Little Bird of Heaven (11 page)

I escaped back to my father in the booth. It was amazing to me, Daddy had not been aware of the commotion at the bar.

In fact Daddy was sitting with his shoulders hunched, like a bear that has been wounded and is trying to summon back his strength. A few minutes alone without the pretty blond ponytail daughter, a man like Eddy Diehl can sink into a mood. A man like Eddy Diehl is a sucker for such a mood. Elbows on the scarred tabletop and his heavy jaw brooding on his fists, eyes half-shut as if he was very tired suddenly, so fucking tired. He had ordered another Coke for me and a shot glass of whiskey and a tall glass of foaming dark ale for himself. Glancing up at me with the quick Daddy-smile, as I half-fell back into the booth.

I was dazed, but I was smiling. Another Daddy might have noted the daze beneath the smile but not this Daddy who finished off half his shot glass in a single swallow. “Listen to the song I’m playing for you—know what it is?”

I tried to listen. I thought this might be important. So much commotion in the barroom, more men at the bar staring in our direction, I couldn’t concentrate very well.

A man’s deep baritone voice—a country-and-western drawl—was this Johnny Cash? I tried, but could scarcely hear.

Strange how my father lowered his head, as if it was urgent to hear the words of the song, as if the song conveyed some special meaning to him; as if Eddy Diehl had recently been in some place (but what place could that have been?) where he hadn’t been allowed to hear such music. Or hadn’t been allowed to sit like this drinking whiskey, drinking beer, smoking a
cigarette, in a luxury of sensuousness, solitude; the peculiar solitude of the drinker-in-public.

Still at the bar we were under scrutiny. I could not bring myself to look but in the corner of my eye I was aware of the angry goatee-man—and others—observing Daddy and me. (But why wasn’t Daddy aware? Was Daddy drunk, or was Daddy deliberately not seeing?) I felt an absurd leap of hope, that the drunk woman in the shiny hot-pink blouse would come to our defense; she would enlist others, in support of my father.

Of course I knew that the name
Diehl
carried certain associations now, in Sparta. In all of Herkimer County. Maybe in all of the Adirondacks. As
Zoe Kruller
would be known, and the bluegrass group Black River Breakdown. Cassettes and CDs of the band’s music were passed about locally; Daddy had several in the glove compartment of the Willys Jeep, which I’d often asked him to play, when I was riding with him in that vehicle.

“Mister? Here y’are.”

A waitress brought a platter of French fries to our table, and another bottle of ale. Daddy roused himself from his music-trance to offer some fries to me—“I ordered these for just now. This isn’t our dinner yet—we’ll go somewhere special for dinner—only right now, I’m so God-damned hungry.”

He began to eat with his fingers. He’d removed his baseball cap, his hair was disheveled, dark with feathery streaks of gray, alternately thick and sparse, receding at his temples which appeared flushed and lightly beaded with sweat. It made me uneasy, that Daddy was beginning to resemble his father—Grandpa Diehl who’d always been so
old
—whom Daddy and his brothers had called
the old man
with an exasperated sort of
affection—
the old bastard—can’t put anything over on the old bastard.
A man begins to lose his hair, his skull takes on a different shape, he begins to assume a different identity. I felt such tenderness for Daddy, I wanted to stroke Daddy’s face, that was looking so battered and leathery as if wind-burnt; clearly he’d been working outside. In his early forties Eddy Diehl was no longer a man for whom a fresh-laundered white cotton shirt was appropriate work-attire.

No longer a husband/father of whom his wife said boastfully he was of the
managerial class.

“Krista? Have some. C’mon eat with your old man.”

“No thanks, Daddy! I don’t like fries.”

“Must be hungry, Puss, the way you were running around on that basketball court. C’mon.”

I was hungry. I was very hungry. But could not bring myself to eat the thick greasy-salty fries, reheated in a microwave oven behind the bar, doused with ketchup, the kind of food my mother was quick to perceive was likely to be leftovers from other meals, scraped off other customers’ plates.

Daddy shoved the platter of fries in my direction. I thought
Ben would eat these!
and so I picked up one or two fries, to break into smaller pieces and pretend to eat.

I saw that my father’s knuckles were freshly scratched, bruised. And maybe scarred, beneath. I knew he’d done treework at one time recently—working with chainsaws—I knew that there were men at Sparta Construction who’d had terrible accidents with chainsaws—I wanted to take up my father’s big, scarred hand in mine—to tell him that I loved him, and I did not believe what some people said about him,
I knew it could not be true.

Yet with his unshaven jaws and something heavy-lidded, sulky, about his eyes Daddy exuded a sharkish air; here was a man of pride, to whom you did not condescend; the voice on the jukebox, penetrating the smoky interior of the crowded County Line Tavern on a weekday evening, was the very voice of this man’s soul, and you did not condescend to such a soul. I felt a warning shiver of the kind a swimmer might feel as some
thing not-quite-visible—dark, finned, silent—passes close beneath him, he can’t quite see.

The jukebox song was ending. There was a deep-baritone masculine robustness that seemed inappropriate to its subject:

Daddy was nodding with grave satisfaction, chewing French fries. Big lardy-greasy fries the size of his big fingers lavishly doused with ketchup. Whatever the Johnny Cash song meant to him, it had struck a powerful chord. He’d finished his shot of whiskey and signaled for another. Took a hearty swig from the bottle of ale. Fixed me with a squinting wink and a terse Daddy-smile to finally ask what he’d been putting off asking, since I’d returned to the booth. “Well, Krista: what did your mom say?”

Mom!
I had not heard this word in my father’s mouth for a very long time. I saw that he’d been hopeful that my mother would be joining us, his eyes shone with a crazy hope.

M
ARCH
1983

T
HE TROUBLE
corroding our lives like deep pockets of rust in the hulks of abandoned vehicles.
The trouble
sucking all the joy out of our lives. And the very awareness
the trouble
slow to be absorbed by us, who wished each day to think that this! this would surely be the day when
the trouble is cleared up.

In retrospect it appears inevitable, and awful. At the time it seems just haphazard.

How Daddy was gone from our household and living with his brother in East Sparta and one day Ben said meanly, “If he’s gone thirteen days he’s
gone
. He won’t be coming back.”

Zoe Kruller
was not a name to be uttered in our household. Yet
Zoe Kruller
was a name uttered everywhere in Sparta.

On the Sparta radio station local DJ’s were playing songs by Black River Breakdown. Zoe Kruller’s unmistakable voice—throaty, intimate, just-this-side-of-teasing—was suddenly everywhere. The most popular Zoe Kruller songs were “Footprints in the Snow”—the words of which had an eerie prescience, describing what appears to be the mysterious death of a beautiful young woman—

and “Little Bird of Heaven” which was my favorite, and I guess it was Daddy’s favorite too since it was the one Daddy played most often when he was driving one of his vehicles. Zoe Kruller’s voice was airy and playful in this song but melancholy too, you’d find yourself drawing in a breath and biting back a little cry, these words were so beautiful—

In Sparta it came to be thought that Zoe Kruller had left a message—“a nest of clues”—in this song. Especially by girls and women it was thought that Zoe had “named her murderer” in the song and if you listened closely, or wrote the lyrics down and took note of the first letters, or the last letters, of each line, you would know who the man was.

In Mom’s car we were driving and there came breathy and urgent in our ears amid gushing heat from the heater—for it was a vicious-windy
March morning—the murdered woman’s voice
Little bird of heaven right here in your hand
—and with a cry my mother switched off the radio.

“Her! That terrible woman.”

Why is Zoe Kruller a terrible woman?

Is it because Zoe Kruller is a slut?

And does a terrible-slut woman deserve to die?

No one could understand why Black River Breakdown had never made a commercial record, never had a contract with a New York City or Los Angeles recording agency, or been invited to perform outside the Adirondack region. Now their girl-singer had been murdered, the dazed little band of musicians found themselves touched with a kind of lurid tabloid glamour like a spotlight beamed into their faces. The fiddler, who was the group’s oldest musician, at forty-six, had gone into hiding and refused to be interviewed by the media except to say he’d known Zoe Kruller “since she’d been the prettiest baby you could imagine”—while the young guitarist with his Elvis sideburns and shoulder-length hair turned up anywhere you’d look—on late-afternoon local TV, in the “entertainment features” pages of the Sparta
Journal
facing the comic strips, baring his soul saying he hadn’t slept a night since Zoe was murdered, he hoped to God the police would find whoever did this, and fast; he was composing a ballad in memory of Zoe he hoped he and the group could perform sometime soon….

This newspaper article, and others, I would keep in my notebook, in secret. Seeming to know
This will be with me all my life. This will change my life.

No one had been murdered in Sparta, or in all of Herkimer County, for a long time: nine years. If you didn’t count—as the media did not—several killings at the Seneca Indian reservation designated
manslaughter
which had been settled without trials and publicity. And rarely had anyone in Herkimer County been murdered in such a way: in the victim’s residence, in her bed, to be discovered on a Sunday morning by her own son.

The previous murder, in Sparta, had been during a robbery at the Sunoco station on route 31; before that, a homeless man had been ham
mered to death by another homeless man, in a Sparta shelter. Both killers had been identified and arrested by police within a day or two.

How different this was—
The murderer of Zoe Kruller remains at large.

And—
Suspects but no arrests yet, Sparta detectives decline to comment.

We were frightened but we were thrilled, too. We were made to come home directly from school and our mothers drove us places where just recently we’d had to walk or, in warmer weather, to ride our bicycles. We could not know it—perhaps in a way we did know it, we sensed it—and this was part of the thrill—that this interlude would mark a turn in our lives as in the small-city life of Sparta, a sense that
We will not be safe again, there is no one to protect us always.

Boys were allowed more freedom than girls, of course. This was always the case but now more than ever for whoever had killed Zoe Kruller had to be a man and this man would not wish to kill a boy or another man, only a woman or a girl. Even a child of eleven understood this logic.

Girls were warned always to be wary of strangers. Never be talked into climbing into a stranger’s car, never reply to a stranger, never make eye contact with a stranger, if a stranger approaches you,
run!

Or: it might be someone you know. Not a stranger but an acquaintance. An adult man.

For whoever had killed Zoe Kruller, it was believed that he had known her and that she had let him into her residence willingly. One of Zoe Kruller’s
male companions.

Or, Mrs. Kruller’s
husband Delray.

Sometimes identified as her
estranged husband Delray.

In a dictionary in our school library I looked up
estranged.
There was an exotic sound to this word, that contained the more familiar
strange
inside it like something blunt and commonplace—a pebble, say—inside a colored Easter egg.

Separated, divided, hostile, alienated, indifferent, severed, sunder: estranged.

“Is Daddy ‘estranged’ from us?”—with the cruel simulated naivete of the very young I dared to ask my mother this question one evening when
Daddy had been gone from the house for a week; I saw the wincing hurt in my mother’s face; how I escaped being slapped across the mouth, I don’t know.

How exciting our lives had become, so quickly! Breathless and unpredictable and yet the excitement left behind a sick sensation like that you felt on a roller coaster when you were a young child: you’d thought you had wanted this, you had clamored and begged for this, but maybe you had not wanted it, not
this.
You’d wanted to be frightened, and you’d wanted to be thrilled; you’d wanted something to rush through you like an electric current; you’d wanted to scream in an ecstasy of panic but maybe—maybe you had not really wanted this.

And maybe by the time you realized, it was too late.

“Krista? Come here, I have something to tell you.”

Already my mother had spoken with Ben, when he’d come home from school. I’d heard his sharp raised voice and then he slammed out of the house and Mom called after him just once, a sharp little cry like a shot bird,

“Benjamin!”

From a window I saw Ben running stooped over, in the slanted sunshine of late afternoon, without his jacket. My stricken brother stomping through foot-high snow to the old barn, a short distance behind the two-car garage my father had built adjoining our house; the barn was used for storage and as a second garage for my father’s succession of vehicles. I saw Ben’s breath turn to vapor as he ran. I thought that I might not have recognized Ben running in that way, like something wounded, looking younger than his age, smaller.

From the upstairs hallway, I saw this. I’d hurried upstairs as soon as I came home from school, I’d brought my after-school snack with me—a bowl of cereal, with milk and raisins—so that I could begin my homework while I ate. The cereal was bite-sized shredded wheat; it had to be eaten quickly or it would become soggy, sodden like mush, and the milk would become discolored, and what should have been delicious would become faintly nauseating, an effort to eat.

I was beginning to realize that all that I loved to eat—my special childhood treats like Honeystone’s ice-cream cones—could very easily turn nauseating, disgusting.

Since my father had moved out of the house I’d become susceptible to wild bouts of hunger. Especially in the afternoons, after the strain of school. I would devour a bowl of cereal like a starving animal. A childish elation came over me as if nothing else mattered except this: eating.

By which I meant solitary eating. Not at mealtimes. Not with my mother and Ben. With Daddy missing from his place at the end of the table, I’d come to hate mealtimes. I would eat standing in front of the opened refrigerator, I would eat sitting on the lower steps of the stairs, I would eat in my room or even in the bathroom, my mouth flooding with saliva. As quickly now at the little desk in my room—a desk Daddy had built for me from smooth whorled oak wood, left over from a construction site—I tried to spoon the shredded wheat into my mouth, before my mother called me as I knew she would.

First Ben, then Krista. There had to be some logic in our mother’s cruelty.

Half-choking I swallowed chunks of shredded wheat, milk. Thinking
I don’t know yet. What Ben knows, I don’t know.

“Krista? Come here, I have something to tell you.”

My mother stood at the foot of the stairs calling to me. Her voice was sharp as a knife-blade, I could see it glittering, I wanted to run away, to hide! But I was not a small child any longer, I was eleven years old.

I could not have said if I was mature for my age, or immature. I may have looked younger than eleven but I felt older. I was the girl on the school bus who when the other, older girls shivered and shuddered whispering of
That awful thing that was done to Zoe Kruller worse than being strangled
sat very still and silent and seemed not to hear.

When I came downstairs, my mother had returned to the dining room where she’d been seated at the drop-leaf cherrywood table which was a “family heirloom” always covered by a tablecloth. The dining room was a room rarely used, and then mostly on holidays. For privacy Mom
had brought the kitchen phone into this room, on an extension. These were days before portable phones and cell phones and you were bound to a socket outlet and an extension cord. It was startling to see on the dining room table so many manila folders: financial statements, insurance policies, receipts and income tax forms, scattered official-looking letters, papers.

“Mom? What’s all these things?”

“Sit down, Krista. Never mind these things.”

“But—”

“Wipe your mouth, Krista, for heaven’s sake! It looks like you’ve been lapping milk. I said, sit
down.”

I hated the dining room chairs, that were so
special.
Hard cushions and wicker backs that weren’t comfortable, nothing like the worn vinyl kitchen chairs. Our family meals were always in the kitchen and the dining room was used only for special occasions, occasions of forced festivity arranged by my mother and her family to celebrate birthdays, holidays. There was an inflexible schedule by which Christmas eve, Christmas day, Thanksgiving, and Easter were rotated among my mother and her relatives.

Daddy had used to tease Mom about the tablecloth: What’s the point of cherrywood if no one can see it?—and Mom had said what if someone left a glass ring, a stain or a burn on the table, this was a risk she couldn’t take.

Since Daddy had gone to live with his brother Earl, Mom had become busy as we’d never seen her before. Always she was bustling about the house, up and down stairs; always she was on the phone. Bauer relatives came to see her every day, in the dining room with doors slid shut. There were several women friends who smiled grimly at me and looked as if they’d like to hug me against their droopy bosoms except I ducked away.

A hawk-faced man in a suit and necktie Mom introduced to Ben and me as “my accountant.” Another man in a suit and tie—“Mr. Nagel, my lawyer.”

Lawyer.
I didn’t want to think what this might mean.

Estranged. Separated. Divorced….

“Krista? I want you to listen carefully—”

With an awkward sort of tenderness my mother took hold of my chill squirmy hands. She was speaking in a quiet voice which was unsettling to me, a wrong-sounding voice, a forced voice, a voice in which something pleading quivered, though less than an hour ago I’d heard her on the phone speaking sharply, punctuating her words with bursts of what sounded like laughter. I wanted to shut my ears against her, thinking with childish stubbornness
Daddy will come back and change all this. Anything that is being done, Daddy will change back to what it should be.
Both Ben and I had noticed that our mother’s eyes had a weird glassy sheen for lately she’d been taking prescription medications to help her sleep and to settle her nerves. Not wanting to see Mom’s eyes I stared at our hands, locked so strangely together. As if we were in some dangerous place, on a rocky height for instance, it was our instinct to clutch at each other, in fear. And yet the fear I felt was for my mother. For those glassy red-rimmed eyes and for the smeared-lipstick mouth that might tell me something very ugly I would not wish to hear.