Little Bird of Heaven (40 page)

Twelve years of working with Delray, maybe that was enough. Krull saw in the man’s eyes how deeply distressed he was, how guilty he felt and what damned relief, at the prospect of quitting Kruller’s Auto Repair.

…kind of beat-up, wounded-looking…

Like tracking a wounded animal. An old buck. The gut-shot old buck leaving a blood trail through the woods, in the snow stubbled with broken limbs, swatches of leaves. Krull had never gotten into hunting but knew it was a code of hunting, especially the Seneca Indians believed that the hunter is morally bound to locate the animal he has wounded and put the animal out of its suffering.

Except you have to find the wounded buck, first.

“O.K.! I
AM COMING
.”

Krull was in the habit now of speaking aloud. No one else to speak to, he could trust.

At Booneville Junction twelve miles west of Sparta there appeared to be no inhabitants only a rotting granary of about the height of a three-storey house beside the Chautauqua & Buffalo railroad track. On all sides were overgrown fields. The Booneville road was cracked and crumbling. Here you turned left onto Seven Mile Road which was narrow and unpaved leading back, after a mile, to what must have been once a farming-family enclave. Of six houses two had collapsed into their stone foundations and one had burnt down to its foundation and another had begun to burn from the roof down, gutting out the attic, exposing rooms so that you could see fire-scorched wallpaper, splintered glass in what remained of windows, blackened curtains delicate as lace stirring in the wind. In his jittery mood Krull stared at a window of this devastated old farmhouse thinking that a woman was watching him from there, drawing back the black-lace curtain, beckoning.

“Yah? What?”

Krull’s voice was raw, weird. Krull heard his voice like something through a funnel aimed back at him.

“You don’t know me! I’m not the one.”

Krull laughed to show he wasn’t serious. For sure there was no woman in that house. No one watching Krull, for sure.

Weird thing was this wasn’t Krull’s first time, seeing the female face,
shadowy figure in the window. That he knew was not there. That he knew was not Zoe for Christ’s sake he knew
Zoe was dead.
Hadn’t he seen the body, smelled it. Hadn’t he sprinkled talcum powder on that body like you’d sprinkle lime on a some dead animal you wanted to burn away quick without that terrible smell.

Krull had been out to Dutch Boy’s twice before. First time, when Duncan Metz had owned the premises. Or rented the premises. A rumor was, Krull had heard only the previous week, Metz was buried on those premises.

Dutch Boy’s country place, Dutch Boy called it. The important thing, it was beyond the jurisdiction of the Sparta police and just over the county line in Kattawago County. Dutch Boy boasted he had a friend in the Kattawago sheriff’s department and possibly this was so.

Krull climbed out of his car: a Ford Charger. Four-door, eight-cylinder, dark bronze, last year’s model. The kind of car Delray would’ve been impressed to see his kid drive except how the hell did his kid get the money for it?—that would’ve been Del’s first question.

“Trade-in. Fucking good deal.”

Somehow Krull was outside, kicking at leaves. There were tall grasses here—rushes?—and the wind was rippling these grasses, churning these grasses so Krull’s scalp prickled, almost you could see something—some giant thing—animal, or a human figure—not quite visible but you could see it like a moving shadow making its way through the grasses, flattening the grasses, letting them spring up again, and the challenge was not to panic, for
there was no one there.

A body is a dead thing. You buried a body, or burnt it. Like garbage it was buried, or burnt. It was an asshole kind of sentiment, to imagine that some kind of
spirit
survived after the
body
was shot all to hell. Krull told himself this
Your mother is dead and she is not coming back.

Krull explored the fire-site. Part-burnt lumber, shingles, scattered and crumbling bricks and parts of dead trees like fallen things from which life had leaked out. Sweet damp grass had begun to grow out of the debris, there was wild lilac grown tall and leggy like the bushes behind the
peach-colored farmhouse.
Fallen hearts and fallen leaves, starlings light on the broken trees
she was singing. He’d broken off a sprig of lilac to bring to her, torn the tree limb like an arm wrenched out of a socket but Zoe didn’t scold him, hadn’t seemed to notice. Wasn’t that kind of Mommy to take much special notice except she’d thanked him, kissed him.
All we need is a place to land, my little bird of Heaven right here in my hand.
Now the scent of lilac flooded Krull’s senses so he felt drunk, buzzing-high, it was a sweet high though mixed with smells of rot and wood-scorch. Of the six houses one remained habitable: Jimmy Weggens’s grandparents’ house Jimmy had inherited, in disrepair and oddly aslant as if the very earth had shifted and tilted beneath it, and in this house Dutch Boy and some others were living.

From a distance the house was an old gaunt-looking farmhouse with steep roofs and a sagging front veranda and lightning rods like ice picks on the highest peaks of the roofs. The chimney was brick and partly collapsed, the veranda roof glared with a rich rotted sheen. Translucent rags of plastic flapped at the windows like soiled bandages. There remained some measure of dignity to the veranda which was wide and had a look of soaring, with ornamental-carved posts like something in a picture book. The front yard was grassless and rutted from the tires of numerous vehicles and this evening—somehow, it was evening—Krull was sure he’d left Sparta in the early afternoon—several vehicles were parked there of which the showiest was Dutch Boy’s 1984 dark-purple T-top Barracuda with its left side scraped as if with a giant fork and a front bumper fastened to the chassis with wire.

Krull had climbed back into his car and continued up the lane. Parked in the yard in front of Dutch Boy’s place. Krull had no weapon except a tire iron shoved partway beneath the passenger’s seat. Dutch Boy had several times tried to give him one of the semi-automatic pistols, twenty-two caliber six-shot, small enough to fit in Krull’s jacket pocket, but Krull had not wanted to carry any firearm reasoning that if he had a gun the urge would be to use it, to find a use for it. When Krull was high on ice—“black ice” was the worst—his nerves were wound so tight,
the least noise and sudden movement like a butterfly beating its wings, hummingbird or just some thistle silk blowing in the wind, his heart began to pound with adrenaline which even in his nerved-up state Krull was able to understand was not a good thing.

The wild-flamey-meth high had gradually leaked out of Krull, from eighteen hours before, or whenever. Now his heart was pounding with only just apprehension, fear. He had not switched on his headlights. There was that, he’d done right. The sun had not yet disappeared. Much of the sky remained light in the west, above Lake Ontario, and was ablaze with red.

A waning red sun. Delray had talked of taking him there some time, a friend had a boat, they could go fishing. A part of Krull’s mind, this was still a prospect. This might still happen. The old man comes back, he’s “retired” from the auto repair and cycle shop. Sure they could do it, some weekend.

Dutch Boy wasn’t so crazy in daylight as he got to be sometimes, in dark. Krull was thinking this time of year, it stays light later.

Krull was thinking this melancholy thought: how Jimmy Weggens’s old grandparents had lived out here in Booneville off that unpaved road all of their lives and farmed—wheat, soybeans, corn, dairy cows—and had children to whom they’d left the farmhouse and property of some fifty acres but the children had all grown up and moved to Sparta or some other city with not the slightest interest in farming, gradually they’d sold off the property, or maybe it was leased to neighboring farmers, but the old house had gone uninhabited until at last in the mid-1980s it had fallen to Jimmy Weggens who was a meth-head junkie of thirty-five with teeth rotted in his jaws and a grin like a Hallowe’en pumpkin.

Jimmy had been an old-time partner of Duncan Metz and was now a partner of Dutch Boy Greuner in the manufacture of crystal meth. In the basement of the old house was a “cooking lab” and out back a putrid waste-chemical dump. For a mile you could smell this dump but no county law enforcement officers had ever investigated the premises nor were likely to, Dutch Boy boasted.

Dutch Boy was also a source of more mainstream drugs: pot, coke, prescription painkillers and anti-depressants, diet pills and heroin. No weapon except the tire iron which obviously Krull could not carry into the house.

Krull cupped his hands to his mouth. It was always a chancy thing, showing up here even when expected. “Hey. It’s me—Krull.” He’d seen a face at one of the first-floor windows.

Just inside the door, Dutch Boy’s young girlfriend Sarabeth was hugging her bony arms, shivering. There was a shiny metal clip in her left eyebrow. Nervous and embarrassed-seeming Sarabeth told Krull, “He’s kind of pissed right now. Don’t know why.” Sarabeth had once been a girl of Krull’s. Not Krull’s only girl at the time and not for a very long time but there was a sentimental attachment between them, an air of regret, apology. Sarabeth was eighteen, or twenty. Some tales Sarabeth told, you could figure her for twenty-five, or older. Her tales of herself were seductive and fanciful. She was a rich man’s daughter on the run from Averill Park, a classy suburb of Albany. Sarabeth herself had been a classy model, unless it was a classy call girl, in Syracuse. Her small myopic watery tea-colored eyes were dilated and might have registered fear in normal circumstances. Dry-mouthed from whatever drugs she’d taken Sarabeth licked her lips and lay a quivery hand on Krull’s arm to warn him in a breathy whisper, “He’s kind of excited.” In an interior room, that had once been a kitchen, Dutch Boy was speaking on the phone. His voice was unmistakable: a sequence of furious stammering surges. He was speaking with his Syracuse supplier, Krull surmised. Krull had remembered that he’d made five deliveries in Sparta that day and each had gone without any difficulty and so he had money to hand over to Dutch Boy, a wad of crumpled smelly bills. Even new-minted bills handed to Krull from the shaky hands of upscale customers like the doctor’s wife had a way of taking on the smells of Krull’s body. Time would be required for Dutch Boy to count these bills for Dutch Boy did not trust what he called “intermediators.” Now Dutch Boy hung up the phone and fixed his eyes on Krull at first not seeming to recognize him. Then he said, “You. God
damn where the fuck’ve you been.” It did not seem to Krull to be a question requiring an answer.

Krull tossed the bills onto the table which was an ancient kitchen table with an enamel top, badly scratched now, and stained. It was an enamel table of the kind Krull recalled from his grandparents’ kitchen, Zoe’s parents’ kitchen in some long-ago time when they’d gone to visit almost every Sunday.

Now Krull wasn’t sure if the old people were still alive. If they’d have wanted to see him, his face that would remind them of Delray’s face.

The floor was linoleum splotched like bubbles. There were several windows layered in grime but emitting the waning sun, like Technicolor. A chemical stink pervaded the air, a sharp smell of fertilizer. Nitrogen? Krull had nothing to do with the cooking of the drug, he was wary of its dangers and had no intention of becoming involved in its preparation if he’d been asked, which he had not. No one in the house seemed to notice this strong chemical stink except Krull and then only when he first arrived. Dutch Boy was in a mood, excitable as Sarabeth had warned, and anxious. Possibly something had gone wrong. Dutch Boy wore his black-vinyl leather vest, his bare chest beneath clam-colored and concave, hairless. Dutch Boy’s nipples were pinched little berries. His shoulders and upper arms were scrawny, he appeared to have no muscle-tissue at all. His dyed-brass hair was brown now at the roots. Except for his stubbled jaws and flamey eyes and creases in his face he might’ve been a kid dressed for Hallowe’en, a figure to smile at. As he spoke to Krull trying to address something urgent in a strangulated stream of words, his stained teeth shone. His eyes appeared mismatched, unfocused and yet he seemed to be making a genuine effort to speak reasonably to Krull, to convince Krull of something, perhaps to warn Krull, to threaten Krull but somehow his words came out garbled as in a language foreign to both Krull and himself. Krull murmured
Yeh, right. O.K.
in a placating voice. He’d been looking and had not seen any gun visible. Sometimes Dutch Boy kept a pistol in plain sight, sometimes one of his Enfield Military rifles, and there was the twelve-gauge Rottweil shotgun somewhere at close hand. So far as Krull knew, Dutch Boy had never fired any of these weapons except at targets, fence posts and scavenger birds. Scattered on the enamel-topped table were Dutch Boy’s notebooks, pages filled with the elaborate crosshatchings of a certain kind of comic strip drawing, and Dutch Boy’s own comic-strip figures, as well as intricate designs of whirling suns or atoms, grinning skulls, evil-clown faces. It was Dutch Boy’s fantasy he’d be an acclaimed cartoonist someday, in the style of R. Crumb.

Krull went on to use the toilet, in a back hall. Dutch Boy continued to speak at Krull’s retreating back.

What happened next, Krull would have no recollection. Emerging from the toilet at the rear of the house and there’s a flash of headlights turning into the driveway, had to be unexpected since Dutch Boy became so upset. Krull heard Dutch Boy curse as a child might curse in a whimper and there went Dutch Boy limping out onto the veranda and there came three gunshots in rapid succession, loud as if they’d exploded an inch from Krull’s head. A moment of silence then like the silence following a thunderclap and then Sarabeth’s voice—“Oh no, no. Oh God
no.”
Krull saw from a window that a bearded man—was this Metz?—looking enough like Duncan Metz to be his brother—was sinking to his knees at the side of the house where he’d fled stumbling, and there came Dutch Boy shrieking, “Fuck! You f-fuck!” after him as he tried to crawl away into tall grasses moaning and whimpering, and bright blood glistened across his back. If this was Metz, Dutch Boy had not the slightest fear of him for Krull saw Dutch Boy rush at him and fire point-blank into the back of his head and he fell forward with no resistance. Dutch Boy kicked at the writhing body, furious. Another shot, and a great well of blood escaped now from the fallen man’s head.

All this happened more rapidly than Krull could comprehend. Almost, than Krull could see.

Like in lacrosse, you can’t always see. The plays are so swift, when the players are good, your eyes trail after.