Little Bird of Heaven (18 page)

I
THINK THAT
I should say bluntly
This was the time in my life, I fell in love with Aaron Kruller.

There would be a way of composing this that would allow the reader to understand
She is in love with that boy. She will be so humiliated, she will make such a fool of herself, can’t anyone stop her!
—a way of indirection and ellipsis, suggestion and not blunt statement; but I want to speak frankly, I want say something that can’t be retracted
Yes I was in love with Zoe Kruller’s son, the first time in my life I was in love. And there is no time like the first.

Even before his mother was killed in that terrible savage way, and all of Sparta talking about it, yes and dirty-minded boys laughing about it, Aaron Kruller was trouble.

He was
troubled,
and he was
trouble.

One of the
Indian-looking kids
at my brother’s school, straight dark coarse hair and glaring-dark eyes, a hard ridge of bone above his eyes and his eyebrows heavy and tufted like an adult man’s, his young face scarred from lacrosse. Already in ninth grade at the age of fifteen Aaron Kruller was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 150 pounds looming over his younger—mostly Caucasian—classmates with the gleaming menace of a switchblade among bread knives. He was a boy to avoid, you would never push near him on the stairs or in the cafeteria line or make eye contact with him, in his movements Aaron Kruller was both guarded and yet impulsive, coolly remote and yet short-tempered, unpredictable. Because he had a mixed-blood father and a Caucasian mother it wasn’t clear what
Aaron Kruller was—only what he was
not
—a white kid, or a full-blooded Seneca from the reservation.

Yet: “Aaron.” A beautiful and mysterious name out of the Bible, I thought. Like “Zoe” this name had acquired a special meaning in my ears, tenderly I spoke these names aloud—“Aaron”—“Zoe.”

Poor kid! His father killed his mother, he was the one to discover the body.

Or
Poor kid! His mother was a heroin addict and a hooker and one of her men friends killed her, Aaron found the body.

Or
Poor bastard that Kruller kid, the way his mother was killed and nobody arrested yet, Aaron found the body which has to have fucked the kid up totally but it’s damn hard to like him, that look in his face. And the size of him…

In his classes at school Aaron Kruller was a distracting presence. Often he was restless, bored. Moods shifted in him visibly like clouds in the Adirondack sky. At the rear of the classroom where he was allowed to sit—the preference of most
Indian-looking kids
in Sparta public schools was the rear of the classroom—he fixed his steely eyes upon the teacher at the front of the classroom in the way of a hunter sighting his target. He had a way of lifting his desk with his muscled thighs, forcing the back of his seat (which was attached to the desk) against the wall behind him where it was made to scratch and injure the wall in a
thump-thump-thump
rhythm that seemed calculated to annoy others, to infuriate and exasperate the teacher, yet was probably unconscious, unpremeditated. Aaron did not give the impression of being a fully conscious, premeditated being. As if his thoughts were elsewhere, and drew his fullest attention. Frequently he came to school with bruise-like shadows beneath his eyes, as if he’d been up all night; he was glaze-eyed, dreamy; he slept with his spiky-haired head lowered onto his crossed arms, and no teacher would have wished to awaken him.

Frequently too, Aaron Kruller was absent from school.

Returning then with a battered face, fresh scabs on his face and arms and if asked what had happened, by one or another concerned adult, he’d shrug and mutter what sounded like
L’croz.

(Lacrosse wasn’t a Sparta school sport. Lacrosse was some kind of
wild dangerous field hockey played exclusively by the
Indian-looking kids,
no white kid would have dared to play with them for fear of getting his teeth or his brains knocked out.)

L’croz.
Aaron Kruller’s homeroom teacher came to interpret this as a kind of code meaning
Something to do with being who I am, the family I am from, don’t ask anything more it’s none of your God-damn business.

Most days Aaron Kruller wore black T-shirts, black jeans or work pants, grease-stained. He wore flannel shirts that were laundered—when they were laundered—without being ironed. He wore a dingy green-lizard-skin vest, that looked as if it had been plundered from a biker’s trash. He wore a leather belt with a brass cobra-head buckle, braided leather thongs and chain-bracelets around his wrists of the kind adult bikers wore. He wore man-sized work-boots with reinforced toes, grease-stained from working at Kruller Auto Repair out on the Quarry Road which his father Delray Kruller owned for it was said that Delray needed his son to work for him, couldn’t afford full-time mechanics, Delray was close to going bankrupt from loans he owed, local lawyers he’d had to hire in this season of bad luck for him as for Eddy Diehl.

Go easy on the Indian kids
was the consensus among the Sparta public school teachers
most of them will quit at sixteen, disappear out in the rez or in the U.S. Army, or in Attica.
Because he was mixed-blood Aaron Kruller was something of an exception, known to be the son of Zoe Kruller who’d been for years—before the notoriety of her death—a locally popular “girl singer” with a popular bluegrass group—so teachers made more of an effort with Aaron even as they were uneasy in his presence, and wary of his short temper; here was the kind of difficult student of whom a teacher inclined to youthful optimism would say
You know, that Kruller boy is really intelligent, if you’re patient with him he catches on.

Or
Aaron is shy, insecure. He’s scared someone will laugh at him that’s what makes him dangerous.

After his mother’s death it was understood that Aaron was seriously disturbed and his absences from school were rarely investigated; his empty desk at the rear of the room was a welcome sight, to teachers and
classmates alike. Yet long before Zoe Kruller’s death, Aaron had been a difficult presence at school, for you could not tell, if you were an adult in authority, if the tall gangling Indian-looking boy was being polite in his awkward way muttering in monosyllables
Yes ma’am—no ma’am—yessir!—nossir!
—or if he was being rude, mocking. Often Aaron would lurch to his feet, when approached, if he was seated; his reaction seemed deferential, yet it gave him the advantage of looming over the shorter, usually female teachers. Adults who knew Zoe believed that they could detect in the son some of the friendly-drawling cadences of Zoe’s speech but in Aaron’s face, shut up like a fist, there was never Zoe’s warm flash of a smile, that flash of bared and vulnerable pink gums.

Only the glaring-dark eyes, irises like pinpricks. Uncanny how he made you feel you were being sighted in the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

More than once in grammar school and in middle school Aaron Kruller had been suspended from classes—for fighting on school grounds, threatening his classmates, “insolence” toward adults-in-authority—but always he’d been allowed to return on probation. Even those youthful optimistic teachers who claimed to see the “real” Aaron Kruller in his eyes took for granted that, the following year, when Aaron was sixteen, and no longer legally required to attend school in New York State, like his father Delray before him, he’d quit.

“That loser. You have to feel sorry for him.”

Though in his sour-mocking voice Ben didn’t sound at all sorry for Aaron Kruller.

Frequently now—since our father had moved out of our house, since
the trouble
had swept into our lives like a flash flood bearing filthy water, debris—my brother spoke with this air of angry hurt, sarcasm. Ben had never been a very forceful child, he’d been shy in our father’s presence, eager to be noticed by Daddy and eager to be loved but shy about putting himself forward as—as Daddy’s little girl—I was not; and now, as if overnight, Ben seemed to have drawn into himself something of our father’s furious disdain, even Daddy’s facial expressions—creased forehead, narrowed eyes, a cobra-look in those eyes of almost gleeful malevolence.

My mother was becoming frightened of Ben, I thought. The two of us stung by the ugly words springing from his mouth after the Sparta police had searched the house
Cracked her head! Brained her! I know how to use a hammer, any asshole does.

Just joking! Sure.

These days—late February, March—it was just our mother, Ben, and me at the house on the Huron Pike Road. Ben and me returning home from school in a state of dread. We were waiting for something to happen—waiting for the news
Edward Diehl has been arrested in the homicide of
—or waiting for the news
Edward Diehl has been cleared of suspicion in the homicide of
—waiting for our mother to call out to us, as we entered the house at the rear
Daddy is coming home! It’s all over.

There was a rumor circulating at school and on the school bus that Aaron Kruller had approached Ben, in the boys’ locker room at their school. Aaron Kruller at five feet eleven inches who loomed over Ben Diehl at five feet six inches as an adult man would loom over a child intimidating him by his very presence. According to this rumor which had been relayed to me—separately—gleefully—by several girl-classmates of whom one was a Bauer cousin-twice-removed—a girl who should have been protective of my brother—the Kruller boy had shoved Ben against a row of lockers without explanation or warning, when Ben tried to shove him back, struck at him with his fists, Aaron Kruller calmly slapped his face—not punched but slapped his face, with an open palm—bloodied Ben’s nose—while other boys fearful of Aaron Kruller drew away staring, keeping their distance; nor would anyone report the assault to the boys’ gym coach, even poor Ben.

“I fell. I fell on the ice. Hit my face, made my nose bleed. It’s nothing. Never mind.”

So Ben explained his battered face to our mother that evening. Overwhelmed by whatever had happened that day—of which Ben and I had little idea though guessing it involved phone calls, drives into town on “errands” and visits from Bauer relatives, a consultation with her lawyer—our mother seemed scarcely to hear.

Another incident, reported to me: Aaron Kruller had followed Ben onto the footbridge above the river threatening to push him off and laughing when Ben burst into tears.

I saw that Ben was edgy, upset. I saw the chipped tooth, the bruised face. I was frightened of angering my brother and yet I had to ask him if it was true, that Aaron Kruller was following him, had threatened him, and Ben said no, it was not true—“Bullshit.”

I must have looked disbelieving. Ben said sneering no no
no
it was not true,
not fucking true
—“Don’t you say anything to Mom, Krista. First thing Mom will do is call school, see? Call the principal, and get me in worse trouble. Or worse, call the cops. Keep your mouth shut.”

I asked Ben if Aaron Kruller wanted to hurt him because Aaron believed that Daddy had hurt his mother and Ben said excitedly, “Are you crazy, Krista? What d’you mean saying a thing like that? That’s bullshit,” and I asked why, why was this bullshit, and Ben said, pushing me away—we were alone in the house, our mother had driven out on one of her desperate errands to the grocery store, drug store—seemed that Lucille Diehl was always at Walgreens getting a prescription filled—“You have to feel sorry for Kruller, he’s such a loser. His drunk old man killed his mother who’d been a junkie-whore, how’s it get more pathetic than that?”

The way Ben’s mouth twisted on
junkie-whore,
you could see that he’d come to hate Zoe Kruller, too.

But we’d always liked Zoe, didn’t we?

At Honeystone’s we’d wanted to be waited on by Zoe hadn’t we?

How does it happen, you like someone so much—love someone, maybe—then later, not so long later, what you feel is hate? Terrible hurtful hate? Wanting-to-kill hate?

Why?

Already when I was in eighth grade, aged thirteen, thrown together in the company of older kids on the school bus, I’d begun to hear such words as
whore, hooker, prostitute
and to have an idea what these words might mean. Without needing to inquire I understood that these were ugly words that applied exclusively to females.

Junkie
was an ugly word that applied to males, also. To be a
junkie
you could be either female or male and it meant you were a
druggie, drug addict, doper.

Turning tricks
I’d begun to hear. This had an appealing sound: you could imagine showy tricks of some kind—card tricks, magic tricks, teaching a dog to teeter about on its hind legs—to arouse envy and admiration in others.

To provoke applause. Whistles of approval.

As in Chautauqua Park at the bandstand. Zoe Kruller in her shiny spangle-dress clinging to her feverish little body like liquid mercury and bowing to the crowd—the crowd that adored her—tossing her streaked-strawberry-blond hair over her head in a gesture of swift utter abjection.

Bowing low and then straightening again, arching her back. Smiling so happily at the applauding whistling crowd you’d think her heart would burst.

I think it was my brother who’d said of Zoe that she’d been
turning tricks
but maybe it had been someone else, another, older boy on our school bus. Crude loud-laughing boys you avoided looking at, pretended not to hear. Even when they called your name
Kris-ta! Krissss-taaa! Kissy-kissy-Krisss-taaa!
you pretended not to hear.

Cruel things were said of Zoe Kruller
turning tricks.
You would have thought that now Zoe was dead, and had been buried in the Lutheran cemetery on Howell Road—we hadn’t gone to the funeral of course, but a girl I knew from school had gone—most people would feel sorry for her and for the Krullers but this didn’t seem to be the case, not with everyone.