Little Bird of Heaven

  Left the girl in her driveway. Drove home to the darkened farmhouse on Quarry Road to which Zoe had abandoned him, God damn her. He would not forgive her. He would not forgive any of them God damn them. Took another beer from the refrigerator out of a six-pack of Delray’s he had to drink fast to keep from gagging, wipe out any thoughts he might’ve had to disgust him like cockroaches slithering out of the tears in the wallpaper as he stumbled to his room, fell onto his bed and into a stuporous sleep of no dreams.

  43

  NOVEMBER 17, 1987

  DRIVING TO BOONEVILLE to haul a wrecked Dodge Colt out of a drainage ditch where the drunk-driver kid had died behind the wheel in fact mashed into the wheel as the cheap four-cylinder engine beneath the hood was mashed like the snout of a hog and a stink of gasoline and oil made his head ache Krull was distracted hearing the tow-truck radio turned up high breaking news! news bulletin! thinking he’d heard the name Diehl but uncertain until on the 11 P.M. local TV news he caught at a tavern on Garrison Road he saw blurred film footage of Sparta PD vehicles in a motel parking lot, there came a female broadcaster’s excited voice and photo-inserts of a man identified as Edward Diehl, suspect in unsolved 1983 murder. And in the morning the Sparta Journal was ablaze with news of how Edward Diehl, 45, longtime “suspect” in the Zoe Kruller murder case had been shot and killed by Sparta police and county sheriff’s deputies in a shoot-out at a Days Inn on route 31.

  First reports suggested that before his death Diehl had “confessed to” the murder of Zoe Kruller in February 1983. The “longtime suspect” had taken his fifteen-year-old daughter “hostage” with him in the motel room and had demanded that his former wife come to the motel to speak with him but the former wife identified as Mrs. Lucille Diehl, of Huron Pike Road, had called 911 instead.

  Krull was stunned thinking It’s over then? This is it?

  In subsequent news bulletins it would be revealed that Edward Diehl had not fired “a single shot” at police officers outside his motel room though allegedly he’d been holding a gun identified as a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, allegedly he’d aimed this gun at police officers and threatened to fire it.

  Later, it would be revealed that Edward Diehl had not admitted killing Zoe Kruller, either.

  On the front page of the Sparta Journal was a prominent photograph of Eddy Diehl with a pinched half-smile, the narrowed eyes of a boy who seems to have wakened in the body of a middle-aged man, bemused, distrustful, yet hopeful: Krull had seen this photo of Diehl many times before, in the Journal, in other local papers and on TV, he’d come to know Eddy Diehl like a relative. (The man he’d seen with his mother, at the landfill! Where, it seemed to Krull, all this unhappiness had begun.) And for sure there was, in the adjoining newspaper column, the same photograph of Krull’s mother the God-damned paper had printed a thousand times above the gloating caption Zoe Kruller, victim in brutal 1983 slaying.

  Krull looked for a photograph of Diehl’s daughter the fifteen-year-old hostage Krista Diehl but there was none.

  Anyway, he knew her face.

  “Krista.”

  For hours, days afterward Krull could think of nothing else. No one else.

  Badly he wanted to see her. The girl.

  Not knowing what the hell he would say to Krista Diehl if he saw her but maybe—if he saw her—some words would come.

  Too shy to call. Though Krull could deal with auto repair business over the phone in the way that Delray called expediting yet Krull hated speaking on the phone in any personal way.

  He was nineteen. He had a woman he saw frequently, a divorcee in her mid-twenties with two young children. He saw other women. He did not much see “girls.” He had sex with these women, sometimes. He did not stay overnight with them, usually. He wasn’t comfortable in close quarters. He wasn’t comfortable with speech. Wasn’t comfortable with emotions that felt to him crude and outsized as the gigantic blades of windmills turning in sporadic gusts of wind. Keep away from her. Keep your pig-hands off her. Might’ve torn her insides, raped her and be sent to Attica for twenty years. You have been warned.

  44

  MARCH 1990

  MID-AFTERNOON OF THE DAY following the night he’d been summoned by his aunt Viola to her house, to haul his sick-drunk father home, dump him on the mattress on the floor of the spare room in the house they shared on Quarry Road, Krull said to his wrecked father he’d take him to detox at Watertown, meaning the veterans’ administration hospital there where Delray had been a patient once, a few years before, briefly; and Delray shuddered, and rubbed his bloodshot eyes with his skinned-knuckle fists, and said, in a voice of chagrin Krull could not determine might be sincere, or mocking: “Right. I better.”

  Krull persisted, as if the old man hadn’t given in like a rotted door pushed open: “Or you’re a dead man, see Pa? Your liver’s shot.”

  “Yah right. Din’t I just say. I better.”

  Delray was seated in the kitchen slump-shouldered in a chair where he’d staggered, to sit hard, heavy as a bag of gravel. Squinting his broke-egg eyes on his son as if hoping to bring him into sharper focus.

  Delray was bare-chested, in work trousers worn without a belt. His torso was a mass of bristly gray hairs, fatty flesh, stippled discolorations that were moles, pimples. Vague as part-recalled dreams were tattoos in bright but fading colors—eagle, skull, scripted words on flowing banners. In the ironic light of afternoon Delray’s old glamour-tattoos had a comic-strip look.

  Krull lit a cigarette, exhaled smoke like disbelieving laughter.

  “You’re going? You will go? You will?”

  “God damn I said yes din’t I. You and Viola, you talked me into it.”

  There remained just the decision: whether Delray would commit himself to the VA hospital alone or whether Krull had better come with him, and maybe his sister. Delray insisted hell he could drive to Watertown by himself, he was cold stone sober now and would remain sober and he’d done this before, with good results.

  Krull asked, “What kind of results?”

  “Good results. Two weeks in, and they discharged me.”

  Krull wasn’t sure that this had been so. Krull thought he remembered some scene with Zoe screaming at Delray, crying and breaking things in the kitchen. But maybe this was some other time. Some other hospital visit. Maybe it hadn’t been Delray who’d been in, but some other relative. Krull was eager to believe this good news, that Delray was agreeable to Watertown.

  On the phone when Krull called her with the good news Viola broke down. Saying God had intervened, must’ve been God had listened to her prayers all that day she’d been pleading with Him saying if Delray didn’t get professional help for his drinking she was finished with him, her big brother she’d always loved she would not speak with ever again, her soul would be damned. Which God could prevent, if God only would.

  Now it seemed to Viola, God had intervened.

  “And I pray for you, too, Aaron. Let God into your heart, some.”

  Arrangements were made at Watertown. Phone calls were made. There was a bed for Delray in the detox ward. Krull thought He must be scared as hell. Zoe would never believe this.

  By 4 P.M. of that very day Delray left for Watertown which was a three-hour drive to the northwest, on the St. Lawrence River. By this time Krull had helped Delray take a long steamy shower to cleanse himself of the accumulated filth and shame of days and with one of Zoe’s small scissors Krull had trimmed Delray’s coarse matted hair growing down his neck and the wild-man whiskers threaded with gray so that his father no longer looked drunk or crazed or the most pathetic thing there is, an aging biker. Viola arrived excited and hopeful and helped Delray pack a single suitcase and a duffel bag into which, she’d confided in Krull, she had placed a Bible; and both Viola and Krull offered to drive Delray to the hospital and help him get settled but Delray insisted he wasn’t a God-damned invalid, he’d made up his mind to quit drinking by his own choice and by his own choice he would check himself in.
r />   And when he was dried out, Delray said, he’d check himself out.

  “Zoe said the most shameful thing about a drunk is, he gets his family tangled in his misery. This time, I will spare you.”

  So it was Zoe, of whom Delray had been thinking. All this day they’d been preparing for Watertown. All this day Delray had been brooding, somber. Stone-cold sober Delray called this condition.

  “Like raking your insides with a hand rake. Hurts so much, it almost feels good.”

  OUTSIDE THE FAMILY there isn’t much. It was a consoling thought, or a terrible thought. Krull didn’t know which.

  THAT EVENING a call came from the hospital at Watertown, a supervisor at the detox clinic. Informing Aaron Kruller that his father Delray had checked himself into the alcohol rehab program and wanted his family to be informed. Delray’s name and records were already in the hospital computer and his veteran’s status had been confirmed. Krull asked how long would his father be hospitalized and was told six to eight weeks minimum.

  Six to eight weeks! That long, Krull would have to run his father’s business.

  He was twenty-one at this time. He’d been an adult for as long as he could remember, before even Zoe had died. Only vaguely could Krull recall a boy—a little boy named “Aaron”—on the far side of Zoe’s death as in a shadowy corner of the house on Quarry Road.

  Krull asked when his father could have visitors at the hospital and was told that visitors were not encouraged until the patient was progressing “significantly.” For a patient in Delray’s condition this could be four or five weeks.

  Krull said they’d be there. Soon as his father could see them, him and his aunt would drive up.

  At the auto repair Krull told the mechanics that Delray would be “out of town” for a while. This meant that Joe Susa, the most experienced mechanic, would oversee the work of the garage while Krull answered the phone and took care of invoices, bills, orders, customers as well as filled in where he was needed. The startled and somber way Delray’s employees took the news, not meeting Krull’s eye, he guessed they knew: Delray had to be back in detox, or worse.

  45

  “KRULL? OPEN UP.”

  Krull. This was a name none of the mechanics called him, or anyone who knew him as Delray Kruller’s son. So Krull knew this had to be trouble.

  Past 10 P.M. at the rear of Kruller’s Auto Repair & Cycle Shop which closed at 8 P.M. Since that time Krull had been hunched over his father’s battered old rolltop desk trying to make sense of his father’s bookkeeping. There were bills, invoices, supply orders, illegible handwritten notations, loose checks of which some had been cashed, and others had not. There were drawers stuffed with old receipts, state and federal income tax documents, bank statements. It wasn’t clear to Krull whether Kruller’s Auto Repair & Cycle Shop was making money—a “profit”—each month, or whether Delray’s erratic bookkeeping didn’t reflect the economic reality. Delray had a way of paying out checks without subtracting sums from the business’s checking account; he had a way of stuffing bills into drawers without paying them. And there were old, scrawled checks from customers dated so long ago, the checks had become worthless.

  Owning your own business sounded good. Running your own business was the problem.

  It was less than three days since Delray had checked himself into the VA hospital at Watertown. In that time Krull had been putting in fifteen-hour days minimum at the garage. Your own business meant you never had a free thought for anything else.

  Why a man had to get drunk, Delray would claim. Why a man had to get high.

  Most of that damned day Krull had been lying flat on his back beneath a jacked-up Jeep having a fucking hard time repairing the engine, Jeep repair wasn’t Krull’s specialty, God damn he missed Delray. Stained with grease and his eyes ringed with grime looking like a raccoon’s startled eyes and his hair around the edges of his baseball cap stiff with dirt. The snaky-purple tattoos he’d acquired in a Niagara Falls tattoo parlor with some friends not long before were blurred like a bad drunk dream. But Krull didn’t want to go back to the house and get cleaned up until he’d located some crucial records in Delray’s desk which it looked like, at this point, he wasn’t going to locate.

  Owning your own business meant some kind of pride. That was the idea. Going bankrupt was not the idea.

  Now came—was it Dutch Boy Greuner?—banging his fist against the rear door of Kruller’s Auto Repair in a way to suggest that he’d done this before. The garage was shut, darkened; just a light at the back, in Delray’s office; through the window Krull saw the scrawny-tall Dutch Boy like an apparition. And when Krull opened the door Dutch Boy said, blinking his pale-lashed eyes, “W-Where’s your old man, Krull? I need to speak with Del-roy. Where the fuck is Del-roy?” Dutch Boy spoke rapidly to overcome a stutter that seemed to begin in his solar plexis and move up into his throat in peristaltic jerks. His enunciation of Del-roy was mean, mocking. Dutch Boy had a reputation for being unpredictable, dangerous. Like Duncan Metz you could not anticipate how he would greet you—friendly, not-so-friendly. When he’d been in high school and for a while afterward Krull had had dealings with Dutch Boy who’d worked for Duncan Metz and whose family had kicked him out of their house at the age of fifteen. Dutch Boy was three or four years older than Krull, taller than Krull by an inch or two, bony-shouldered like a vulture with papery folds of skin over his eyes, stained teeth amid bright gold fillings. Dutch Boy had been incarcerated at Potsdam on drugs and weapons charges and had maxed out on a three-year sentence which meant he wasn’t on parole and Sparta police had no legal right to keep a watch on him or run him in for “suspicious” behavior. It was rumored that Dutch Boy had participated in the execution of another prisoner at Potsdam, at Duncan Metz’s bequest. Dutch Boy wore black leather and biker boots except the black leather was cheap black vinyl and smelled wrong; the boots weren’t leather but vulcanized rubber. Dutch Boy’s pale-lashed eyes shone with a flamey-meth heat and his dyed-brass hair stuck up in spikes. In an excited quavering voice Dutch Boy said, “Del-roy owes me, Krull. Where the fuck is Del-roy. Next time Del-roy’s head is going to be broke not just his sorry old ass.”

  Krull understood, then: his father had been deliberately beaten.

  His father had been beaten in some way connected with Dutch Boy Greuner which meant drugs. It could be high school weed and speedballs but also harder stuff like crystal meth, cocaine, heroin. Selling out of the rear of Kruller’s Auto Repair, not Delray personally but one of the young mechanics, and Krull had a good idea which one. God damn, this was too much.

  “You looking like—what? You don’t believe me? Huh? Go ask your old man, Krull. Ask him why his ass got broke the other night, he’d tell you.”

  Krull said his father was out of town.

  “Yah? ‘Out of town’ what the fuck’s that mean? Like—‘out of town’ he’s on the run?”

  “How much does he owe you?”

  “How much does he owe us’—like it’s that simple, Krull! See, it ain’t that simple.”

  Needing money. That was it. Desperate to repay loans, the God-damned interest on the loans which was killing him. Delray had taken out a second mortgage on the house. After Zoe died when everything went to hell. The business wasn’t generating enough profit, Delray’s reputation was wife-beater, wife-killer. You would have thought that people would ease up after Eddy Diehl was shot down by police, but that hadn’t happened, or anyway not enough. It was like Sparta residents had made up their minds what they wanted to think about both Delray Kruller and Eddy Diehl, and couldn’t be troubled to change their minds.

  Plus there were new gas stations and auto repairs out on the Strip. A new Harley-Davidson franchise. Delray was of a Vietnam-vet generation beginning to fade. Like being eaten while you are still alive, Delray called it. And not yet fifty years old.

  Dutch Boy had invited himself inside Delray’s office. This was a small cluttered space partitioned off from the garage by a plasterboar
d wall adorned with calendars, posters, advertisements. Krull had not so much as glimpsed Dutch Boy in maybe a year. Of Krull’s circle of loser-druggie-friends most had had dealings with Dutch Boy that hadn’t turned out so well like Mira Roche who’d O.D.’d on a combination of meth and crack cocaine, dead at eighteen and her picture in the papers and on TV for a day or two then dropped.

  POLICE CHIEF CLAIMS “DRUG EPIDEMIC” AMONG SPARTA TEENS

  SPARTA POLICE, COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPT. JOIN IN WAR AGAINST DRUGS

  FOURTH DRUG-RELATED DEATH IN HERKIMER COUNTY THIS YEAR

  Since Delray needed him, Krull had tried to put distance between himself and the drug scene. Krull who had a weakness for anything speedy that could fire him up, make him think O.K.! This is it! but the downside of it was seeing his hands shake, dazed and dizzy after he’d slept for twenty hours sodden like a waterlogged tree trunk. One day putting on clothes he discovered that the waist of his trousers was loose like he’d begun to shrink, must’ve lost ten pounds within a few days—scared as hell of losing muscle-tissue like the meth-heads he knew, teeth rotting in his head.

  Now Dutch Boy was crowding Krull. His stammer was ringed with spittle. Saying there were people he owed—him, Dutch Boy—Krull had to figure it’s like a ladder, someone owes you, someone on the rung below you, asshole doesn’t pay what he owes so you can’t pay who you owe on the rung above you, there’s a breaking point. There’s a point of no return.

  “Like, the ladder can break, see Krull?”

  Krull shrugged. How was this his problem, Krull suggested.

  “See, you better call him, Krull. Your old man. You know where he is, you can call him. Get your old man on the phone, K-Krull. Don’t fuck with me.”

  Calmly Krull thought I could kill him here. Who’d know?