Little Bird of Heaven (36 page)

H
ERE ON EARTH
to love one another.

A beautiful secret we will keep between ourselves.

Could be your mother, Zoe would bless us!

Afterward in a frenzy of repugnance he’d closed off the room.

His parents’ old bedroom with Zoe’s flowery, faded wallpaper.

The bed they’d lain on. Torn like the mud of a pigsty.

And Zoe’s sad-glamour clothes hanging in the closet—these he could not bear to glance at, let alone give away as the DeLucca woman had suggested.

He’d never told his father about Jacky DeLucca who’d come looking for him but had settled on Krull, instead.

Never wished to think of her—the DeLucca woman—but always he was thinking of her. The things she’d done to him—her mouth, her hands, her pearly-fat thighs, the way she’d drawn him into her so deep—deeper—until his senses exploded in crazed white heat, blindness.

Could be your mother Aar-on. We are the right ages.

In dread that she might show up again at the house, or at the auto repair—looking for Delray Kruller. But then, she’d see
him.

She’d been high. Some kind of speed. Her skin scalded. Her kisses were frantic bites. Her eyes rolled back in her head. The beet-dyed hair exuded a sweaty-chemical smell. Panting and grasping and groaning like some convulsing sea-creature
Oh oh ohhhh help me Jesus love love you.

What sprang out of Krull, out of his cock, something like hot mucus. He guessed was his soul.

Weeks later his hands, his hair still smelled of the beet-dyed hair.

His back was riddled with nail-marks. Some of these had become infected and itched badly. His mouth still felt raw, bitten.

Nights when he couldn’t sleep, roughly stroking his chafed cock. And when he did sleep, dreaming of the woman, wakened from sleep by an explosion in his groin that made him gasp aloud, stricken with both intense pleasure and intense shame.

Ohhh Aar-on! Love you.

The mattress beneath the tangled sheets of Krull’s bed was stained with the leakage of his sperm. That unmistakable reek. In desperation he opened the windows of his room wide, let the wind, rain inside. Still the smell prevailed. The smells.

“Pig.”

Not sure if he meant DeLucca, or himself.

His old morbid thoughts of Zoe were being crowded out by DeLucca. God damn he resented her! In his bed trying to sleep he’d be thinking of what they’d done together—what the woman had made him do—his cock perpetually aroused and increasingly chafed and he could feel the sex-desire like a fat lazy snake curled up inside him in the pit of his belly where unbidden and unwished-for it uncoiled, violent as a trap you’d set for rabbits, you had better take care you did not trip yourself.

Ohhh Aar-on! You are fantastic, I adore you.

Business was down at Kruller’s Auto Repair, only one or two guys came to work most days. Krull worked the pumps, the least of the jobs. Whenever a compact turned off Quarry Road in the direction of the gas pumps wondering if it might be the cheesy-green Ford Escort and inside Jacky DeLucca. How she’d roll down her window and stare at him with a pretense of surprise, how she’d smile licking her fleshy lipstick-lips
Ohhh Aar-on! been missing you
while Krull remained stony-faced, unsmiling.

As if not recognizing her.
That
would freak the woman.

But Jacky DeLucca never returned to Quarry Road so far as Krull knew. As if she’d given up looking for Delray Kruller or had found him some other way and Krull would be the last to know about it.

Maybe it was a relief, Zoe wasn’t living with them any longer. Zoe would strip Krull’s bed to launder his sheets seeing splotches of stiffened mucus everywhere and the mattress shamefully stained. Zoe would make some joke to embarrass him—
Used to be, you’d pee your bed, kid! That was bad enough.

Babies grow up, she’d said.

She hadn’t loved him. That was the secret between them.

“Glad she’s gone. Bitch!”

Now they didn’t have to worry about losing her.

M
ARCH
1985

D
ELRAY WAS SAYING
he’d made some mistakes in his life.

Hoped to God that these mistakes would not follow
into the next generation
like the Bible warns us.

Making such pronouncements though he wasn’t drunk. His heavy hand falling on his son’s shoulder and the son shuddered but did not shrink away. Thinking
Pa isn’t drunk. Not any ordinary kind of drunk.

In such a somber and penitential mood Delray might speak of his father and his father’s father and the
Indian-blood
connection.
The Seneca Nation
connection that had gone wrong somehow in Delray.

“What they want from you—it’s like sucking at your blood. They can’t even say what they want. What it is, it’s the ‘white’ in you—like bone-marrow. They’d like to suck it out. When I married Zoe, that fixed it for me, with my relatives out on the rez. Fucked it. I had a close cousin, he never spoke to me again. And he’s dead now, and that can’t be remedied.”

The son listened to the father uneasy at what was being disclosed.

The son loved the father for all that the father was a man capable of inflicting sudden hurt.

“—so I’m saying, don’t think you can go back there. You can’t. You play lacrosse with some guys, don’t mistake that for anything more. Don’t think like you’re gonna be a ‘blood brother’ or any shit like that with them, you’re not.”

Delray’s father had been a half-blood Seneca and his father’s father a
full-blood Seneca and both men were unknown to Delray’s son who had never met them nor even glimpsed them.

Zoe had said: “If your father wants you to know about this, he will tell you. There’s plenty of things he hasn’t told me and you know what?”

What, he’d asked.

“It’s for a purpose, that’s what. What we are told and what we are not told. So don’t ask.”

News came of the DeLucca woman, on the following morning.

A
savage assault
the Sparta
Journal
reported.

The news item was brief, on an inside page of the paper. There was no accompanying photograph. Krull would have missed it except at the auto repair there was a copy of the
Journal,
loose pages a customer had left in the waiting area.

Numbly his lips moved: ““Jacqueline DeLucca.’”

Not wanting to think—he had no reason to think—that Delray might have had anything to do with this assault. He had no reason to think that Delray had anything to do with DeLucca at all. Nor had Krull anything to do with DeLucca since more than two years ago when she’d come to the house bringing Zoe’s things.

Could be your mother, Zoe would bless us.

Krull had not seen the woman since that day. Except in his most lurid sex-dreams. But in person, no he had not. The actual woman who’d been, as the article in the
Journal
noted,
a close friend of the 1983 homicide victim Zoe Kruller,
he had not glimpsed and had done his best to forget.

T
HAT NIGHT WITH HIS FRIENDS,
at the train depot. Nights he didn’t have to work late or help with the tow truck which was a twenty-four-hour service Kruller’s Auto Repair provided he’d begun hanging out with these new friends who were older than Krull and admirable in Krull’s eyes. For Krull was under-age and they were not. What a swift transition it was—one year you dropped out of high school, a few years later you were in your mid-twenties, or older. Like Delray these guys would try anything. And the occasional girls, too. Krull had a weakness for beer but also he’d come to like the sensation of dreamy not-caring he got from smoking dope. Like Novocain this was. The buzzing turned numb and you experienced a kind of wavy tunnel vision, faces in a slow spin and melt, to be laughed at.

Zoe had been a
junkie, a heroin user.
So it was said of the dead woman, after her death.

What Krull liked about smoking dope was the way the faces lost substance, the more you stared at them. Anything you might see in such a state, pushing a door open, seeing what lay tangled in bloodied bedclothes on that bed, how could you take it seriously?

Mellow out
Krull’s friend Duncan Metz advised him.
Any fucking thing that happened it’s over with, you’re not going back to change it.
Metz was older than Krull by as many as ten years but had taken a liking to him, it was said that there’d been a murder, maybe more than one murder, in Metz’s family, also you could see that Metz had mixed-blood, an olive-swarthy skin darker than Krull’s and the same deep-set dark eyes and naturally those kinds of guys were drawn together like cousins, or brothers.

Another kind of weed Metz gave Krull to smoke he called
Jamaican,
that was more expensive and harder to acquire that gave a nasty kick of a high, made your heart thump like a crazed thing which was why not everybody wanted to smoke it especially girls were wary of smoking it and of being in the close company of guys who smoked it for this weed when you smoked it and sucked in the smoke really deep into your lungs made you want to fuck, or fuck somebody up bad, and Krull came to like
Jamaican
best of all.

D
IEHL,
B.
O
NE OF
a dozen names of Sparta High juniors posted outside the chemistry lab on the second floor of the building.

Krull would not be taking a course in chemistry. Krull would not be taking courses in biology, physics, advanced math or in any language. Krull was not a college-entrance major but a vocational arts major—a “shop” major—and all that such majors were required to take, to receive a Sparta High diploma, were courses in English, social studies, health, physical education and driver’s education as well as courses in shop.

Driver’s education! As if Krull hadn’t been driving cars, even trucks, since he’d been eleven.

It pissed Krull to see
Diehl, B.
on that list, and beside the name a grade of A-. Eddy Diehl was a construction worker, a “manual laborer”—wasn’t he?

So far as Krull knew, Ben Diehl’s father Eddy no longer lived in Sparta. He’d been allowed by the Sparta PD to move away and Krull had not heard that he’d moved back.

In the pickup he’d seen. At the landfill. Before she’d left home. Before she’d been killed. When it was Eddy Diehl she’d been with and Delray had not known.

It seemed to be happening to spite Krull, how frequently he saw Ben Diehl at school this year. Must’ve been that their schedules were bringing them into proximity. That proximity felt like taunting. In the school cafeteria, on the stairs, in the halls Krull moved tall and lanky and quick as a cobra sighting the smaller boy with red-coppery hair and a pinched
face walking stiff-legged away from Krull without seeming to have seen him, like there’s a broomstick up his ass. For sure Ben was aware of Krull as the cobra’s prey is aware of the cobra but too terrified to acknowledge this awareness.

There was a girl, too. Ben Diehl had a sister. She was younger.

When it happened that first time, it was purely by chance.

Krull had not been stalking Ben Diehl. Krull had been thinking of other things. Seeing then Ben Diehl entering the guys’ locker room, a few steps ahead of Krull. The boy was alone as frequently he seemed to be alone whenever Krull noticed him. The boy moved jerkily as if parts of him wished to go in separate directions but were held together by a brittle and inelastic skeleton. Here was a boy not a natural athlete—you could tell. Somber-faced, ashy-faced, downlooking. His forehead was creased. His mouth worked silently as if he was arguing with a voice inside his head. He was perhaps five feet six inches tall. He weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He wore the clothes—shirt, jeans, running shoes—favored by most of his classmates but on Ben Diehl these clothes were unconvincing.
Diehl! Some kind of freak.
Krull took note of this for it was surprising, how Ben Diehl scarcely resembled his father Eddy who was a good-looking man, or had been. Even as Ben Diehl seemed to be bearing something of the shame and notoriety of his father which meant that he was guilt-stricken and would understand why he had to be punished.

Fifth hour, this wasn’t Krull’s gym class. Krull was a sophomore and not a junior, for Krull had been
kept back.
Yet by instinct following the Diehl boy into the locker room bypassing other boys without seeming to see them until he sighted Diehl just setting his backpack on a bench in a far corner of the locker room. Those who observed Krull swiftly approaching Diehl with the obvious intent of inflicting hurt upon him fell immediately silent and backed away and those whose lockers were close by Diehl’s quickly departed so that, as Krull advanced upon Diehl, taller than Diehl by several inches and heavier by at least twenty pounds, there were no witnesses remaining to see how the smaller, seemingly younger boy glanced up in surprise at Krull, yet a kind of guilty surprise,
as if he’d been expecting this; how Diehl had time to stammer only, “What—what do you—” before Krull seized Diehl’s narrow shoulders and in virtually the same movement slammed him against the lockers with such force that the entire row of lockers rattled and shook. The attack was silent, unerring. The attack seemed scarcely to have required much effort on the larger boy’s part.

Diehl hadn’t had time to protect himself or had not the strength to protect himself having fallen onto the cold tile floor cringing beneath the long narrow bench as Krull kicked the bench aside to get at him, looming over him hot-faced and trembling.

“Get up. God damn cuntface
get up.”

Now witnesses would report hearing Ben Diehl beg, “Don’t h-hit me! What did I do to you! L-Leave me alone I didn’t do anything to you”—a look of such fright in his face, such abject pleading, Krull gave him a punch, another punch and a kick and turned away in contempt.

Without seeming to hurry Krull left the locker room. Krull no more than glanced at Ben Diehl’s classmates observing him, seven or eight boys keeping their distance from him in such respectful silence, Krull saw no need to threaten them. They understood.

Now you know, what I can do to you. Any time.

What you deserve, your father killed my mother.

For a time then ignoring him. The Diehl kid. He’d have liked to murder with his bare hands. Stomping, with his booted feet. Sensing that the time of their proximity was rapidly diminishing as Aaron Kruller’s days in the Sparta public school system were rapidly diminishing for soon it would be his sixteenth birthday and so badly he wanted to quit, he could taste it.

You stay with it God damn it you know your mother wanted that.

And he’d protested
Pa you didn’t graduate from high school—why should I?

Because you can’t turn out like me. The time for people like me is past.

These words out of Delray’s mouth were chilling to his son. It was not possible that Delray Kruller could think such thoughts still less give voice to them.

In the aftermath of death, strangeness was released in their lives like a toxic gas.

Delray saying
Your mother never liked you working with me, so young. She said, Aaron can try different things. Not be a slave to fixing engines.

Fuck her.

Delray looked at him, as if he hadn’t heard.

Fuck her. Mom. Fuck what she wants for me, she left us didn’t she?

Snake-quick came Delray’s backhand slap, striking his sulky-faced son on the side of his head and nearly knocking him over.

You don’t talk of your mother like that, you little pisspot. You show respect or I will break your ass.

I
F THERE’D BEEN DOUBTS
before, now there were none. Ever after the son’s allegiance to the father was unquestioned.

O
UT OF NOWHERE
it must have seemed. By accident it must have seemed. The tall hulking Indian-looking boy known as Krull—the boy whose mother had been murdered—appeared at the edge of a dirt path descending to the river just as Ben Diehl was climbing the path to the footbridge above the river.

You could see the look of fright in Ben Diehl’s face:
should he run?
Or—was it better
not to run?

Since the attack in the locker room that had been unpremeditated and seemingly spontaneous it might have been that Ben Diehl was hoping that there would not be another for guiltily he had acquiesced to Krull’s anger and hadn’t reported him to the boys’ gym instructor or to school authorities nor even to his own mother explaining with convincing self-irony how he’d tripped over the bench in the locker room and fell against a locker.

No other boy confirmed this. No other boy seemed to be involved.

Now it was weeks later, in a damp-wintry season. Ben Diehl was
wearing a brown corduroy jacket with a hood he’d drawn over his head, Krull was wearing a jacket that looked as if it were made of silver vinyl, with no hood. Ben Diehl was carrying a backpack that looked to be crammed with books. Walking, he tended to look down. A kind of gravity drew his gaze down. Krull’s gaze was a predator’s gaze uplifted, alert. He’d had no conscious plan to follow—to “stalk”—Ben Diehl that day except somehow it had happened.

I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way.

Was that Zoe’s voice? Zoe singing one of her bluegrass songs?

Almost, Krull could hear. It was a famous song—maybe by Johnny Cash—but Krull heard it in Zoe’s voice, intimate in his ear.

No plan for any second attack. Except it wouldn’t be in the presence of potential witnesses this time.

Thinking
This is it! This makes up for the other.

Meaning his sudden happiness. Like a lightning-stroke. About twenty feet behind his frightened classmate Krull broke into a run, his legs were suffused with strength, hard-muscled and there was a sinewy joy in all his limbs and fleetingly he saw the warning
PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE CLOSED FOR REPAIR DO NOT USE
but Ben Diehl couldn’t turn back, Krull was driving him forward and onto the bridge and within seconds he’d overtaken Ben Diehl and grabbed his arm and shook him as you’d shake a rag doll—“You running from me? Turn your back on me, I’ll break your ass.”

Ben tried to push away. There was a frantic strength in his arms, his teeth were bared in a grimace of terror and fury and Krull was surprised, like a frenzied little rat the Diehl boy was, fighting him. Krull shook him harder, slammed him against the bridge railing so he heard the other’s breath knocked from him. His own breath was coming in short steaming pants. Below, the Black River rushed darkly swollen from a recent rain. Krull thought
I can kill him here, no one would know. The body would be lost for weeks.

What he said to Ben Diehl was: “Your father—where is he?”

Ben Diehl stammered he didn’t know.

“You know! He murdered my mother.”

Ben Diehl stammered no.

“He did! And he got away with it! And he’s living somewhere else now, he was never punished!”

Clumsily the boys struggled, for Ben Diehl was trying to loosen Krull’s grip on his shoulder and neck. Krull had caught him in something like a wrestling hold. There was a wish to hurt here but there was an awkward intimacy as well. Krull said, as if pleading, “Why’d he do it! Why’d he kill her!” and Ben protested, “He didn’t. He
did not.”
Somehow then out of a jacket pocket Ben Diehl drew a knife, a jackknife, managed to get the four-inch blade open and to stab wildly at Krull before Krull comprehended what was happening, the blade glanced against Krull’s jacket sleeve and recklessly Krull grabbed at it, closed his fingers around the blade cutting his fingers in that instant though scarcely aware that he was cutting himself, pain came so sharp yet fleeting, in the exigency of the struggle so fleeting that Krull could not register it. Ben Diehl was sobbing trying to wrest the knife free so that he could stab Krull with it, a frenzy overcame him. Krull cursed him struggling for the knife, both Krull’s hands were bleeding now but he managed to strike Ben Diehl with his fist, a tight bare-knuckle punch, felt like he’d cracked the bone beneath Ben Diehl’s right eye socket. The knife was loosened from Ben Diehl’s fingers and fell, and Ben Diehl fell to his knees stunned from Krull’s punch, a rain of punches directed at his face, head, shoulders. Ben Diehl’s face was a sickly white now smeared with blood, Krull’s face felt hot, flushed. He was saying, “Could kill you, God damn you! Could push you over, you’d drown. Nobody to see.” The jackknife glistening with blood Krull had to suppose was his blood had been kicked a few feet away, Krull snatched it up and threw it over the railing into the river. So he could not use the knife. In his murderous mood he understood that this was a wise thing to have done. Pushing Ben Diehl into the river was different, there would be no stab wounds. There would be nothing to incriminate another person. He was kicking at Ben Diehl who had curled up on the plank bridge as a worm might curl to protect itself. Kicking at Ben Diehl’s legs, thigh, buttocks not in the ribs, he’d break
the kid’s ribs if he did, and taking care not to kick him in the face, he’d already bloodied the poor kid’s face. Short of breath half-sobbing, “Could kill you—see? Tell your son of a bitch father! Tell him “Aaron Kruller could’ve killed you, and he didn’t.” You tell him.”

He’d left Ben Diehl there, on the bridge. Turned his back and walked away and at the dirt path he began to run and he did not look back. His face was damp as if he’d been crying. His hands were bleeding, he’d been wiping them on his clothing. The sight of his own blood was strange to Krull, he was beginning to feel pain now, a sharp throbbing pain in his hands and he thought
This is a good thing. Something is decided.
And that night drunk and stoned at the depot he hooked up with a girl named Mira, there was Mira high and giggling and straddling Krull at the groin and Mira was kissing his mouth and moaning and Krull wiped his hands where the clumsy bandages had come loose, his greasy-bleeding hands on the girl’s tangled hair.