Little Bird of Heaven

  Finally, my father Eddy Diehl had hired a lawyer. Days after he’d been interviewed by the Sparta detectives, when it was almost too late. And then, following his lawyer’s advice, my father had changed his statement to police: yes he had been “involved with” Zoe Kruller, for several years; yes he had “visited with” Zoe Kruller in the West Ferry residence on a number of occasions; yes he’d “had sex with her” on the night of February 11.

  On that night! On the eve of Zoe’s death but no later than 11 P.M. he was sure.

  Maybe 9 P.M. Maybe 10 P.M. It had not been late. She had not wanted him to stay. He had not stayed. This, Edward Diehl would swear.

  All this would be revealed in large lurid headlines in the Sparta Journal. All this, to the horror, humiliation, disgust of Lucille Diehl who took comfort at least in the fact that she hadn’t lied for her adulterer husband. Another time the glamour-photo of Zoe Kruller on the front page of the paper, beside the darkish brooding photo of Edward Diehl.

  SUSPECT IN KRULLER HOMICIDE CONFESSES TO AFFAIR

  Diehl Changes Story: “I Was With Zoe That Night”

  Each time Aaron Kruller and I saw each other, we were made to recall such facts.

  18

  AARON KRULLER’S beat-up mountain bike.

  It was large, ungainly, ugly. Its frame looked like nothing so much as soldered-together pipes, lead-colored and graceless, with tires attached. The chrome handlebars, lowered to resemble the horns of a charging bull, were dim with rust; you could barely make out the name Schwinn Flyer engraved on a sort of medallion above the front wheel. The fenders had fallen off or been removed. The seat was made of black rubber and so hard it felt like rock, unyielding. How’d anyone sit on this?—I dared to touch the seat.

  Dared to take hold of both handlebar grips, also of black rubber, worn thin. The crossbar came to approximately my mid-chest, the bike had to be twice the size of my own.

  No one ever saw me there, behind Sparta High. Where Aaron Kruller left his battered old bike leaning against a wall. (Most students’ bikes left behind the school were neatly arrayed in bike racks, their wheels prudently locked. The oldest, most battered bikes, which no one would wish to steal, or would have dared to steal, were just left leaning against the wall as if they’d been abandoned there for the time being, unlocked.) More than once I slipped from class in the middle school and made my way through connecting corridors into the high school and so outside to the rear of the school where Aaron left his bike with all the others. Yet I never had to search for Aaron’s bike, lead-colored among so many shiny bikes, I found it immediately. Just to touch the freezing rust-stippled chrome, to stroke the hard-rubber seat with my fingers…

  “‘Aaron Kruller.’”

  He wasn’t yet old enough to drive a vehicle on a public street. Though he was old enough to drive vehicles on his father’s property, and had been old enough for years. Except in severe winter weather Aaron Kruller bicycled to school from his house on the Quarry Road which was approximately three miles from school. Along the two-lane state highway and into the city of Sparta on potholed streets, through alleys, onto sidewalks and across the cracked and glass-littered lot of the abandoned Sears mall, unmistakable in his biker’s gear, leather jacket, or vest, sometimes bareheaded and sometimes wearing a baseball cap (reversed), never protective headgear: grimly and expediently Aaron pedaled the stripped-down old Schwinn Flyer without the slightest interest in his surroundings except as he approached an intersection or moved into traffic. Unlike most bicyclists in Sparta you were likely to see, Aaron bent far over the handlebars of his bike so you’d have thought his spine must ache, there was something both adult and self-punishing in his posture.

  It was thrilling to see him, and to be unseen by him! Aaron Kruller on his ugly lead-colored bike hurtling through stalled traffic on Union Street, his singed-looking face impassive as a clay mask.

  “Who is that?” once, on Union Street, about to turn into the Walgreens parking lot my mother saw Aaron Kruller on his bicycle as if she’d been startled out of a reverie; and I said—seated beside my mother in the passenger’s seat, her only passenger that day since Ben was elsewhere—that the bicyclist was a boy from Ben’s class at the high school, no one we knew, hoping that my mother wouldn’t have recognized Aaron, for often my mother surprised us by knowing more than we believed she could know; but my mother said only, “In Ben’s class? They’re the same age? That doesn’t seem possible, that’s a grown man.”

  The intonation my mother gave to grown man, you’d have thought she was speaking of some kind of monster.

  And a moment later in the parking lot, adding a remark I’d been expecting from her, that I could have supplied myself in Lucille’s primly chiding slightly reproachful maternal voice: “He looked Indian. That boy. They grow up fast, in their way of life. So you should know, Krista, and Ben too, to keep your distance.”

  Now, I did laugh. Mom looked sharply at me.

  “I was just thinking, the trouble Dad is in—and you so mad at him—that’s got nothing to do with anyone being Indian, does it?”

  “All right, Krista! Enough of your smart mouth.”

  “Mom, I was just thinking. Any trouble Dad is in—he’s what’s called ‘Caucasian’—”

  “Yes. And if he’d been mixed-blood, like that woman’s husband Kruller, it’d be a damn lot worse.”

  Flush-faced and indignant my mother slammed out of the car, to hurry into Walgreens before the pharmacy closed.

  Such was my mother’s logic. Such was Caucasian logic. Laugh at her! This was the air of Sparta we had no choice but to breathe, to exist.

  A second time in the car with my mother—the turtle-colored Plymouth sedan my father had left for my mother’s use, when he’d been made to move away—we were driving along Front Street by the river, we’d just turned off Huron Pike Road and were approaching the busy intersection with Chadd Boulevard—warehouse district, Mayflower moving vans—when I had time only to glimpse a boy on a bicycle approaching rapidly from our right, on Chadd, where there was a traffic light—red—and vehicles were waiting for the light to change—before I saw that the cyclist was Aaron Kruller and that he had no intention to stop with traffic but to continue through the intersection at full speed—unless it was accelerating his speed, his muscled legs pedaling rapidly, his gloved hands tight-gripping the handlebars—and in a horror of paralysis I could not warn my mother—so quickly had Aaron appeared, so swiftly his bent-over figure on the bicycle was moving—I could not warn my mother as Aaron sped into the path of our car heedless of our existence as my mother—distracted by her thoughts like the mad droning of a hive that never ceased—and this had been a bad day for Lucille, I seemed to know—poor Mom!—as my mother continued forward heedless of the cyclist’s existence, placing her faith—in this case, it was blind faith—stubborn-blind faith—in the green light above the intersection upon which she’d fixed her gaze—Mom in her typical driver’s posture leaning forward frowning and pursed-lipped gripping the steering wheel as if she feared it might wrench away from her and so her visual range was likely to be limited to a tunnel-space directly in front of her—and suddenly there passed before her, within a foot or two of the Plymouth’s front fender, the reckless boy-cyclist—the arrogant, insolent, oblivious cyclist who had to be Aaron Kruller in leather jacket, revered baseball cap—causing my poor mother to slam her foot against the brake, to make us both cry out in surprise and alarm—

  “Oh! My God! That bicycle—where did it come from—”

  Often to her chagrin Lucille had accidents, around the house. In fact all of us—Ben, Mom, me—had grown clumsy and uncoordinated in recent months. Like individuals afflicted with an unknown neurological impairment we dropped things, banged into things, bruised and cut and burned ourselves; most of the time our mishaps were minor and might be construed as comical—overturning a box of Cheerios to send miniature wheat O’s scattering across the floor, misjudging distances and tripping on the stairs—bu
t there had begun to appear on my mother’s car mysterious dents, scrapes, bruises and I knew that Mom had been “ticketed” for one or another traffic violation, having found the receipt misplaced with flattened paper bags in a kitchen drawer.

  In the car, my mother had grown unusually cautious, anxious. She took pills “for my nerves” and she took pills “to help me sleep” and the combination of such medications could not have been good for her capacity to see, think, and react quickly. Shaken now, Mom braked the car to a shuddering stop. We were on a busy street and other drivers were sounding their horns at us angrily but no matter, my mother had to stop. So upset she didn’t even think to blame me for not having warned her which was her usual reaction in such situations. “Oh, Krista! If I’d run into that man! God help me, if I’d hit—if I’d killed—”

  Fortunately, Lucille didn’t know that the cyclist she’d narrowly missed hitting was the son of Zoe Kruller.

  My heart was pounding painfully. Not that we’d nearly run into Aaron Kruller with our car but if Aaron had glanced around, and seen me—I’d have been overcome with embarrassment.

  “Mom, it’s all right. You didn’t hit him.”

  I spoke with forced vehemence. I felt sorry for my mother, who had become so hard to love.

  “But my God, Krista—if I had! With so much else gone wrong in our lives…”

  “It wouldn’t have been your fault, Mom. It would have been his—you were in the right.”

  “That makes no difference, Krista.” Bitterly my mother laughed, wiping at her eyes with a tissue. “‘Right’—‘wrong’—when trouble comes to you, everyone is punished.”

  It was November 1983. My father Edward Diehl was now living in Buffalo where he’d found work “in construction” and my mother had begun “divorce proceedings” and was working at the consignment shop and had much on her mind that left her excited and hopeful at times and at other times irritable, despairing, depressed. I was not a child any longer but a canny young girl—eleven going on twelve!—whose awareness of the complexities and nuances of adult life had been sharply honed in the past nine months and whose capacity for irony had been yet more sharply honed, like a taste for bitter chocolate or dark bitter ale. It was no secret to me that my mother was still in love with my father, always my mother would be in love with my father who had so ravaged her, that was Lucille’s fate.

  “No. That’s wrong. Mom hates him.”

  So Ben spoke, smugly. In our household it was my mother and Ben who were close, Ben was my mother’s favorite though I was the one more frequently at home and much nicer to my mother than Ben was.

  “She wants people to think she hates him. She wants him to think she hates him. But she doesn’t.”

  “She does.”

  “She wouldn’t be so hurt, then. She’d have divorced him by now. She can’t let go of him, that’s her problem.”

  “Fuck you, Krista: that’s your problem.”

  In public, meaning outside our house and in the company of people other than Ben and me, or her closer Bauer relatives, my mother managed to maintain an air of dignity, even hauteur. Mostly.

  In public, Lucille wasn’t the sort of woman to shrink timidly away from others’ eyes. Her face was no longer the face of a woman who might, in certain lights, be mistaken as young, nor was her body—solid, stolidly, fleshy-without-being-fat—a young woman’s body. Being girlish, being very pretty, “sexy”—the Lucille Bauer of old snapshots posed with her handsome fiancé Eddy Diehl—all that was finished now, vanished.

  Except at the Sparta Hills Mall where almost you could hear the murmurs in our wake not-unfriendly, matter-of-fact and terrible See that woman? That’s Lucille Diehl. Her husband is Eddy Diehl who murdered that woman over on West Ferry Street—he was having an affair with her, they say he killed her—look at the poor wife, Eddy Diehl’s wife trying to be brave.

  19

  “THAT WOMAN! Has she no shame.”

  My mother’s voice was flat as the slap of a hand. Though you could hear the hurt, rage, indignation in it.

  My mother was staring at an item in the Sparta Journal. Not on the front page but on an inside page, a single column of newsprint beneath the headline:

  SPARTA WOMAN FOUND BADLY BEATEN

  Towaga Street Resident Hospitalized

  The accompanying photograph depicted a glamorous woman with a heavy jaw, unconvincing doll-like features, thin-plucked eyebrows and a cupid’s bow mouth: Jacky DeLucca?

  I knew not to betray much interest, or my mother would become suspicious. Together we read of how in the early morning of March 2, 1985—this would have been mornings ago—Ms. Jacqueline DeLucca, thirty-nine, a resident of 32 Towaga Street, East Sparta, had been found semi-conscious on a service road intersecting with route 31, a quarter-mile from Chet’s Keyboard Lounge where she worked as a cocktail waitress.

  Sparta police cruising the Strip—as this section of route 31 was called—discovered her and called an ambulance that brought her to Sparta General Hospital where Ms. DeLucca was admitted with injuries to her face and head, several cracked ribs, a sprained wrist and a “high level of alcohol” in her bloodstream. Her condition was listed as “stable.”

  Jacqueline DeLucca had told police that she had not seen her attacker or attackers and had no idea what had provoked the attack and could not remember circumstances leading up to it. She had left Chet’s Keyboard Lounge shortly after 2 A.M. “in the company of friends” but could not recall what happened in the interim between leaving the Lounge and being wakened in the speeding ambulance in critical condition. The article concluded:

  Ms. DeLucca is a former resident of 349 West Ferry Street where in February 1983 Ms. Zoe Kruller, with whom Ms. DeLucca shared the residence, was found murdered.

  No arrests have been made in the Kruller case which Sparta detectives will describe only as “on-going.”

  Briskly my mother folded up the newspaper and slapped it down on the kitchen chair by the back door, where we placed flat things like newspapers, magazines, advertising flyers and junk mail to be removed to the trash each day. How strangely shaken and disapproving she seemed, out of all proportion to the sordid little incident. “A woman like that! Just like the other. ‘Cocktail waitress.’ ‘The Strip.’ You’d think they would learn, wouldn’t you. God help them!”

  I thought It isn’t God you want to help them is it Mom!

  I said, “She just seems sad, Mom. Maybe you should feel sorry for her—‘cocktail waitress’ is the best she can do.”

  “Feel sorry for her? For either of them?”

  My mother stared at me as if she’d have liked to slap my face. Her eyes welled with tears of indignation, insult.

  Them, she’d said. I went away thinking it wasn’t poor Jacky DeLucca who’d so incensed my mother, but the other.

  20

  “THAT 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 Spa
rta 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.