Little Bird of Heaven

  Viola spoke at length, bitterly. Viola said why didn’t the God-damned journalists do a “human interest” story about an innocent man who’d been hounded by police and reporters and his auto repair business near-bankruptcy as a result. Why didn’t they do a story on the family of the murder victim whose wounds could never heal, being clawed open by such stories.

  Viola asked Krull what he was doing. Krull mumbled what sounded like Nothing.

  In fact Krull had been scrubbing the kitchen floor. At last disgusted at the sticky linoleum underfoot. Using Dutch Cleanser and hot water and a wooden-handled toilet brush to push into those narrow cracks between the counters and the refrigerator and stove where months of filth had accumulated.

  “So—what are you having for dinner tonight, Aaron?”

  Trying to sound cheery, chatty. Like she really cared for him, her brother’s son.

  Krull mumbled he was O.K. He had some things here, Delray had left for him.

  “Yes? Like what?”

  Krull mumbled inaudibly. Wished to hell his aunt would hang up the phone, this conversation was making him nervous.

  “Delray needs to watch over you more, Aaron. He’s going to pieces which isn’t fair for you. He knows this, I’ve talked to him. But where the hell is he. At the garage they’re always saying ‘Del stepped out for a few minutes.’”

  Krull said well, he couldn’t help that. His dad did what his dad wanted to do, he guessed.

  “Yes. Right. Your dad always has. That’s the trouble.”

  Krull could think of nothing to say. In the background at Viola’s there came a sudden swelling of sound, like a radio. Or a man’s voice, and someone responding. Laughing.

  “Aaron, hon—I have to hang up now. I hate to just leave you. It sounds to me like—well, it doesn’t sound good. On this day of all days. ‘One-year anniversary.’ Del should be with you, damn him. You’re not a little kid but still he should take more care with you.” Viola paused. Krull was waiting for her to hang up. He was feeling anxious, resentful. Why’d his aunt call him, if she was just going to hang up? If she wasn’t going to ask if he was hungry, if he was alone and might want to have supper with her that night? In the background a clatter as of bowling pins—was that what that noise meant? Might mean the Ten Pin out on the highway next to B & B Barbeque…. As if she’d just now thought of it Viola said, “Aaron? If you’re alone there and hungry, I could swing around and pick you up. I’m with some people after work, it wouldn’t be any trouble. We could have pizza, or barbecue, O.K.?”

  Krull dropped the receiver onto the phone and broke the connection.

  Viola didn’t call back.

  37

  HERE ON EARTH to love one another.

  A beautiful secret we will keep between ourselves.

  Could be your mother, Zoe would bless us!

  Afterward in a frenzy of repugnance he’d closed off the room.

  His parents’ old bedroom with Zoe’s flowery, faded wallpaper.

  The bed they’d lain on. Torn like the mud of a pigsty.

  And Zoe’s sad-glamour clothes hanging in the closet—these he could not bear to glance at, let alone give away as the DeLucca woman had suggested.

  He’d never told his father about Jacky DeLucca who’d come looking for him but had settled on Krull, instead.

  Never wished to think of her—the DeLucca woman—but always he was thinking of her. The things she’d done to him—her mouth, her hands, her pearly-fat thighs, the way she’d drawn him into her so deep—deeper—until his senses exploded in crazed white heat, blindness.

  Could be your mother Aar-on. We are the right ages.

  In dread that she might show up again at the house, or at the auto repair—looking for Delray Kruller. But then, she’d see him.

  She’d been high. Some kind of speed. Her skin scalded. Her kisses were frantic bites. Her eyes rolled back in her head. The beet-dyed hair exuded a sweaty-chemical smell. Panting and grasping and groaning like some convulsing sea-creature Oh oh ohhhh help me Jesus love love you.

  What sprang out of Krull, out of his cock, something like hot mucus. He guessed was his soul.

  Weeks later his hands, his hair still smelled of the beet-dyed hair.

  His back was riddled with nail-marks. Some of these had become infected and itched badly. His mouth still felt raw, bitten.

  Nights when he couldn’t sleep, roughly stroking his chafed cock. And when he did sleep, dreaming of the woman, wakened from sleep by an explosion in his groin that made him gasp aloud, stricken with both intense pleasure and intense shame.

  Ohhh Aar-on! Love you.

  The mattress beneath the tangled sheets of Krull’s bed was stained with the leakage of his sperm. That unmistakable reek. In desperation he opened the windows of his room wide, let the wind, rain inside. Still the smell prevailed. The smells.

  “Pig.”

  Not sure if he meant DeLucca, or himself.

  His old morbid thoughts of Zoe were being crowded out by DeLucca. God damn he resented her! In his bed trying to sleep he’d be thinking of what they’d done together—what the woman had made him do—his cock perpetually aroused and increasingly chafed and he could feel the sex-desire like a fat lazy snake curled up inside him in the pit of his belly where unbidden and unwished-for it uncoiled, violent as a trap you’d set for rabbits, you had better take care you did not trip yourself.

  Ohhh Aar-on! You are fantastic, I adore you.

  Business was down at Kruller’s Auto Repair, only one or two guys came to work most days. Krull worked the pumps, the least of the jobs. Whenever a compact turned off Quarry Road in the direction of the gas pumps wondering if it might be the cheesy-green Ford Escort and inside Jacky DeLucca. How she’d roll down her window and stare at him with a pretense of surprise, how she’d smile licking her fleshy lipstick-lips Ohhh Aar-on! been missing you while Krull remained stony-faced, unsmiling.

  As if not recognizing her. That would freak the woman.

  But Jacky DeLucca never returned to Quarry Road so far as Krull knew. As if she’d given up looking for Delray Kruller or had found him some other way and Krull would be the last to know about it.

  Maybe it was a relief, Zoe wasn’t living with them any longer. Zoe would strip Krull’s bed to launder his sheets seeing splotches of stiffened mucus everywhere and the mattress shamefully stained. Zoe would make some joke to embarrass him—Used to be, you’d pee your bed, kid! That was bad enough.

  Babies grow up, she’d said.

  She hadn’t loved him. That was the secret between them.

  “Glad she’s gone. Bitch!”

  Now they didn’t have to worry about losing her.

  38

  MARCH 1985

  DELRAY WAS SAYING he’d made some mistakes in his life.

  Hoped to God that these mistakes would not follow into the next generation like the Bible warns us.

  Making such pronouncements though he wasn’t drunk. His heavy hand falling on his son’s shoulder and the son shuddered but did not shrink away. Thinking Pa isn’t drunk. Not any ordinary kind of drunk.

  In such a somber and penitential mood Delray might speak of his father and his father’s father and the Indian-blood connection. The Seneca Nation connection that had gone wrong somehow in Delray.

  “What they want from you—it’s like sucking at your blood. They can’t even say what they want. What it is, it’s the ‘white’ in you—like bone-marrow. They’d like to suck it out. When I married Zoe, that fixed it for me, with my relatives out on the rez. Fucked it. I had a close cousin, he never spoke to me again. And he’s dead now, and that can’t be remedied.”

  The son listened to the father uneasy at what was being disclosed.

  The son loved the father for all that the father was a man capable of inflicting sudden hurt.

  “—so I’m saying, don’t think you can go back there. You can’t. You play lacrosse with some guys, don’t mistake that for anything more. Don’t think like you??
?re gonna be a ‘blood brother’ or any shit like that with them, you’re not.”

  Delray’s father had been a half-blood Seneca and his father’s father a full-blood Seneca and both men were unknown to Delray’s son who had never met them nor even glimpsed them.

  Zoe had said: “If your father wants you to know about this, he will tell you. There’s plenty of things he hasn’t told me and you know what?”

  What, he’d asked.

  “It’s for a purpose, that’s what. What we are told and what we are not told. So don’t ask.”

  News came of the DeLucca woman, on the following morning.

  A savage assault the Sparta Journal reported.

  Thirty-nine-year-old East Sparta resident Jacqueline DeLucca, cocktail waitress at Chet’s Keyboard Lounge, left unconscious and bleeding in a parking lot behind Big Boy Discount Appliances. Discovered early Monday morning by a security guard.

  Assailant or assailants unknown. In stable condition, Sparta General Hospital. Sparta police investigating.

  The news item was brief, on an inside page of the paper. There was no accompanying photograph. Krull would have missed it except at the auto repair there was a copy of the Journal, loose pages a customer had left in the waiting area.

  Numbly his lips moved: ““Jacqueline DeLucca.’”

  Not wanting to think—he had no reason to think—that Delray might have had anything to do with this assault. He had no reason to think that Delray had anything to do with DeLucca at all. Nor had Krull anything to do with DeLucca since more than two years ago when she’d come to the house bringing Zoe’s things.

  Could be your mother, Zoe would bless us.

  Krull had not seen the woman since that day. Except in his most lurid sex-dreams. But in person, no he had not. The actual woman who’d been, as the article in the Journal noted, a close friend of the 1983 homicide victim Zoe Kruller, he had not glimpsed and had done his best to forget.

  THAT NIGHT WITH HIS FRIENDS, at the train depot. Nights he didn’t have to work late or help with the tow truck which was a twenty-four-hour service Kruller’s Auto Repair provided he’d begun hanging out with these new friends who were older than Krull and admirable in Krull’s eyes. For Krull was under-age and they were not. What a swift transition it was—one year you dropped out of high school, a few years later you were in your mid-twenties, or older. Like Delray these guys would try anything. And the occasional girls, too. Krull had a weakness for beer but also he’d come to like the sensation of dreamy not-caring he got from smoking dope. Like Novocain this was. The buzzing turned numb and you experienced a kind of wavy tunnel vision, faces in a slow spin and melt, to be laughed at.

  Zoe had been a junkie, a heroin user. So it was said of the dead woman, after her death.

  What Krull liked about smoking dope was the way the faces lost substance, the more you stared at them. Anything you might see in such a state, pushing a door open, seeing what lay tangled in bloodied bedclothes on that bed, how could you take it seriously?

  Mellow out Krull’s friend Duncan Metz advised him. Any fucking thing that happened it’s over with, you’re not going back to change it. Metz was older than Krull by as many as ten years but had taken a liking to him, it was said that there’d been a murder, maybe more than one murder, in Metz’s family, also you could see that Metz had mixed-blood, an olive-swarthy skin darker than Krull’s and the same deep-set dark eyes and naturally those kinds of guys were drawn together like cousins, or brothers.

  Another kind of weed Metz gave Krull to smoke he called Jamaican, that was more expensive and harder to acquire that gave a nasty kick of a high, made your heart thump like a crazed thing which was why not everybody wanted to smoke it especially girls were wary of smoking it and of being in the close company of guys who smoked it for this weed when you smoked it and sucked in the smoke really deep into your lungs made you want to fuck, or fuck somebody up bad, and Krull came to like Jamaican best of all.

  39

  DIEHL, B. ONE OF a dozen names of Sparta High juniors posted outside the chemistry lab on the second floor of the building.

  Krull would not be taking a course in chemistry. Krull would not be taking courses in biology, physics, advanced math or in any language. Krull was not a college-entrance major but a vocational arts major—a “shop” major—and all that such majors were required to take, to receive a Sparta High diploma, were courses in English, social studies, health, physical education and driver’s education as well as courses in shop.

  Driver’s education! As if Krull hadn’t been driving cars, even trucks, since he’d been eleven.

  It pissed Krull to see Diehl, B. on that list, and beside the name a grade of A-. Eddy Diehl was a construction worker, a “manual laborer”—wasn’t he?

  So far as Krull knew, Ben Diehl’s father Eddy no longer lived in Sparta. He’d been allowed by the Sparta PD to move away and Krull had not heard that he’d moved back.

  In the pickup he’d seen. At the landfill. Before she’d left home. Before she’d been killed. When it was Eddy Diehl she’d been with and Delray had not known.

  It seemed to be happening to spite Krull, how frequently he saw Ben Diehl at school this year. Must’ve been that their schedules were bringing them into proximity. That proximity felt like taunting. In the school cafeteria, on the stairs, in the halls Krull moved tall and lanky and quick as a cobra sighting the smaller boy with red-coppery hair and a pinched face walking stiff-legged away from Krull without seeming to have seen him, like there’s a broomstick up his ass. For sure Ben was aware of Krull as the cobra’s prey is aware of the cobra but too terrified to acknowledge this awareness.

  There was a girl, too. Ben Diehl had a sister. She was younger.

  When it happened that first time, it was purely by chance.

  Krull had not been stalking Ben Diehl. Krull had been thinking of other things. Seeing then Ben Diehl entering the guys’ locker room, a few steps ahead of Krull. The boy was alone as frequently he seemed to be alone whenever Krull noticed him. The boy moved jerkily as if parts of him wished to go in separate directions but were held together by a brittle and inelastic skeleton. Here was a boy not a natural athlete—you could tell. Somber-faced, ashy-faced, downlooking. His forehead was creased. His mouth worked silently as if he was arguing with a voice inside his head. He was perhaps five feet six inches tall. He weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He wore the clothes—shirt, jeans, running shoes—favored by most of his classmates but on Ben Diehl these clothes were unconvincing. Diehl! Some kind of freak. Krull took note of this for it was surprising, how Ben Diehl scarcely resembled his father Eddy who was a good-looking man, or had been. Even as Ben Diehl seemed to be bearing something of the shame and notoriety of his father which meant that he was guilt-stricken and would understand why he had to be punished.

  Fifth hour, this wasn’t Krull’s gym class. Krull was a sophomore and not a junior, for Krull had been kept back. Yet by instinct following the Diehl boy into the locker room bypassing other boys without seeming to see them until he sighted Diehl just setting his backpack on a bench in a far corner of the locker room. Those who observed Krull swiftly approaching Diehl with the obvious intent of inflicting hurt upon him fell immediately silent and backed away and those whose lockers were close by Diehl’s quickly departed so that, as Krull advanced upon Diehl, taller than Diehl by several inches and heavier by at least twenty pounds, there were no witnesses remaining to see how the smaller, seemingly younger boy glanced up in surprise at Krull, yet a kind of guilty surprise, as if he’d been expecting this; how Diehl had time to stammer only, “What—what do you—” before Krull seized Diehl’s narrow shoulders and in virtually the same movement slammed him against the lockers with such force that the entire row of lockers rattled and shook. The attack was silent, unerring. The attack seemed scarcely to have required much effort on the larger boy’s part.

  Diehl hadn’t had time to protect himself or had not the strength to protect himself having fallen on
to the cold tile floor cringing beneath the long narrow bench as Krull kicked the bench aside to get at him, looming over him hot-faced and trembling.

  “Get up. God damn cuntface get up.”

  Now witnesses would report hearing Ben Diehl beg, “Don’t h-hit me! What did I do to you! L-Leave me alone I didn’t do anything to you”—a look of such fright in his face, such abject pleading, Krull gave him a punch, another punch and a kick and turned away in contempt.

  Without seeming to hurry Krull left the locker room. Krull no more than glanced at Ben Diehl’s classmates observing him, seven or eight boys keeping their distance from him in such respectful silence, Krull saw no need to threaten them. They understood.

  Now you know, what I can do to you. Any time.

  What you deserve, your father killed my mother.

  For a time then ignoring him. The Diehl kid. He’d have liked to murder with his bare hands. Stomping, with his booted feet. Sensing that the time of their proximity was rapidly diminishing as Aaron Kruller’s days in the Sparta public school system were rapidly diminishing for soon it would be his sixteenth birthday and so badly he wanted to quit, he could taste it.

  You stay with it God damn it you know your mother wanted that.

  And he’d protested Pa you didn’t graduate from high school—why should I?

  Because you can’t turn out like me. The time for people like me is past.

  These words out of Delray’s mouth were chilling to his son. It was not possible that Delray Kruller could think such thoughts still less give voice to them.

  In the aftermath of death, strangeness was released in their lives like a toxic gas.