Little Bird of Heaven (34 page)

What these exuberant words meant, Aaron didn’t know. Zoe drained her first can of beer and opened another and drank thirstily and avidly as he’d never seen any woman drink, still less his mother. He too was drinking, but cautiously. He felt queasy, nauseated. One of the young cops had struck him with his knee, in Aaron’s abdomen. In the struggle he’d been kicked, punched, slapped many times. His mistake was that initial attempt to get away from them—like a panicked animal—which was a desperate asshole thing to do for within a second they had him on the floor, on his face, arms twisted up behind his back, one of the cops kneeling on his lower back, the weight of a full-grown man on his lower spine—at least three law enforcement officers of the size, heft, and belligerence of Delray Kruller shouting
Lay still! Lay still punk! Fuckin’ little punk! Threaten some old lady, punk, there ain’t no old ladies here
and he could not draw breath, he could not explain, all his effort had gone into staying alive, his wrists, his arms, his ribs, his back, his thighs, his belly and the right side of his face were bruised and scraped as if he’d been dragged along the ground which maybe he had been, out there in the driveway. Maybe he’d stumbled, or they’d knocked him down again, and dragged him half-conscious whimpering and trying God damn so hard not to cry knowing Delray would be disgusted with him, if he cried. And Zoe would not be so proud of him, if he cried. If for instance he pissed himself
which he had not.
Staring out the kitchen window at the police cruisers racing up the drive like TV cops he’d thought this had to be some sort of joke—was it?

His friends would talk of nothing else for days. For weeks marveling
You heard? Krull was arrested!
Faintly smiling trying to feel good about something, at least.

Zoe cuffed him on the less-bruised side of his head. “What? You’re smiling? This is
funny?”

No, no! Quickly Aaron protested. Nothing was funny.

“Like your father. Del had a juvenile record, too.”

There came Zoe’s fingers icy from the beer can brushing Aaron’s sweaty matted hair off his forehead. With a detached sort of tenderness as you’d gaze at a wounded animal at the roadside, as you’re driving by, Zoe said: “You are like your father, I can see that. There’s good in Delray, a lot of good in Delray along with the other, that’s how he is. A certain kind of man, that’s how he is. You’re growing up faster than I’d expected, I guess. A hell of a lot faster than I can monitor. The cops didn’t hardly believe you’re the age you are, frankly I might not if I wasn’t your mother. But I don’t need you to intervene on my behalf, see? Honey? That can bring only harm. That can hurt you, too. In my life I’m moving in some other direction now. You’ll have to have faith in me, that I love you deep in my heart and forever even if things change, for a while. You’ll have to let me go, see? You, and him.”

Him.
By which Zoe meant Delray.

Let me go.
Aaron didn’t want to think what this might mean.

Framing his face in her hands, to kiss him. Wet beer-smelling kiss on his nose. Aaron laughed uneasily, wanting to slip free. They were laughing together, a little wildly. What was so funny? Why’d anybody laugh, in the situation they were in? He’d been arrested on the complaint of a hysterical vicious old woman and charged with serious adult crimes and he’d have to be taken back to the courthouse and if he was lucky the family court judge would give him probation not a few months at the county juvenile facility. And that evening his father would break his ass when he returned home,
when Delray heard the news which Zoe could not keep from him. Even Krull was made anxious by the possibility of being sent away to juvie like certain of Krull’s friends nor did Krull relish the prospect of having his ass broke by the old man, in the beat-up state he was already in.

“Wish I’d seen that old biddy’s face, when you came at her. This will give old Adele something to think about, at least.” Zoe wiped her eyes that were damp from so much laughter.

“I didn’t ‘come at her,’ Mom. It wasn’t like that.”

“Well—did you have a knife? Like they said?”

“Mom, no. It wasn’t like that really.”

“Long as they didn’t find any knife.”

Zoe turned the key in the ignition with her bronze-crimson two-inch cocktail-waitress nails to drive them home.

M
OVING IN SOME OTHER DIRECTION.
Have to let me go.

You, and him.

After she was murdered they continued to live together in the house on Quarry Road except that they lived together now not as a father and a son awaiting the wife and mother who linked them but simply as a man designated as a “father” and a boy designated as a “son.” Though neither Delray nor Aaron could have explained it, the distinction was crucial. And sometimes it was not much evident that the man was a “father” and the boy a “son” for often they went for a full day, a day and a night and yet another day without seeing each other and without speaking like sleepwalkers or ghosts inhabiting an identical accursed space. Since Zoe had moved out in the early winter of 1982 approximately two months before her death the house had begun its slide into chaos, dissolution. As Delray would say with a sigh of peeved satisfaction
Gone to hell.

It had been Zoe’s wish that the farmhouse be painted peach-color and now Zoe had vanished from the house the peach-color began at once to fade like a light going slowly off. The dark-green shutters began to rot and the roof developed leaks. Long before Zoe’s actual death miles away in another house muddy footprints were tracked onto carpets, bare floors. Dishes collected in the sink, dirty cutlery and glasses which Aaron would “wash” by dumping boiling water over them once a week or so. Debris collected everywhere including the stairs. There were dust-balls the size of mice, grimy handprints on the walls. Windows left unwisely open, rain lashing through the screens, puddles and stains on furniture, walls,
floors. Large shelled insects died and turned to husks underfoot. When drains became clogged or the God damn toilet backed up—this happened often—Delray dumped in Drano and stood back out of the fumes. Aaron learned to dump cleanser on the floors, run hot water on an already filthy sponge mop and in a frenzy of concentration mop everywhere until abruptly he lost interest and the floor was clean, or wasn’t.

She’d said
Sure I will be coming back sweetie. Maybe just to get you. But I will be back. Sometime.

After she died it took time for the fact to sink in: Zoe wasn’t coming back. These months they’d shared the vague idea unexamined as the cause of spreading stains in the ceilings that yes, she’d be back, for sure Zoe would be coming back and they’d hear her singing/humming in the kitchen as always and her cheery voice lifting to them except now the new fact was she was not returning to Quarry Road not ever.

Delray’s younger sister Viola began to drop by the house every week or ten days. Viola and Zoe had gotten along well enough but Viola hadn’t approved of Zoe’s hopes for a singing career still less had she approved of Zoe moving out of the house as she had.
Sure he’s hell to live with but Delray was her husband. And what about Aaron?—he’s just a kid.

There came Aunt Viola noisily running Zoe’s Electrolux vacuum cleaner through the rooms of the house whistling in a way to remind Aaron of Zoe, that grated against his nerves. Halfway down the stairs staring at his husky-bodied aunt in overalls and a man’s flannel shirt and when Viola frowned at him saying why didn’t he give a hand, God damn there was a lot of housecleaning here, Aaron said: “Nobody asked you. You don’t need to do this.”

“Well—somebody ‘needs to.’ What kind of pigsty would this be, things just were let go?”

Aaron brushed past his aunt, head bowed. Except he didn’t mumble the words audibly Viola was sure he’d said
Fuck you Viola.

She laughed, shocked. Or maybe not shocked. Aaron was that kind of kid.

Still, Viola wouldn’t report this to Delray. Viola wasn’t one to provoke
trouble within the Kruller family, when there was trouble enough in the family. Especially she wouldn’t provoke trouble between Delray and his son, in a state of what they didn’t know or could acknowledge was grief.

And he’d lied for his father. This was generally believed within the Kruller family. No way Delray had been home on the night—a Saturday night!—that Zoe was killed, yet Aaron had given a statement to the police, and would swear by it.

“There’s a special bond between you and me, Aaron”—so Viola told Aaron who had no idea what she meant.

No idea what most women meant. Most adults. The words they uttered might’ve been in some foreign language, for all you could trust them.

This
special bond
meant that the Kruller family would hold together, the family would not split apart because of what had happened to Zoe.
Even if Delray had killed her. That was Delray’s business.
Aaron supposed this must be the meaning. Other Kruller relatives had hinted as much to him eyeing him anxiously, with a kind of alarmed respect.

Lying to protect Delray. Shows the kid must love him.

Aaron felt no emotion for any of it—Aaron felt, if he could have defined the sensation, like a pig that has been hacked open and gutted but was still alive somehow. That was the weird, wild thing: how he was still alive. After he’d walked in on his mother’s corpse that morning. After he’d seen her, and her half-closed eyes like burst grapes had seen
him.

At school in science class they’d studied evolution: “The Theory of Evolution.” Aaron had not done well on tests and quizzes but took away from the unit the thought that
Things are always changing. Nothing stays what it is.

Without Zoe between them it was hard for Aaron and his father to connect. If Aaron was in the kitchen preparing a quick breakfast for himself, wheat flakes dumped in a bowl, near-rancid milk dumped on the cereal, he’d eat standing at the sink staring out the rain-splotched window at a cornfield fifty feet away, Delray might pass by the kitchen door as if unseeing, or with a muttered greeting but Delray preferred to have breakfast most mornings at the Star Grill Diner on Garrison where
the waitresses knew and liked him and the sentiment was he’d been a husband treated badly by his wife who’d left him and was promiscuous with other men and a heroin-user and whoever killed her, it had not been Delray Kruller who left the waitresses sizable tips, smiled and joked with them so you could see the hurt in the poor man’s heart, he was trying so damn hard to heal.

And if Delray stood in the twilit living room watching TV, remote control in hand and flicking through the channels too restless to sit down or to watch anything for more than a few minutes Aaron might pass silently behind him, up the stairs and into his room and the door shut behind him.

Hey you know I’d never hurt her, right? I loved her.

You know that Aaron don’t you. Aaron?

C’mon watch TV with me. Just a little. Hey Aaron?

The one reliable place father and son saw each other was the auto repair. Here, Delray exuded authority, gave the other mechanics instructions. Delray ordered supplies over the phone, spoke with customers and dealt with complaints, gave estimates and rang up final charges, ran credit cards, vetted checks, counted cash. Delray was the one to pay bills and to hand out salary checks. There was satisfaction in this, Aaron thought. The other mechanics liked his father and respected him—Delray was an expert mechanic, when he took the time. Aaron’s happiest memories of Kruller’s Auto Repair were how Delray would take him into his private office which was partitioned off from the noise and bustle of the garage, and in this office there was an old rolltop desk with a swivel chair Zoe had bought for Delray at a “bankrupt auction” when she’d loved him and there were shelves of mechanics’ manuals and automotive catalogues and on the walls advertisements, posters, a calendar of Vargas females in various stages of seductive undress, at which Aaron scarcely dared to look, such sexual excitement rushed to his groin in an instant. And at the rolltop desk Delray might take time, if he was in the mood, if the damn phone wasn’t ringing or somebody out front with a complaint, to draw diagrams showing Aaron what needed to be done on a vehicle—“See? Like this.”
Fascinating to Aaron, to be shown the logic of engines; how gearshifts, piston rods, cylinders, fuel lines and ignitions worked together; this was the only time Delray spoke to him in such a way, describing what needed to be done as if what needed to be done was the crucial thing, and a thing to be taken seriously and respected, and not who did it.

“See, kid, a good mechanic is half-instinct, you get born with it. But the other half, you have to learn. I can teach you.”

A
PRIL
1983

M
UST’VE BEEN THE WEEK
following Easter there came an unfamiliar car up the driveway to the house on Quarry Road and out of the car which was a not-new Ford Escort—cheap compact, cheesy-green exterior—there climbed, like a soft-oozing mollusk squeezing out of its shell, the DeLucca woman.

Krull stared in disbelief. Her!

(More now since Zoe died, he was Krull. Especially alone with his thoughts which were hurtful raging thoughts like a blizzard of driving nails he summoned Krull to him.)

Uninvited and without warning the DeLucca woman—“Jacqueline”—“Jacky”—was coming to knock on their door. This woman with whom Zoe had been living at the time of her death, in the row house on West Ferry. This woman whom Aaron had only glimpsed, once. Who in the local media was quoted as saying in a wavering little-girl voice
So many men in poor Zoe’s life it would be hard to find just the one, who hurt her.

And
There’s some of them, I never knew their names. I don’t think Zoe did, either!

This terrible woman Delray denounced to anyone who’d listen as a
whore, hooker, junkie
to blame for Zoe being murdered. This woman who took Zoe in to live with her, helped her get a job on the Strip, introduced her to the men who’d provided her with hard drugs like heroin—Delray was sure, previously Zoe had only smoked dope now and then and
dropped diet pills—never anything you’d inject in a vein. But what made Delray murderous toward Jacky DeLucca was allegedly she’d told Sparta police that if something happened to her, Delray was responsible.

See Zoe was scared of her husband he’d beat her she said but worse he said what he would do, she ever left him. Not just her but their son he said.

No I never saw him actually there. At the house. I never did. But I was gone a lot. That night, I was gone.

In the Sparta
Journal,
on local TV the DeLucca woman said such things. Not once but numerous times. Such accusations can be made by “witnesses” and quoted widely—newspapers and TV stations are only reporting “news.”

In the days and weeks following, business at Kruller’s Auto Repair fell off abruptly. And since then, a slow-skidding decline. Especially women ceased to patronize the garage. Even at the gas pumps sales were off. Delray blamed the Sparta PD and the media—“Making people think I am a murderer, for Christ sake
of my own wife.”

Krull backed away from the kitchen door not wanting the DeLucca woman to see him.

She must have gone to the auto repair first, looking for Delray. But Delray wasn’t there. For weeks she’d been hoping to see him. Trying to speak with him on the phone but Delray eluded her. At Kruller’s Auto Repair Delray’s assistants took messages for him on smudged scraps of paper
Plese Call Jaky DeLuca URGENT!
and in disgust Delray ripped these to shreds. Once, Aaron picked up a ringing phone in the house and at the other end was a breathy female voice
Ohhh h’ lo!—DelRoy? Is this Del-roy Krul-ler? Hel-lo?
He’d hung up quickly seeming to know who it was.

Now, she’d dared to come to the house. Making her way in itty-bitty open-toed shoes up the hill to the front door carrying in her arms what appeared to be two large shopping bags. DeLucca was a fleshy woman moving at a quickened if erratic pace as if she were bearing something precious she was fearful of dropping. From behind a filmy curtain Aaron observed her. In fact, Krull observed her. It was Krull who was required.
Seeing how the woman paused squinting toward him in the chill April sunshine, her face shiny as if polished with a rag. Her voice was girlish, high-pitched.

“Hello? Hel-
lo
? Is anybody home? Is it—
Aar-on?”

She’d seen him, inside the door. He had not ducked away in time.

Not Krull but DeLucca opened the door. Stumbled at him with a look like she wanted to hug him, hard. Her mascara-smudged eyes were bright with tears. As if no time had passed since Zoe’s death and now the two of them could grieve together.

“Why, Aar-on! Oh honey—I tried to c-call you—and your dad—so many times I tried to call you and Del-roy and n-never—”

Shorter than Krull by an inch or more yet DeLucca outweighed him by possibly twenty pounds and most of this weight packed into her upper torso and into her hips. Giving off a perfumy-talcumy scent she passed uncomfortably close to him and entered the living room as if she’d been invited. (That talcum scent. Krull’s knees went weak.) It wasn’t a warm day but DeLucca wore no coat or jacket just salmon-colored polyester stretch slacks and a black V-neck pullover in a fabric shiny as shellac that made her breasts appear enormous as twin dirigibles seen at close range. Her plastic-looking shoes were open-toed, to display her pudgy small waxy-pale feet and painted toenails. Between the heavy breasts, in the cleavage of the black V-neck, there glittered a small gold cross on a gold chain. Despite folds of excess flesh Jacky DeLucca was coarsely glamorous and radiated a powerful sexual aura. Her dark-maroon hair glinted like wires lifting from her scalp in giddy filaments and her eyebrows were pert little triangles, strokes of red-brown pencil. Her mouth was crimson and moist as an open wound. The pupils of her eyes were blackly dilated as if she were on some drug: Quaaludes? Krull knew plenty of people taking this powerful tranquilizer and some who dealt it at Sparta High School.

“—a sorrowful mission, Aar-on! I’ve been procastrinating—’castrinating—for too long! Wanting to bring Zoe’s things over here—Zoe’s pretty things—I knew Zoe would want her family to have if
f’instance there’s some young cousins or a niece or someone who could fit into ‘petite’ sizes—
I
surely can’t!—but Delroy seems never to be home nor to answer his phone, I am hoping
not because of me.
I mean—
not because he has taken a dislike to me.”

DeLucca spoke wistfully and with an air of flirtatious reproach as if guessing that Delray might be somewhere near, listening.

Krull mumbled she could leave the bags with him but DeLucca seemed not to hear. She’d edged closer to the boy staring hungrily at him.

“Y’know, Aar-on—you look
changed.
You look
older.
I was reading about you in the paper, Aar-on. Ohhhh your eyes are not a child’s eyes! What those eyes have seen….”

Krull was taken aback and could not speak.

“—see I had to leave that place, Aar-on. That accursed place. It could never be cleaned, Aar-on. ‘Exercised.’ I live somewhere else now—I am looking to change my life. Those sonsabitches—‘Sparta PD’—the Herkimer County sheriff men, too—interrogating me like they did!—threatening to ‘incracerate’ me—‘abfucscation of justice’—
I never knew a thing, and had nothing to do with anything!
I—I am waiting for forgiveness.”

Forgiveness! Krull backed off uncertain what this was about. Krull had not quite recovered from the whiff of female-talcumy-sweat.

Wishing now that his father was home. Delray would take hold of this pushy female and fast-walk her to the front door and if she didn’t leave as he wished, he’d give her a nudge with his knee in the small of her back.

“If only I’d been there that night, Aar-on! With Zoe. I would risk having been k-killed too—if I might have saved her. That night when I went away knowing it might be a mistake. And with a man—a man I kn-knew was a mistake! I am awaiting my redeemer now. Aar-on!”

Awkwardly Krull was backing away from Jacky DeLucca even as Jacky DeLucca lurched forward. Her eyes brimming with tears of sympathy were fixed on him like a hypnotist’s. In his confusion Krull had no idea whether this fleshy woman his mother’s age—or older—was tormenting him deliberately, as certain Sparta girls were known to do, in
the safety of public places and in the company of their friends, or if she spoke naively and sincerely and was appealing to Krull to be her ally “Your father Del-roy has said such hurtful things about me, Aar-on! Of course I understand—I am trying to understand the hardness of the human heart—I am trying to forgive. Since this tragic thing that happened to my closest dearest friend Zoe and spared me—only God knows why I was spared, I have tried every day to pray, and comprehend. Zoe speaks to me sometimes, Aaron! Not in actual words but in a whispering in my soul. She is so changed, now. She ‘sees both sides now.’ She wants me to tell you, she loves you. Her changed state does not mean that she doesn’t love you, Aaron, or continue to think of you—she does.”

To this, Krull had no reply. His clumsy boy-fingers were clenching and unclenching into sweaty fists.

“This one time Zoe was drinking and she said suddenly, ‘Jacky, I feel so bad—I’m not a good mother.’ Zoe laughed and said, ‘I love babies, I loved my son as a baby, but babies grow up.’ Another time, it wasn’t long before the terrible thing happened, Zoe was a little high and in one of her flighty moods she said, ‘I don’t give a damn what happens to me, Jacky, as long as
something happens.’
Zoe said this! And I said, ‘Zoe, you don’t mean that,’ and Zoe said, ‘Don’t I?’ and just laughed. Any wild thing that came into her head in such a state, she’d say. Just getting on an airplane like she was planning to fly out to Vegas she’d say, ‘It’s a crap game. You shake your life like dice.’”

Krull was cornered, somewhere. Krull’s head was throbbing. Trying to tell this woman he
did not want to talk about Zoe with her.

“—so good to cry, honey! You’re just a child. Boys like you grow up too fast, it’s Del-roy’s blood in you, that Seneca blood—I know, all too well—I was engaged to one of you, once—you don’t know how to cry, and that’s bad. Like a man—a boy—needs loving, too. Not just women. If it’s denied you, some kind of poison festers.” It seemed that for an eerie unsettling moment Jacky DeLucca glanced down at Krull’s lower body—his legs, his groin—where a single great pulse was beating quick and hard. “You and I, Aaron, we’re the right ages, I think. I could be your mother—Zoe would
bless me, where she dwells now. Never had a baby of my own yet and this would be a clear sign, Zoe forgives me.”

In a croaking voice Krull repeated he did not want to talk about his mother. If she’d like to leave the things she’d brought….

“Zoe’s piano! Is that it?”

In a corner of the living room was Zoe’s old upright piano. She’d bought at some auction or garage sale. The keys were yellowed and thick with dust since certainly neither Delray nor Aaron had tended to it since her departure; Aaron avoided even looking at it. Now Jacky DeLucca hurried to the piano to strike several keys dramatically. The sharp sounds grated against Krull’s nerves. Badly he was wanting to cry, gnawing at his lower lip so hard he’d nearly split the skin. “Zoe just loved piano! She’d get people to give her little lessons, like. Like at Chet’s. Mr. Csaba who was our boss there said he’d pay for lessons for Zoe but she never took him up on it. At the Club if it was a slow night Zoe would pick out some tunes on the piano and get all dreamy. And sing, in her wonderful voice. Oh, Zoe could sing! This person who hurt her, whoever he was, he took a terrible advantage of Zoe, her yearning to sing. This is what I think.”

Krull was trying to think
So she doesn’t think Delray is the one.

Trying to make sense of this
She knows who it is, then. That’s what she is revealing.

Seeing the expression in Krull’s face that was both pained and abstract, Jacky DeLucca said, “I’d better take these things upstairs, hon. And hang them. Zoe would want that. The wrinkles might shake out some and you can ask some girl cousins over. Or, maybe, if you have a girlfriend, some sexy size two, you can ask her over to pick what she wants.”

Krull winced. Who in the family would have wanted anything of Zoe’s! And a girlfriend of
his
—the thought was repugnant to him.

Boldly DeLucca brushed past Krull to the stairs. As if she’d been in this house before and knew the way.

There was no choice but for Krull to follow this pushy woman upstairs. Hoping to hell he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Delray
She didn’t listen to me, Pa! Just barged past, I couldn’t stop her.

After the incident at Honeystone’s, where Krull lost control and had punched the old woman in the hip, he knew better than to touch any female again. Not for a long time.

He’d been charged with
second-degree assault.
Through the pleading of a young-woman Family Court officer the other charges—
attempted armed robbery, attempted destruction of private property, threatening great bodily harm
—had been dropped. The case had been heard in a Family Court judge’s private chambers and the judge—also female, middle-aged and frowning—spoke harshly to the young defendant and to his sober-faced parents sentencing him to six months at the Youth Facility at Algonquin and after a pause adding
suspended sentence
which caused Zoe to burst into tears of gratitude.
Thank you Your Honor! Thank you, from the bottom of all our hearts.

At the hearing, both Zoe and Delray were dressed as if for church—Delray in a corduroy coat and tie and his wild hair tamped down for the occasion and Zoe in a dark blue dress primly buttoned up the front and her hair too tamped down and drawn back neatly into a chignon. The judge told them that during Aaron’s six-month probation one or another of his parents was obliged to bring him to weekly meetings with a Herkimer County youth probation officer and if he missed a meeting without a legitimate excuse his probation would be revoked and he would be remanded to Algonquin to serve out the remainder of his sentence. Aaron had not missed any meetings but by the time the six months had passed, Zoe had moved away and Delray was the one, exasperated and embittered, to bring him to the probation office.

God damn good thing you didn’t kill that old woman. You’d be up at Potsdam and that’s too fucking far to drive.

On the stairs Krull stared helplessly at the woman’s hips above him in the tight-fitting salmon-colored slacks. Seeing the suggestion of a crack between her buttocks Krull felt a sickish stir in his groin of the kind he felt sometimes—Christ, this was sick—seeing a mangled dead thing, raccoon, young deer, broken and motionless at the roadside.