Little Bird of Heaven (6 page)

“…I never said I wasn’t responsible, for that. Not…not the other, Krissie, but…that. Your mother, and you and Ben…ruining your lives. Jesus! If I had to do it over again….”

This was new, I thought. I was uneasy, hearing such words from my father.
Ruining your lives. Ruining that woman’s life.
For a moment I hadn’t known which
woman
my father was speaking of, my mother or—the other woman.

My father had never once spoken of Zoe Kruller to me, or to Ben.
I was sure he had not spoken of her to Ben. In his claims of innocence and his protestations that he’d had nothing to do with
that woman’s death
he had never given a name to Zoe Kruller. And he would not now, I knew.

“…grateful to be alive. And free. That’s the miracle, Krissie—I am not in Attica, serving a life sentence. They say you go crazy in a few months in Attica, the inmates are crazy especially the older ones, the white ones, the guards are crazy—who else’d be a C.O. at Attica? You can’t make it alone, I’d have had to join up with the Aryan Nation—there’s some bikers in Attica, guys I knew from the army, already they’d sent word to me—if I got sent to Attica, I’d be O.K. Imagine, Krissie, my ‘future’ was being prepared for, this was what I had to look forward to, as some kind of
good news.”
My father laughed, harshly. His laughter turned into a fit of coughing, in disgust he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray that opened out of the dashboard beside his knee. “What I am trying to determine, Krissie, is: maybe there is a God, but does God give a shit for justice on earth? For any of us, on earth? I was reading some science discovery, that God is a ‘principle’—some kind of ‘equation’—so there is a God, but what kind of a God is that? A man has got to forge his own justice. As a man has got to forgive his own soul. This justice can’t spring forth too fast, it has to bide its time. So when it’s least expected. Most of humankind, they don’t give any more of a shit than ‘God.’ I guess you can’t blame them, there’s hurricanes, floods, every kind of terrible thing erupting out of the earth, every time you see a paper or turn on TV—how’d you keep up with it? I was a kid, I had to go to Sunday school for a while, till I was eleven when I wouldn’t go any more, I remember how we were told about Jesus performing his miracles, how impressed everyone was, it was ‘miracles’ that impressed them not Jesus as a preacher, anyway—my point is—you are made to think that Jesus could raise the dead, Jesus could save his people, but in actual fact, how could Jesus ‘save’ the teeming multitudes that populate the world
now?
There’s millions—maybe billions—of people alive, and they are all in peril. As for the God-damned ‘authorities’—the ‘leaders’—they don’t give a damn.
It’s all about power. It’s about raking in cash, hiding it in Switzerland. Some banks where they don’t reveal your identity. You don’t pay taxes. The ‘authorities’—they’d sell their own grandmother’s soul, to put an innocent man in prison, or on death row—bottom line is, they want to ‘close the case.’ God-damned hypocrite fuckers…”

I was confused, frightened. It had seemed at first—hadn’t it?—that my father was speaking of something painful with which he’d come to terms, something for which he acknowledged responsibility; he’d sounded remorseful at the outset of his speech but then abruptly the tone shifted, he’d become angry, indignant. His jaw jutted like a fist. His eyes stared straight ahead. Despite warm air from the Caddie’s heater I felt a sensation of chill wash over me.

Can’t trust a drinker. Krista promise me never never get in any vehicle with a drinker you will regret it.

Hadn’t my mother warned me, many times! For surely her mother had warned her, too; and she had not listened.

It seemed that we were headed into the country on route 31, a two-lane state highway north of Sparta. The strip of fast-food restaurants, gas stations and motels where the Days Inn was located was behind us. I thought that, if Daddy had intended to kidnap me, he would not be driving in this direction—would he? In a more genial Daddy-voice he was saying now that for my sixteenth birthday just maybe he’d give me a car—“How’s about a convertible coupe? Just right for sweet sixteen.”

Was Daddy joking? A car, for
me?
I wondered if Daddy even knew when my birthday was.

From a cloverleaf ramp I could look into the fleeting rears of houses: sheds, animal pens, clotheslines drooping in the rain. A dispirited-looking trailer “village,” a smoldering trash dump that smelled of burning rubber.

We were headed east on route 31, we seemed to have a destination. I had to wonder if Daddy was planning to meet up with someone, there was such urgency in his driving. Those places that Zoe Kruller had frequented were miles behind us: Tip Top Club, Chet’s Keyboard Lounge,
Houlihan’s, the Grotto, Swank’s Go-Go, bars at the new Marriott and the Sheraton-Hilton. There was the HiLo Lounge at the Holiday Inn. There was Little Las Vegas at the traffic circle. These were neon-glamorous places by night and by day mostly deserted. In the raw light of day you were made aware of the crude unlit signs sporting semi-nude female figures like cartoon drawings and of overflowing Dumpsters, parking lots littered like acne. After Eddy Diehl had been taken into police custody it would be revealed that he had not been the only “family man” who moved in such circles, as his friends and companions were made to inform upon him and upon one another.
No one was arrested for any crime. Yet lives were ruined.

I’d been too young then to know. I was still too young at fifteen to have a grasp of what it might be, that I didn’t yet know.

Here in the country, in a township of Herkimer County known as the Rapids, we were in hilly farmland where by day we’d be seeing herds of Guernsey cows grazing placid and near-motionless in pastures on either side of the road. There were odd-shaped hills called drumlins, exposed shale and limestone like bone broken through skin. Eddy Diehl had relatives who lived in the Rapids but we were not going to visit them, I knew.

“Wish I could see where we were, Daddy. Where we’re going.”

My voice was little-girl wistful, I took care not to sound whiny or reproachful. I guessed we were headed for the County Line Tavern which was one of Eddy Diehl’s places. I wished it was another time and Daddy was taking me for a sight-seeing drive along the Black River and into the countryside in his showy new car as he’d done when Ben and I were young children and sometimes our mother would come with us.
This car! I can’t get over this car! What on earth are you going to do with this car! Oh Eddy. Oh my God.

On Sunday drives Daddy would take us out to Uncle Sean’s farm.

Uncle Sean was an uncle of my mother’s, an old man with stark white fluffy hair and skin roughened as the skin of a pineapple. Ben and I were allowed to stroke the velvety noses of horses in their stalls, in the company
of our cousin Ty who kept a close watch over us—“Careful! Walk on this side”—and we were allowed to brush the horses’ sides with a wire brush, warm rippling shivery sides, always you are astonished at the size of a horse, the height of a horse, the ceaseless switching of the coarse mane and the coarse stinging tail, the fresh manure underfoot, horseflies hovering in the air, repulsive. Yet I had wanted a horse of my own. I loved to press my face against the horses’ warm sides. My favorite was a mare named Molly-O, one of my uncle’s smaller horses, pebble-gray, with liquidy dark eyes that knew me, I was certain.

I wondered what it meant: here was a
horse,
but I was a
girl.

I wondered if it was just an accident, how we are born:
horse, girl.

The way after my father was lost to us in defiance of my mother I would bicycle into Sparta and past the row house where Zoe Kruller was said to have been
strangled in her bed
and the thought came to me unbidden, illogical
If I’d lived here. Anyone who lived here. Death was meant to come here.

You want to blame them, those who’ve been killed. Any woman
naked and strangled in her bed
you certainly want to blame.

“…shouldn’t have shut me out like that. Your ‘Uncle Sean.’”

“Uncle Sean” was uttered in a tone of contempt, hurt. Daddy seemed to have been following my thoughts.

“All of your mother’s people, that I’d thought liked me. I mean, some of them. The men. Your ‘Uncle Sean’—”

“He isn’t my uncle, Daddy. He’s Mom’s uncle.”

“He’s your
great-uncle.
That’s what he is.”

I wanted to protest, that wasn’t my fault!

I wanted to protest, Uncle Sean was just an old, ignorant man. Why should Daddy care what he thinks…

“…should know that I won’t give up. A guilty man, he’d give up, he’d move away. By now he’d be vanished from Sparta. But I’m not a guilty man—anyway not guilty of
that
—and I mean to alter the judgment of bastards like ‘Uncle Sean’ that had no faith in me. You tell your mother, Krista: I am not going to slink away like a kicked dog, I am still fighting
this. It’s been—how long—going on five years—a guilty man would’ve given up by now, but not Eddy Diehl.”

Moved by sudden emotion, Daddy reached out another time to grope for my arm, my hand. His fingers were strong, closing around my wrist. I felt a pang of alarm, a moment’s unthinking panic.
Always you are astonished. Their size, their height. Their strength. That they could hurt you so easily without meaning to.

“W
ELL, SAY!
Thought it was
you.”

At Honeystone’s Dairy the person you hoped would wait on you was Zoe Kruller.

Not heavyset Audrey with the sulky dark-purple mouth like a wound, not the steely-eyed grandma Mrs. Honeystone the owner’s wife, or in the height of summer temporary hired-help, high school girls who took little interest in the names of most customers or in recalling that a finicky child might prefer one type of ice-cream cone (lighter, less crunchy) over another (darker, grainier and chewier), and want her chocolate scoop on the bottom and her strawberry on top so that, melting, the strawberry would seep into the chocolate and not the other way around which seemed to the finicky mildly repugnant, unnatural; and on sundaes no nuts, and no maraschino cherries. But Zoe Kruller knew, Zoe Kruller always remembered.

As Zoe remembered names: “Krissie, is it? H’lo there Krissie!”

Zoe was glamorous, not merely pretty. Your eye moved onto Zoe with startled interest as your eye might be drawn to a billboard face posed above the highway, you would never imagine might have the slightest consciousness of
you.

If you were a child, that is. A girl-child intensely aware of adult women: their faces, their bodies.

Zoe was an adult woman, a wife and a mother. Yet you would not have guessed that Zoe was much older than the high school girls who worked behind the counter at Honeystone’s. Her face was a girl’s face, just
this side of beauty: her eager smile revealed a band of pink gum and her long hungry-looking teeth overlapped just perceptibly in front. Her skin was pale, warmly freckled. Her hair was “strawberry blond”—crimped, flyaway, shoulder-length. Her eyebrows had been carefully plucked and filled in with eyebrow pencil, her pale lashes were inky with mascara. Her nose was a little too long, with a waxy tip, and wide nostrils. Her chin was a little too narrow. Yet her eyes were beautiful, exotic: shades of amber like sherry at the bottom of a glass, or a certain kind of children’s marble, amber-glazed, changing its colors as you turned it in your fingers.

Zoe was a small woman, her figure was what’s called
petite.
She could not have weighed more than one hundred pounds nor was she more than five feet two. Yet she exuded an air of sexy funny-girl swagger that made her appear taller, like one accustomed to the spotlight. Behind the counter at Honeystone’s Zoe had a way of rising up on her toes when she locked eyes with a customer, smiling that glistening bared-gum smile and a light seemed truly to come into her face.

“Well, say! Thought it was
you.
”

Most remarkable was Zoe’s throaty purring voice. It was a voice so low and shivery it didn’t seem as if it was issuing from Zoe Kruller’s wide-lipped crimson mouth but from a radio. Here was a distinctive
voice
amid a clamor of voices of no distinction, that made you stop and stare at Zoe even more than her lit-up face might have warranted.
Here is someone special
you were made to think.

That red-embroidered
ZOE
on a tiny pocket above Zoe’s left breast.

‘“Zooh-ey.’ Not ‘Zoo-ey.’ Please!”

In Chautauqua Park on summer nights local musicians and singers performed at the bandstand and Zoe Kruller belonged to the most popular group, that called itself Black River Breakdown. Zoe was the only woman among several men—guitarist, banjo player, fiddler and piano-player.

Except for the Elvis-looking guitarist, a kid in his early twenties with dyed-black hair and cowboy boots with a prominent heel, they were all in their thirties, ardent, excitable, yearning for applause. Their music
ranged from country-and-western classics (“Little Maggie,” “Down from Dover,” “I’ll Walk the Line”) to bluegrass (“Little Bird of Heaven,” “Her Little Footprints in the Snow”) and disco (“I Will Survive,” “Saturday Night Fever”).

Especially on stage at the bandstand, sexy-seductive in a spangled dress that left most of her thighs exposed and her strawberry-blond hair frizzed and crimped in a wild halo around her head so it looked like an electric bolt had shot through her, Zoe Kruller did not resemble any other wife/mother in Sparta.

Yet she was Mrs. Kruller, the mother of a boy in Ben’s class at school. This boy was named Aaron and he looked older than Ben by a year or more and had a stiff glaring face nothing like Zoe’s.

“Zoe married young”—this was said of Mrs. Kruller, by our mother and our mother’s friends.

“Zoe married ‘way too young’”—this was said with satisfaction.

And, sometimes: “Zoe married ‘way too young and the wrong man.’”

None of this meant anything to Ben and me. Being taken for a drive out to Honeystone’s which was an actual dairy farm on the outskirts of Sparta, locally famous for its homemade ice cream and desserts, was a Sunday reward for having been good through the week, or one of Daddy’s capricious treats.
Anybody interested in a ride? Honeystone’s?

Say I returned to Sparta. Say I looked up my few remaining “friends”—classmates from school—and asked what they remembered most vividly from our childhood, each would say—“Honeystone’s!” Clutching at one another’s hands, eyes misting with tears of sentiment, the sweetest sort of tears, recalling Honeystone’s Dairy as you’d recall a lost paradise.

Recalling even the drive to Honeystone’s, fraught with the happiest sort of anticipation.

Out East Huron Pike Road, past the water treatment tower. Past the railroad yard. Across the Black River Bridge and beyond East Sparta Memorial Park and a short mile or so to the Sparta town limits and there was the sparkling-white stucco building set back from the road in a neatly tended graveled parking lot bounded, in summer, by bright red geraniums
in clay pots, and in the autumn by chrysanthemums of all hues; there was the smiling-cow sign thirty feet high, on a pole illuminated at night like a stage set—HONEYSTONE’S DAIRY. Inside Honeystone’s the air was immediately distinctive: milky-cool, marble-cool, like the foyer of the Midland Sparta Bank, except here there was an odor of bakery, so sweet your mouth watered like a baby’s. On the floor of Honeystone’s was what appeared to be actual marble, black-and-white checked, worn but still elegant; there were ornately designed white wrought-iron tables and chairs and there were vinyl booths that resembled leather, sleek and black. Descending from the ceiling were a half-dozen slow-moving fans with blades like the propellers of small planes, both languorous and vaguely threatening. If you were to dream of Honeystone’s interior, the slow-moving fans would take on an ominous note.

A dream of Honeystone’s might be edgy as well because you would not clearly see who’d brought you. For invariably in these dreams you are a young child in the company of an adult and you are essentially helpless.

“What can I do you for, sweetie?”

This was Zoe’s snappy way of greeting. Glamorous Zoe Kruller leaning forward onto the high counter, on her elbows, on her toes, smiling that crimson long-lipped hungry smile, baring her gums. Her eyes so exotic in black mascara, silvery-blue eye shadow and eyeliner, you gaped not knowing how to respond.

And there were other fascinating things about Aaron Kruller’s mother: the way she wore the sleeves of her white Honeystone’s smock pushed up past her elbows so that her slender arms were exposed, covered in dark little moles and freckles like tiny ants! Oh there was something ticklish—shivery—about Zoe Kruller! This giggly throaty-voiced woman about the size of a thirteen-year-old girl who made you want to sink your teeth into ice cream, bite down hard so your teeth ached, and your jaws, and you shuddered at the cold.

Honeystone’s help had to wear white smocks over white cord trousers and both smock and trousers had to be kept spotless. Honeystone’s help had to wear hairnets which made them—except for Zoe Kruller—look
silly, dowdy. But on Zoe, her thick strawberry-blond hair just barely contained by the gossamer net, the effect was strangely alluring.

Zoe’s pert question—“What can I do you for, sweetie?”—was like a riddle for there was something wrong with it, words were scrambled, you had to think—and blink—and think hard to figure out what was wrong.

Do you for.
Not
Do for you.
This was so funny!

Even Ben, who disliked being teased, especially by people he didn’t know well, laughed when Zoe Kruller leaned on her elbows to peer down at him over the counter asking what could she
Do him for
and calling him
Daddy’s big boy.

Well, if Mommy had brought us, Zoe would call Ben
Mommy’s big boy.
But it wasn’t so thrilling somehow, then: Zoe wouldn’t pay much attention to us, then.

Our mother knew Zoe Kruller when she’d had a different last name. When she’d been a high school girl, the younger sister of a classmate of Lucille Bauer’s at Sparta High.

In a small city like Sparta, everyone knows everyone else. It’s a matter of age, generation. Everyone knows everyone’s family background, to a degree. There are commingled histories, intense friendships and intense feuds that, having gone underground decades before, continue to smolder and pollute the air.

You can smell the pollution, but you can’t see it. You could not ever guess its history.

Tangled roots, beneath the surface of the earth. How astonishing to discover these roots, so hidden. How my mother began working obsessively outdoors that spring, digging in the clayey soil beside the driveway determined to plant what she called
snow-on-the-mountains
—a hardy fast-growing perennial—and the shovel struck a tangle of roots like something ugly knotted in the brain.

When
the trouble
began in my parents’ lives—except Ben and I had not known that there was anything like
the trouble,
at the start—our mother became strange to us, spending time outdoors as she’d never done in the past, sweaty and her forearms ropey-veined in a way frightening to see, and
the set of her mouth grim like something zipped-up seen from the wrong side. And Mom would try to sink the shovel into the ground, using her weight as leverage, and the sole of her sneakered foot struck hard against the rim of the shovel and she cried out in pain
Oh God! God-damn.

Beneath, those tangled roots. Severed, their insides glared a terrible white like bone marrow.

However our mother knew Zoe Kruller who was so glamorous at Honeystone’s, our father knew Zoe Kruller some other way.

Say I was on comfortable speaking terms with my brother Ben—from whom I am not estranged, exactly—and I called him impulsively and asked
Do you remember us going to Honeystone’s? When Daddy took us? How different was that, from when Mom took us?

And say Ben didn’t hang up the phone. But in a mood of not-bitter reminiscence he would speak sincerely to me, thoughtfully. He would say:

Sure, you could tell. For sure.

At the time?

No. Not at the time.

But later?

Right. Later.

That quickness in Daddy. Playing the car radio loud, humming loudly with it. Driving just a little too fast on Huron Pike Road and the careful way he parked in Honeystone’s graveled lot, very likely it was one of Eddy Diehl’s showy cars he was driving, that very morning washing, waxing, polishing in our driveway and here in Honeystone’s graveled parking lot Eddy Diehl was positioning the car in such a way that, if anyone inside cared to glance out—Honeystone’s front window was horizontal, long, plate-glass spanning nearly the width of the building—she would see the stately 1973 Lincoln Continental with two-tone beige-and-black finish, or maybe it was the cream-colored 1977 Oldsmobile Deluxe with its glittering chrome grille—possibly the cherry-red vintage Thunderbird like the sleekest of rockets yearning to be launched—and she would stop dead in her tracks, and stare. And smile.

Eddy Diehl’s
specialty-autos
were to make observers smile.

Certain observers, that is. Others, the intention was to intimidate, provoke envy.

Jesus! Who owns that?

Seeing this vehicle in the lot, guessing the driver was probably Eddy Diehl, quickly she would turn away to check her reflection in the mirror at her back, or in the mirror of the little plastic compact she kept in a pocket of her white cord smock for just such semi-emergency occasions; there was just time for her to dab some scented ivory powder on her nose, check her eye makeup, shape a pouting smile to see if the crimson lipstick was still fresh. And adjust her hair in the damned hairnet they made you wear in this damned prissy place.

“Well say, Eddy Diehl! Thought it was
you.”

Zoe Kruller’s sexy-throaty voice that was like sandpaper rubbed against sandpaper to make you shiver. Zoe Kruller’s voice that was close and warm and teasing like a voice murmured in your ear as you lay in bed, head on your pillow and bedclothes clutched to your chin.

With what eagerness Daddy entered Honeystone’s—pushing the door open with such force that the little bell attached overhead tinkled loudly, ushering his young children—what were their names—Ben? Krissie?—into the milky-cool, marble-cool air of Honeystone’s Dairy which was so wonderful.

And there in that instant was Zoe Kruller catching sight of Eddy Diehl, and Eddy Diehl catching sight of Zoe Kruller. Almost, you could feel the rush of blood that ran through them, like an electric current.

“How’re you doing, Zoe-y. Looking good.”

In a casual voice my father called out a greeting. Sunday afternoons, Honeystone’s was likely to be busy.

Zoe Kruller was such a favorite at the dairy, as she was a favorite at Chautauqua Park on summer-music nights, there were customers who waited in line to be waited on by her: though heavyset Audrey and white-haired Mrs. Honeystone might both be available behind the counter, scowling.

Not wanting to meet Mrs. Honeystone’s eye—the white-haired older woman was Marv Honeystone’s wife, and Eddy knew Marv Honeystone from having worked for him—Eddy lingered before one of the refrigerated dessert cases, hands on his hips, brooding. As if he’d come to Honeystone’s with the intention of buying a strawberry whipped-cream pie, a chocolate
mousse,
a three-tiered birthday cake, a luscious glazed fruit tart or a platter of fudge, chocolate-chip cookies,
macaroons.
“O.K. Ben, Krissie—say what looks good to you. What’d you like best.”