Little Bird of Heaven (45 page)

It was the way of such men, when you seemed to have overstepped, into their territory.

He’d been glancing behind me, at a stream of headlights turning into the restaurant parking lot.

Hypnotic, the stream of lights outside the sleet-lashed window. I saw
the reflections in Aaron’s face like a play of water-lights over rock. I felt a small stab of satisfaction, he’d come to
me.

I asked him if Sparta had changed much since I’d moved away in 1988 and he said he guessed so, sure. “When you live in a place, you don’t see it. And I’m always there.”

I asked him if he’d sold Kruller’s Auto Repair and he said yes, if you could call it “selling”: he’d sold off the property to pay Delray’s God-damned mortgages and loans. But now he was co-owner of a body shop out Garrison Road and business there was O.K.

“I’m like a ‘citizen’ now. Own a business, pay guys to work for me. But I work, too.”

“And you enjoy that work, Aaron? Don’t you? What your father did…”

“Sure.” Aaron laughed, as if my question was so utterly stupid, there was no point in taking it seriously.

Badly I wanted to ask if Aaron was married. I knew he would never volunteer such personal information. Instead I asked about the body shop, where it was located on Garrison Road. I asked who his co-owner was and what sort of work a “body shop” did.

When the waitress brought our check, Aaron insisted upon paying for both our meals. He opened his wallet, and showed me a snapshot of a dimpled, smiling toddler. In an enigmatic voice he said: “Davy. When he was two. He’s older now.”

“Your—son?”

I stared at the snapshot. My blood beat hard, in sudden envy.

“He’s beautiful, Aaron.”

“Not looking much like me, that helps. He’s O.K.”

The child had his father’s somber eyes, and something that suggested Aaron in the set of his jaws. But his hair was fair and slightly wavy, his skin much lighter than Aaron’s. Very little of the
Indian-look.
I wondered who his mother was. Where his mother was. Why Aaron said nothing about her and why he had no snapshot of her to show me.

Oddly alone the little boy was, in a patch of sunlit grass. With a
sweetly trusting smile he gaped open-mouthed at the camera held above him, aimed downward. An adult shadow, his father’s, fell slantwise over him.

Aaron took back the wallet, shut it up and put it away. He’d maybe showed me more than he was comfortable with, his gaze was again evasive. Thinking of his son’s mother, I supposed. He finished the last of the ale, he’d drunk several bottles. Among my acquaintances no one would drink so much who was driving but Aaron Kruller was not among my acquaintances, nor could I speak to him the mildest words of reasonable caution as I would have spoken to an acquaintance. Aaron said: “Ever think, life’s a crapshoot? Toss of the dice. How a kid gets born. All the odds against it. Jesus!” He laughed, it was a joke to him.

I said: “No. I think it has a purpose, there is a meaning.”

“‘A meaning’—just one? Like—to life?” Aaron was amused, disdainful.

“That we’re here together, right now—you and I driving to Sparta together. After so many years. There is meaning in this.”

My voice quavered with unexpected emotion. I was feeling anxious, unsettled. Aaron looked away as if embarrassed.

The waitress reappeared with a hopeful smile cast at Aaron. Aaron left a tip of several dollars for her, grabbed his sheepskin jacket and slid out of the booth.

As if we’d been lovers long ago. Before we’d grown into the adults we are now. Impossible to shake that conviction, almost it was a kind of music, sexual music you had only to shut your eyes, sink into sleep, this music would sweep over you in a wave of heart-stopping desire.

Sparta, a city built on glacial hills. Through a misty scrim of icy rain the lights of the city were scarcely visible as we approached in our separate vehicles crossing the Black River which was nearly obscured in darkness beneath us and continuing on to route 31 east and north of the city where I would be staying at a newly built Sheraton Hotel. Aaron had called on his cell phone to make a reservation for me. It was nearly 11 P.M. when we arrived, I was staggering with exhaustion. Aaron walked with me from the parking lot and insisted upon coming with me
to my room on the fifth floor. In the corridor as I unlocked the door Aaron hesitated as if waiting for me to invite him inside. Waiting for me to turn to him, to appeal to him.
Aaron I am so lonely, I’m afraid Aaron don’t leave me just yet
.

When I told him good night and held out my hand with a smile he turned away saying he’d pick me up at nine the next morning.

“…
WANT TO MAKE
a blessing. Before I die. I want to bless you—Krista—and you—Aaron. Now that Jesus dwells in my heart I know that I can bless. But I must make amends, for I have wronged you. I have wronged others in my lifetime but you are the living—young—faces of those I have wronged terribly. Please forgive me!”

Jacky DeLucca spoke passionately, in a hoarse husk of a voice.

Jacky DeLucca: so changed, after almost twenty years, I would not have recognized her.

The female body that had been so opulent and brazen seemed to have collapsed in upon itself but not evenly, like sunken earth. There were hollows and bulges and fissures inside her clothing, which was a kind of flannel sweat suit, incongruously flamingo-colored; her formerly sensuous moon-face that had glared with makeup like neon was now shrunken and subdued and sallow; in her flattened cheeks there were fine vertical creases like erosion in sand. Her formerly glittery eyes were lashless and ringed in sunken flesh, her eyebrows that had been penciled in so dramatically seemed to have vanished. Jacky could not have been sixty years old yet looked as if she were in her late seventies. The poor woman! On her head was a pert helmet-wig that shone as if it were made of silver wires. With a wry smile Jacky touched the wig, adjusted it fussily. “My ‘hair’! Not going to fool anyone is it! But my poor baldie-head, no one wants to see. /don’t want to see.”

With a muffled little cry Jacky leaned forward to seize my hand, kneading the fingers anxiously. She would have seized Aaron’s hand also
but Aaron remained out of reach, standing somewhere behind me as I seated myself in a sunken easy chair close by the ratty sofa on which Jacky lay, her wasted legs covered by a frayed quilt. “Reverend Diggs made the purchase for me, out of his own pocket. Reverend Diggs is a saint! I said, ‘Just some old head-scarf is good enough for me, I’m past female vanity now,’ and Reverend Diggs smiled and said, ‘A little vanity is necessary for the soul, Jacky. Female or male.’” I had to force myself to realize, Jacky was talking about the cheap silver-wire wig.

I was badly shaken by the sight of poor Jacky DeLucca and distracted by odors in the room and a mysterious commotion as of voices, shouts and laughter and—was it furniture being moved?—elsewhere in the building. We were in Jacky DeLucca’s sparsely furnished room in a residence of some kind, halfway house or homeless shelter and soup kitchen attached to the Central Sparta Evangelical Unity Church. This was a nineteenth-century red-brick church on Hamilton Avenue in a neighborhood of old, large churches and municipal buildings; once, the First Episcopal Church of Sparta had occupied this site. Hamilton Avenue was parallel with Huron Boulevard which had been, in some long-ago time before my birth, Sparta’s most prestigious residence neighborhood: sandstone, limestone, brick and granite mansions had been built here, enormous private homes with pillars and porticos and twelve-foot privet hedges. Now the private homes had been converted into small businesses, offices and apartments. The privet hedges had been torn down.

“Sit, please! Aar-on! Just pull that chair closer….”

Reluctant as a sulky teenager Aaron hauled a rattan chair over to sit facing Jacky DeLucca at a slant. His eyes evaded mine, I could see the misery in his face.

“…so much to reveal. Before time runs out…”

Aaron had parked his car outside in a vast, open wasteland of a lot where a block of buildings had been razed in an effort at urban renewal that seemed to have ceased abruptly. Much of Sparta’s aged and decaying downtown was unrecognizable to me, after so many years: a maze of one-way streets, a showy but near-deserted pedestrian mall on
South Main, a half-mile of waterfront parkland bounded by gigantic oil drums on one side and Sparta Quality Ball Bearings on the other, heralded by wind-whipped banners BLACK RIVER ESPLANADE: A COMMUNITY OUTREACH PROJECT. Here on the Esplanade in the chill wan light of a November morning, several heavily bundled vagrant-looking individuals were adrift like flotsam or inert on benches in the way of those bandaged George Segal figures. Except for riverboat sounds there was mostly silence but it was an anxious and not a meditative silence. It had come to me in a wave of something like despair that the Sparta that my father had known so intimately, the city in which he’d grown up, where he’d worked as a carpenter and as a construction foreman and lived a life that had mattered to him, had vanished. And he’d died because that life had mattered to him.

“…your father Eddy Diehl, such a handsome man, Krista, I remember the first time I saw Eddy Diehl, this was a long time ago at the old Tip Top Club….” Jacky DeLucca spoke in an eager, hoarse, rambling voice, gripping my hand in her thin chill fingers, regarding me with searching eyes as if hoping to recognize me. Elsewhere in the residence was a grating clatter of voices, scraping chair legs, radio pop-rock. A smell of breakfast: bacon grease, pancakes, scorched eggs. Cloying-sweet baked goods. Making my nostrils pinch, a smell of Jacky DeLucca’s decaying body. “…never knew your poor mother, dear Krista. I hope she’s all right, Krista, is she? I hope that she was a “survivor”…of such a sad, hard time.” Jacky sighed, looking confused. I held her hand, hoping to warm it. The flamingo-colored sweat suit appeared to be a kind of sleepware. The silver-wire wig was slightly askew on Jacky’s head, I felt an urge to adjust it. That Aaron Kruller was restless in his chair a few inches from mine, that he stared blankly at Jacky DeLucca without seeming to see her, was making me nervous. “…my happiest times, working here. In the kitchen. Love to cook! Pancakes, waffles my specialty. Of course there’s more to them than just sugary dough, I mix in berries, apples, almonds. Before coming here I was what you’d call a “cleaning woman”—but got sick—oh I was so sick: hepatitis B. Why my liver was weak. Why I was
“susceptible.” There had come Jesus into my heart, by that time. If there hadn’t been Jesus, I could not have made it through that terrible time, and Reverend Diggs to show me the way, and the wonderful people here at Haven House, they have made a home for me, Reverend Diggs has said he will arrange for a hospice for me—‘When it is time, and not a day before.” This liver cancer!—they tried all kinds of chemotherapy which is so awful, dear, I hope you will never know, one day they told me the cancer had ‘metized’ to my bones and there would be no more chemo. The doctor said, “There is nothing more we can do for you, Jacky. You must put your soul at rest.” Dr. Waldrop is a Christian man, and a good man. And Reverend Diggs…” Jacky paused, wiping at her eyes. She squeezed my hand a final time and released it. Aaron lurched from the rattan chair to struggle at opening the single window in the airless room, the window seemed to have been painted shut but by sheer force of desperation Aaron managed to shove it open a meager inch causing Jacky to protest: “…not a draft, dear! I can’t bear a draft, I will start coughing, dear. Why I have to bundle up indoors and keep a quilt over my legs, my feet are always cold, the circulation in my poor feet is not good. Dr. Waldrop said…” Aaron now had to shut the window, yanking downward. I risked a glance at his face that was stiff and guarded and without expression though his gaze drifted onto mine, a look of raw mute misery and rage.

Get her to talk. Hurry her up. Jesus!

As a paralegal I’d had plenty of experience with clients who had crucial stories to tell yet could not seem to find a way to tell them, who struggled almost physically to say what was painfully evident, thus unsayable; I had learned patience, and a measure of sympathy; I had learned the humility of frequent failure. Gently I asked Jacky DeLucca if she’d invited us to visit her this morning because she had “something special” to tell us? Zoe Kruller’s son Aaron and me? Did she—remember us?

In a gesture of mock-hurt Jacky slapped at my arm. “Why, ’course I remember you! You are Eddy Diehl’s daughter Kristine—Krista?—all grown up and moved away from Sparta and back just to see
me.
And you are”—Jacky’s voice lifted in a feeble sort of flirtatious reproach,—“Zoe’s
grown boy Aaron. Did I thank you for these…” It had been my idea, to bring the sick woman flowers: a heavy pot of flaming-pink hydrangea. In the florist’s shop the hydrangea had looked less showy but in this bleak room with its shabby sofa-bed, battered Goodwill furniture, and stained remnant-carpet, the gorgeous cluster-flowers exuded an air of subtle mockery. “…beautiful flowers that look like…some kind of carnation paper…crepe paper….
Did
I just thank you, dear? Sometimes I forget what I’m saying, it’s this medicine! So many damn pills! Zoe loved flowers she said but never had time to tend them. Fresh-cut flowers some man would give her, a dozen roses that are so expensive these days it’s like a joke, or like poin-settas, at Christmastime, Zoe would hand to me—‘Jacky, take care of these, will you?’—like she couldn’t be bothered. Zoe was always in such a hurry. I was not so different myself, when I was younger. I don’t mean to cast judgment on my friend. I was blind to myself, there was a veil over my eyes, I was not one to judge others and I am not, now. Jesus has said, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself.’ Jesus has said, ‘Judge not, that ye not be judged.’

“In those years before Jesus entered my heart I was not one to judge others, I was not cruel or vindictive. After Zoe died—that way she did—I entered the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ and lived through a dark time, I was a heroin addict, my addiction was two hundred dollars a day, and more—yes I turned tricks and did not give a damn for my health. So stained with guilt as I was, that Zoe had died in that terrible way!” Jacky paused, breathing forcibly. I did not dare to look at Aaron Kruller who’d remained on his feet, near the window he’d had to shut. “I don’t mean that I brought Zoe to her killer, I don’t mean that. This man, that owned Chet’s, his name was Anton Csaba, he’d have met Zoe some other way if it had not been through me, I know that. Yet I was Anton’s friend first, as Anton was friends with many women. When Zoe moved in with me, we both started work at Chet’s. Anton had Zoe sing sometimes at the club, and we’d do a few lines of coke together, if guys provided it which they did. It was what everybody did. Damn hypocrite cops, those ‘detectives’ came to question me acting like nobody’d ever
done coke or smoked dope, you see the bastards off-duty out on the Strip pretending like they’re undercover—bull
shit.
I’m ashamed to say, I liked it that Zoe was my girlfriend ‘cause she was damn glamorous, and singing in that band of hers, Zoe was
real sexy.
And Zoe was a good friend, like just doing drugs with, she’d look out for me, it can be dangerous, you need a trusted friend if something goes wrong. A man, you can’t trust…. There are people who say if you maintain your health, if you take vitamins, you can use heroin for the rest of your life if you don’t increase the dosage and your veins don’t collapse! Even now, I am ashamed to say that there is this craving in me. Zoe said, ‘Sex is for people who can’t score heroin.’” ‘Jacky laughed at this witty remark with no heed for how Aaron was staring at her. In another part of the residence there came a muffled thunderous noise as of footsteps on stairs in a cascading downward stream. Hastily Jacky added, ‘Of course—Zoe was not an ‘addict’—a ‘junkie’—not ever. And I was not, really. There’s men who provide women with drugs to take control of their souls but Zoe was too independent, she wanted her ‘career’ and she was fearful it would never come to her, at her age. Around this time, I’m embarrassed to say, I was jealous of Zoe sometimes because if there was a man Zoe wanted it would not matter who Zoe cast aside to get him. And Zoe got away with so much more than others of us could. If Zoe borrowed money for instance. A man would ‘forgive’ the loan, who would not ever forgive it for
me.
Anton Csaba was one of these. Zoe’s mistake was, she took Anton for granted. You would be inclined to do that if you met him, Anton was soft-spoken and never raised his voice. Because he was in love with Zoe, she thought he was in love with her, she made some mistakes with Anton. He’d promised Zoe certain things. Yet Zoe had this new man, this ‘music broker’ he called himself, some kind of ‘enter-prenner’ whose business was booking bands. How Zoe met him I don’t know for sure. I guess he’d heard her sing at Chet’s one night. Now, I knew that Anton could be dangerous, he had hurt women before, who’d betrayed him. It was Anton’s way of speech—he would use the word ‘betray.’ I should explain, Anton was a gentleman to look at. Anton had the ways
of a gentleman. He’d been born in Budapest, he said. Which is in Hungry—in the real old part of Europe. Anton was a sharp dresser, he wore a sealskin coat and a fedora hat, and gloves made of skins of ‘unborn lambs.’ (Did you ever hear of—
unborn lamb skins})
He drove just Caddies and Lincolns and never kept them more than a calendar year, they were always luxury cars with every extra. He had a way of ‘owning’ women, too. When he was tired of you, he would not care to see you again, and he’d give you a ‘gift in parting’—but if he wasn’t tired of you yet, you could not just walk away. Anton liked me—‘My gal Jacky’ he would call me—when I’d fill in at the club for him, he knew he could depend on me, and this was lucky for me, that he only ‘liked’ me but nothing more. Zoe was the one got under his skin.’ Anton spoke of Zoe in this way like Zoe was some kind of infectious thing like lice, he couldn’t shake off. He wore expensive suits that never fitted him right, made him look like a corpse some undertaker had dressed. Zoe laughed at him behind his back. ‘That little mannequin-man’ she’d call him. ‘My Boris Karloff And we would laugh. And maybe it got back to Anton. I forgot to say, Anton could be very generous. Nobody in Sparta was like Anton Csaba that way. If you worked for him and did a good job he would give you presents, if he liked you. Of course if you bitched or made trouble, you were out. Some of those nice clothes I brought to your house, Aaron, that time, Anton had given to Zoe, and she’d always thank him real gratefully but after a few days, you know Zoe, she’d forget…. And there’s cops who hung out at Chet’s. This ‘police chief’ at the time, he was a friend of Anton’s. You’d see them smoke cigars together. It was known that Anton paid off the Sparta police, so they wouldn’t interfere in his business which had many facets. When Zoe was killed, ‘Anton Csaba’ was a name some people told the detectives, but it never went much farther than that. The detectives knew it couldn’t be Eddy Diehl who’d killed her because Eddy’s prints were all over Zoe’s room except not bloody prints. I heard this. This was known. It had to be, whoever killed Zoe was wearing gloves. They knew that Eddy hadn’t been there, at that time. The time Zoe was killed. They brought
Eddy in and questioned him and made it hell for him but not because they thought he was the one who’d killed Zoe, it was just some personal dislike of him. You fuck with the cops, they take their revenge on you how they can. They’d have tried to arrest Delray but there was a general feeling in Sparta, that Delray had been badly enough treated by Zoe behaving like she did, and Delray’s boy—that is, Aaron—I came to know Aaron—gave his sworn statement, he and his dad had been home together that night, all night. So if it came to a jury trial they figured that Delray would be found ‘not guilty’—so the detectives never arrested anyone. Every God-damned question this Martineau asked me, there was a trick to it. Trying to get me to name ‘Eddy Diehl.’ Which I would not. And I would not say ‘Anton Csaba’—I would not have lived beyond a week. Not in Sparta. And where else could I go? Where, that Anton couldn’t follow? This son-bitch Martineau would call me, he’d drop by where I was living, had to move out of the house where poor Zoe died, I was living on Towaga and he’d drop by there on his way home he said, off-duty he said, the son-bitch prevert, ‘Hey there Jacqueline,’ he’d say in this fake-honey voice, ‘you named for Jacqueline Kennedy?
You
—named for
her?”
Things that bastard did to me I had to be high, or blind drunk, to endure, and d’you think the bastard ever showed any gratitude? ‘Lucky you’re not in the female house of detention, fat-twat Jacky, for obstruction of justice, aiding and abetting a homicide, drugs on the premises.’ He’d leave me like some broken thing on the bed, or the floor. He never gave me a God-damned penny. A man like that, and the ‘police chief too—Schnabel—Schnagel—things were said of, he’d never sign off on Anton Csaba being investigated let alone arrested. Oh no.’ Jacky paused, shivering. The room seemed to me overheated yet almost I, too, could feel a draft from the window, I shivered locating a blanket to wrap around Jacky’s shoulders. Still Aaron kept his distance from us, like a kid getting more and more dangerous as he’s more and more restless and near to explode. The last speech she’d made Jacky seemed to have forgotten that there was a third party in the room, blinking at me with watery eyes of such yearning, I had to look away. The smell of the
woman’s body seemed less strong to me, as the minutes passed. I thought
When this is over, I can bathe her.