Little Bird of Heaven (21 page)

“T
HAT LOSER.
You heard?”

Ben slammed into the house, his boy’s voice lifted happily.

It was a weekday evening, near 6:30 P.M. Ben had caught a ride home with a neighbor after work, after school. Our mealtimes were now closer to 7:00 P.M. and sometimes later, if my mother was busy. Sometimes, we didn’t have “mealtimes” at all but ate—if we ate—separately, leftovers from the refrigerator or Campbell’s soup—or, in my case, cereal, upstairs in my room while I did homework.

It was a matter of shame to me, I would not have wanted my friends at school to know, or my girl-cousins: that when Daddy left, he’d taken so much with him. Preparing meals with my mother, all those years—mostly, that had ended, I hadn’t quite understood when.

And eating together, at the kitchen table—the four of us. All that, ended.

Krista grow up! He isn’t coming back, fuck him. Fuck all of them you don’t need them, why do you need them you DO NOT NEED THEM.

Rare for Ben to call out in such a tone, I steeled myself to hear his news.

In fact, I’d heard rumors earlier, at school: Aaron Kruller had been “permanently expelled” from Sparta High.

I hadn’t been one of those who’d crowded against windows in the school, to see a Sparta police vehicle pull up the drive followed closely by a second vehicle, this memorable event that would long be told and retold by witnesses both first-and second-hand—thrilled, gleeful, awed
that one of their own classmates would not only merit the summoning of uniformed police officers but offer enough “resistance” to their efforts to warrant being handcuffed and taken forcibly away, in the rear of one of the vehicles.

I had to think that Aaron had been provoked. His short temper, his quick hard fists lashing out—he’d been wounded, it was natural for him to wish to wound others.

I felt sorry for Aaron and for myself—the bleak thought came to me, I might never see Aaron Kruller again.

“Like his drunk old man, he could kill someone. He’s dangerous. He knocked Mr. Farolino down. He’s a
psycho.”

Ben spoke eagerly, gloatingly. It was Ben’s belief that Aaron’s father Delray had killed Zoe Kruller and that Aaron had lied to protect him, about Delray being home with him that night.

I asked why didn’t he feel sorry for Aaron, after all Aaron’s mother had been killed. “Isn’t that enough, why hate him too?”

“Why?” Ben looked at me with a quizzical sort of attention, as if a very young or slow-witted child had spoken. “Because he lied about his father, stupid. Why’d you think?”

“How do you know he lied, Ben? How can you be so sure?”

“Because it’s what I didn’t do, and Mom didn’t do, for Dad.”

Dad
was not a word Ben had uttered in a long time. Whether he was conscious of uttering it now, embarrassed at having uttered it, I could not tell for Ben was looking away. A faint flush like a rash had come into his face, he began to scratch as if it itched him.

“That’s weird logic, Ben.” I laughed, uncomfortably. “That’s actually
illogic
.”

In math we’d been learning about “logic”—the deductive logic of theorems. There was another kind of logic—inductive. Yet you could not always trust either, for in life most rules didn’t seem to apply.

“Know what, Krista? I hate them all, I wish they’d die. Krullers.”

Krullers.
Ben pronounced the name like an obscenity.

I ran away upstairs to my room. Often it was to my room—that was
small, with a slanted ceiling and just a single dormer window Daddy had built overlooking an overgrown pasture beside the barn—that I ran, to hide.

I didn’t want to think that, if what Ben said was true about Aaron Kruller lying to protect his father, Ben’s judgment of the Krullers was more logical than my own.

There were girls in my class whom I might have called that evening, to ask what they’d heard, what was the news of a boy in the high school who’d been arrested that day and taken away by police—a boy whose name I didn’t know; but I didn’t dare, I couldn’t risk anyone guessing that I was in love with Aaron Kruller.

Nor could I risk my mother or my brother overhearing me on the phone, asking such questions.

Downstairs I could hear Ben telling my mother the thrilling news. A half-dozen times Ben must have told and retold all that he knew. His voice and my mother’s voice murmurous and rising together in a single tide of elation, spite. I threw myself onto my bed. I stuck my fingers in my ears. I didn’t want to hear them so united in hatred, maybe I envied them.

At least, they had that to share.

N
EVER RETURNED TO
349 West Ferry Street except in memory, never saw Jacky DeLucca again in those years of my growing-up in Sparta and my growing-away from Sparta though frequently in moments of weakness—in moments of loneliness—I felt the woman’s warm fleshy arms folding me against her, the foam-rubber resilience of her big breasts, the sweet-stale fragrance of her unwashed body which I’d found repugnant at the time and yet in memory not at all repugnant but pleasurable—the shock of her lips against the top of my head. The gesture had seemed to me utterly spontaneous and unwilled as the sudden kiss of a dog, or a cat—pure instinct, one warm being for another. And there came the breathy childlike plea with its undercurrent of adult coercion
Friends now aren’t we Krissie?

Promise you’ll come back to see me.

I had never gone back of course. And very likely, Jacky DeLucca had moved away from West Ferry Street, soon after.

To live, among other addresses perhaps, on a street called Towaga in gritty East Sparta.

My fascination with the run-down row house in which Zoe Kruller had died was a fascination too with a place—forbidden, never acknowledged within the family—to which my father had gone, by his own belated, reluctant admission.
Yes he’d visited the murder victim there. Yes he’d had sexual relations with the murder victim there. Yes within hours of her death. Yes he had lied. Yes he insisted he was innocent, he was not lying now.

Abruptly then my fascination with this house ceased for as the
weather turned more mild, and I was able to bicycle out to the Quarry Road, it became the Kruller house where Zoe had once lived, and where Aaron and his father Delray still lived, that drew me to it.
Here, Aaron lives! He is alive and living and knows nothing of you
.

How mysterious it is, to be
in love.
For you can be
in love
with one who knows nothing of you. Perhaps our greatest happinesses spring from such longings—being
in love
with one who is oblivious of you.

Shut my eyes now, years later and yet how vivid to me that long looping bicycle ride along the Huron Pike Road to the cobblestone overpass that carried railroad tracks high above my head—pushing my bike up a steep dirt path to the tracks—pedaling along the bumpy cinder-strewn shoulder of the tracks to the river a quarter-mile away—and there onto the footbridge above the river where in the wake of recent storm damage there was a newly posted warning
PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE CLOSED FOR REPAIR CROSS AT YOUR OWN RISK
. Below was the fast-rushing Black River which began high in the Adirondacks, a confluence of numberless small creeks and rivers, and would empty into vast Lake Ontario to the west, to which we’d taken some day trips when Daddy had been in a mood for such family trips to the wide sandy beach at (oddly named! Ben and I laughed at this) Mexico Bay, very near the tiny settlement of Texas. Though I knew these facts, I could not imagine how such a wide treacherous-seeming snaky-glittering river could
begin
anywhere, as I could not imagine how anything so vividly real to me as my own life could
begin
: for
beginning
implies a time and a point before which a thing or a being
does not yet exist
—and how is this possible?

Like my feeling for Aaron Kruller. I could not have said when precisely it
began
, it seemed to have been with me always.

Rationally I know, and surely I knew then: my feeling for Aaron had only to do with Zoe Kruller, and with my father. A mysterious conjunction of these persons. Yet how could that explain the depth of my feeling, and its obsessiveness?—gripping me tight as in the coils of a massive boa constrictor.

Cautiously I pedaled across the bridge. You were supposed to walk
not ride bicycles across such pedestrian bridges but no adult was present to reprimand me. I tried not to glance down—tried not to be distracted by glimpses of the river below—fleetingly visible through cracks between the loosely-fitted planks as a sensation of terrible dizziness rose in me—until I was safely across—and clumsily descending another steep dirt path to a service road beside the Chautauqua & Buffalo railroad yard—past the graffiti-defaced train depot and then to Front Street, and to Chadd, and a mile or so to the two-lane state highway where enormous trucks bearing trailers careened by me in a haze of exhaust and heat and sometimes sounded their horns at me, their sharp terrible braying horns at a lone girl-bicyclist on this dangerous stretch of highway where vehicles routinely sped beyond the fifty-five-mile-per-hour limit into the seventies if not higher and now came the angry adult reprimand
Get the hell out of here girl, this is no place for you.

Following the highway into an area of industrial sites, warehouses and small factories, Atlas Van Lines, Herkimer County Animal Control where Daddy had once taken a wounded stray dog we’d found on the Huron Pike Road, no hope for the dog Daddy said
No we can’t take him in, that isn’t going to happen so don’t push it you kids.
And there beyond Sparta Salvage was the blacktop Quarry Road where heavy dump trucks rattled through the days on their way to and from the gypsum quarry a mile or so beyond a neighborhood of small clapboard and asphalt-sided houses and tin-colored mobile homes decorated with American flags—there was Kruller’s Auto Repair & Cycle Shop

There were two garages, adjoining. In a sprawl of secondhand motorcycles and other vehicles for sale, in a wide mostly grassless front yard. And at the rear of the lot at the end of a long gravel driveway was the Kruller house, a renovated old-style clapboard farmhouse of the kind common to Herkimer County painted a pale peach color with lime-green shutters, you could see Zoe Kruller’s touch in these startling colors now fading. How strange it seemed to me that Zoe Kruller had lived in that house, the smiling freckle-faced woman from Honeystone’s Dairy who had once appeared—unless I’d imagined it—in the kitchen of our house
and had spoken to me with a feverish sort of intensity calling me
Krissie
and smiling at me assuring me there was no need to tell my mother about the visit, she would tell my mother herself; how strange to think that the same woman was the girl-singer up on the stage at Chautauqua Park, for whom people had clapped so wildly; a woman who’d been a man’s wife, a boy’s mother, living out on Quarry Road in the sort of neighborhood my mother called
poor white
which was a different kind of poor from
colored
and
Indian,
maybe worse.

How strange, Zoe who’d been alive was now
dead.

More than dead,
murdered.

Zoe had been most alive at Chautauqua Park, summer nights singing with Black River Breakdown. Summer nights I’d been allowed to stay up past my usual bedtime of 9:00 P.M. There on the stage was Zoe Kruller looking so different from how she’d looked at the dairy, glamorous-sexy like a woman on TV singing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” in her low throaty voice—“Up the Ladder and Through the Roof”—“Footprints in the Snow”—“Little Bird of Heaven.” Circling her head like a quivering deranged halo were gnats and moths, Zoe did her best to ignore. She wore sparkly dresses with very short skirts unless the skirts were long, and slit at the sides to mid-thigh. Her legs shone in pale stockings or were netted in black lace stockings and her shoes were high-heeled unless—I don’t think that I was imagining this—Zoe once performed in her stocking feet, or barefoot. On a very hot Sparta summer night long ago.

Yes: Zoe had kicked off her shoes. Zoe had loosened her wild-streaked hair that had been caught back from her face in some sort of headband, shook her hair free now as the audience whistled and clapped.

You knew it was the end of a performance when the performer bowed. There was Zoe Kruller bowing—smiling her wide glistening hopeful smile—lifting a hand to shade her eyes squinting past the stage lights as a more experienced singer would not have done—thanking the audience for being “the very best audience, ever—I love you—”

The lights went down. With terrible abruptness, like a heavy curtain falling.

That woman.

Yes? What woman?

You know what woman.

Del Kruller’s wife? What?

Is there something between the two of you?

Something—what? Like what, Lucille?

I asked, is there something between the two of you.

Based on—what?

Based on you. And her.

About as much as there’s between you and Del.

I hardly know Delray Kruller! He doesn’t know me.

There you are, Lucille. We’re even.

Damn that’s a low thing to say. Damn you.

In the car, driving home. Daddy driving and Mommy in the passenger’s seat and Ben and me in the backseat drifting into sleep.

Thinking of such things, pedaling past the driveway to the Kruller house. It was a gauzy summer day, overcast sky and white-hot sunlight reflected everywhere. I was fourteen years old lanky-limbed and skinny and looking younger than my age glimpsed at a little distance. By this time Zoe Kruller had been dead—murdered—for three years and four months and her murderer had yet to be identified.

Kruller’s Auto Repair & Cycle Shop was a garage where every kind of vehicle was brought for repair: autos, pickups and small trucks, tractors, motorcycles. The garage resembled a box laid on its side and spilling contents: vehicles, tools and equipment, loud rock music, mechanics in grease-stiffened overalls. The men’s voices were loud. Their laughter was loud, grating. I took care to bicycle on the farther side of the road for I did not want that laughter directed at me, I did not want to attract the notice of anyone at the garage—workers, customers, Aaron Kruller who might be one of the younger mechanics glimpsed in the corner of my eye.

Often there were other bicyclists on Quarry Road but mostly these were teenaged boys. It was not common to see a girl out here, alone. In jeans and a pullover shirt I might have passed for a boy except for my pale-
blond hair in a ponytail streaming behind me. If someone at the garage whistled at me, called after me
Hey there girl! Hey baby!
My heart kicked with alarm—unless it was with excitement—but I never glanced around for I knew that it wouldn’t have been Aaron Kruller who’d called after me—Aaron Kruller wasn’t one to call after girls—and for sure it would not have been his father Delray and whoever it was, one of the mechanics, or a customer, or just some guy hanging out at the garage where lots of guys seemed to hang out, he’d have ceased seeing me in more or less the same instant he’d singled me out for fleeting male attention and he wouldn’t have had a good enough look at my face to realize
That girl! Eddy Diehl’s daughter.