Little Bird of Heaven

  Jacky saw me staring at the painting. With a girlish shiver she said she’d painted it herself after a vision of Jesus, did I like it?

  I said, “It’s beautiful, Jacky. Just the way He would look, if He were with us.”

  “FRESH AIR! JESUS.”

  Aaron was waiting for me outside the room. Grabbed at my arm and pulled me impatiently out the rear door of the residence cursing Fuck fuck fuck under his breath.

  Together we stumbled down steps. Crumbling concrete steps. The air was wetly cold. Tears sprang from my eyes and ran down my heated cheeks. I had not realized how, in Jacky DeLucca’s sickroom, the cloying-sweet smell of decay had been so pervasive, by instinct I’d been breathing shallowly, taking in little oxygen. I was dazed, light-headed. The impact of the fresh chill air was profound as a slap to the face.

  Aaron was disconcerted, furious. And frightened, like a man fleeing a collapsing building. I said:

  “Aaron, you have to go back. To say good-bye to her. You can’t just run away, she’s a dying woman.”

  “Fuck her. Fuck them all. They can die.”

  I detached Aaron’s hand from my arm. He’d closed his fingers around my arm as if we were intimates—an older brother, an annoying sister—without seeming to know what he did, in his paroxysm of fury. He had the look of a man about to strike out with his fists, at any close target.

  “Aaron, we can’t just leave like this. I won’t go with you.”

  “Fuck you will. Come on!”

  We were shoving at each other. Badly I wanted to strike at this stubborn man with my fists, that expression in his face, that expression of obstinacy, willful stupidity, he’d begun unexpectedly to laugh, sharp barking laughter, cruel and without mirth. Somehow I was following after Aaron who ignored my pleas, waved away my good-girl pleas with a wave of his hand, my sensitivity to the dying woman was utter bullshit to this man, unworthy of discussion.

  Together we stumbled past an overflowing Dumpster. What a reek of raw garbage! I thought The poor woman has already died. This is hell she is in, where we had to come for her.

  For this near-deserted area of downtown Sparta there was an unusual amount of activity in the vicinity of the Central Sparta Evangelical Unity Church. The noise we’d been hearing in Jacky DeLucca’s room was a U-Haul rental truck being unloaded of shabby donated furniture, by volunteer workers. Close by, unrelated to the U-Haul effort, was a lengthy, straggling line of mostly men—with pulpy veined faces, rheumy eyes and body parts that looked mismatched—as many as forty men—among them a few women scarcely distinguishable from the men—eerily patient, resigned, like penitents, or perhaps they were beyond penitents, these were the damned, like Jacky DeLucca these were residents of Hell, yet unprotesting of their damnation, stoic and contented, for it was a communal damnation, and you could be fed: they were shuffling through an entrance into what appeared to be a soup kitchen. Hot delicious smells wafted to our nostrils, at odds with the stink of the Dumpster. No one took the slightest notice of Aaron Kruller and me.

  I thought Someday I will return here. I will be a volunteer. When I am strong enough.

  In a vast open windy lot partially heaped with rubble from demolished buildings we were walking to Aaron’s car. If I’d been brought to this place blindfolded and asked where I was, I could not have said. The ruins of an American city devastated by war, a post-industrial American city in upstate New York—but what exactly had happened here? There was a strange glaring broken beauty to the rubble-strewn lot as of the ruins of antiquity but these were not ruins to be named, let alone celebrated. These were ruins lacking all memory, identity.

  What relief, to get to Aaron’s car! New-model, American-made, with sleek lines, four-wheel drive for our harsh upstate winters, satellite radio. Suddenly our hands fell on each other. I had hold of the man I’d been wanting to pummel just now, I was clutching and desperate. Aaron’s sheepskin jacket was open, I could smell his body. He’d reached inside my coat, opening my coat, dragging me against him. A wet wind rushed at us, smelling of the river. Jocular, teasing. Roughly Aaron shoved me against the side of the car, he’d taken hold of my head in both his hands and he kissed me open-mouthed. We were gnawing at each other’s mouth, a sexual frenzy seemed to sweep over us. You would think we’d narrowly escaped some terrible danger. You would think we were both drunk. Seeing us from the rear of the church residence, you’d have thought we were stumbling drunk, shameless-drunk, on a weekday in late morning.

  On our way to the Sheraton motel at the northern rim of Sparta, on route 31, Aaron stopped at a liquor store to buy a bottle of Scotch and two six-packs of beer. As he drove he held the steering wheel with one hand and with the other gripped and kneaded my thigh as I pressed close beside him. We were dazed, giddy with desire. So long I’d lived my numb sexless life inhabiting my body as one might inhabit a cocoon, it was astonishing to me how powerfully I felt this sex-need for the man, how my body was reacting, with what directness. Or was this another kind of numbness, a numbness of anonymity, sheer physical yearning. I was very happy suddenly, something had been decided. It’s over, they are all dead. Only we are here.

  The final time: crossing the wide rapidly-rushing froth-tormented Black River that wound through Sparta, over the stately old suspension bridge. Never again to cross this bridge. Not again in my lifetime—I seemed to know this, with an ecstatic fatalism—seeing at the crest of the bridge the sinuous-snaky curve of the river and, in the distance, the hazy peaks of the southern Adirondacks. As a girl I’d memorized those peaks:

  Star Lake Mountain, Little Moose Mountain, Bullhead Mountain, White Ridge Mountain, Mount Hammer just barely visible at the horizon.

  Never again, these waterfront docks, aging wharfs, warehouses and mills; eighteen-wheel rigs being loaded, unloaded, in the cobblestone streets. Oil drums, oily pools. Refineries, tall smokestacks rimmed with flame like teasing little lips. But where, along the waterfront, was Link Ladies Hosiery?—I could not find it.

  This November day was wet, windy, splotched with sudden sunshine, and overhead a vivid blue sky in which enormous clouds like rubble were being blown, broken, scattered.

  Aaron said, “It’s what I thought. What she said. I knew Delray hadn’t ever been the one.”

  Close beside the excited man, I could not speak. I could not say I knew my father had not ever been the one. I could not say I want you inside me. As deep inside me as another can be.

  At the Sheraton, Aaron entered with me. In one arm carrying the Scotch and the six-packs in a paper bag and with the other arm slung about me as if he feared I might escape. His face was flushed and aroused and not so angry now and I told the desk clerk—whose initial glance at Aaron and me had turned into a frank stare—that I would be staying another night.

  In my room on the fifth floor Aaron shut the door and double-locked it and I pulled the drapes across the windows carelessly and then we were pulling at each other, at each other’s clothing, we were laughing, we were short of breath as if we’d run up five floors to this room, and we were on the bed, Aaron heavy and grunting and kissing me the way he’d kissed me in the parking lot, open-mouthed, his teeth striking mine. We were half-dressed, he was lying between my legs, I was clutching at him, our faces were contorted as the faces of swimmers who have slipped beneath the surface of the water, in a sudden panic of drowning. I thought But is this Krista? Is this—what I want? Still we laughed together, as we kissed. Our laughter was harsh, stunned. My arms around the man’s neck were tight, there was no time for tenderness. My elbows locking together as if, if I wished, I might break the man’s neck.

  It was like falling together. Falling from a great height. The impact of the earth against flesh. The breath was knocked from me. My brain was extinguished, dark. There were no words, only just sounds. Which of us uttered such sounds, I would not know.

  A time for Krista to confess Always I loved you. Always I dreamt of this.

  Except: there was something impersonal, anonymous in A
aron’s lovemaking. You could feel that you were being swallowed up in a ravenous sexual need like the ravenous appetite of a predator.

  Later, Aaron opened the bottle of Scotch. We drank—giddily I drank, from a plastic cup, the liquor burning my mouth—and we made love again, and after a while we drank, Aaron was drinking both Scotch and beer, and we made love again. Our kisses reeked of alcohol. Our bodies reeked of sweat. We had been so gnawing each other’s mouths, the pillowcase beneath our heads was soaked with our saliva. Tangled in smelly bedclothes we slept. In each other’s arms we slept. Waking I could not comprehend where I was, with whom I was lying as in the grip of a python, one of my bare legs slung over the man’s haunch, the small of his back. We woke, we took turns using the bathroom: Krista first, then Aaron. Nakedness seemed to make us unusually clumsy. I stumbled, blinking in the over-bright light of the bathroom. Our laughter was abrupt and unpredictable. We may have been embarrassed. We may have been very happy. We may have been drunk. We were naked and sweaty and careless of the time. We had ceased hearing vacuum cleaners in adjacent rooms and in the corridor outside our room. It was late morning, it was early afternoon and in time late afternoon and we’d begun to hear the voices of a new shift of motel guests arriving. It may have been early evening. Beyond the carelessly pulled drapes, the November day had flared up in a kind of luminous flame and now it had abated, now dusk came swiftly. This was a melancholy time of day, or would have been, in Peekskill. Here in Sparta I fumbled for my plastic cup, that seemed always in need of refilling. Aaron was drinking his way into the second six-pack of beer. He’d ordered room-service meals for us, cheeseburger, turkey-club with bacon and cheese, French fries and catsup, sugary coleslaw and the crusts and malodorous remnants of these meals remained, on a tray shoved against a wall, on the shag carpet behind the darkened TV where a hotel maid would discover it, hours later. Through a crack in the drapes my eyes discerned what appeared to be a moon, a crescent moon, unless it was just a light in the parking lot, on a tall pole. Hungrily I was kissing the man’s mouth, that tasted of beer. I was kissing a mouth like Daddy’s mouth. The man himself lay sprawled and slovenly in his nakedness amid churned-looking bedclothes. The man was cupping my left breast in his hand, kneading and squeezing, squeezing and releasing in the way that you stroke or caress an animal, to allow the animal to know that you feel affection for it though you can’t pay it your fullest attention at just this moment. I was half-crying, suddenly I was stricken with emotion saying, “Oh Aaron, oh God—I forgot what I’d meant to do for her—” and the man said, “‘Do for’—who?” and I said, “Jacky DeLucca. I forgot what I’d meant to do,” and the man said, “What’s that, honey?” and I said, tears streaming down my face, “I meant to bathe her, Aaron! To wash her, to change her bedclothes. That poor woman, I meant to take her address so that I could send money to her,” and the man said, laughing, “Jesus Christ, her again! Fuck old Jacky.”

  “Aaron, you don’t mean that.”

  “No? Why don’t I?”

  “She has put our souls to rest, Aaron. She needn’t have done it, it was an act of kindness.”

  The man had ceased kneading my breast. Idly he kicked at the bedclothes that were restricting his leg movements.

  “Fuck who’s got a soul.”

  “You have a soul.”

  I framed the man’s face in my hands. I told him he had a soul, I’d seen that soul.

  Love had made me speak in such profundities.

  Drunk-love, especially. Crazed profundities.

  Aaron laughed. Aaron shook off my hands.

  I insisted, I said. His soul. I’d seen it, I was the only one.

  I was drunk, Aaron said. But he liked me, he said.

  Aaron laughed, embarrassed. But also with pleasure. His face was aglow with pleasure. He grabbed me and pulled me down beside him and burrowed his face in my neck, so that I couldn’t see his face, as a child might do, to hide. His arms around my naked sides, my back, his hands restless on me, I knew were strong enough to crack my bones. Almost inaudibly he said, “Don’t go back. Stay here.”

  “Stay—where?” I thought he meant the motel.

  “Stay with me. Where I live. There’s room.”

  “I can’t stay with you. I don’t even know you.”

  “Yes. You know me.”

  Later: shaking my head, to clear it. Somehow I had fallen asleep beneath the man’s heavy arm. And my own arm was twisted beneath me, numbed. I was unaccustomed to drinking anything stronger than white wine, and that only occasionally, and I had never been drunk but I liked being drunk. I had to lift the man’s heavy warm arm, that was covered in hairs, to pry myself loose from him. I was uncomfortably warm, over-warm, the nape of my neck felt scalding, rivulets of sweat ran down my naked sides. How my mother would scold: Krista, you smell of your body! For there was nothing more shameful for a girl than to smell of her body. This man’s smell was sharp, pungent, unmistakable. It was the male sex-smell, frank and undisguised. And the man took not the slightest care, he lay sprawled in sleep in a luxury of abandon, sleeping so deeply, his mouth part-opened, his breathing loud and wet. I thought The male has to snore, to frighten away predators. I laughed, this was a radical new insight perhaps, an entirely new and ingenious sub-theory of evolution. Where Aaron had been kissing me, rubbing his stubbled jaws against me, my skin smarted as if with sunburn. The impracticably soft skin of my small hard breasts, and my stomach, and the insides of my thighs, was reddened and chafed as if with sandpaper. Where he’d entered me, that too was chafed. That too felt raw, appropriated. I thought No one has ever come so deeply into me. But I can walk away from him even now.

  In a heavy stuporous sleep the man lay on his back, one arm flung above his head in an expression of arrested alarm. His forehead was furrowed, there were creases at the corners of his eyelids, in even this stuporous sleep he was tense, restless. Softly he moaned, he ground his back teeth. On his face that was a coarsened boy’s face was a scattering of old scars. On his forearms that were muscular and covered in thick dark hairs were purplish-dark tattoos, their shapes and significance obscure. And on his torso and belly and groin were swirls of dark hair like seaweed. Together we’d grappled underwater. Together we’d struggled in each other’s arms. The lengths of our straining bodies, naked and pressed tightly together. Like slithering fish. Like eels. Not just we’d been naked together but there had seemed to be no skin between us, no barrier. Yet now, I was fully awake and aware of him, the sleeping man, as he lay heedless of me. Where I was most alive was inside me, where he’d entered me, his penis, his thrusting penis but also his fingers, he’d pushed his fingers inside me, I’d come close to fainting, the sensation was near-unbearable. There was no part of me the man had not entered, penetrated. There was no part of me he had not appropriated. I thought of neuro-anatomical lesions—a part of the cortex injured, a corresponding sense (sight, smell) appropriated, erased. Yet now I stood alert and apart from the man, above him. Lightly I drew my hand across his chest, I stroked the man’s chest, the heat of his coarse skin, the man’s breasts hard with a layer of muscle. His skin was the hue of stained parchment and the male nipples small and tight as dried berries. With the palm of my hand I dared to feel the man’s heart beating deep inside his chest, a vigorous fist-sized heart, stronger than my own. I thought of the Indian boys in our school who’d played their violent games of lacrosse together, and Aaron Kruller among them, how it was said that no girl could touch a player’s stick, if so the stick was defiled, and I thought This is what I can do that he can’t know: touch him. In a swoon of adoration of the sleeping man I leaned over him, nearly lost my balance touching the side of my face against his chest, the pelt-like hairs were a dazzlement to me, I felt the heart, I heard the heart, astonishing to me, a kind of oblivion swept over me, unspeakable. I was sick with love for the man, I could not bear it. I stroked the more flaccid flesh at his waist, at the small of his back. I smiled to think of these secrets of the sleeping man’s bod
y, small pockets of flesh, where once he’d been a thin lanky insolent boy. Indian-looking Aaron Kruller. The boy of whom my mother warned They grow up fast in their way of life. Keep your distance.

  Calmly I drew back, to observe him. The sleeping man oblivious of me. Never again in this man’s sleep would I observe him like this. I drew a rumpled sheet to his midriff. Still he slept, oblivious. I had never seen anything so beautiful. You would not have said that the man was beautiful, his face was not beautiful, a hard-chiseled face, a coarse face, a face that could be cruel, a face of obstinacy, male stupidity. Yet it seemed to me a beautiful face, I was lost in wonderment of it. The beauty of the man, the maleness, swept over me leaving me weak, disoriented. I would stay with him in Sparta, if he wished me to stay. I would believe him, that truly he wanted me. I would believe that the man’s ravenous sexual hunger was a genuine love, for me. I foresaw our lives together here in Sparta. I would have this man’s next child. (Would I? Was that possible?) (Certainly, it was possible! The hot fluid leaping from this man teemed with life ravenous to reproduce itself.) I saw our disparate and unlikely lives conjoined as a single life here in Sparta. For Aaron Kruller and I could have a life together only in Sparta. We were a romance of Sparta, our parents had been born here. We had been born here. My father had died here. Wherever Delray had finally died, Delray had died here in Sparta. I thought Maybe it hasn’t ended. Maybe nothing is ever finished. I saw that the man was like my father, a predator male. His body was suffused with a powerful sexual restlessness. I would love him, and I could not bear it. Every time we made love, the man’s possession of me would grow. I would love him more, as he would love me less. There can never be equality, in sexual love. I would wait for him, nights. I would wait for headlights on a ceiling. As my mother had done. For he must appropriate Krista Diehl, I’d seen the determination in his face, in our booth at the restaurant, in the water-splotched mirror above his aunt’s sink, for otherwise Aaron Kruller was repelled by me, my blondness, my small-boned white-girl body. For otherwise he’d have wanted to strangle me, to have done with me. To kill his desire for me. And it was an insult to him, as a girl I’d left Sparta and I’d left him; I’d grown into an adult female for whom such words as paralegal, criminology, subpoena, prosecutorial misconduct were commonplace. Aaron Kruller would marry me to claim me and appropriate me as a daughter of Sparta, as he was a son of Sparta, the doomed city on the Black River. He would never leave me, probably. His first marriage had ended in wreckage but he would not make the same mistake a second time, his pride would not allow it. He would not leave his family as my father had not left his family but had been made to leave, finally. I foresaw that this man would betray me, for how could Aaron Kruller not betray Krista Diehl?—he was the predator male, by nature he was promiscuous, restless and cruel, he could not help himself. That I was a woman was a challenge to him, and a triumph for him, in the motel bed he’d made me cry out as he’d entered me, but I was not a mate for him, not Aaron Kruller. I knew this, already in high school I’d known this. When he’d closed his big-knuckled hands around my throat, I’d known this. I foresaw the slow wreckage of my life, if I gave in to him. In Peekskill it would be said wonderingly and pityingly of me Where is Krista Diehl? Why has she moved away? Is it true, Krista is married? To someone she knew in Sparta? When she’d been a girl? And is Sparta where Krista is living, now?