16
“SEARCH WARRANT, MA’AM. We need to come inside these premises.”
Out of nowhere they’d come like tanks in wartime. Sparta PD vehicles driven up our lane and a violent rapping at the front door and no one but Eddy Diehl’s left-behind wife Lucille to open the door, white-faced and astonished.
My mother in a flannel shirt, slacks, woolen socks—hair disheveled and one side of her sleep-dazed face creased from where she’d been napping—in the wake of an insomniac night—her face against the coarse-woven fabric of a sofa. My mother hoarsely stammering, “W-what? What—?”
This was soon after my father had been “brought in for questioning”—“taken into police custody.” This new shame!—my mother would never outlive.
Never forgive my father, for bringing this upon the family.
She would say afterward—we would hear her, on the phone—the tone of her voice varying from plaintive and stunned to indignant, incensed—angry, resigned, stricken—her words frequently incoherent, interrupted by sobs—that it was as if her very body was being invaded, searched by strangers. The privacy of the home she’d taken such pride in, and such care. And none of this was her fault! How was this her fault! How did the Sparta police dare to invade Lucille’s home like this! Pleading with the officers whom she followed into the rooms of the house even as they ignored her—for only the senior plainclothes detective Martineau who bore the search warrant was authorized to speak with Eddy Diehl’s wife—she protested, “Stop! Go away! You have no right! I’ll tell my—”
But there was no husband to tell. Husband was no longer a word in my mother’s vocabulary.
My mother was being shown the search warrant which in her rattled state she could barely read. The senior officer—this was Martineau—explained to her that nothing would be damaged in the search and nothing removed from the premises without a receipt and whatever was taken would be returned in time if it wasn’t found to be “evidence” crucial to their investigation and my mother heard only the term “evidence” and became further upset asking, “Evidence for what, officer? Evidence for what?” and with blunt politeness Martineau said: “This is a homicide investigation, ma’am. You’ve been informed.”
But Lucille had not been informed. She didn’t think so. In the strange calm of terror as in the wake of a violent thunderclap she heard herself demanding of this man—a stocky gray-haired man of no distinction except that he’d shown her his shiny Sparta PD badge like a TV cop—what the “homicide” was—and what had it to do with her?
Though Lucille knew. Should have known. Yes, Lucille surely knew. These many days that Zoe Kruller had been a name not to be uttered in this household.
Knew to ask Martineau in a pleading voice if her husband had been arrested?—and Martineau said no ma’am, not yet.
“Not yet? Not arrested yet? But—”
“Not yet, ma’am. That’s all that I am authorized to say.”
“Where is he? Is he—with you? At police headquarters?”
This was where Eddy Diehl was, yes. This was information Lucille already knew.
“And the husband of that woman who—the one who—who’d been killed—is he—is he arrested?”
No. Neither was Delray Kruller arrested, yet.
Police officers had already searched my father’s Willys Jeep which was still parked in the lot at Sparta Construction and now in the driveway of our house they searched the family car which was a turtle-colored 1981 Plymouth sedan in reasonably good condition, by default now my mother’s, that Daddy had left her. With grim frowning thoroughness they searched the back seat of the Plymouth and beneath the seats and inside the trunk as with equal thoroughness they searched the basement—every corner of the basement including the furnace and hot-water tank room—and Mom’s laundry room—taking away from Daddy’s workbench many of Daddy’s tools for the police officers were looking for the “murder-weapon”—nothing is more crucial to a homicide investigation than the murder weapon—and among my father’s tools which were precious to him, always kept neatly arranged, hanging from hooks in the wall or placed side by side on the top of the workbench, were several hammers of varying sizes including a newly purchased twelve-inch claw hammer; and all these hammers the police officers took away with them in their neatly labeled cardboard boxes.
Did my mother ask herself Is one of them what he used? Should I have thrown it away oh God what should I have done?
Or did my mother think Good! If one of them is the hammer they want, now they have it. Now it’s too late.
This search of our house—“Basement to attic, every room”—over which my mother would be grievously upset for hours, days, weeks took place in the late morning of a weekday while Ben and I were in school. When we returned home we knew at once that something had happened—strangers had been on our property—the snow in the driveway was raddled with tire marks and inside the house my mother was feverishly vacuuming the living room. She’d opened several windows, the air was cold. Ben called, “Mom? Hey Mom is something wrong?” for my mother’s eyes were swollen and red-rimmed and her face flushed but my mother didn’t seem to hear him until Ben pulled the plug from the wall socket—and the roaring vacuum abruptly ceased—and Mom began to scream at him, tried to throw the cleaner’s wand at him but the hose was too short.
Later, when she was calmer, Mom told us what had happened: the Sparta police, no warning, the “search.” Things they’d carried away in their cardboard boxes taken from closets, bureau drawers, the spare room where he kept financial records, even from the family laundry hamper, even his near-flattened tube of toothpaste, spray-shaving cream, wadded-up tissues and such in the pockets of his work trousers—she was laughing now, and Ben laughed with her, and with a queer twist of his mouth as if these were words meant to entertain both of us—his Mom and his kid-sister—he said, “Shit if they found some damn hammer of his how’d they know it hadn’t been washed clean? You could boil water and wash away blood with detergent or bleach, I bet. He’d know that, wouldn’t he? And if a hammer was missing, Daddy has so many damn hammers down there how’d they even know one was gone?” Ben laughed. Lately my brother’s laughter had been raw, harsh and jeering like something part-alive being squeezed through a grinder, horrible to hear.
“Might’ve taken it myself. They gave us enough time. Threw it into the river. Maybe I was the one who cracked her head. ‘Brained’ her—her brains had got to be all over the floor, I heard. See, I know how to use a hammer, too. Any asshole does.”
My mother stared at Ben. For a moment I thought that she would slap him—I could see that Ben was expecting to be slapped—a twitch in his right eye—the jeering smile fixed in place—but she only stared at him, and shuddered in the cold draft from the opened windows, and turned away.
Upstairs in her bedroom Mom slept for the rest of the day. Slept and slept and next morning we fixed our own cold-cereal breakfasts and tramped out the driveway to the school bus through a new-fallen snow that covered most of the tire tracks so you wouldn’t have known.
Ben said with a nasty laugh we’d ought to’ve woken her, maybe she was passed out or dead.
But it was too late. Neither of us was going back. We waited for the school bus as always. There was a curve in the Huron Pike Road, you could see the carrot-colored bus on its way, a quarter-mile to the east approaching us. A curve in the road along the glittery river where ice was broken along the shore like ravaged teeth.
Somewhere close by a bird was singing. It was a bright liquidy persistent song, beautiful to hear. So beautiful my heart felt pierced. In the snowy boughs of an evergreen I could see a red cardinal—bright red feathers and a black cap—a male cardinal, this was—and the female was there also, olive-green feathers, identical black cap and chunky orange beak and the two of them were singing and I said, “Think that’s the ‘little bird of heaven’—right here? In our tree?”
Ben said, laughing, “No.”
17
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.