Little Bird of Heaven (26 page)

When nothing came of these repeated demands, my father drove to the Sparta TV station WWSP-TV demanding “airtime”—and was turned away by a frightened office manager. Driving then to the office of a lawyer in downtown Sparta whose name he’d found in the yellow pages, insisted upon speaking with this lawyer, a man named Schell, hoping to interest him in taking on his case in lawsuits charging “slander”—“libel”—“defamation of character”—“loss of income”—against the Sparta police, the district attorney, and the
Journal
and other newspapers through the state that had defamed him, but his excited and belligerent manner as well as his lack of money didn’t encourage Schell to take him on as a client.

Even on a “contingency fee” basis?—Edward Diehl would gladly have signed over 90 percent of the money the lawsuits brought him, which, he believed, would be “millions of dollars”—but no, Schell declined.

Nor would Schell recommend another lawyer.

Saying afterward, “Jesus, the poor bastard! Looking at me like a drowning rat—that’s just realized he isn’t going to be hauled up and saved from drowning.”

And so, my father Edward Diehl came at last to see that these men, seemingly unlinked to one another, were secretly allied. Far from feeling sympathy for him, as some of them pretended, the men were in fact contacting one another and laughing at him, in his misery.

Once, they’d accused him of murder. They’d tried to get him to confess, they’d tried to blame him for a crime he hadn’t committed. But now they’d given that up. Not a one of them, he was sure, seriously believed that he’d killed Zoe Kruller. They hadn’t been able to prove that Delway Kruller had killed her, either. All that was past, forgotten. They were laughing at Eddy Diehl now as a crank, a “nut-case,” a figure of scorn.

It was like pack animals: one of their kind was injured, limping and doomed. The others detached themselves from him. He would die alone, expelled from the pack; unless the pack turned on him in a frenzy of bloodlust, tearing out his throat.

The wild laughter of wild creatures. Of wolves.

Blood on their muzzles. Beautiful cruel creatures cavorting and leaping in the snow, and on the ground the fallen animal, a gutted carcass.

T
UESDAY AFTERNOON,
dusk when Daddy arrived at last at my school. I had not given up waiting for him and yet it was a shock to me to see my father in the dark-coppery Caddie Seville as I’d last seen him a few days before.
So this is real after all! Daddy is real.

Much of that day he’d been drinking. Now it was 4:40 P.M., he’d been drinking since late morning both whiskey and ale. He hadn’t slept for several days in succession. He’d made his decision.

“Krista sweetheart! Climb in.”

Quickly I ran to the new-looking Caddie Seville. Maybe I was being observed by some of my classmates—envied, I would have thought.

She has a father. He came to pick her up. Classy car!

Smelling whiskey on Daddy’s breath as he leaned over to hug me hard enough to knock the breath from me. I laughed excitedly, I loved Daddy’s whiskey-breath, Daddy’s stubbly chin.

“I knew you’d be here, Puss. Sorry I’m late. I had business to attend to. Now I’m clear. I knew you’d be the one not to let me down.”

We drove out of the parking lot. I saw that there was a change in my father since the last time I’d seen him: he was still wearing the suede jacket but it looked soiled, even torn. His graying-red hair was disheveled as if he’d been sleeping and had not combed it. His face was ravaged and yet radiant and his eyes were bleary, bloodshot yet alert and alive. Eddy Diehl was a desperate man but he was a righteous man. In history we’d been learning about John Brown the Abolitionist leader, the “bloodthirsty madman” reviled by others who’d sacrificed his life for a principle. He had been hanged, he’d become a martyr for the sake of ending slavery in the United States. In our textbook the photograph of John Brown resembled my father, I thought.

“From now on, it’s you and me, Krista. I need my girl with me.”

And I said, blinded by happiness
Yes!

“But if you come with me now, see?—you can’t go back to
her.
You can’t go back to any of them, you will be with
me.
”

And I said, blinded by happiness
Oh yes!

“Because she would never have you back. Your mother would never want to see you again.”

And I said
I know this, oh Daddy this is what I want too.

At the Days Inn, he showed me the gun.

Calmly removing it from a duffel bag, where it was wrapped inside a white cotton T-shirt. The duffel bag—soiled, adorned with mysterious seals and insignia as if it had originally belonged to someone else—he’d set carefully onto the bed, to unzip. As his boyish grin unzipped in his battered face part-shy part-boastful. And his quickened breath.

A gun! A handgun! Many times I’d seen rifles up close, .22-caliber rifles, and boys’ air rifles: Ben had one, my father had bought him when he was twelve. And there was my grandfather’s shotgun, he’d used to hunt pheasants when he’d been younger, Ben and I were warned never to touch.

But only in movies and on TV had I seen a handgun, a revolver.

Blunt-nosed, ugly and dark-dully-gleaming, an alarming sight in my father’s just-perceptibly unsteady hand.

Both hands, as he gripped it. Sighting along the barrel like a TV cop with a deep-furrowed brow and in that stance regarding himself in the mirror above a bureau of drawers.

“Our secret, sweetheart. Yes?”

I was too surprised to react, at first. Smiling stupidly as often I was left standing on the basketball court in the first dazed moment before my nose began to leak blood from a ball carelessly or cruelly flung at my provoking little-girl Caucasian face.

“Krista? Don’t look so scared, sweetie. A gun is our friend, when we are in danger. When we have enemies who are armed. See, honey—”

Daddy was showing me something about the gun, I was too upset, too distracted to understand what he was saying, what he was showing me, later I would think
The safety lock was on, was that it?
—“I would never
resort to a ‘deadly weapon’ except if I was forced. Like for self-protection, or to protect my family. To protect
you.
If for instance they break in here and try to take you away from me.”

This too was confusing. This too I could not comprehend.

“‘Break in’-? Here?”

“If they locate us. If they know that Edward Diehl is in this room.”

My heart was hammering inside my skinny rib cage. My father’s words made no sense to me. Lines from the song Zoe Kruller sung in her teasing-sexy throaty voice
Little bird of heaven! Little bird of heaven right here in my hand!
ran through my mind, mocking me for my heart had become the little bird wildly thrashing its wings to escape.

Still gripping the gun, Daddy went to shut, lock, and bolt the door of the motel room. Briskly Daddy yanked the Venetian blind down over the single window, that overlooked a cracked asphalt parking lot nearly deserted at this time of day.

Daddy tried to shut the drapes, too. But the cord broke in his jolting hand.

“Just to take precautions, sweetie. Nobody should know that I’m here—or you, with me—unless they’d been spying on me, or on
you.
Unless your vindictive momma put them on my trail or one of the Krullers, still hoping to cast the blame on me and not on Delray they’ve all got to know is the one…. God damn their sick sorry souls to
hell.”

I was swallowing hard. My mouth had gone dry. Daddy spoke in a reasonable-sounding voice as if knowing that I would agree with him.

Wanting to say
Daddy why do you have a gun? Daddy please put away the gun!
but the words caught in my throat. Daddy paid no heed to me, not the slightest heed, as a father pays no heed to the prattling of a very young child he loves, but has no need to hear.

Light-headed I needed to sit down quick but was fearful of sitting on the bed where Daddy had tossed his things, the unzipped duffel bag weirdly decorated with a stranger’s private icons, a brown paper bag out of which long-necked bottles glistened—whiskey?—and a cardboard box containing manila files grimy from usage. Nor would I have been
comfortable sitting in the room’s single chair near the TV for the chair was covered with Daddy’s soiled clothing, sweated-through undershirt and boxer shorts he must have worn to bed, and stretched out to dry that morning.

His smell pervaded the room. It was a smell I would long remember, briny and sweaty and acrid and despairing, the smell of a desperate man.

As if Daddy could read my thoughts he said cheerily, “Krissie honey! Give your old Daddy a smile, eh? Like you were smiling when you got into the car? See, this gun is a damn good high-quality Smith and Wesson thirty-eight caliber. This gun
is not going to hurt Krissie. This gun is for self-defense only
. All you need to know is we’re safe here. If they’d been following us they’d have broken in by now.”

On the drive to the Days Inn my father had peered into both the rearview mirror above the dashboard and the outside mirror. At the time I’d thought that another vehicle was crowding him from behind. Sharply he’d turned corners, brazenly he’d driven through intersections as the yellow light turned red. Now I knew that he was making sure that no one was following us.

Daddy’s enemies. Our enemies. But we were safe in this locked room.

I wondered why we were here. What would be perpetrated, here.

“Want a Coke, Krista? You look thirsty. There’s a machine outside—I’ll get you a Coke. You stay right here.”

Quickly I said Daddy no, no thank you.

If he’d unlocked the door and stepped outside, maybe there would be danger for him. Maybe—these thoughts came fluttering through my brain like dazed moths—I would push past him, run outside and call for help and Daddy would never trust me or love me again.

“You sure? I’m having a drink, myself. Sure you don’t want anything?”

Still the revolver was in my father’s hand. Not pointed anywhere purposefully, it was not at that moment, strictly speaking, a
gun,
a
weapon;
you might argue that it was simply an object.

We were in a first-floor room at the far end of a two-storey stucco building of just discernible shabbiness and melancholy; something in the very jauntiness of the sign
Days Inn Vacancies
exuded this air of shabbiness and melancholy. In books there is said to be meaning, in our English class our teacher was reading poems by Robert Frost to us and it was astonishing to me, and a little scary, how the words of a poem have such
meaning,
but in actual life, in places like the Days Inn motel there is not much
meaning,
it is just something that
is.
And outside our room was a scrubby evergreen hedge that looked as if it was dying and beyond the hedge a nasty-smelling Dumpster. The room itself was depressing, as you’d expect—the bed so carelessly “made” as to suggest mockery, or anger—someone, seemingly my father, had risen from this bed and only just yanked the chenille spread up to cover the bedclothes at a diagonal, knocking a sweat-stained pillow to the floor. In our house my mother insisted upon making beds daily, even Ben was trained to make up his bed shortly after getting out of it, like brushing our teeth this was, washing our faces and combing our hair, something you
did.
But not Daddy, and not here.

Strewn about the room were Daddy’s things: manila folders, legal-looking documents, newspapers, an empty Four Roses bottle on the bedside table, a two-thirds depleted six pack of Pilsner Ale. At home it had been understood that Daddy’s territory in the basement, which was most of the basement, was not to be disturbed: Daddy’s “workbench” as he called it, a long plank table where he kept his numerous carpenter’s tools, his “power” tools, some of them hanging from hooks, always in the same order. You could see that Eddy Diehl was a serious man, for all his joking and kidding-around and liking to drink with his men friends, Eddy was a serious man who took his work and his work-tools seriously; here there was no
fooling around
—still less
fucking around
—at Daddy’s workbench, not ever.

But in this room, this terrible room at the Days Inn, Daddy’s things looked as if they’d been flung down, as if a windstorm had swept through the room yet leaving the stale-smelling air intact.

Afterward it would be revealed that several nights earlier my fa
ther had registered at the motel under the name “John Cass.” It wasn’t clear—from the motel clerk’s vague testimony, you might infer that the clerk hadn’t looked carefully at the ID my father had shown him—why he’d chosen the name “John Cass” but immediately I knew
It’s for Johnny Cash
.

I would smile to think this. Not a happy smile but one that I could have shared with Daddy. One of his secrets, I would not tell anyone.

Nor would I reveal most of what Daddy confided in me, in the next two hours. At last speaking of having been in the U.S. Army—in boot camp at Fort Pendleton, and in Vietnam for five months; how “weird and scared” he was in Vietnam; how the black soft earth had seemed to erupt from inside, as if the explosion had come from beneath his feet and not through the air; how recalling it he wanted to laugh, it had been so
easy;
falling, losing consciousness, giving up—so
easy;
so he knew that dying could be
easy,
it was coming back to life, it was living your life, waking in a hospital bed delirious with pain and for the rest of your life walking with pain, and certain memories, that was the hard part. And working construction in the Thousand Islands, after he was discharged, sent home, limping and having headaches and a fucking ringing in his ears he’d have to live with, how he’d had a glimpse the summer he was twenty-two of “wealth”—“the real thing”—not just the “cottage” his work crew was building for a millionaire businessman from downstate but most of the properties on the island, which was Harbor Island—summerhouses with as many as fifteen, twenty rooms—and these were not small rooms—the highest-quality woods (redwood, cedar)—the highest quality kitchens, bathrooms, furnaces, every kind of electrical fixture; and the thirty-foot docks, and the yachts, so many yachts, all of them dazzling-white and some so large they required crews to man them; and sailboats of a size and quality Eddy Diehl had never known existed, high-class speedboats, even canoes. Canoes! You could spend hundreds of dollars on a canoe! That summer was what you’d call an “eye-opener” Daddy said, wiping his mouth as he drank. “Made me wonder what the hell life is, that I could get to be the age I was, after I’d been in the God-damned U.S. Army
like I was, and thought I knew some things, like seeing people blown apart and feeling your own self drain away like something down a sink, but that was nothing, just movie stuff, comic-book stuff, not like what the world actually
is.
What the world
is
, Krissie, is people owning things, and owning
you.
That’s not something you are taught or you can see in the plain daylight. I was twenty-two and didn’t know shit. Not a fraction of what’s going on. No more than a beetle would know crawling over the hull of one of those forty-foot Chris-Craft yachts. See what I’m saying, Krissie?” He squinted at me. He drank again, roughly wiping his mouth. “You get to realize, it hurts like hell, like a tire iron shoved up your ass, all that you are not going to have. All that you are never going to have no matter how you work your sorry ass off, every drop of your blood squeezed out of you and it wouldn’t be enough, see? It’s never enough, a guy like me. I knew that, then. It was a harder thing to know, than about dying. Because this, you have to live with; the other, you just give up. Right then, I was just a kid really, I knew how it would play out. My own father, and his father. And guys working construction, making ‘good money’ in the union. I never had delusions of grandeur like some people. Your mother, she’d have liked me to ‘invest’ with her brothers—she’d say maybe I could start my own construction business—didn’t know the first thing about the business, pissed me off trying to tell me what to
do.
So, Krissie, this wasn’t a kind of knowledge that helps you with your life, but at least you see how things are. And there it was.”