Little Bird of Heaven

  “Hey there. You needin’ a ride?”

  A farmer’s flat-bed truck approached. Headlights in mist. Krull had washed his stubbly lacerated face and wetted his quill-hair with ditch water, adjusted his filthy and torn clothing and walked into the road with some measure of dignity like middle-aged Delray easing off the Harley-Davidson, not letting on how his back throbbed with pain. Jesus! You could pretend to be almost anything you weren’t, there were so few things you could actually be.

  “Yes I am. Needin a ride. Thanks!”

  Conscious of this good luck he had not deserved Krull was driven eleven miles across the Black River and into Sparta as the city on its steep glacial hills passed from mist-shrouded dawn to day, to a haze of pale sunshine; yet some lights continued to burn, streetlights, billboard lights, porch lights on houses; something about these lights left on struck Krull as poignant, or sad; or maybe hopeful. And the farmer—whose name was Floyd Donahower—whose hand Krull shook—who by purest chance was delivering his malfunctioning John Deere tractor to Kruller’s Auto Repair where he’d known the owner Delray for a long time—brought Krull to Quarry Road and to his home, he had not thought he would ever see again; and late that afternoon at the garage the phone rang in Delray’s office and Krull answered it and it was a girl’s breathy voice in his ear, Sarabeth informing Krull that Dutch Boy wanted him to know there were no “hard feelings” or a “wish for retribution” on his side and that the problem had been “dealt with”—buried in a rotted old mound of hay and manure behind the barn.

  To this, Krull could think of no reply. He’d been working on the tractor fuel line, he’d about repaired the damage. His hands were greasy and just slightly shaky but he was managing.

  “Krull? Are you there?”

  Krull murmured a sound to indicate yes.

  “I was so scared last night! Not sure all that happened—I mean, I didn’t see any of it—I wasn’t exactly there. But it’s over now, I guess. Things will work out, Dutch Boy says. He just wants you to know—what I told you.”

  Krull said, “That sounds good. Tell Dennis, good.”

  He would clean up his life. He was not yet twenty-two. There’s some things I can teach you Delray had promised. Krull would look to see what these might be.

  Part Three

  1

  NOVEMBER 2002

  ON THIS DAY I saw him: Aaron.

  He’d seen me. He’d been waiting for me. Before he could speak I said his name: “Aaron.”

  It had been years. Yet Aaron Kruller inhabited my dreams. My most intimate dreams, I would never have shared with anyone else including Aaron Kruller.

  “Krista.”

  He spoke my name flatly. There was no music in his voice, no sign of yearning. And his eyes were narrowed, wary. The eyes of a man of thirty-four years who has lived each of those years and yet calmly I thought He has come to take me back to Sparta.

  I thought No love like your first.

  THE HOPE IN THEIR EYES! So blinding sometimes, I have to look away.

  Or maybe it’s fury. Smoldering-hot acid-fury jammed up inside their ulcerated bowels.

  Claude Loomis, for instance. With his pretense of not-remembering me though it has been less than two months since I’ve seen him in this room, at this very table.

  And the way he jerks forward in what appear to be erratic and involuntary muscular twitches against the edge of the metal-topped table that separates us. His voice is a low barely audible mutter Ma’am? Din’t hear you. His shoulders are bony and misshapen in a way to make you wonder if, beneath the khaki-colored prison uniform, you’d see evidence of amputation, wings sheared bluntly off at the shoulders. Ma’am din’t hear you ma’am. Mock-courteous, screwing up one side of his purplish-black pitted and whorled face and cupping a hand to his ear, that’s pulpy and mutilated.

  The ear, that is. Pulpy, mutilated, but “healed.”

  Between us on the grimy rectangular table is a Plexiglas partition approximately eight inches high. A barrier between civilian-visitor and client-prisoner that must be purely symbolic, suggestive. For either of us could reach over it before a guard could intervene. Lunge, and grab over it.

  …ma’am? Say that again ma’am?

  Claude Loomis has been incarcerated in the New York State Correctional Facility for Men at Newburgh since 1991 on charges of second-degree homicide, assault with a deadly weapon, possession of an unlicensed firearm, and resisting arrest. He is in the eleventh year of a twenty-five-year-to-life sentence and his face has come to resemble one of those primitive-mask faces in certain paintings of Picasso’s, the residue of a face that has melted and congealed numerous times. There is a savage white sickle-scar on his upper lip that looks like a living thing and his eyes are shiny-dark and protuberant as if a tremendous pressure were being exerted upon them from inside his skull.

  Ma’am din’t I tell you! Tryin’ damn hard to remember….

  Ma’am is what they call me, mostly. Mumbled and near-inaudible like a sound of phlegm at the back of the mouth. Ma’am because they don’t recall my name from one visit to the next or my name seems problematic because unless you see Diehl spelled out it sounds like Deal and Deal sounds wrong, for the name of an individual whose work is to represent indigent prisoners whose sentences are being investigated or are under appeal.

  (Is “Claude Loomis” an invented name? Yes. I am professionally and ethically bound to respect the privacy and confidentiality of all the clients in my caseload.)

  (As “Krista Diehl”—the name I have given myself in this document—is an invented name, by just a few letters.)

  As I speak to Claude Loomis, as I explain why I am here, what I am hoping to do for him, he stares at me with his yellow-tinged protuberant eyes narrowed in distrust. Here is a man who has been disappointed in the past—not by me, but by someone very like me. Once, he’d been younger and more hopeful and thus disappointed, wounded in his hope. To hope is to risk too much, like baring your throat to a stranger.

  It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I have come to meet with Claude Loomis. I am a nervously smiling white woman and I am seated on the civilian-visitor side of the table with my back to the door and just outside the door is a guard. I am the stranger.

  Ma’am what is your business Claude Loomis asked me, at our first meeting several months ago and I said My business is helping.

  And Claude Loomis laughed baring big stained teeth Ma’am that so? Ain’t much money in that business is there?

  The guard outside the door is a burly white man from Catskill named Emmet: he has told me, I’ve asked him, unlike my more aggressive professional colleagues I am always friendly with the staff of any prison or facility to which I am sent. Emmet must weigh 250 pounds, his hair is a crewcut of metal shavings, his face a ganglia of muscles. His stone-colored eyes shift on me when I approach, his mouth twitches into a smile that might be friendly, or just subtly derisive; my profession isn’t respected by the prison staff community, in fact we are generally resented, disliked. For we are seeking to overturn, vacate, release where they are concerned with incarceration, maintaining security. But I’m a young blond woman—younger-looking than my age—and so I have made a friend in Emmet—haven’t I? Wanting to think that this burly uniformed man isn’t my enemy. Wanting to think that he will protect me if I need him. And not resent me because I’ve been allowed into the prison as a privileged visitor assigned an “interview” room and not made to meet with my client in the large open clamorous visitors’ room where a half-dozen guards are visibly stationed.

  Wanting to think, yes Emmet is my friend. An outcry from me, a sound of plastic chairs overturned, Emmet is prepared to open the door and rush inside.

  Prepared to save me from Claude Loomis, if I require saving.

  Mr. Loomis knows this, all prisoners know this which is why he regards me, his paralegal visitor, with ironic eyes. The lurid scar on his upper lip attracts my attention, he can see. And the purplish-dark skin, the mangled ear.
Yet calmly I am explaining: “…these documents, Mr. Loomis?—if you could confirm…Sorry for the smudged photocopies—this is how they came to me! And your file is still missing a notarized birth certificate, I’ve tried several times to contact the Haggen County courthouse….”

  Haggen County, Alabama. But it’s possible that no birth certificate was ever issued for Claude Loomis.

  One of those American citizens not born in a hospital—as he has claimed—and no one cared to register his birth which, by my estimate, must have occurred in the mid-1950s.

  No birth certificate, no Social Security number. In this stack of much-handled documents pertaining to LOOMIS, CLAUDE T. the information regarding “education history”—“employment record”—“armed services status”—“residence”—“family”—looking as if it has been filled out by someone not Mr. Loomis, is incomplete, inconsistent and unreliable.

  (Is Loomis’s first name Claude, in fact? On one of the older documents, the initial arrest sheet from the Newburgh Police Department, the typed name is Cylde. Clyde?)

  In this windowless fluorescent-lit interview room, poorly ventilated, and measuring perhaps ten feet by twelve, crucial information is being sought from Claude Loomis, without conspicuous success. This interview might be taking place in a lifeboat, in a quaking sea! The light is both harshly glaring and dim. My mood is both upbeat-professional and growing-anxious. Claude Loomis is hunched over the documents I have passed to him blinking and squinting as if trying to get them into focus. Ma’am shi-it. The disgruntled client knows to keep his voice lowered so the guard outside the door can’t hear.

  Client is the correct term, not prisoner. The organization for which I work deals in clients and not prisoners, inmates, convicts, convicted felons. For it is our contention that the individual Claude Loomis whose case we have taken up has been wrongfully incarcerated in this maximum-security prison as the final consequence of a sequence of wrongful actions by the state: unjustified arrest—“racial profiling”—by law enforcement officers as a “suspect” in a crime or crimes; a twelve-hour “interview” that was in fact an interrogation; a “confession” by the arrested man, to be subsequently recanted; an indictment by a grand jury, despite insufficient evidence and a (recanted) confession; a trial, with an overworked and ill-prepared defense attorney; a conviction, and a prison sentence that might keep him behind bars for the remainder of his life.

  For this visit I have dressed in my usual paralegal clothes: dark blue wool pants suit, white silk blouse and trim little black shoe-boots. For this visit I am determined will be a success and not a failure, I have plaited and wrapped my long silky pale-blond hair around my head, fastened with a tortoiseshell comb at the nape of my neck. I wear schoolteacher pearl earrings, an oversized (man’s) watch on my left wrist. Patiently I am saying in my voice of forced calm, “…Mr. Loomis please! If you can’t make out the fine print let me read it for you. What the form requires is…”

  What the hell is Loomis doing? Hunched so far over the table, as if his spine is broken? In his skimpy record there is no indication of physical ailments other than diabetes and high blood pressure but now he seems to be jamming himself forward in a sequence of shuddery little twitches as if—I don’t want to think this, I am not thinking this—there is something crudely sexual in his movements, and I am the object.

  “Mr. Loomis! Let me read these lines….”

  Loomis pauses. Rubs his hands over his head, digging in his thumbs, hard. His glistening eyes remain fixed on the documents spread out before him. As I read to him I am thinking that nowhere in these documents is set down the most obvious and dispiriting fact of this man’s life as a convicted felon: convicted, though very likely innocent: by chance Claude Loomis had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, late one Saturday night picked up by cruising Newburgh police, arrested and “identified” and charged with a robbery-homicide in the Newburgh jurisdiction that seemed to have been, judging from evidence more recently assembled, committed by another black man of Loomis’s approximate age, size, and appearance/skin tone. After hours of interrogation there came to be a “confession” subsequently entered into evidence at Loomis’s trial handwritten not by the defendant—who could not write but barely hand-print, in the simple way of a young child—but by a Newburgh police detective, a single sheet of paper at the bottom of which, in a space designated for a signature, Loomis’s name appears as CLAUD LOMISS. There was a two-day trial, jurors conferring for forty minutes, sentencing. More than ten years so far served in the Newburgh maximum-security prison.

  He’d signed a blank sheet of paper, Loomis had claimed. Not a one of the words of his “confession” was his own.

  “…your original attorney, back in 1991, it’s been noted that he failed to cross-examine any of the prosecution witnesses. He failed to…”

  Failed. Failed to! So many years.

  Much of my conversation with Claude Loomis is a repeat of previous conversations. For our cases—of which the Claude Loomis case is representative—move with torturous slowness, like black muck flowing uphill. I can’t determine if my client is having difficulty seeing—he might be myopic, or have cataracts—or if he simply can’t read very well; there is the possibility that he’s drugged, also; or slow-witted, or ill. I have no more real knowledge of Claude Loomis than Claude Loomis has of Krista Diehl. If Loomis is, like so many prisoners, illiterate, he wouldn’t want me to know; the illiterate have their pride, as we would in their places. Or maybe he’s hunched over the table squinting at the documents as a way of not looking at me; maybe he feels, not a sexual attraction, but a sexual revulsion for me. How much more comfortable Claude Loomis would be with a male paralegal, a black or Hispanic paralegal! I know this but there is nothing I can do about it.

  In Sparta I learned as a girl: you play the cards you’ve been dealt. In this case, Krista Diehl is the cards I’ve been dealt, and the cards I will have to play.

  With a smile saying, ever-upbeat, cheerful and encouraging: “…my office is optimistic about the appellate court. One of their recent decisions, Claude, overturning a conviction in a case similar to yours, ‘corroboration of identification by police-informant witness’…the witness your attorney failed to cross-examine and to challenge…”

  How like a lawyer I sound, though I am only a paralegal. The distinction has been explained to the client but very likely he has forgotten.

  “Excuse me, Claude, could you hand the file back to me, and I will…”

  Calling him Claude. Not once but twice Claude. Trying so hard to win his confidence.

  Not wanting to think Give up! He doesn’t trust you, white girl.

  Why should this man trust you, white girl.

  I take back the files from my client. Out of my paralegal’s document bag have emerged these soiled manila folders, dog-eared copies of court transcripts, yellowed and brittle legal papers, stapled documents issued by the Newburgh County district attorney’s office, and these have been placed on the table between us. Hundreds of pages, thousands of words. No one could hope to read and retain so many words even if his fate is contained within them. How exhausting this is, in this airless room! Like sucking oxygen through a pinched straw, desperate to breathe.

  The first time I met with a client alone, unsupervised, was several years ago, not here at Newburgh but at Ossining. After a quarter of an hour I began to feel disoriented and after an hour I believed that I could hear a heavy machine in the distance throbbing, thudding, pounding but this turned out to be just blood-pulses in my head. And I’ve come close to fainting, and throwing up. And in fact I have fainted and I have thrown up but luckily not with anyone to witness. As Lucille said You want to prove something with your life, like it’s your life-blood you want to spill—but what? All that is over. He’ll never know.