Listen, there’s a guy in my house. I found him passed out on my front porch. He’s asleep in the kitchen now, but I think he might need some kind of help. He’s got a gun.”

  “In his late twenties, army surplus trench coat, boyish face? Antique-looking pistol?

  “You’ve gotten other calls,” I assumed. “He’s been to other places on the mountain tonight.”

  “He has. Can you keep him in your kitchen until I get there?”

  I stepped farther around the corner away from the kitchen so as not to wake the man in question.

  “Pretty sure I can at this point. He’s asleep. But could you come right away? Let me just say again: He’s got a gun. He’s making me nervous.”

  “He should.”

  “Really? Who is he? Where else has he been?”

  “He might be dangerous, Fever. Don’t mess with him.”

  “ Mess with him? I’m tape-recording him.”

  “I might have guessed.” I could hear a bit of a smile in the words. “Well, keep it up, if it makes him stay.”

  “No kidding, Skid, what’s going on with this guy?”

  “I’ll be right up.” He hung up.

  I stared at the phone, listening to the dial tone.

  Apparently Sheriff Skidmore Needle, in his official capacity, was a bit short on the niceties of conversation—or phone etiquette. If I hadn’t known him for most of my life, I might have been at least surprised. As it was, it was just one more example of the many ways in which Skid’s personality had changed since he’d become sheriff.

  When he was a deputy, he seemed to revel in the long, slow unwinding of a conversation. Something that could have been said in several words took long, colorful paragraphs. I missed that. In his elevated office he’d become something of a spendthrift with words. In the old days, he would have spent at least another moment telling me why I had to keep a stranger in my house, what the stranger had done.

  It was one more sad indication of the modern age, my visitor’s so-called Age of Adrenaline, I concluded. Ours was a time when speed seemed more important than depth or breadth or anything else. Damn the modern age, I was thinking, if you couldn’t even say good-bye before you hung up a phone.

  I was aware that my mind was rambling to keep from thinking about the man with a gun in my kitchen.

  Unfortunately, when I went to hang up my own phone I saw that speed might have been of the essence in this particular instance.

  The kitchen was empty. The man was gone.

  Two

  The phone woke me at six in the morning. I didn’t even have a chance to say hello.

  “Fever, damn it,” Skidmore growled, as if we were already in the middle of a conversation, “can you come over to the back road behind the Jackson place? Right away?”

  His voice was primarily static and ambient noise. He was calling from his squad car.

  “Good morning, Skidmore.” My voice, on the other hand, sounded like a rock being sawed in half.

  “That man who was in your kitchen last night? The one you let get away? I believe I’m looking at him dead right here.”

  “What?” I sat up.

  “He’s wearing an overcoat two sizes too big, he’s got black hair, and he’s in his late twenties.”

  “Sounds like the man.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, trying to wake up. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, after he disappeared from your house last night, I didn’t go home. I sort of prowled around looking for him. And about ten minutes ago, I found him.”

  “No.” I sat up. “I mean, who was he, do you know?”

  “No idea. Look, can you get over here right away? It’ll be light in a little while, and I think the school bus comes this way.”

  “Oh.” I saw his point
. “Let me—what? Get some pants on, swallow one cup of espresso, and I’m there. Right behind the Jacksons’?”

  “You can’t miss us,” he sighed into the phone. “We’ll be where all the flashing lights and police cars are.”

  Fine, if that’s the way he wanted it.

  “Didn’t this man visit other people before me? Did you call any of them?”

  “I’m not waking people up at this time of the morning to look at a dead body.”

  “You just woke me up.”

  “Are you going to put your pants on,” he hissed, “or do I have to come up there with my nightstick?”

  “I don’t know why it’s always me,” I complained, stirring in the bed. “People around here are starting to get the idea that I’m the kiss of death or something. Every time there’s a dead body in Blue Mountain, I’m around it.”

  “Is it my fault that you’re best friends with the sheriff?”

  “Yes! It’s your fault exactly! You’re the only person in town I like, and you turned into a sheriff. What the hell is that?”

  “You like Hek and June.”

  “The only person my own age. Look—”

  “Could we continue this argument in person, Fever?” Skid lowered his voice. “You really want the school kids to see a dead body?”

  “It is coming up on Halloween.”

  “Fever, damn it—”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Less than half an hour later I was standing on a dirt road looking down at a corpse. I’d thrown on a charcoal T-shirt and black jeans, a thin rust-colored sweater, and black hiking boots. My hair, supernaturally white for no reason I could understand, was so unkempt that it felt like an albino squirrel perched on my head. It was cold in the shadows, so I tried to stay in the morning sun.

  Skid had called only two deputies, and no one else was around. The Jackson place was off in the distance, and lights were still on in the house. They’d probably seen the flashing police cars. It wouldn’t be long before someone from the family ambled down our way.

  If we’d been down in the town, dawn might have been further away, but up on the mountain the night was almost gone. Everything was in shades of gray. The three policemen were dark shadows. Their cars were black and white. The body on the ground could have been a pile of dead leaves.

  I’d parked my old green pickup truck a little away from the police cars so that an ambulance could get past it. I assumed that Skid had called for one.

  “How did you even see this in the dark?” I was staring down at the body. “I’m standing right here and I can’t make out anything about it.”

  “Headlights caught it.” He shrugged.

  This was one of the things that made Skidmore Needle my best friend in the mountains. He had absolutely no ego. Everything was luck or happy fate or, though he would never put it to me in so many words, God. He hadn’t found a dead body, his headlights had.

  “It looks like the guy, and who else would it be? Those are his clothes.” I had my arms folded in front of me.

  “Then why do you sound like that?” Skid asked plainly.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re not sure.”

  “Because I can’t see his face,” I complained, a little more petulantly than I had intended.

  “Melissa!” he hollered.

  Deputy Melissa Mathews appeared out of nowhere.

  “Yup?” Her voice was lively; her face was bright.

  “Would you shine a light on the face of the deceased, please, ma’am? I lost mine, and Dr. Devilin can’t see in this light. I believe he may need glasses. Could you help him out?”

  “Sure can!” Melissa instantly produced an oversized flashlight and snapped it on.

  I was momentarily blinded.

  “Enough light?” Skidmore asked calmly.

  Melissa was holding a lighthouse.

  “It’s enough for a small country.” I squinted, shielding my eyes from the eerie white blaze.

  “He complains when he can’t see,” Skidmore told Melissa, “and he complains when he can.”

  “He’s not awake yet,” Melissa said sympathetically.

  But she didn’t turn off her torch.

  Almost as if it were a movie scene, fading from white into a gray, dappled pattern, the face of the dead man slowly appeared and came clearer.

  I took a step closer.

  “Did you get his gun?” I asked Skidmore.

  “No. Haven’t found it yet. But that gunshot wound in his chest has powder burns all around it. He may have shot himself in the heart, which isn’t that easy to do, really. And he may have flung the gun somewhere as he was dying. We’ll get hold of it directly.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What?” He came to stand beside me. “What do you see?”

  “Not sure.” I held out my hand. “Melissa, could I have that flashlight?”

  “Sure.” She handed it over.

  I knelt by the body, shined the light a little off to the right of the face, and let the halo illuminate him. That light was more like the light in my kitchen, and I could see what I wanted to see.

  “Okay.” I stood and offered Melissa her flashlight back. “Damn.”

  “Fever?” Skidmore stared down at the corpse. “What the hell is it?”

  “That’s not the guy.” I took a step away.

  “Not the guy?”

  “Those are his clothes—I mean, that coat is what the man was wearing last night, and those construction boots, too. This guy even looks a little like him, but this is not the man who was in my kitchen last night.”

  Skid blinked.

  “Maybe it’s the light,” Melissa offered. “Plus, a man looks a lot different when he’s dead.”

  “What would—” Skid began, then faltered.

  “I admit it doesn’t make sense.” I rubbed my eyes and stared at the dead man again. “What possible explanation could there be for a look-alike, dressed in the same clothes as the man I saw, lying dead on a back road this close to my house? Maybe I’m just not awake.”

  The eastern sky was bleeding red at the rim of the horizon. The mountain peaks did their best to hold back the onslaught of day, but rocks are earthbound, and light is made of angels. Light always wins the battle, even though it isn’t always the right thing. That morning could have used a few more moments of darkness, only there it was: red sky at morning.

  I was staring down at the body, trying to make my eyes change their mind, to admit that the dead man on the cold ground was the same thing as the live man in my warm kitchen. I was almost swayed, when the second deputy, a kid named Crawdad Pritchett—champion fiddler at age seven, deputy by age nineteen—called out.

  “Yonder comes Ms. Jackson.”

  We all looked up toward the Jackson place. She was still a long way off, but Mrs. Jackson was indeed making good time, old as she was.

  The back road where we were standing was little more than dirt and weeds. A ramshackle fence, made primarily of graying wood and rusted nails, ran along it that might have kept something in at one time, but only really served as a guide to help drivers know how the road ran.

  Up the hill behind that fence lay an array of golden grass, wild ageratum, and blackberry brambles. Beyond that, at the top of the rise, sat the Jackson home, a white two-story place built just after the turn of the last century and well taken care of, enough to make it last until the turn of the next, except for an act of God. A covered porch littered with a dozen rocking chairs surrounded the entire home. Though I couldn’t see it from where I was standing, I knew there was a garden at the front of the house, mostly annuals. There would probably be pumpkin-colored mums there, so late in October.

  Mrs. Jackson, who claimed to be over a hundred years old, wrapped in a thick brown sweater, was motoring in a very determined fashion right for the dead body.

  “Melissa!” Skid called. “Get something over the body. You got a blanket in your trunk?”

  She nodded and moved quickly
.

  At that exact moment we all heard an ungodly rumbling at the western end of the road. It sounded like a tow truck was dragging an old battleship up the mountain. A second later, headlights on despite the break of day, a banana-colored school bus appeared, rising from the darkness and shadows at the far end of the road, coming our way.

  “Damn.” Skid moved toward the body.

  The school bus had plenty of room to get past my truck and could easily have maneuvered around the police cars as well, but the driver slowed, uncertain how to proceed. A child’s face appeared in every window.

  Melissa had the blanket out of her trunk and was rushing toward the corpse. Mrs. Jackson, in a preternatural burst of energy, was nearing the fence; children were clamoring in the bus.

  Skid stopped where he was, looked around, then turned back to me.

  “Ever have one of those mornings?” There was a hint of a smile in his voice, if not on his face.

  That was another reason Skidmore was a man everyone liked. He had a sense of humor even in the most hectic of moments.

  The bus came to a standstill just shy of the first police car. Mrs. Jackson steadied herself on one of the fence posts and peered in the direction of Melissa Mathews. Melissa smoothed the blanket over the body and stood.

  “Crawdad,” Skid said calmly, “would you go over and help that bus driver get around our cars and on his way?”

  “Her way,” Crawdad corrected. “It’s Ms. Henley driving today.”

  “Crawdad,” Skid began, only a bit exasperated.

  “Yes, sir,” the deputy interrupted, moving quickly toward the bus. “Hey, Ms. Jackson,” Skid called.

  “What is all this?” she wanted to know.

  Skidmore ambled her way, moving deliberately slowly to belie the chaos of the moment.

  “Not much.” He smiled.

  “Is it somebody dead under that blanket?” She stared at Melissa.

  Skid arrived at the fence where Mrs. Jackson stood.

  “Yes,” he told her. “Yes, ma’am, I believe it is.”

  “It’s a vagrant,” Melissa offered. “Nobody we know, I mean.”