Little Bird of Heaven

  All he’d said to me was if I didn’t want to be hurt maybe I shouldn’t be playing the game. But I am playing the game, and I think that I am doing all right.

  At least, I haven’t failed yet.

  I am still young. I have plenty of time.

  “…update these forms? ‘Next of kin’…”

  Has Claude Loomis suffered a stroke in prison?—or has someone beaten him, caused a hemorrhage in his brain? That would explain the paralyzed look of half his face. If he’d been beaten, he would not have reported the assault. “…let me read this for you, Claude. See if we can make sense of…” A stale smell wafts to my nostrils, a smell of despair from Claude Loomis, or from the pile of documents. Badly I want to lay my head down on my arms, cradle my pounding head and shield my face from the fluorescent glare, shut my eyes and sink into sleep.

  Is this what Claude Loomis is doing? His protruding eyes are half-shut, his eyelids are folds of reptilian flesh. When I ask if he’s all right he mutters what sounds like Ma’am! or maybe it’s I am or Uhhh.

  In this maximum-security prison Claude Loomis is an old man. He’s fifty at least and most prisoners are young men—white, black, Hispanic—in their twenties or early thirties. A few are older, in their forties. And Claude Loomis is physically disadvantaged. Sad to think that there’s a chance he will die in this terrible place, if his case is rejected by the appeals court. Sadder to think that the man’s spirit has been sucked from him, the marrow of his bones sucked dry. Even if Claude Loomis is finally granted a new trial, even if he’s acquitted and released after eleven years of incarceration…

  This trouble that came into my life.

  This trouble that’s the end of my life.

  When surreptitiously I check my watch—this watch which had been my father’s watch, with its white-gold stretch-band—to my horror I see that less than thirty minutes have passed since I entered this interview room. Thirty minutes!

  To enter these places of twelve-foot stone walls topped with swirls of razor-wire, these mazelike corridors with no exit signs and heavy metallic doors that open only when a code is punched in, is to enter a primitive time. A warp in time. Though you are a “visitor”—you are “free” to enter and to depart. And when you depart you stagger out exhausted, unable to believe how relatively little time has passed since you’d entered. A single hour is many hours. A single day is many days. A month, a year. Prisoners speak of doing time. In such places time is effort, like physical labor.

  My father was spared this, at least. He’d arranged for himself a swift execution by firing squad.

  Often I dream of him—Edward Diehl. Maybe always, every night. As you dream of something knotted and gnarled in the region of your heart. As you dream of a musical chord repeated to the point of madness. As you dream of the unknowable and unsayable fact of your own death. As the city of Sparta had become, in my memory, a mute, physical sensation that made my heart contract with emotion. Back there.

  Where I had lost them. My father, my family.

  Aaron Kruller, I had loved.

  For these reasons—of which I have told no one in my life at the present time—it is a profound occasion for me, to drive to the prison at Newburgh. It is a profound occasion for me to drive here alone and to enter the facility alone through its several checkpoints. The State Correctional Facility for Men at Newburgh is an antiquated stone fortress overlooking the Hudson River wind-whipped and of the hue of molten lead on this overcast November afternoon fourteen years, eleven months and five days after Edward Diehl’s death.

  Badly I wish that I could confide in Claude Loomis, about my father. Badly I wish that I dared touch the man’s arm, his wrist—it would not be difficult for me to reach over the Plexiglas partition and touch him: lightly. My heart is beating quickly—I am so dangerously close to doing this.

  Loomis peers at me, alert and wary. As if he senses something dangerous in the air between us.

  Don’t touch ma’am!

  Of course—I would not reach over and touch Claude Loomis! Such intimate gestures are forbidden here. As contraband is forbidden. Any kind of personal touch, communication. Each time you enter the prison, you are so warned.

  (The interview room, however, isn’t under surveillance. Unless the prison authorities are secretly violating federal and state law guaranteeing the privacy/confidentiality of attorneys and clients. There is no camera here, no one is watching or listening.)

  Patiently I am trying to explain to Claude Loomis the need to listen carefully to me, and to answer the questions I’m asking him—these are crucial questions. Trying not to sound exasperated with him asking how can he expect to be granted a new trial, how can he expect to be released from prison, unless he cooperates….

  Still Loomis stares at me, unsmiling. There is no use my trying to pretend to myself that this man trusts me, has confidence in me. Still less, that he “likes” me. His mouth twitches, his words are unintelligible, what sounds like even if, see ma’am, they be dead, no family there’d be just me ma’am frowning and grimacing as if he’s arguing with someone. Has Claude Loomis been arguing with me all along? And I haven’t understood his hostility? In one of his spasmodic twitches he knocks a manila folder off the table, my ballpoint pen flies off clattering to the floor, suddenly there’s noise, excitement in the airless little box of a room. Suddenly Claude Loomis is on his feet and suddenly Claude Loomis is very angry—but why?

  So quickly this has happened, afterward I won’t recall the sequence of events.

  Though I think that I tried to speak quietly to the agitated man, calmly and as if nothing was wrong, just yet. Urging him to please sit down, please don’t speak so loudly, the guard will come into the room and our interview will end. But Claude Loomis isn’t to be calmed, not by me. Not by this pissy little white-girl paralegal whose eyes are widened in fear. Loomis looks as me as if I am the enemy—he doesn’t know me, doesn’t remember me, a look of disgust, a look of fury, shiny dark eyes showing a rim of white above the iris like the eyes of a panicked animal. Not knowing what I am doing—maybe this was a gesture I’d made to my father, in the motel room—I reach out toward him and he curses me and throws off my hand as you’d throw off a snake.

  Claude Loomis has knocked over his chair, his legs are tangled in his chair legs, violently he kicks the chair against the wall. Reaches over the Plexiglas partition to grab hold of my shoulder, tears the lapel of my navy blue wool suit, shoves me back against the wall. By this time the burly white guard has entered the room cursing Loomis—it’s C.O. technique to yell at such times—to yell profanities—grabs Loomis and throws Loomis struggling to the floor. The little room rings with shouts. The men’s voices are deafening. All this has happened within seconds, like a car crash. More swiftly than I can comprehend. More swiftly than I can recount. I am clutching at something, to keep upright. I am trying very hard not to faint. Not to lose control of my bladder. My head is ringing with pain—somehow, I’d been thrown against the wall. Precious papers are scattered everywhere. The case file of LOOMIS, CLAUDE T. is scattered everywhere. Documents, folders, transcripts. My leather shoulder bag, my document-bag. By this time Emmet has his prisoner belly-down, facedown on the floor. Expertly Emmet is kneeing the fallen man in the lower back, and cuffing his wrists. Loomis’s wrists are thick, the metal cuffs sink into his purplish-dark flesh. Emmet jerks Loomis’s wrists and arms up behind his back, to maximize the pain. This is standard procedure, like shouting profanities, obscenities. This is the great thrill of the C.O., the moment of triumph for which the C.O. waits patiently through hours of tedium, boredom. The adrenaline rush to the heart, potent as any drug. Better than sex.

  Still I am trying to intervene—though the issue is now exclusively between the guard and the prisoner—between the men—I am trying to explain that what happened may have been my fault—I’d said something inappropriate—thoughtless—I’d made Loomis think of his family—the client over-reacted, he may be off his meds—it wasn’t his
fault—but another guard, so closely resembling Emmet he might have been a brother or a cousin, has arrived on the run, is leading me out of the interview room, when I try to resist the guard walks me forcibly—here is a man who outweighs me by at least one hundred pounds calling me Ma’am saying loudly Interview’s over ma’am this way out—as I stammer trying to explain that I need to collect my legal papers, can’t leave the facility without the papers, to which the guard says, scarcely troubling to disguise his contempt Ma’am that’s for the warden to say.

  DRIVING BACK TO PEEKSKILL, without the papers!

  Driving back to Peekskill, chastened, trembling!

  Thinking it was my mistake. A blunder of mine. Maybe, I had actually touched Claude Loomis. Mistaking him as a wounded man merely, not a man filled with rage.

  Don’t touch white girl. Don’t come near.

  When I’d first begun working as a paralegal for the non-profit organization Prosecution Watch, Inc., I’d hoped to “share”—“forge a bond with”—clients. The indigent, the mentally unstable, a disproportionate number of whom were black, Hispanic, Native American. I’d been eager and naive speaking to both women and men of my father’s experience with the law in Sparta, New York. I would say I am the daughter of a man who was murdered by law enforcement officers. A man who died not because he had committed a crime but because he was suspected of having committed a crime.

  I would say My father died of being a suspect.

  I would not say that I’d seen my father die. That I’d been a witness to my father writhing in agony in a hail of bullets he’d summoned to him yet in terror tried to ward off with uplifted outspread hands. I would not say My father took me hostage.

  No need to say My father took me hostage out of despair, because he loved me. He would never have hurt me.

  No need to say Daddy loved me, why would Daddy have hurt me!

  Seeing Daddy’s hands sometimes, in the hands of strangers. In Claude Loomis’s more mangled hands in fact. Daddy’s strong capable hands, the fingers broad and stubbed, a workingman’s hands.

  Sometimes my words were effective, to a degree. That was what I thought.

  At other times, no. The client would stare at me indifferently, or with a sneer. Or maybe he hadn’t been listening. My little moment of drama fell flat. In my vanity hoping to communicate Look, I understand! I am one of you, because of my father. Don’t push me from you, I am here to share and to help but they’d seen through me, they had not been seduced.

  And so, I rarely speak of my father any longer. Never do I utter the name “Edward Diehl.” With colleagues and friends and when it’s awkward to avoid acknowledging that my father is “no longer living” and that he’d died “years ago, when I was a girl” in Sparta, New York, in that hilly region at the western edge of the Adirondacks.

  And now, I have no “hometown”—only just temporary places in which I live. Since we all left Sparta—my parents, my brother Ben, and me.

  “AARON.”

  Before he could speak, I said his name. I’d recognized him immediately.

  He was waiting for me in the corridor outside my office. The office I shared with several other paralegals. Though we had not seen each other in many years he spoke my name flatly, bluntly: “Krista.”

  Not smiling and not reaching out his hand to shake mine as people do, in my profession—instead I reached out my hand, and gripped his.

  “Aaron! It’s wonderful to see you…”

  So soon after the incident at Newburgh, I was feeling light-headed, unreal. A faint roaring in my ears which often I heard when I was overworked and fatigued and now the thought came to me He has come to take me back to Sparta.

  And No love like your first!

  (Maybe this was Lucille’s voice, mocking. The less I saw of my mother in recent years, the more deeply imprinted her voice in my head.)

  Such ease in speech, such warmth in my greeting and a smile that suggested confidence, assurance were not qualities in Aaron Kruller’s life, I could see. He seemed embarrassed, awkward. He’d located me here in Peekskill through relatives of mine in Sparta, he said. He was wearing a sheepskin jacket, work-boots. His dark hair grew thick and wiry and had begun to recede from his forehead. His angular face had filled out, thickened. Still his skin was pitted and faintly scarred and his eyes were steely and unsettling as I remembered. Those eyes I’d seen in the water-splotched mirror above the sink in Aaron’s aunt’s apartment, that night.

  Despite my poise I was shocked to see him. This would be one of the shocks of my adult life.

  Why hadn’t he called me first, I didn’t want to ask. It would have seemed impolite to ask. Why, instead of driving three hundred miles on the chance that he would see me?—there was something dogged and fatalistic in this, the sort of thing my father might have done, driving halfway across the state with the hope of seeing or at least speaking with my mother—or Ben, or me. Not daring to call first, in fear of being rebuffed.

  Or maybe, being the person he was, Aaron Kruller hadn’t wanted any confrontation that wasn’t face-to-face. Maybe telephone conversations put him at a disadvantage. It was a perverse sort of male shyness, in the most aggressive and masculine of men.

  When I’d returned to the office from the debacle at the Newburgh prison, I was relieved to see that my supervisor wasn’t in. Instead one of the staff lawyers told me that someone was waiting for me upstairs. Is he a client, I said, I don’t think that I can face a client right now. The lawyer said he didn’t think so. Then: “Or maybe he was, and he isn’t now.”

  Aaron had come to tell me surprising news: there was someone in Sparta with new information about what had happened to Zoe, and she wanted to tell Aaron and me, at the same time.

  “‘New information’—? What is it?”

  “She won’t say—she wants us to visit her, together.”

  It had to be Jacky DeLucca, I thought. That woman who’d befriended me in the brownstone on West Ferry Street, who’d kissed the top of my head with a strange heated ardor, and sent me away. Aaron had no way of knowing that I knew Zoe’s roommate. He said that the woman who wanted to see us had been “a close friend, like a sister” to Zoe at the time of her death, who was dying now of cancer and wanted to reveal something to us before it was too late.

  “That’s what she calls it—‘reveal.’ To the two of us, together.”

  In his flat blunt voice Aaron managed to disguise any excitement he might have been feeling.

  We were in my office now—the office space divided into cubicles for paralegals like me. Aaron had seemed reluctant to follow me into the room. Maybe he thought that Prosecution Watch, Inc. was a government agency, aligned with the local county prosecutor’s office. Maybe he thought I was a lawyer, I had left Sparta to join forces with the world of law courts, law enforcement officers, statutes and penalties. Without exactly looking at me he spoke slowly and with an air of strain like one exerting force against a barely yielding object. I thought—he was still working at Kruller’s Auto Repair! He was still living the old Sparta life, that had exuded a kind of romance at one time, a romance exclusively masculine, physical. Ordinary speech was an effort to him, near-painful, as this subject was painful to him.

  I remembered how he’d taken me from Duncan Metz’s hard hands—literally. I remembered when we were together in his aunt’s bathroom, and later in his car, he’d spoken very little to me, yet communicated so much. I thought He is ashamed, even now. He remembers what he did.

  I thought He has no idea how I wanted it. Whatever he could do to me, I’d wanted.

  In his manner Aaron reminded me of my brother Ben whom I saw now only once or twice a year, at our mother’s home in Port Oriskany in the western part of the state.

  Lucille had remarried. Her husband was fifteen years older than she was, a semi-retired manufacturer’s representative with a Port Oriskany ball bearings company, a self-defined Christian. Lucille’s life was not the old Sparta life, she’d cast from her with the
desperation with which one might cast off a water-logged coat, to save oneself from drowning.

  “‘Jacky DeLucca.’ I haven’t seen her in twenty years.”

  If Aaron was surprised to know that I knew Jacky DeLucca’s name, he gave no sign. When I pressed him more about what Jacky DeLucca might have to tell us he shrugged saying he didn’t know, and he didn’t want to speculate. Speaking of his mother hadn’t been easy for him, even now. His flat upstate voice had quavered, just perceptibly: Zoe.

  The reckless impulse came to me, to mime Zoe Kruller in her white Honeystone’s uniform. Well say! Thought it was you.

  In that throaty intimate voice What can I do you for today?

  And that sly hungry smile. Those hungry eyes.

  Aaron was looking at me more openly now. I saw the hunger in those eyes, too: the sexually aggressive male, not entirely certain of his power over me, over the person I’d become. I wondered if he was remembering: the old connection between us.

  In his aunt Viola’s bathroom. In those minutes his aunt had been elsewhere. Aaron Kruller forcing his weight on me, on my back; Aaron Kruller’s hands tightening around my neck.

  A flush rose into his face. He remembered. He said:

  “…should leave tonight. Now. I’ll drive you there, Krista.”

  “Tonight! I can’t leave tonight….”

  This was totally a surprise. My pretense of calm seeing Aaron Kruller here in my office after seventeen years had begun to waver.

  But Aaron insisted: “We can get to Sparta by at least eleven o’clock tonight, if we leave now. Then in the morning we can go see DeLucca. On the phone she told me, ‘Mornings are my best time.’”

  I began to stammer. I was feeling light-headed now, disoriented. It was shameful and astonishing to me, I’d begun to feel a low throbbing sexual yearning, in the man’s presence. Though saying, “Aaron, you can’t be serious! I can’t leave for Sparta tonight. I don’t have the kind of job I can just walk away from. I will need…” Rapidly my mind worked, thoughts spinning like wheels in mud. I was indignant, insulted. I wanted Aaron Kruller to know that my life was an important life, my responsibilities were considerable despite the small shared office, the utilitarian desk and somber surroundings decorated by unframed wall posters of paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper. “I will need to make arrangements about my work, I have appointments all day tomorrow. I’m due to visit Ossining. I’d need to reserve a motel room in Sparta….”