Little Bird of Heaven (22 page)

D
IDN’T SEE WHO IT
was who’d hurt me. Never knew his name.

This would be my statement. My testimony. There was no way of speaking of what had been done to me that was not a way of acknowledging what I’d wanted done for otherwise why would I have gone with these individuals, why in the battered van that day after school instead of to the yearbook editorial meeting where our advisor Mrs. Finder would be waiting for me, and disappointed in me.

Hoping he’d be there, at the other place. At the depot.

It was where certain individuals hung out after school. Though not all of them went to school any longer. Older guys in their twenties who supplied the dope. Aaron Kruller was known to be among their friends.
Druggies
Ben would say sneering
dopers junkies losers
but there can be happiness in such risks.
Want to party with us Krissie? Want to get high? You look like you need to get high sweetheart, c’mon I know the way.

And so I went with them. Maybe it was a mistake—maybe all of my life has been a mistake—how’d I have known, unless I took the risk?

Turned out, Aaron Kruller wasn’t there.

But then, Aaron Kruller was there.

…didn’t see who hurt me. Any of them. Didn’t see their faces, don’t know their names.

Where it started to go wrong, can’t remember. Or why. Maybe there’s no
why
. When it’s your fault. When you invited it. When you know beforehand this is wild, this is risky, this is reckless, these girls are not your friends. Why are you here but there’s no
why.

Wet, and cold. Inside the depot, like a cellar. Coughing, and choking. Gagging. Whatever they’d given me—
Krissie c’mon! You need to get high sweetheart
—was coming back in hot coins of vomit like acid soiling the front of my sweater.
Stoned out of her mind who the fuck is she? She’s just a kid Jesus she’s freaking out, crashes and O.D.’s who’s gonna dump her? Not me!

One of the girls caught at my arm digging in her nails. Whose name I didn’t know, or her face except it was a face of fierce concern, impatience. Maybe I’d been crying, her boyfriend was trying to comfort me.
Hey Baby: wake up! Open your eyes Baby Girl you’re gonna be O.K.

This girl was tugging at my hair, to wake me. This girl made my head jerk like a puppet’s, the others laughed. We were crowded together. Out of our closeness a frantic heat was generated. Still, in the stone-walled depot it was cold, damp as the farther, unfinished section of our cellar beyond the furnace room. And the other girl—Bernadette. They were high, and they were laughing. Buzzing voices, how many I could not have said and afterward could not recall, overcome by fits of nausea, vomiting hot-acid clots of liquid like rancid milk and the girls who’d been my friends were disgusted and the girls were furious with me
Puking on my boots God damn Krista you did that on purpose.
The guys were laughing. Laughter like animals shrieking. Girls fighting girls are so funny. I wasn’t to know that
Baby Girl
was a gift they’d brought, for the guys.

In fact it was
Baby Tits, Baby Cunt
they called me. To my face
Baby Girl.

How the fuck old is she, she looks like a kid. This could be bad.

She’s our age, for Christ’s sake! She’s in our class at school.

These girls I’d thought were my friends. Hot-skinned, eyes glittery as broken glass. One of them tore my sweater. One of them took hold of my head to turn it, to cause me to vomit—if I was still in danger of vomiting—into a corner of the room where there was a pile of refuse already reeking with the stink of urine. Why this was so funny, I didn’t know. Laughter ran like wildfire around the room like blue sparks leaping from one of my tormenters to the other and there was Duncan who’d just
arrived demanding to be introduced to Baby Girl/Baby Tits/Baby Cunt who’s some kind of a trade for the dope he’s bringing. Puking, and on my knees, and laughing wanting to think
But they like me, too—don’t they? Think I am pretty, and want me with them.

Passing joints, a “joint” burned in my clumsy fingers, one of my friends had to steady my hand. There came hot searing smoke into my mouth, into my lungs, it was a mistake to breathe, I could not help but breathe for otherwise I would have choked, yet now I was choking, there passed before my eyes a quick vision of my mother staring at me appalled and disgusted
You are not my daughter any longer, you are his.
Tears running down my face and I’m gagging but laughing and the girls who’d brought me here—Mira, Bernadette—my friends from school—are shoving me away squealing with laughter
Don’t you puke again girl! Jesus
unless this has already happened and is somehow happening again, this sour taste in my mouth, the front of my pretty pale yellow sweater embroidered with rosebuds now splotched with vomit, dark-yellow stains like rancid buttermilk, my clothes are smelly and damp and beneath the sweater is my little white cotton brassiere that’s been torn, too.

One of them must’ve reached up inside the sweater. Hard male fingers you might mistake for tickling, or a caress.

Why’s this?—started off they’d been nice to Baby Girl then abruptly there’s a change—like a cold wind picking up from the river—brackish-smelling, evil—can feel the meanness like heat coming off their skins—their ice pick eyes. Duncan Metz is an older guy—in his twenties—long out of Sparta High—thick-muscled neck and straggly hair and a spiky goatee gives him the look of a mean goat, a billy goat that’s got to be boss. Duncan Metz was a friend of Aaron Kruller’s. I had seen the two together on the street. Maybe, Duncan Metz worked at Kruller’s Auto Repair and riding past the garage I’d seen him, or he’d seen me, maybe Duncan wasn’t one of the mechanics but just a guy who hung out at the garage, took his car there to be serviced or purchased a car from Delray Kruller, he’d have wanted work done on, a Chevy Camaro maybe, or a Pontiac Firebird, Daddy would’ve known the names of this class of car not special enough
for Eddy Diehl. Seeing Duncan, I thought
Now Aaron will be here. Now my life will be changed, all this will become beautiful.

It isn’t true, Krista Diehl is a senior at Sparta High, in the same class with Mira Roche and Bernadette Hedwig. Krista is in tenth grade, a sophomore. Krista is fifteen years old and under-age and Duncan and Jake and R.J., older guys in their twenties, are pondering this fact. Duncan has been admiring Krista’s hair, pale-blond hair that isn’t bleached, asks is her pussy blond, twists her hair in his fist making her whimper with pain, pulls her head down, toward his groin, Duncan means to be funny (doesn’t he?), he’s showing off for his friends, Krista is whimpering like a scared little girl which is always funny. Mean billy-goat Duncan Metz yanking Krista’s head up, now forcing Krista up on her toes like a dancer, Baby Tits on her toes is even funnier and with part of her mind that isn’t doped and dazed she knows that this is a mistake, pleading with one whose pleasure is hurting you displaying you before others is a mistake but Krista can’t help herself begging
No don’t please don’t hurt me please
and one of the other guys tries to intervene, his objection is practical, common-sense
Duncan leave off she’s too young, Baby Tits will get you arrested, man
and Duncan says
Baby Tits is stoned out of her mind, she’ll be damn lucky her brains ain’t fried when she comes to.
Inside the depot the air is fouled by a fire somebody has started, smoldering-garbagey stink of old rotted newspapers, rotted lumber, rotted leaves burning giving off an acrid smoke so the fire has to be stamped out. Still it’s cold and damp inside the abandoned old train depot, you can see where the ticket sellers’ counter used to be, benches for passengers now overturned, wrecked, a smell of urine/excrement in here, for homeless men sometimes sleep here in cold weather on the wrecked benches, or beneath them wrapped in newspapers on the filthy floor. Passing joints, crouching together around the remains of the fire that gives off no heat only this smoldering-garbagey stink you want to think
This is like family, sharing
except the dope Duncan has brought is hash mixed with speed, so strong it’s like fire, the inside of my mouth is throbbing with heat, my head, my skull, my heart begins to race, there comes then a wave of sudden happiness, warmth, a crazy good feel
ing making me want to laugh as Daddy could make me laugh tickling his little girl out of a sulky mood, that quick, within seconds squealing with laughter or maybe it’s the start of being smothered, suffocated—they’ve brought me here to suffocate me—too much is being crammed into my skull, my brain is swelling inside my skull like a balloon close to exploding.
Girl you must’ve wanted this, why else are you here. God damn stupid Baby Cunt why else you here
.

Somehow, Zoe Kruller was consoling me. On tiptoes leaning over the counter at Honeystone’s asking
What can I do you for Krissie?
Desperately I needed to know if Zoe had been here, too. If this was a place she’d been brought to. And when she’d known, what would be done to her. Where she was going, and would not come back from. When she knew that she would die. When he began to strike her with the hammer, when he cracked her head like a melon, threw her onto the bed, unless already Zoe had been thrown onto the bed, must’ve been such rage in him, such a need to do harm, a frenzy, a madness as he twisted the towel around her neck and tightened it until her terrible thrashing waned, and ceased—until she’d ceased breathing—ceased struggling. And beyond this, there is no Zoe. And three and a half years later no one knows why. No one knows who. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been resolved. The man’s face is a blur, the man’s name is not known. Not a day, not an hour I am not aware of whose daughter. To this very day as an adult woman and as powerfully then as a girl of fifteen thinking defiantly
But I love him, I will never not love him. I will never not believe him.

Early afternoon in fifth period study hall that day where I was staring at my geometry text, chewing at my lower lip, that emptiness inside me like a hole that can never be filled and there was Mira Roche whom I scarcely knew, an older girl, a senior with the face and figure of an adult woman, smiling at me leaning over to whisper to me
Hey Krista: want to party with us? Tonight?
And Bernadette Hedwig who sat behind me leaned close so I could feel her fluttery breath against the back of my neck saying
There’s this guy Krissie, this really cool guy wants to meet you
. And Mira says
Yeah he does! He told me
. And in the girls’ lavatory after
ward where they followed me Mira on one side of me, Bernadette on the other, I was blushing so flattered, so confused, why’d these older girls care about
me?
—and Mira said I was sexy as hell, that blond hair
to die for
and Bernadette was stroking my hair, leaning close as if to kiss me and I felt a sudden happiness, I believed that these girls were a way to Aaron Kruller, it was Aaron Kruller of whom they spoke. The thrill of being chosen like this! The thrill of being liked thinking
These girls want to be my friends. My special friends.
For I no longer had any friends at Sparta High. The girls in my class I had believed I could trust, I could no longer trust. Or I did not wish to trust. It had been a long time since I’d stayed overnight with a girlfriend in Sparta, as I’d once done. Before
the trouble
had come into our lives changing our lives so Ben and I were conscious of people feeling sorry for us, pitying us and we’d come to hate them, it was a mistake to confide in a friend, both Ben and I had learned. If I confessed to a friend that I missed my father, if I told her where Daddy was living now (which was Buffalo), and what kind of work he was doing (“Like his work here”—which wasn’t exactly the truth), if I said how the fact was he’d never been arrested, the Sparta police had never arrested him because they had no reason to arrest him, no proof, no “evidence,” they’d never had any and yet so many people thought he’d killed Zoe Kruller, more and more recklessly I might be led to confess to my friend, I might begin to cry, my friend might console me, and encourage me to say more, and so I would say more, I would tell her how sad my mother was, how sad my brother Ben was, how angry we were, how unfair it was and how unjust, so much about Edward Diehl on TV, in the papers, and none of it was true, and there was no way to erase it, or make it right. And this girl would pretend to be sympathetic, pretending to be my friend, saying
Oh Krista it must be so hard, it’s like somebody dying in the family, my mother feels so sorry for you and for your mother she says she can’t imagine how your mother has lived through it having to wonder if he’d hurt that woman maybe he’d hurt
her?

But Mira and Bernadette are not like that, I think.

Her and me goin for a ride. Just us.

Duncan is taking me outside he says. Twisting my hair in his fist. He’s the kind of guy, a girl would go easy for, a girl would go with him not fearful and not needing to be forced but Duncan doesn’t want that, that is boring to Duncan, in a loud braying voice Duncan declares
Bor-ring!
Which is why Duncan requires a change of scene and a change of people often. He’s angry at Baby Tits/Baby Cunt or maybe just pretending—pretending to be angry, and to scold—like a stern daddy—pulling me by the hair so I’m limping after him like a dog on a short leash trying to laugh, I know that Duncan Metz is a joker, Duncan Metz takes pride in making people laugh and so if I’m laughing like the others it isn’t cruel—is it? If I’m laughing and not whimpering in fear or pleading for him to stop this isn’t going to hurt—is it? Or, if it hurts, if my scalp is screaming with pain, it’s an accident and not intentional, Duncan is just joking.

Outside the depot it’s been raining. A wet sweetly-rotted smell of earth, spilled fertilizer in the Chautauqua & Buffalo freight car Duncan is trying to lift me into—
C’mon baby, cooperate! One two three
—there’s a logic to this, Duncan Metz is going to dump me inside the abandoned freight car and crawl in after me maybe, or Duncan Metz is going to dump me inside the abandoned freight car and force the sliding door shut trapping me inside, there must be a logic to what Duncan is trying to do and to my panicked laughter but my brain seems to have shut down except to register that someone seems to have intervened—a stranger—another guy grabbing at Duncan’s arm furious and disgusted
Let the girl alone, Metz get the fuck away from her
—suddenly the two guys are struggling, exchanging curses, quick hard blows—Duncan falters and backs off—lets me go—even shoves me at the other guy with a muttered obscenity
Fuck you Kruller!
—I see that the second boy is Aaron Kruller—Aaron is incensed as if he’s been watching Duncan and me from a distance not wanting to get involved but somehow he has become involved, God damn he has no choice.