Little Bird of Heaven (23 page)

When Duncan shoved me, I lost my balance and fell to the ground. No strength in my legs. So tired!—so exhausted!—wanting suddenly desperately just to sleep, to escape into sleep on the wet pavement except
Aaron Kruller is crouched over me pulling at me
Get up, c’mon girl get up you can’t go to sleep here—

He manages to get me on my feet. At a little distance, Duncan is jeering at us. Aaron ignores him saying
Okay lean on me don’t shut your eyes try to stay awake. Jesus, come on!

How badly I want to sleep. Lie on the ground curled into the shape of a little white grub, no eyes, no ears, scarcely a heartbeat and my bones are hollow filling with sleep like ether except that Aaron Kruller is shaking me, gripping my shoulders and shaking me, won’t let me sleep
Wham! Wham!
the flat of Aaron Kruller’s hand against my face waking me so that my eyes fly open.

Later, I will see the logic of this. I will think
This was meant to be, in just this way.

My mouth is bleeding. My upper lip has been cut. Maybe from Aaron Kruller’s slap, or one of Duncan Metz’s blows. There’s vomit dribbling from my mouth down the front of my clothes. Silky blond hair falling in vomit-clotted tatters in my face.
Stay awake
Aaron says.
Keep your eyes open. Fall asleep you’ll O.D.
Roughly walking me as you’d walk a staggering drunk. Half-dragging me to the street his arm tight around my waist supporting my weight while Duncan Metz shouts after us like someone crazed.

Aaron ignores Duncan Metz. Aaron is saying, urging
C’mon girl, you can walk. We’re almost there.

There’s a car parked on the street, motor running. Aaron helps me into the passenger’s seat. My legs are limp, I seem to have lost one shoe. My head feels loose on my neck as if it might fall off. Still I am so sleepy, so dazed!—stricken by another spasm of nausea—gagging and vomiting though there is virtually nothing to throw up—my guts are sick—poisoned—so ashamed you would think
This can’t be happening to me, I am not a girl to whom such an ugly thing can happen
but when the vomiting seems to have run its course Aaron Kruller wipes my mouth matter-of-factly with a wadded tissue out of his jacket pocket. He has to be disgusted with me but half-marveling too
Jesus, girl! Look at you.

And I know that I am safe with him. Thinking
He knows me. All these years Aaron Kruller has known who I am.

I
T WAS SAID
They grow up fast, the mixed-bloods.

My mother and her people said this. In Sparta, Caucasians said this. Not in contempt or disdain or anyway not always but in a kind of guilty wonder.

They grow up fast. They don’t have much choice.

And so it seemed to me Aaron Kruller was no boy like my brother Ben. Aaron Kruller wasn’t a kid. Not yet eighteen—I think this is right—yet Aaron behaved like an adult man tall and decisive and cursing beneath his breath as if knowing that what he was doing was bad luck, damned bad luck but he had no choice.

Getting involved with Krista Diehl. He’d had no choice.

He drove us to a brick row house. Somewhere in Sparta, not far from the train depot. A red-brick row house dripping rain and inside smelling of fried potatoes, grease. Walked me into the house his arm slung hard around my waist and I was slipping-down, near-falling, near-fainting and too dazed even to cry. Briskly Aaron walked me past an astonished-looking woman—a relative of his—middle-aged, a stranger to me—she’d come to open the door when Aaron rapped on the door with his fist and called to be let in—“It’s me, Aaron!”—walking me then past this woman and down a narrow corridor tilting like something in a fun house and into a cubbyhole of a bathroom ordering me to wash my face, clean myself up, if he drove me home and my mother saw me looking like this she’d freak and call the cops.

And if the cops saw me, I’d be busted.

At the sink I had difficulty turning on a faucet. My knees were weak, I could not seem to keep my balance. Aaron cursed faintly beneath his breath—what sounded like
fuck fuck fuck this
—but pushed down my head, ran cold water from a faucet and splashed it onto my heated face until I was coughing, sputtering, part-revived.

Aaron asked how old I was. I told him. Aaron shook his head in that way of his half-disgusted half-marveling. “
Fuck
.”

Meaning, I was under-age. I was a minor. Being in my company, in my drugged state, and looking the way I did, as if something had been done to me, something crude and nasty and sexual, meant trouble.

“Aaron? Who’s this?”

The woman pushed into the bathroom behind us excited and blustery as if her patience were beyond frayed, she was seriously pissed. In the exasperated familiarity with which she spoke Aaron’s name you could hear an accent echoing Aaron’s, they were of the same family, the same kin. Aaron gave her a highly truncated account of what had happened at the depot. He spoke of
she, her
as if I were not present. As if I were a problem that had been presented to him, he had not wished for and could not abandon.

“Oh, Jesus. Did she—is she—
hurt?”

“I don’t think so.”

“She’s high on—what?”

“Ask her.”

The woman pushed Aaron aside. She would fuss over me now as you’d fuss over a sick child. Her breath smelled warmly of beer, her red flannel shirt strained over her wide heavy breasts. Her name was Viola: it seemed to me, I’d seen V
IOLA
on a name tag somewhere, maybe at Kmart.

Viola was an aunt of Aaron Kruller’s—a sister of Delray Kruller—with some of the same facial features, the swarthy skin, heavy dark eyebrows.

Aaron’s aunt Viola might more plausibly have been Aaron Kruller’s mother than Zoe Hawkson had been.

Vaguely I was made aware of a stained porcelain sink with exposed pipes, an antiquated toilet with a pink chenille toilet-seat cover, a large scarred bathtub into which laundry seemed to have been dumped—dirty towels, bedding, women’s underwear. I was made to think how revolted my mother would have been by such untidiness. Such slovenliness. Such letting-go. Viola was asking Aaron if anyone had followed us here and Aaron said he didn’t think so. She asked if he’d seen police cruisers in
the neighborhood and Aaron said he didn’t think so. She asked if this had anything to do with—the name sounded like
Dutch-boy
—and Aaron said, “Fuck, no.”

Aaron didn’t care for this line of questioning. Aaron left me with his aunt whose breath came fiercely as if she’d been running up a steep stairs. Roughly she was swiping and slashing at my hair with a grimy hairbrush and with her fingers—her nails were oddly shaped, square, and had been painted a lurid red-orange, now chipped—she picked out snarls and clots of what she hadn’t immediately recognized as vomit. In exasperation she gave a breathy little scream: “Ohhh shit.”

“What’s the problem?”

Aaron had returned, with a fresh-opened can of beer. Through my stuck-together eyelashes I saw him drink in thirsty swallows as a drowning man might suck at air. I fell in love with him then. I fell more deeply in love.

The Kruller boy, Aaron. The boy I had so long pursued and dreamt-of and seeing now how coarse his face was, a bristly dark beard pushing out on his lower jaws, the heaviness of his jaws, in his forehead and cheeks old acne-scars or lacrosse scars or maybe scars from fights and in his left eyebrow a particularly nasty-looking scar like a fishhook. And seeing him now at such quarters I thought that I might not have recognized him, I was frightened of him and yet hopelessly I loved him, a sick sinking love must have shone in my bloodshot eyes for Aaron stared at me, and looked quickly away.

Muttering again what sounded like
Fuck fuck fuck this
under his breath.

Viola was asking Aaron why he’d brought me here “stoned out of her head”—and “so young”—and Aaron said it wasn’t like he’d had any choice. Viola asked if he knew who I was and Aaron didn’t answer at first and then he said, with a harsh mirthless laugh, “Guess.”

“‘Guess’? How the hell am I going to ‘guess’?”

“Her last name is ‘Diehl.’”

“Last name—what?”

“Diehl.’”

Viola was standing at the sink beside me and she lifted her head now to stare into the splotched mirror above the sink, at Aaron who stood behind us lounging in the doorway drinking beer.

“‘ Diehl’—? You mean—him?”

“Fuck who else I mean, Vi. How many ‘Diehls’ are there.”

Aaron shrugged. In the mirror Viola continued to regard me with something like fascinated dismay. More clearly now than before I could see the family likeness between her and her nephew: not just the facial features and the dark-tinted skin but her way of tensing her jaws as if she were trying to bite back terrible words, she dare not reveal.

I wanted to take comfort in this woman’s nearness. I wanted to take comfort in her physical warmth, the way the material of her frayed flannel shirt strained at her breasts and the way in which she stared at me as if unable to know what she felt for me. She was my mother’s age, perhaps. Fine worry-lines beside her eyes and a tiny pinch of flesh beneath her chin, but still Viola Kruller was a good-looking woman, men would turn to stare after her in the street.

In a kind of delayed rebuke, she gave me a little push.

“Ed Diehl’s daughter! Jesus.”

I had no response to this. At the sink, my face flushed and my hair in my eyes, I could pretend that I didn’t understand. I was high—“stoned.” I could pretend to not understand many things.

Viola said, relenting, working her mouth into a kind of forced smile, “Well. I guess it isn’t your fault, is it. You’re just a girl. His kid. Like it isn’t anybody’s fault whose kid they turn out to be, murderer or not.”

I wanted to protest
But my father is not! Daddy is not
but my throat was shut up.

Suddenly I felt faint. The faintness came and went in waves and this was a bad one. The woman caught me beneath the arms and helped me to sit on the lowered toilet seat. Fuzzy-chenille toilet seat. Viola Kruller and Lucille Bauer had at least one thing in common: toilet-seat covers of fuzzy chenille.

In the downstairs bathroom Mom had a yellow cover. In the upstairs bathroom rosy-pink.

I smiled to think
Mom wouldn’t like to see this!

I was feeling light-headed again. Wanting to slip down, curl onto the stained linoleum floor of the little bathroom and sleep.

A tight-curled little white grub. The kind you might crush underfoot, without noticing.

“No, hon! Not that. You aren’t going to nod off, hon. You know that’s not a good idea, in the state you’re in, hon. Bet-ter not. No-oo—” Briskly the woman shook my shoulders to keep me awake. With weak fingers I fumbled for one of her hands, gripped it with a tenacity that must have surprised her. I could not recall when I had last gripped any adult’s hand in such a way. “O.K., hon. I got you. You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.”

Behind us Aaron spoke—startling how close his voice was—I’d forgotten he was there—“If I can get her out of here and get her home, if she’d sober up”—and the woman said, “God damn Aaron, you should’ve thought of that before you brought her here,” and Aaron said, “This was the closest of any place I knew. Vi, you’d have done the same thing,” and the woman said, “Why didn’t you take her to the hospital, if you thought she was O.D.’ing,” and Aaron said, “She was breathing O.K. and she could walk,” and the woman said, “So—you could take her now, get her off our hands,” and Aaron said, “I’m scared of fucking up my probation,” and the woman said, “Your probation? What about mine? God damn you, Aaron. Kids like you don’t
think.”

Scolded, Aaron fell silent. You could tell that this was a familiar routine. There was an exasperated fondness in the aunt’s voice, something conciliatory and trusting in the nephew. I thought how fascinating it was, these strangers were speaking of me as if I mattered. As if, if I O.D.’d on drugs, that would matter. And how strange, that they spoke of me as if I were a young child, not responsible for my behavior. The woman asked another time if I’d been
hurt
—I knew to translate this as
raped
—and Aaron said he was pretty sure not, there’d be “signs” of that if I had been. “Looks
like she wetted herself, poor child,” the woman said, dabbing at my clothes with a wet towel, and Aaron said, with that harsh mirthless laugh, “Long as the wet isn’t blood, I don’t mind wet.”

They laughed together. Aunt and nephew laughing together. Krullers laughing together. The woman slapped my face with the wet washcloth sharply scolding—“I told you, hon. Don’t fall asleep.” To Aaron she said, “If she goes into a coma, if she dies on the floor right here that will fuck up your probation real good, mister smart-ass,” and Aaron said, “Fuck, Auntie. She’d be dead by now, she was going to die.”

My lips twitched in childish relief. I wasn’t going to die!

The woman went away. Seeing that I was steady on the toilet seat and not about to fall off. In another room I heard her on the phone. I didn’t think that it was an emergency number she was calling.

Alone together, Aaron Kruller and me. It seemed a different kind of alone than before.

As if we were known to each other now. We’d been identified and declared to each other now.

“You. You’re ‘Krista’—right? Some days, after school—I’d see you.”

Meaning
I’d seen you following me. And I’d known why.

This was not a question. Aaron knew the answer.

I had only to remain silent, Aaron knew the answer.

“That asshole brother of yours—‘Ben.’ He knows to stay out of my way.”

Such contempt in Aaron’s voice. The ugly fishhook scar in his eyebrow glared waxy-white.

It was disconcerting to think how young my brother Ben was—my “white” brother Ben—set beside Aaron Kruller. How Ben hardly needed to shave, his voice was a cracked boy’s-voice, and there was stubble on Aaron Kruller’s jaws, and his voice was deep and mocking and his big hands more resembled my father’s hands than my brother’s that were still the hands of a boy and so the hatred between them might be dangerous, for Ben. I wanted to plead for him
But Ben never hurt you
!