Little Bird of Heaven

  Unlike Aaron, I was determined to be sociable. I asked him about his family: his father, his aunt Viola, his Kruller relatives. My voice was lowered as if we might be in danger of being overheard.

  Aaron said in his flat, blunt voice that suggested no emotion other than disdain, his father had died a few years ago.

  I told him that I was sorry to hear this.

  Aaron shrugged. Aaron drank ale from the bottle.

  I asked him about his aunt Viola and Aaron said Viola was O.K.

  “Got married, finally. I mean, she’d been married before. This time looks better.”

  I told him that I was happy to hear this—“Your aunt was so kind to me, that night.”

  Stoned out of my mind that night, stricken with nausea—I could remember little of what happened. Except I knew that Aaron’s aunt had called my mother and managed to convince her that I’d been at a friend’s house and some sort of domestic crisis there had prevented me from calling her. Apparently Lucille had believed this.

  My anxious suspicious mother!—placated by the possibility of a crisis in another Sparta household.

  Aaron laughed suddenly, as if he’d been reading my mind. With one of his thick begrimed nails he was peeling at a label on his bottle of ale. “Yeah, Viola’s O.K. Maybe you’ll see her.”

  Why would I see Aaron’s aunt? I could not imagine.

  “Your brother—how’s he? Ben.”

  I would not have thought that Aaron Kruller would remember my brother, let alone his name. Or wish to ask after him.

  “Ben is a chemical engineer with Pierpont Labs, in Schenectady. He’s married, he has a son.” I didn’t tell Aaron that there was a strangeness between Ben and me of which we could not speak. That this strangeness had begun in that hour when one of us had come to believe that our father was a criminal, a killer; and the other had continued to love him.

  “I didn’t think you would know Ben. You weren’t in the same class, were you?”

  “Sure. We knew each other.” Aaron paused, drinking. He’d finished his dinner and had pushed the plate just slightly away. A subtle look came into his face, guarded, half-sneering. “Ben knew me.”

  Now I remembered the rumors, that Aaron had roughed up my brother.

  And that Aaron had lied to protect his father Delray. Lying, Aaron had made the case against my father more plausible.

  Not provable, but plausible.

  Now, Delray Kruller was dead. Like Eddy Diehl.

  There was a brotherhood in death, I thought.

  I wanted to ask Aaron about Mira and Bernadette, my friends from high school. My cruel false friends, who’d exuded an air of cheap reckless glamour. I’d heard that Mira Roche had died of a drug overdose but I had heard nothing of Bernadette in years. And there was Duncan Metz.

  I asked what had happened to Metz. Aaron said, in his slight-sneering tone, that Metz had “disappeared.”

  “‘Disappeared’—how?”

  “Executed in some drug deal, probably. His body was never found.”

  Executed! The word conveyed an air of finality, vindication.

  Thank you for saving my life dear Aaron.

  I had never sent any of those letters. I’d torn them into pieces to make sure that my mother never saw them. Yet now I felt a tinge of fear, that somehow Aaron had seen them.

  Aaron asked how long I’d been living in Peekskill and I told him: two years. I waited for him to ask if I was married but of course, he did not ask. I told him that my work was fascinating to me, if exhausting and sometimes disappointing, discouraging. Prosecution Watch, Inc. was a non-profit organization originally founded in 1972 to investigate cases of police and prosecutorial misconduct.

  “When people are wrongly arrested. Wrongly interrogated, tried, convicted and sent to prison. Sometimes executed.”

  I told Aaron that I’d gone to college at SUNY Binghamton. And graduate school at Cornell where I’d earned an M.A. in criminology. I was a paralegal, a lawyer’s assistant. Most of the lawyers at Prosecution Watch did pro bono work, volunteer work, but the paralegals received salaries. I was trying to save money, I told Aaron. I was accumulating experience, I hoped to go to law school in a year or two.

  To this, Aaron had no reply. As my brother Ben had no reply.

  Aaron hadn’t finished high school, I supposed. I remembered that he’d been expelled in his junior year.

  These facts about myself I wanted Aaron to know. For they were facts of my exterior life, like armor.

  I told Aaron that when I’d first begun to work as a paralegal, I’d tried to contact the Sparta detectives—Martineau, Brescia—their names I would never forget—who’d investigated his mother’s death. But Martineau had retired, and Brescia never answered my calls. I’d tried to speak to the police chief, who’d taken over after Schnagel retired, but the police chief too never had time for me. Whoever I spoke with, I was put on hold. The last time I called, I’d threatened to get a subpoena, to be allowed to see what the Sparta PD had in their files, and a voice had said Ma’am I’m going to have to put you on hold.

  I laughed. I seemed to have meant for Aaron Kruller to laugh with me. Instead, he looked away. His face stiffened, his eyes became remote.

  It was the way of such men, when you seemed to have overstepped, into their territory.

  He’d been glancing behind me, at a stream of headlights turning into the restaurant parking lot.

  Hypnotic, the stream of lights outside the sleet-lashed window. I saw the reflections in Aaron’s face like a play of water-lights over rock. I felt a small stab of satisfaction, he’d come to me.

  I asked him if Sparta had changed much since I’d moved away in 1988 and he said he guessed so, sure. “When you live in a place, you don’t see it. And I’m always there.”

  I asked him if he’d sold Kruller’s Auto Repair and he said yes, if you could call it “selling”: he’d sold off the property to pay Delray’s God-damned mortgages and loans. But now he was co-owner of a body shop out Garrison Road and business there was O.K.

  “I’m like a ‘citizen’ now. Own a business, pay guys to work for me. But I work, too.”

  “And you enjoy that work, Aaron? Don’t you? What your father did…”

  “Sure.” Aaron laughed, as if my question was so utterly stupid, there was no point in taking it seriously.

  Badly I wanted to ask if Aaron was married. I knew he would never volunteer such personal information. Instead I asked about the body shop, where it was located on Garrison Road. I asked who his co-owner was and what sort of work a “body shop” did.

  When the waitress brought our check, Aaron insisted upon paying for both our meals. He opened his wallet, and showed me a snapshot of a dimpled, smiling toddler. In an enigmatic voice he said: “Davy. When he was two. He’s older now.”

  “Your—son?”

  I stared at the snapshot. My blood beat hard, in sudden envy.

  “He’s beautiful, Aaron.”

  “Not looking much like me, that helps. He’s O.K.”

  The child had his father’s somber eyes, and something that suggested Aaron in the set of his jaws. But his hair was fair and slightly wavy, his skin much lighter than Aaron’s. Very little of the Indian-look. I wondered who his mother was. Where his mother was. Why Aaron said nothing about her and why he had no snapshot of her to show me.

  Oddly alone the little boy was, in a patch of sunlit grass. With a sweetly trusting smile he gaped open-mouthed at the camera held above him, aimed downward. An adult shadow, his father’s, fell slantwise over him.

  Aaron took back the wallet, shut it up and put it away. He’d maybe showed me more than he was comfortable with, his gaze was again evasive. Thinking of his son’s mother, I supposed. He finished the last of the ale, he’d drunk several bottles. Among my acquaintances no one would drink so much who was driving but Aaron Kruller was not among my acquaintances, nor could I speak to him the mildest words of reasonable caution as I would have spoken to an acquaintan
ce. Aaron said: “Ever think, life’s a crapshoot? Toss of the dice. How a kid gets born. All the odds against it. Jesus!” He laughed, it was a joke to him.

  I said: “No. I think it has a purpose, there is a meaning.”

  “‘A meaning’—just one? Like—to life?” Aaron was amused, disdainful.

  “That we’re here together, right now—you and I driving to Sparta together. After so many years. There is meaning in this.”

  My voice quavered with unexpected emotion. I was feeling anxious, unsettled. Aaron looked away as if embarrassed.

  The waitress reappeared with a hopeful smile cast at Aaron. Aaron left a tip of several dollars for her, grabbed his sheepskin jacket and slid out of the booth.

  As if we’d been lovers long ago. Before we’d grown into the adults we are now. Impossible to shake that conviction, almost it was a kind of music, sexual music you had only to shut your eyes, sink into sleep, this music would sweep over you in a wave of heart-stopping desire.

  Sparta, a city built on glacial hills. Through a misty scrim of icy rain the lights of the city were scarcely visible as we approached in our separate vehicles crossing the Black River which was nearly obscured in darkness beneath us and continuing on to route 31 east and north of the city where I would be staying at a newly built Sheraton Hotel. Aaron had called on his cell phone to make a reservation for me. It was nearly 11 P.M. when we arrived, I was staggering with exhaustion. Aaron walked with me from the parking lot and insisted upon coming with me to my room on the fifth floor. In the corridor as I unlocked the door Aaron hesitated as if waiting for me to invite him inside. Waiting for me to turn to him, to appeal to him. Aaron I am so lonely, I’m afraid Aaron don’t leave me just yet.

  When I told him good night and held out my hand with a smile he turned away saying he’d pick me up at nine the next morning.

  2

  “…WANT TO MAKE a blessing. Before I die. I want to bless you—Krista—and you—Aaron. Now that Jesus dwells in my heart I know that I can bless. But I must make amends, for I have wronged you. I have wronged others in my lifetime but you are the living—young—faces of those I have wronged terribly. Please forgive me!”

  Jacky DeLucca spoke passionately, in a hoarse husk of a voice.

  Jacky DeLucca: so changed, after almost twenty years, I would not have recognized her.

  The female body that had been so opulent and brazen seemed to have collapsed in upon itself but not evenly, like sunken earth. There were hollows and bulges and fissures inside her clothing, which was a kind of flannel sweat suit, incongruously flamingo-colored; her formerly sensuous moon-face that had glared with makeup like neon was now shrunken and subdued and sallow; in her flattened cheeks there were fine vertical creases like erosion in sand. Her formerly glittery eyes were lashless and ringed in sunken flesh, her eyebrows that had been penciled in so dramatically seemed to have vanished. Jacky could not have been sixty years old yet looked as if she were in her late seventies. The poor woman! On her head was a pert helmet-wig that shone as if it were made of silver wires. With a wry smile Jacky touched the wig, adjusted it fussily. “My ‘hair’! Not going to fool anyone is it! But my poor baldie-head, no one wants to see. /don’t want to see.”

  With a muffled little cry Jacky leaned forward to seize my hand, kneading the fingers anxiously. She would have seized Aaron’s hand also but Aaron remained out of reach, standing somewhere behind me as I seated myself in a sunken easy chair close by the ratty sofa on which Jacky lay, her wasted legs covered by a frayed quilt. “Reverend Diggs made the purchase for me, out of his own pocket. Reverend Diggs is a saint! I said, ‘Just some old head-scarf is good enough for me, I’m past female vanity now,’ and Reverend Diggs smiled and said, ‘A little vanity is necessary for the soul, Jacky. Female or male.’” I had to force myself to realize, Jacky was talking about the cheap silver-wire wig.

  I was badly shaken by the sight of poor Jacky DeLucca and distracted by odors in the room and a mysterious commotion as of voices, shouts and laughter and—was it furniture being moved?—elsewhere in the building. We were in Jacky DeLucca’s sparsely furnished room in a residence of some kind, halfway house or homeless shelter and soup kitchen attached to the Central Sparta Evangelical Unity Church. This was a nineteenth-century red-brick church on Hamilton Avenue in a neighborhood of old, large churches and municipal buildings; once, the First Episcopal Church of Sparta had occupied this site. Hamilton Avenue was parallel with Huron Boulevard which had been, in some long-ago time before my birth, Sparta’s most prestigious residence neighborhood: sandstone, limestone, brick and granite mansions had been built here, enormous private homes with pillars and porticos and twelve-foot privet hedges. Now the private homes had been converted into small businesses, offices and apartments. The privet hedges had been torn down.

  “Sit, please! Aar-on! Just pull that chair closer….”

  Reluctant as a sulky teenager Aaron hauled a rattan chair over to sit facing Jacky DeLucca at a slant. His eyes evaded mine, I could see the misery in his face.

  “…so much to reveal. Before time runs out…”

  Aaron had parked his car outside in a vast, open wasteland of a lot where a block of buildings had been razed in an effort at urban renewal that seemed to have ceased abruptly. Much of Sparta’s aged and decaying downtown was unrecognizable to me, after so many years: a maze of one-way streets, a showy but near-deserted pedestrian mall on South Main, a half-mile of waterfront parkland bounded by gigantic oil drums on one side and Sparta Quality Ball Bearings on the other, heralded by wind-whipped banners BLACK RIVER ESPLANADE: A COMMUNITY OUTREACH PROJECT. Here on the Esplanade in the chill wan light of a November morning, several heavily bundled vagrant-looking individuals were adrift like flotsam or inert on benches in the way of those bandaged George Segal figures. Except for riverboat sounds there was mostly silence but it was an anxious and not a meditative silence. It had come to me in a wave of something like despair that the Sparta that my father had known so intimately, the city in which he’d grown up, where he’d worked as a carpenter and as a construction foreman and lived a life that had mattered to him, had vanished. And he’d died because that life had mattered to him.

  “…your father Eddy Diehl, such a handsome man, Krista, I remember the first time I saw Eddy Diehl, this was a long time ago at the old Tip Top Club….” Jacky DeLucca spoke in an eager, hoarse, rambling voice, gripping my hand in her thin chill fingers, regarding me with searching eyes as if hoping to recognize me. Elsewhere in the residence was a grating clatter of voices, scraping chair legs, radio pop-rock. A smell of breakfast: bacon grease, pancakes, scorched eggs. Cloying-sweet baked goods. Making my nostrils pinch, a smell of Jacky DeLucca’s decaying body. “…never knew your poor mother, dear Krista. I hope she’s all right, Krista, is she? I hope that she was a “survivor”…of such a sad, hard time.” Jacky sighed, looking confused. I held her hand, hoping to warm it. The flamingo-colored sweat suit appeared to be a kind of sleepware. The silver-wire wig was slightly askew on Jacky’s head, I felt an urge to adjust it. That Aaron Kruller was restless in his chair a few inches from mine, that he stared blankly at Jacky DeLucca without seeming to see her, was making me nervous. “…my happiest times, working here. In the kitchen. Love to cook! Pancakes, waffles my specialty. Of course there’s more to them than just sugary dough, I mix in berries, apples, almonds. Before coming here I was what you’d call a “cleaning woman”—but got sick—oh I was so sick: hepatitis B. Why my liver was weak. Why I was “susceptible.” There had come Jesus into my heart, by that time. If there hadn’t been Jesus, I could not have made it through that terrible time, and Reverend Diggs to show me the way, and the wonderful people here at Haven House, they have made a home for me, Reverend Diggs has said he will arrange for a hospice for me—‘When it is time, and not a day before.” This liver cancer!—they tried all kinds of chemotherapy which is so awful, dear, I hope you will never know, one day they told me the cancer had ‘metized’ to my bones a
nd there would be no more chemo. The doctor said, “There is nothing more we can do for you, Jacky. You must put your soul at rest.” Dr. Waldrop is a Christian man, and a good man. And Reverend Diggs…” Jacky paused, wiping at her eyes. She squeezed my hand a final time and released it. Aaron lurched from the rattan chair to struggle at opening the single window in the airless room, the window seemed to have been painted shut but by sheer force of desperation Aaron managed to shove it open a meager inch causing Jacky to protest: “…not a draft, dear! I can’t bear a draft, I will start coughing, dear. Why I have to bundle up indoors and keep a quilt over my legs, my feet are always cold, the circulation in my poor feet is not good. Dr. Waldrop said…” Aaron now had to shut the window, yanking downward. I risked a glance at his face that was stiff and guarded and without expression though his gaze drifted onto mine, a look of raw mute misery and rage.

  Get her to talk. Hurry her up. Jesus!

  As a paralegal I’d had plenty of experience with clients who had crucial stories to tell yet could not seem to find a way to tell them, who struggled almost physically to say what was painfully evident, thus unsayable; I had learned patience, and a measure of sympathy; I had learned the humility of frequent failure. Gently I asked Jacky DeLucca if she’d invited us to visit her this morning because she had “something special” to tell us? Zoe Kruller’s son Aaron and me? Did she—remember us?

  In a gesture of mock-hurt Jacky slapped at my arm. “Why, ’course I remember you! You are Eddy Diehl’s daughter Kristine—Krista?—all grown up and moved away from Sparta and back just to see me. And you are”—Jacky’s voice lifted in a feeble sort of flirtatious reproach,—“Zoe’s grown boy Aaron. Did I thank you for these…” It had been my idea, to bring the sick woman flowers: a heavy pot of flaming-pink hydrangea. In the florist’s shop the hydrangea had looked less showy but in this bleak room with its shabby sofa-bed, battered Goodwill furniture, and stained remnant-carpet, the gorgeous cluster-flowers exuded an air of subtle mockery. “…beautiful flowers that look like…some kind of carnation paper…crepe paper…. Did I just thank you, dear? Sometimes I forget what I’m saying, it’s this medicine! So many damn pills! Zoe loved flowers she said but never had time to tend them. Fresh-cut flowers some man would give her, a dozen roses that are so expensive these days it’s like a joke, or like poin-settas, at Christmastime, Zoe would hand to me—‘Jacky, take care of these, will you?’—like she couldn’t be bothered. Zoe was always in such a hurry. I was not so different myself, when I was younger. I don’t mean to cast judgment on my friend. I was blind to myself, there was a veil over my eyes, I was not one to judge others and I am not, now. Jesus has said, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ Jesus has said, ‘Judge not, that ye not be judged.’