Little Bird of Heaven (41 page)

Krull wondering
Is that Metz? Coming from—where?

Thinking
If I can get through this, I will never deal again.

Krull backed away from the window. Behind him Sarabeth was moaning, keening. Dutch Boy limped back into the house excitedly muttering to himself and waving the gun in his right hand. It was a pistol with a long barrel, heavy, mean-looking, could be a forty-five caliber, Krull was sure he’d never seen before. Dutch Boy’s crazed meth eyes fastened on him. Dutch Boy gestured with the gun at him. “Y-you. K-K-Krull what’re you l–l-looking at.” Krull felt the dangerous impulse to laugh but managed not to laugh, in fact it was a calm sort of panic
Either he will kill me now, or he will not.
Beside the sink was a drawer yanked partway open, Krull tried to peer inside to see if there might be something in the drawer, a knife for instance, a long-handled knife, he might use to defend himself, but there came Dutch Boy panting like a winded dog, “K-K-Krull? You never saw that, K-Krull—right?” and quickly Krull said that was right, he had not seen anything, and Dutch Boy said, “God damn I thought I could trust that sonbitch, see what he made me do,” and Krull said, “That wasn’t Duncan, was it?” and Dutch Boy said, “Who? Wasn’t—who?” and Krull said, “Just so you know, Dutch, you can trust
me.”
Inside the drawer was what appeared to be a hunting knife but Krull knew he couldn’t remove the knife from the drawer, couldn’t hope to use the knife even if he could get his fingers around it in a clutter of other utensils, there wouldn’t have been time.

“K-Krull? You listening to me?”

A spasm of itching overcame Dutch Boy. With the barrel of the pistol he scratched at his left armpit and at his chest shiny with sweat beneath the vinyl vest. In this instant Krull turned blindly and pushed his way out of the back door of the house. In this instant outdoors in the fresher air running panicked and stumbling through sweet-smelling tall grasses and wild rose briars that clawed at him. Dutch Boy was calling, “K-Krull! K-K-Krull!” in a rising voice like a hurt and aggrieved child. Dutch Boy fired a shot, Krull heard the bullet whistle past and disappear into the grasses. Krull ran not glancing back wanting to think that Dutch Boy had only just fired into the air, a warning shot, Dutch Boy would not want to shoot
him.
Wasn’t Krull Dutch Boy’s lieutenant? Dutch Boy’s right-hand man?
Maybe this was a way of indicating that Krull was fired and would be replaced and so Krull ran between a part-collapsed barn and the remains of a barbed-wire fence. Behind him Dutch Boy was shouting and another time fired the gun. Krull heard Sarabeth’s thin uplifted voice, and another voice, male, that might’ve belonged to Jimmy Weggens.

Head-on Krull ran. Ducking and weaving like an animal that has already been wounded, desperate to save its life.

…stumbling through marshy fields. Could not risk returning to his car. The sun had vanished now as if it had never been. Sweet damp grasses as tall as his head, and rich soft black earth, a din of peepers, tiny tree frogs. Krull’s feet were wet. Krull’s head pounded with pain. It was the post-meth headache, the brain’s arteries were swollen. Wiping at his face, nape of his neck felt like it was bleeding. (Maybe one of Dutch Boy’s bullets had grazed him. Maybe Dutch Boy assumed he was wounded and would crawl away to die like a gut-shot deer.) How many miles he’d half-run stumbling and panting through fields, formerly cultivated fields now given over to weeds, spare stands of trees, thunder rumbling in the eastern part of the sky, in the foothills of the Adirondacks. Hiked along a two-lane blacktop road with no name, hoped he might catch a ride except when headlights swung up out of the dark he ducked away to hide in the underbrush. He had to figure that Dutch Boy and Jimmy Weggens would be pursuing him. By chance then coming upon the railroad track he’d seen at Booneville Junction here elevated to a height of about five feet and Krull hiked along the track in what he surmised to be the direction of Sparta however many miles away, Christ he had no idea. Instinctively you know to head downhill, toward a river. The river was the Black River and in that direction was home. Finally exhausted somewhere in the night Krull stumbled upon what seemed to have been a weighing shed beside the track and inside the earthen-floored shed partly covered by strips of tar paper he lay down cautiously, exhausted and curling upon himself like a kicked dog. Freezing-cold for May, and damp seeping into his bones. Zoe was saying
Just keep warm you can do it hon. Just keep breathing. Love ya!
Felt like his heart was mangled he missed Zoe so. Christ he missed
Delray. He’d come to terms with losing Zoe he’d thought but Delray there was a chance he’d see again. Hadn’t tried hard enough to find his father and now it was almost too late. Already he was forgetting what had happened at Dutch Boy’s. Had to be some logic to it. Always a logic if you know the circumstances.
Follow the money trail
Delray advised. Sank into an exhausted sleep. Woke and slept again and woke hearing at a distance the furious spittle-edged voice trying to explain something to him except the language was unintelligible. Then Delray crouched beside him explaining which tool to use. Now the language was clear, Krull’s heart was flooded with warmth.
The wrench is used like this, and like this. This screwdriver is what’s called a Phillips. See?—the little cross at the tip. I can teach you.
Above them was the chassis of a vehicle like a gigantic insect showing its skeleton beneath. Crankshaft, transmission. Fuel line. His child-fingers fumbled the tool and Pa closed his fingers around his and lifted the wrench.
See Aaron, I can teach you. Take your time.
He had not remembered where the hell he was, it came as a shock to wake in the shed on the freezing earthen floor on strips of tar paper and his backbone stiff and joints aching with cold as he’d imagine an old man’s joints. From rough reckless lacrosse you acquired aches, sprains, hairline breaks in your bones that would show up years later, older guys claimed. Play your heart out when you’re a kid it’s the only time you will have, what the hell what comes later. An old man at forty-five. Limping at fifty. Arthritis, slipped discs. He was staring at something moving on the ruined wall. Shadows or a ripple of something outside, and alive.
Hey kid. It’s me, kid.
Krull pulled himself up, crawled to the shed entrance and looked outside. It was still night. It was not a true dawn. Gusts of wind stirred broken things on all sides. Flurry of wind in the trees. Hairs at the nape of his neck stirred. Jesus it was a terrible thing to see Pa out there so strangely calm, not twelve feet away. Delray was standing as if bracing himself against the trunk of a large deciduous tree. Pa’s dark-stained face was striated, as if creased at an angle. It was a disfigured face, a freak’s face, Krull stared astonished.
Kid it’s a long time now. Let me go O.K. kid? I’m tired.
And then waking at dawn to discover that the figure he’d believed
to be his father standing with unnatural rigidity against a tree was in fact a dense striated covering of fungus on a dead tree trunk; ridges of pale parasitic growth that looked like miniature shingle boards set at uniform angles. Krull had never seen anything like this fungus-growth that must have been fifteen feet high, clamped to the tree and eclipsing the very base of the tree. The fungus-growth had sucked the life from the great tree, only swaths of dead leaves remained on the broken and tattered limbs. There was a kind of face in the fungus, a human face if you stared hard enough but you would not want to approach the fungus to see the face, and the suffering in the face, at close range.

“Hey there. You needin’ a ride?”

A farmer’s flat-bed truck approached. Headlights in mist. Krull had washed his stubbly lacerated face and wetted his quill-hair with ditch water, adjusted his filthy and torn clothing and walked into the road with some measure of dignity like middle-aged Delray easing off the Harley-Davidson, not letting on how his back throbbed with pain. Jesus! You could pretend to be almost anything you weren’t, there were so few things you could actually
be.

“Yes I am. Needin a ride. Thanks!”

Conscious of this good luck he had not deserved Krull was driven eleven miles across the Black River and into Sparta as the city on its steep glacial hills passed from mist-shrouded dawn to day, to a haze of pale sunshine; yet some lights continued to burn, streetlights, billboard lights, porch lights on houses; something about these lights left on struck Krull as poignant, or sad; or maybe hopeful. And the farmer—whose name was Floyd Donahower—whose hand Krull shook—who by purest chance was delivering his malfunctioning John Deere tractor to Kruller’s Auto Repair where he’d known the owner Delray for a long time—brought Krull to Quarry Road and to his home, he had not thought he would ever see again; and late that afternoon at the garage the phone rang in Delray’s office and Krull answered it and it was a girl’s breathy voice in his ear, Sarabeth informing Krull that Dutch Boy wanted him to know there were no “hard feelings” or a “wish for retribution” on his side and
that the problem had been “dealt with”—buried in a rotted old mound of hay and manure behind the barn.

To this, Krull could think of no reply. He’d been working on the tractor fuel line, he’d about repaired the damage. His hands were greasy and just slightly shaky but he was managing.

“Krull? Are you there?”

Krull murmured a sound to indicate
yes.

“I was so scared last night! Not sure all that happened—I mean, I didn’t see any of it—I wasn’t exactly
there.
But it’s over now, I guess. Things will work out, Dutch Boy says. He just wants you to know—what I told you.”

Krull said, “That sounds good. Tell Dennis, good.”

He would clean up his life. He was not yet twenty-two.
There’s some things I can teach you
Delray had promised. Krull would look to see what these might be.

N
OVEMBER
2002

O
N THIS DAY
I saw him: Aaron.

He’d seen me. He’d been waiting for me. Before he could speak I said his name: “Aaron.”

It had been years. Yet Aaron Kruller inhabited my dreams. My most intimate dreams, I would never have shared with anyone else including Aaron Kruller.

“Krista.”

He spoke my name flatly. There was no music in his voice, no sign of yearning. And his eyes were narrowed, wary. The eyes of a man of thirty-four years who has lived each of those years and yet calmly I thought
He has come to take me back to Sparta.

I thought
No love like your first.

T
HE HOPE IN THEIR EYES!
So blinding sometimes, I have to look away.

Or maybe it’s fury. Smoldering-hot acid-fury jammed up inside their ulcerated bowels.

Claude Loomis, for instance. With his pretense of not-remembering me though it has been less than two months since I’ve seen him in this room, at this very table.

And the way he jerks forward in what appear to be erratic and involuntary muscular twitches against the edge of the metal-topped table that
separates us. His voice is a low barely audible mutter
Ma’am? Din’t hear you.
His shoulders are bony and misshapen in a way to make you wonder if, beneath the khaki-colored prison uniform, you’d see evidence of amputation, wings sheared bluntly off at the shoulders.
Ma’am din’t hear you ma’am.
Mock-courteous, screwing up one side of his purplish-black pitted and whorled face and cupping a hand to his ear, that’s pulpy and mutilated.

The ear, that is. Pulpy, mutilated, but “healed.”

Between us on the grimy rectangular table is a Plexiglas partition approximately eight inches high. A barrier between civilian-visitor and client-prisoner that must be purely symbolic, suggestive. For either of us could reach over it before a guard could intervene. Lunge, and grab over it.

…ma’am? Say that again ma’am?

Claude Loomis has been incarcerated in the New York State Correctional Facility for Men at Newburgh since 1991 on charges of second-degree homicide, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of an unlicensed firearm, and resisting arrest. He is in the eleventh year of a twenty-five-year-to-life sentence and his face has come to resemble one of those primitive-mask faces in certain paintings of Picasso’s, the residue of a face that has melted and congealed numerous times. There is a savage white sickle-scar on his upper lip that looks like a living thing and his eyes are shiny-dark and protuberant as if a tremendous pressure were being exerted upon them from inside his skull.

Ma’am din’t I tell you! Tryin’ damn hard to remember….

Ma’am
is what they call me, mostly. Mumbled and near-inaudible like a sound of phlegm at the back of the mouth.
Ma’am
because they don’t recall my name from one visit to the next or my name seems problematic because unless you see
Diehl
spelled out it sounds like
Deal
and
Deal
sounds wrong, for the name of an individual whose work is to represent indigent prisoners whose sentences are being investigated or are under appeal.

(Is “Claude Loomis” an invented name? Yes. I am professionally and ethically bound to respect the privacy and confidentiality of all the clients in my caseload.)

(As “Krista Diehl”—the name I have given myself in this document—is an invented name, by just a few letters.)

As I speak to Claude Loomis, as I explain why I am here, what I am hoping to do for him, he stares at me with his yellow-tinged protuberant eyes narrowed in distrust. Here is a man who has been disappointed in the past—not by me, but by someone very like me. Once, he’d been younger and more hopeful and thus disappointed, wounded in his hope. To hope is to risk too much, like baring your throat to a stranger.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I have come to meet with Claude Loomis. I am a nervously smiling white woman and I am seated on the civilian-visitor side of the table with my back to the door and just outside the door is a guard. I am the stranger.

Ma’am what is your business
Claude Loomis asked me, at our first meeting several months ago and I said
My business is helping.

And Claude Loomis laughed baring big stained teeth
Ma’am that so? Ain’t much money in that business is there?

The guard outside the door is a burly white man from Catskill named Emmet: he has told me, I’ve asked him, unlike my more aggressive professional colleagues I am always friendly with the staff of any prison or facility to which I am sent. Emmet must weigh 250 pounds, his hair is a crewcut of metal shavings, his face a ganglia of muscles. His stone-colored eyes shift on me when I approach, his mouth twitches into a smile that might be friendly, or just subtly derisive; my profession isn’t respected by the prison staff community, in fact we are generally resented, disliked. For we are seeking to
overturn, vacate, release
where they are concerned with
incarceration, maintaining security.
But I’m a young blond woman—younger-looking than my age—and so I have made a friend in Emmet—haven’t I? Wanting to think that this burly uniformed man isn’t my enemy. Wanting to think that he will protect me if I need him. And not resent me because I’ve been allowed into the prison as a privileged visitor assigned an “interview” room and not made to meet with my client in the large open clamorous visitors’ room where a half-dozen guards are visibly stationed.

Wanting to think, yes Emmet is my friend. An outcry from me, a sound of plastic chairs overturned, Emmet is prepared to open the door and rush inside.

Prepared to save me from Claude Loomis, if I require saving.

Mr. Loomis knows this, all prisoners know this which is why he regards me, his paralegal visitor, with ironic eyes. The lurid scar on his upper lip attracts my attention, he can see. And the purplish-dark skin, the mangled ear. Yet calmly I am explaining: “…these documents, Mr. Loomis?—if you could confirm…Sorry for the smudged photocopies—this is how they came to me! And your file is still missing a notarized birth certificate, I’ve tried several times to contact the Haggen County courthouse….”

Haggen County, Alabama. But it’s possible that no birth certificate was ever issued for Claude Loomis.

One of those American citizens not born in a hospital—as he has claimed—and no one cared to register his birth which, by my estimate, must have occurred in the mid-1950s.

No birth certificate, no Social Security number. In this stack of much-handled documents pertaining to L
OOMIS,
C
LAUDE
T. the information regarding “education history”—“employment record”—“armed services status”—“residence”—“family”—looking as if it has been filled out by someone not Mr. Loomis, is incomplete, inconsistent and unreliable.

(Is Loomis’s first name Claude, in fact? On one of the older documents, the initial arrest sheet from the Newburgh Police Department, the typed name is
Cylde. Clyde?)

In this windowless fluorescent-lit interview room, poorly ventilated, and measuring perhaps ten feet by twelve, crucial information is being sought from Claude Loomis, without conspicuous success. This interview might be taking place in a lifeboat, in a quaking sea! The light is both harshly glaring and dim. My mood is both upbeat-professional and growing-anxious. Claude Loomis is hunched over the documents I have passed to him blinking and squinting as if trying to get them into focus.
Ma’am shi-it.
The disgruntled client knows to keep his voice lowered so the guard outside the door can’t hear.

Client
is the correct term, not
prisoner.
The organization for which I work deals in
clients
and not
prisoners, inmates, convicts, convicted felons.
For it is our contention that the individual Claude Loomis whose case we have taken up has been wrongfully incarcerated in this maximum-security prison as the final consequence of a sequence of wrongful actions by the state: unjustified arrest—“racial profiling”—by law enforcement officers as a “suspect” in a crime or crimes; a twelve-hour “interview” that was in fact an interrogation; a “confession” by the arrested man, to be subsequently recanted; an indictment by a grand jury, despite insufficient evidence and a (recanted) confession; a trial, with an overworked and ill-prepared defense attorney; a conviction, and a prison sentence that might keep him behind bars for the remainder of his life.

For this visit I have dressed in my usual paralegal clothes: dark blue wool pants suit, white silk blouse and trim little black shoe-boots. For this visit I am determined will be a success and not a failure, I have plaited and wrapped my long silky pale-blond hair around my head, fastened with a tortoiseshell comb at the nape of my neck. I wear schoolteacher pearl earrings, an oversized (man’s) watch on my left wrist. Patiently I am saying in my voice of forced calm, “…Mr. Loomis
please!
If you can’t make out the fine print let me read it for you. What the form requires is…”

What the hell is Loomis doing? Hunched so far over the table, as if his spine is broken? In his skimpy record there is no indication of physical ailments other than diabetes and high blood pressure but now he seems to be jamming himself forward in a sequence of shuddery little twitches as if—I don’t want to think this,
I am not thinking this
—there is something crudely sexual in his movements, and I am the object.

“Mr. Loomis! Let me read these lines….”

Loomis pauses. Rubs his hands over his head, digging in his thumbs, hard. His glistening eyes remain fixed on the documents spread out before him. As I read to him I am thinking that nowhere in these documents is set down the most obvious and dispiriting fact of this man’s life as a
convicted felon: convicted, though very likely innocent:
by chance Claude Loomis had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, late one Saturday
night picked up by cruising Newburgh police, arrested and “identified” and charged with a robbery-homicide in the Newburgh jurisdiction that seemed to have been, judging from evidence more recently assembled, committed by another black man of Loomis’s approximate age, size, and appearance/skin tone. After hours of interrogation there came to be a “confession” subsequently entered into evidence at Loomis’s trial handwritten not by the defendant—who could not write but barely hand-print, in the simple way of a young child—but by a Newburgh police detective, a single sheet of paper at the bottom of which, in a space designated for a signature, Loomis’s name appears as CLAUD LOMISS. There was a two-day trial, jurors conferring for forty minutes, sentencing. More than ten years so far served in the Newburgh maximum-security prison.

He’d signed a blank sheet of paper, Loomis had claimed. Not a one of the words of his “confession” was his own.

“…your original attorney, back in 1991, it’s been noted that he failed to cross-examine any of the prosecution witnesses. He failed to…”

Failed. Failed to!
So many years.

Much of my conversation with Claude Loomis is a repeat of previous conversations. For our cases—of which the Claude Loomis case is representative—move with torturous slowness, like black muck flowing uphill. I can’t determine if my client is having difficulty
seeing
—he might be myopic, or have cataracts—or if he simply can’t read very well; there is the possibility that he’s drugged, also; or slow-witted, or ill. I have no more real knowledge of Claude Loomis than Claude Loomis has of Krista Diehl. If Loomis is, like so many prisoners, illiterate, he wouldn’t want me to know; the illiterate have their pride, as we would in their places. Or maybe he’s hunched over the table squinting at the documents as a way of not looking at me; maybe he feels, not a sexual attraction, but a sexual revulsion for me. How much more comfortable Claude Loomis would be with a male paralegal, a black or Hispanic paralegal! I know this but there is nothing I can do about it.

In Sparta I learned as a girl: you play the cards you’ve been dealt. In
this case, Krista Diehl is the cards I’ve been dealt, and the cards I will have to play.

With a smile saying, ever-upbeat, cheerful and encouraging: “…my office is optimistic about the appellate court. One of their recent decisions, Claude, overturning a conviction in a case similar to yours, ‘corroboration of identification by police-informant witness’…the witness your attorney failed to cross-examine and to challenge…”

How like a lawyer I sound, though I am only a paralegal. The distinction has been explained to the client but very likely he has forgotten.

“Excuse me, Claude, could you hand the file back to me, and I will…”

Calling him
Claude.
Not once but twice
Claude.
Trying so hard to win his confidence.

Not wanting to think
Give up! He doesn’t trust you, white girl.

Why should this man trust you, white girl.

I take back the files from my client. Out of my paralegal’s document bag have emerged these soiled manila folders, dog-eared copies of court transcripts, yellowed and brittle legal papers, stapled documents issued by the Newburgh County district attorney’s office, and these have been placed on the table between us. Hundreds of pages, thousands of words. No one could hope to read and retain so many words even if his fate is contained within them. How exhausting this is, in this airless room! Like sucking oxygen through a pinched straw, desperate to breathe.

The first time I met with a client alone, unsupervised, was several years ago, not here at Newburgh but at Ossining. After a quarter of an hour I began to feel disoriented and after an hour I believed that I could hear a heavy machine in the distance throbbing, thudding, pounding but this turned out to be just blood-pulses in my head. And I’ve come close to fainting, and throwing up. And in fact I have fainted and I have thrown up but luckily not with anyone to witness. As Lucille said
You want to prove something with your life, like it’s your life-blood you want to spill—but what? All that is over. He’ll never know.