Little Bird of Heaven

  “Yah? What?”

  Krull’s voice was raw, weird. Krull heard his voice like something through a funnel aimed back at him.

  “You don’t know me! I’m not the one.”

  Krull laughed to show he wasn’t serious. For sure there was no woman in that house. No one watching Krull, for sure.

  Weird thing was this wasn’t Krull’s first time, seeing the female face, shadowy figure in the window. That he knew was not there. That he knew was not Zoe for Christ’s sake he knew Zoe was dead. Hadn’t he seen the body, smelled it. Hadn’t he sprinkled talcum powder on that body like you’d sprinkle lime on a some dead animal you wanted to burn away quick without that terrible smell.

  Krull had been out to Dutch Boy’s twice before. First time, when Duncan Metz had owned the premises. Or rented the premises. A rumor was, Krull had heard only the previous week, Metz was buried on those premises.

  Dutch Boy’s country place, Dutch Boy called it. The important thing, it was beyond the jurisdiction of the Sparta police and just over the county line in Kattawago County. Dutch Boy boasted he had a friend in the Kattawago sheriff’s department and possibly this was so.

  Krull climbed out of his car: a Ford Charger. Four-door, eight-cylinder, dark bronze, last year’s model. The kind of car Delray would’ve been impressed to see his kid drive except how the hell did his kid get the money for it?—that would’ve been Del’s first question.

  “Trade-in. Fucking good deal.”

  Somehow Krull was outside, kicking at leaves. There were tall grasses here—rushes?—and the wind was rippling these grasses, churning these grasses so Krull’s scalp prickled, almost you could see something—some giant thing—animal, or a human figure—not quite visible but you could see it like a moving shadow making its way through the grasses, flattening the grasses, letting them spring up again, and the challenge was not to panic, for there was no one there.

  A body is a dead thing. You buried a body, or burnt it. Like garbage it was buried, or burnt. It was an asshole kind of sentiment, to imagine that some kind of spirit survived after the body was shot all to hell. Krull told himself this Your mother is dead and she is not coming back.

  Krull explored the fire-site. Part-burnt lumber, shingles, scattered and crumbling bricks and parts of dead trees like fallen things from which life had leaked out. Sweet damp grass had begun to grow out of the debris, there was wild lilac grown tall and leggy like the bushes behind the peach-colored farmhouse. Fallen hearts and fallen leaves, starlings light on the broken trees she was singing. He’d broken off a sprig of lilac to bring to her, torn the tree limb like an arm wrenched out of a socket but Zoe didn’t scold him, hadn’t seemed to notice. Wasn’t that kind of Mommy to take much special notice except she’d thanked him, kissed him. All we need is a place to land, my little bird of Heaven right here in my hand. Now the scent of lilac flooded Krull’s senses so he felt drunk, buzzing-high, it was a sweet high though mixed with smells of rot and wood-scorch. Of the six houses one remained habitable: Jimmy Weggens’s grandparents’ house Jimmy had inherited, in disrepair and oddly aslant as if the very earth had shifted and tilted beneath it, and in this house Dutch Boy and some others were living.

  From a distance the house was an old gaunt-looking farmhouse with steep roofs and a sagging front veranda and lightning rods like ice picks on the highest peaks of the roofs. The chimney was brick and partly collapsed, the veranda roof glared with a rich rotted sheen. Translucent rags of plastic flapped at the windows like soiled bandages. There remained some measure of dignity to the veranda which was wide and had a look of soaring, with ornamental-carved posts like something in a picture book. The front yard was grassless and rutted from the tires of numerous vehicles and this evening—somehow, it was evening—Krull was sure he’d left Sparta in the early afternoon—several vehicles were parked there of which the showiest was Dutch Boy’s 1984 dark-purple T-top Barracuda with its left side scraped as if with a giant fork and a front bumper fastened to the chassis with wire.

  Krull had climbed back into his car and continued up the lane. Parked in the yard in front of Dutch Boy’s place. Krull had no weapon except a tire iron shoved partway beneath the passenger’s seat. Dutch Boy had several times tried to give him one of the semi-automatic pistols, twenty-two caliber six-shot, small enough to fit in Krull’s jacket pocket, but Krull had not wanted to carry any firearm reasoning that if he had a gun the urge would be to use it, to find a use for it. When Krull was high on ice—“black ice” was the worst—his nerves were wound so tight, the least noise and sudden movement like a butterfly beating its wings, hummingbird or just some thistle silk blowing in the wind, his heart began to pound with adrenaline which even in his nerved-up state Krull was able to understand was not a good thing.

  The wild-flamey-meth high had gradually leaked out of Krull, from eighteen hours before, or whenever. Now his heart was pounding with only just apprehension, fear. He had not switched on his headlights. There was that, he’d done right. The sun had not yet disappeared. Much of the sky remained light in the west, above Lake Ontario, and was ablaze with red.

  A waning red sun. Delray had talked of taking him there some time, a friend had a boat, they could go fishing. A part of Krull’s mind, this was still a prospect. This might still happen. The old man comes back, he’s “retired” from the auto repair and cycle shop. Sure they could do it, some weekend.

  Dutch Boy wasn’t so crazy in daylight as he got to be sometimes, in dark. Krull was thinking this time of year, it stays light later.

  Krull was thinking this melancholy thought: how Jimmy Weggens’s old grandparents had lived out here in Booneville off that unpaved road all of their lives and farmed—wheat, soybeans, corn, dairy cows—and had children to whom they’d left the farmhouse and property of some fifty acres but the children had all grown up and moved to Sparta or some other city with not the slightest interest in farming, gradually they’d sold off the property, or maybe it was leased to neighboring farmers, but the old house had gone uninhabited until at last in the mid-1980s it had fallen to Jimmy Weggens who was a meth-head junkie of thirty-five with teeth rotted in his jaws and a grin like a Hallowe’en pumpkin.

  Jimmy had been an old-time partner of Duncan Metz and was now a partner of Dutch Boy Greuner in the manufacture of crystal meth. In the basement of the old house was a “cooking lab” and out back a putrid waste-chemical dump. For a mile you could smell this dump but no county law enforcement officers had ever investigated the premises nor were likely to, Dutch Boy boasted.

  Dutch Boy was also a source of more mainstream drugs: pot, coke, prescription painkillers and anti-depressants, diet pills and heroin. No weapon except the tire iron which obviously Krull could not carry into the house.

  Krull cupped his hands to his mouth. It was always a chancy thing, showing up here even when expected. “Hey. It’s me—Krull.” He’d seen a face at one of the first-floor windows.

  Just inside the door, Dutch Boy’s young girlfriend Sarabeth was hugging her bony arms, shivering. There was a shiny metal clip in her left eyebrow. Nervous and embarrassed-seeming Sarabeth told Krull, “He’s kind of pissed right now. Don’t know why.” Sarabeth had once been a girl of Krull’s. Not Krull’s only girl at the time and not for a very long time but there was a sentimental attachment between them, an air of regret, apology. Sarabeth was eighteen, or twenty. Some tales Sarabeth told, you could figure her for twenty-five, or older. Her tales of herself were seductive and fanciful. She was a rich man’s daughter on the run from Averill Park, a classy suburb of Albany. Sarabeth herself had been a classy model, unless it was a classy call girl, in Syracuse. Her small myopic watery tea-colored eyes were dilated and might have registered fear in normal circumstances. Dry-mouthed from whatever drugs she’d taken Sarabeth licked her lips and lay a quivery hand on Krull’s arm to warn him in a breathy whisper, “He’s kind of excited.” In an interior room, that had once been a kitchen, Dutch Boy was speaking on the phone. His voice was
unmistakable: a sequence of furious stammering surges. He was speaking with his Syracuse supplier, Krull surmised. Krull had remembered that he’d made five deliveries in Sparta that day and each had gone without any difficulty and so he had money to hand over to Dutch Boy, a wad of crumpled smelly bills. Even new-minted bills handed to Krull from the shaky hands of upscale customers like the doctor’s wife had a way of taking on the smells of Krull’s body. Time would be required for Dutch Boy to count these bills for Dutch Boy did not trust what he called “intermediators.” Now Dutch Boy hung up the phone and fixed his eyes on Krull at first not seeming to recognize him. Then he said, “You. God damn where the fuck’ve you been.” It did not seem to Krull to be a question requiring an answer.

  Krull tossed the bills onto the table which was an ancient kitchen table with an enamel top, badly scratched now, and stained. It was an enamel table of the kind Krull recalled from his grandparents’ kitchen, Zoe’s parents’ kitchen in some long-ago time when they’d gone to visit almost every Sunday.

  Now Krull wasn’t sure if the old people were still alive. If they’d have wanted to see him, his face that would remind them of Delray’s face.

  The floor was linoleum splotched like bubbles. There were several windows layered in grime but emitting the waning sun, like Technicolor. A chemical stink pervaded the air, a sharp smell of fertilizer. Nitrogen? Krull had nothing to do with the cooking of the drug, he was wary of its dangers and had no intention of becoming involved in its preparation if he’d been asked, which he had not. No one in the house seemed to notice this strong chemical stink except Krull and then only when he first arrived. Dutch Boy was in a mood, excitable as Sarabeth had warned, and anxious. Possibly something had gone wrong. Dutch Boy wore his black-vinyl leather vest, his bare chest beneath clam-colored and concave, hairless. Dutch Boy’s nipples were pinched little berries. His shoulders and upper arms were scrawny, he appeared to have no muscle-tissue at all. His dyed-brass hair was brown now at the roots. Except for his stubbled jaws and flamey eyes and creases in his face he might’ve been a kid dressed for Hallowe’en, a figure to smile at. As he spoke to Krull trying to address something urgent in a strangulated stream of words, his stained teeth shone. His eyes appeared mismatched, unfocused and yet he seemed to be making a genuine effort to speak reasonably to Krull, to convince Krull of something, perhaps to warn Krull, to threaten Krull but somehow his words came out garbled as in a language foreign to both Krull and himself. Krull murmured Yeh, right. O.K. in a placating voice. He’d been looking and had not seen any gun visible. Sometimes Dutch Boy kept a pistol in plain sight, sometimes one of his Enfield Military rifles, and there was the twelve-gauge Rottweil shotgun somewhere at close hand. So far as Krull knew, Dutch Boy had never fired any of these weapons except at targets, fence posts and scavenger birds. Scattered on the enamel-topped table were Dutch Boy’s notebooks, pages filled with the elaborate crosshatchings of a certain kind of comic strip drawing, and Dutch Boy’s own comic-strip figures, as well as intricate designs of whirling suns or atoms, grinning skulls, evil-clown faces. It was Dutch Boy’s fantasy he’d be an acclaimed cartoonist someday, in the style of R. Crumb.

  Krull went on to use the toilet, in a back hall. Dutch Boy continued to speak at Krull’s retreating back.

  What happened next, Krull would have no recollection. Emerging from the toilet at the rear of the house and there’s a flash of headlights turning into the driveway, had to be unexpected since Dutch Boy became so upset. Krull heard Dutch Boy curse as a child might curse in a whimper and there went Dutch Boy limping out onto the veranda and there came three gunshots in rapid succession, loud as if they’d exploded an inch from Krull’s head. A moment of silence then like the silence following a thunderclap and then Sarabeth’s voice—“Oh no, no. Oh God no.” Krull saw from a window that a bearded man—was this Metz?—looking enough like Duncan Metz to be his brother—was sinking to his knees at the side of the house where he’d fled stumbling, and there came Dutch Boy shrieking, “Fuck! You f-fuck!” after him as he tried to crawl away into tall grasses moaning and whimpering, and bright blood glistened across his back. If this was Metz, Dutch Boy had not the slightest fear of him for Krull saw Dutch Boy rush at him and fire point-blank into the back of his head and he fell forward with no resistance. Dutch Boy kicked at the writhing body, furious. Another shot, and a great well of blood escaped now from the fallen man’s head.

  All this happened more rapidly than Krull could comprehend. Almost, than Krull could see.

  Like in lacrosse, you can’t always see. The plays are so swift, when the players are good, your eyes trail after.

  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 easter
n 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.