Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates

  Just joking! Sure.

  These days—late February, March—it was just our mother, Ben, and me at the house on the Huron Pike Road. Ben and me returning home from school in a state of dread. We were waiting for something to happen—waiting for the news Edward Diehl has been arrested in the homicide of—or waiting for the news Edward Diehl has been cleared of suspicion in the homicide of—waiting for our mother to call out to us, as we entered the house at the rear Daddy is coming home! It’s all over.

  There was a rumor circulating at school and on the school bus that Aaron Kruller had approached Ben, in the boys’ locker room at their school. Aaron Kruller at five feet eleven inches who loomed over Ben Diehl at five feet six inches as an adult man would loom over a child intimidating him by his very presence. According to this rumor which had been relayed to me—separately—gleefully—by several girl-classmates of whom one was a Bauer cousin-twice-removed—a girl who should have been protective of my brother—the Kruller boy had shoved Ben against a row of lockers without explanation or warning, when Ben tried to shove him back, struck at him with his fists, Aaron Kruller calmly slapped his face—not punched but slapped his face, with an open palm—bloodied Ben’s nose—while other boys fearful of Aaron Kruller drew away staring, keeping their distance; nor would anyone report the assault to the boys’ gym coach, even poor Ben.

  “I fell. I fell on the ice. Hit my face, made my nose bleed. It’s nothing. Never mind.”

  So Ben explained his battered face to our mother that evening. Overwhelmed by whatever had happened that day—of which Ben and I had little idea though guessing it involved phone calls, drives into town on “errands” and visits from Bauer relatives, a consultation with her lawyer—our mother seemed scarcely to hear.

  Another incident, reported to me: Aaron Kruller had followed Ben onto the footbridge above the river threatening to push him off and laughing when Ben burst into tears.

  I saw that Ben was edgy, upset. I saw the chipped tooth, the bruised face. I was frightened of angering my brother and yet I had to ask him if it was true, that Aaron Kruller was following him, had threatened him, and Ben said no, it was not true—“Bullshit.”

  I must have looked disbelieving. Ben said sneering no no no it was not true, not fucking true—“Don’t you say anything to Mom, Krista. First thing Mom will do is call school, see? Call the principal, and get me in worse trouble. Or worse, call the cops. Keep your mouth shut.”

  I asked Ben if Aaron Kruller wanted to hurt him because Aaron believed that Daddy had hurt his mother and Ben said excitedly, “Are you crazy, Krista? What d’you mean saying a thing like that? That’s bullshit,” and I asked why, why was this bullshit, and Ben said, pushing me away—we were alone in the house, our mother had driven out on one of her desperate errands to the grocery store, drug store—seemed that Lucille Diehl was always at Walgreens getting a prescription filled—“You have to feel sorry for Kruller, he’s such a loser. His drunk old man killed his mother who’d been a junkie-whore, how’s it get more pathetic than that?”

  The way Ben’s mouth twisted on junkie-whore, you could see that he’d come to hate Zoe Kruller, too.

  But we’d always liked Zoe, didn’t we?

  At Honeystone’s we’d wanted to be waited on by Zoe hadn’t we?

  How does it happen, you like someone so much—love someone, maybe—then later, not so long later, what you feel is hate? Terrible hurtful hate? Wanting-to-kill hate?

  Why?

  Already when I was in eighth grade, aged thirteen, thrown together in the company of older kids on the school bus, I’d begun to hear such words as whore, hooker, prostitute and to have an idea what these words might mean. Without needing to inquire I understood that these were ugly words that applied exclusively to females.

  Junkie was an ugly word that applied to males, also. To be a junkie you could be either female or male and it meant you were a druggie, drug addict, doper.

  Turning tricks I’d begun to hear. This had an appealing sound: you could imagine showy tricks of some kind—card tricks, magic tricks, teaching a dog to teeter about on its hind legs—to arouse envy and admiration in others.

  To provoke applause. Whistles of approval.

  As in Chautauqua Park at the bandstand. Zoe Kruller in her shiny spangle-dress clinging to her feverish little body like liquid mercury and bowing to the crowd—the crowd that adored her—tossing her streaked-strawberry-blond hair over her head in a gesture of swift utter abjection.

  Bowing low and then straightening again, arching her back. Smiling so happily at the applauding whistling crowd you’d think her heart would burst.

  I think it was my brother who’d said of Zoe that she’d been turning tricks but maybe it had been someone else, another, older boy on our school bus. Crude loud-laughing boys you avoided looking at, pretended not to hear. Even when they called your name Kris-ta! Krissss-taaa! Kissy-kissy-Krisss-taaa! you pretended not to hear.

  Cruel things were said of Zoe Kruller turning tricks. You would have thought that now Zoe was dead, and had been buried in the Lutheran cemetery on Howell Road—we hadn’t gone to the funeral of course, but a girl I knew from school had gone—most people would feel sorry for her and for the Krullers but this didn’t seem to be the case, not with everyone.

  (Like Ben. Like my mother. Like most of our Bauer relatives.)

  Adultery was a word I’d come to know, also. Adulterer.

  There was consolation in this you would have to be an adult to commit adultery, wouldn’t you?

  “Your father is an adulterer, Krista. You may as well be told. Your father betrayed his marriage vows, that he’d pledged in church, before God. He betrayed the sanctity of this family. He betrayed all of us. Whatever his relations were with that woman—I feel sorry for her because I guess he betrayed her, too.”

  Waiting for Mom to add But your father did not kill her.

  She didn’t, though. It was a somber moment between us—we were in the kitchen just the two of us—Ben had started working after school part-time, at about this time—shortly before Daddy moved to Port Oriskany—and often it was just Mom and me in the kitchen preparing supper which we would eat promptly at 6:00 P.M.—Mom, Ben and me—and solemnly now Mom leaned over me to press her lips that looked chewed-at, dry and chapped, against the top of my head, the wavering part in my hair, as if blessing me.

  “AARON.”

  Secretly I spoke his name. This beautiful mysterious name out of the Bible, I had never dared speak aloud to anyone.

  In the fall when I was a student at Sparta Middle School which adjoined the older, red-brick Sparta High School sometimes I was able to catch sight of Aaron Kruller at a distance. He was in tenth grade, a sophomore; he’d been kept back a year. Now Ben who was Aaron’s age—going on sixteen—was a year ahead of Aaron, in the junior class. I thought it must be humiliating to Aaron, to be kept back with younger kids. (Each year there were three or four Indian-looking kids who were kept back, girls as well as boys. They would keep one another company at the rear of classrooms and in tight little clusters in the cafeteria. Though it was forbidden, they would smoke cigarettes at the rear of the school waiting for the special Herkimer County bus that took them out to the reservation.) I had to wonder if Aaron Kruller knew that I existed: Ben Diehl’s younger sister. If he hated me, the way he hated Ben.

  Did I dare to follow Aaron Kruller? I did not.

  Yet somehow it happened, there was Krista Diehl in the 7-Eleven on Chambers Street where Aaron Kruller sometimes dropped by after school. There was Krista Diehl pretending to be on an errand for her mother frowning at milk cartons displayed in the refrigerator—trying to read the labels, the expiration dates. There was Aaron Kruller opening a Coke, devouring something doughy and mashed in a cellophane wrapper, out of his hand. In the 7-Eleven there was likely to be an air of frantic festivity—kids from the high school crowding the aisles—calling out loudly to one another, flirting, exchanging mock-obscenities—while quietly, shy
ly blond Krista decided against buying a carton of milk, slipped out the front door without being noticed.

  He saw me! He knows who I am.

  Those afternoons I didn’t take the school bus home. I walked home. Avoided my friends with whom I’d have been sitting on the bus who would have said Krista are you crazy? and might have guessed it was a boy, an older boy, in whom I was interested.

  Those terrible years, your happiness can only be He saw me! He knows who I am.

  The rubble-strewn alley where Aaron Kruller sometimes rode his bicycle, out to the Quarry Road. The asphalt pavement in front of the train depot where older boys and a few girls, loud-laughing, excitable, hung out together after school to drink beer out of cans carelessly tossed into the weeds, to smoke cigarettes, or “pot.”

  I knew what “pot” was: marijuana. I knew the sweet-acrid smell, that clung to the clothes and hair of certain of the older girls.

  Aaron stayed only a brief while with these friends of his. Aaron smoked with them, drank with them, laughed with them. You could see that Aaron Kruller was one of them but Aaron never stayed long, he had to get home to work at his father’s auto shop out on the Quarry Road.

  Pot was common, at Sparta High. Weed. Getting high.

  I thought it must be nice: getting high. Like a helium balloon rising above the rooftops, treetops where no one could hurt you.

  Ben spoke disdainfully of kids at the high school who were dopers.

  Dopers, stoners, druggies. Losers. Ben scorned drugs, drinking.

  Ben would never be one of those kids expelled from school for bringing beer onto school property, drinking out of his locker, smoking dope in the lavatories. Ben scorned any kind of weakness. This year he meant to work hard in all his classes. The spring before, with our father gone, and the trouble fucking up our lives, Ben’s concentration had been shattered and he hadn’t done so well on final exams and for this he blamed our father, he would never forgive our father and so he’d decided he would not be a God-damned carpenter like Eddy Diehl, not a cabinet-maker, fuck working with his hands, fuck home-building and construction, Ben signed up for mechanical drawing and college-entrance math. He’d stopped hanging out with his old friends—not that these were doper-kids, they were not—but they were not college-entrance kids—and he didn’t make new friends. He didn’t have time for friends. He worked after school at Laird’s Groceries. He would impress his teachers. He would impress the Sparta High principal, the guidance counselor. He would overcome their curiosity about him—their pity—possibly, their mild aversion—for the name Diehl accrued to him like an obscene scrawl across his back.

  Already in his junior year of high school Ben was plotting where he’d go after graduating, not Herkimer County Community College where most of his classmates would go, if they went to “college” at all, but somewhere away from Sparta: Rensselaer Polytech in Troy, and if not Rensselaer the State University of New York at Canton where there was a good technical school.

  Where the name Diehl would not evoke any disagreeable association, like a bad smell.

  I WAS SAD—sometimes, I was angry—mostly I was bewildered—how had it happened, I’d once had an older brother who had been my friend—who had seemed to like me—to “be on my side”—but now I had not.

  “Are you mad at me, Ben? Why are you mad at me?”—it did no good to ask, such questions only embarrassed my brother, and annoyed him. More and more during his high school years Ben stayed away from home, working at the grocery store or at another part-time job; hoping to avoid his lonely sister and his mother, as much as he could; saving money for his escape from Sparta.

  In my dreams—that felt, sometimes, too large for my head as if my head might burst—my brother Ben and Aaron Kruller were strangely confused. The hot-pulsing dream would seem to be insisting This is Ben but the person I saw was Aaron Kruller as if by some authority beyond my control Aaron Kruller was meant to be my brother, and not Ben.

  The uncanny authority of dreams! It has always astonished me, how we surrender ourselves to these nocturnal presences, so trusting and vulnerable as if the outermost layer of our skin has been peeled away! In sleep there is no protection, nowhere to flee, to hide; there can be no solace, if the dream is not a solace.

  In eighth grade, at age thirteen when with increasing boldness—recklessness?—I followed Aaron Kruller after school, if I happened to sight him. And if at the 7-Eleven he glanced toward me quizzically, frowning or blank-faced—quickly I looked away, a hot blush rising in my face.

  He saw me! Maybe he saw me! I was a shy girl, or gave that impression. I was a very young girl, in eighth grade. I had silky-pale blond hair and doll-like features, a “pretty” girl—a “good” girl—if Aaron Kruller noticed me at all, he’d have dismissed me in the same instant. I was both relieved and disappointed telling myself He doesn’t know, whose daughter I am. He doesn’t know me as he knows Ben.

  Then again thinking, with a thrill of dread Does he?

  In Sparta in those days, no matter your age, unless you were really young, you were likely to think that, if Delray Kruller had not murdered his wife in “a fit of jealous rage” you were likely to think that Eddy Diehl had murdered her for more or less that reason. There were other “persons of interest”—“suspects”—“leads”—but essentially it was Kruller, or it was Diehl. As with sports teams, people chose sides. It was a matter of family loyalties, neighborhoods, friends: allegiance to one man, or to the other. Both Delray Kruller and Eddy Diehl had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances known to them from high school—they’d both gone to Sparta High at about the same time in the late 1950s—and from their work; both men had large, sprawling families in Herkimer County; Delray Kruller had even his Seneca-Indian relatives, from whom it was said he’d long been estranged. (Maybe it was the Caucasian wife Zoe, who’d caused the rift? If there’d been a rift?) Lacking what’s called “hard evidence” linking either Kruller or Diehl to the murder, the Sparta PD was said to more strongly suspect Eddy Diehl because he’d “made enemies” of them at the start of their investigation, by lying to them: like a fool he’d tried to deny being Zoe Kruller’s lover, visiting her in the duplex on West Ferry Street…. Whereas Delray Kruller had seemed to cooperate with the police. Or maybe Delray Kruller had a friend or two in the Sparta PD who spoke of him sympathetically as a man badly treated by his wife—treated like shit by his wife! And there was Delray’s fourteen-year-old son Aaron who swore to police in a formal statement that his father had been with him “all that night”—the night of Zoe Kruller’s death—providing an alibi for his father while for some of that same time, for several crucial hours, my father Eddy Diehl had no one to provide an alibi for him.

  Seeing Aaron Kruller I thought He is lying. I thought He wants to destroy my father. Yet I was helpless to seek him out.

  WON’T LIE FOR HIM why should I! All I can tell the police is I don’t know. I can’t say. I was asleep. I don’t know when he came home. He did come home yes sometime in the night but I don’t know when, I was asleep.

  And so I can’t say….

  Ben and I would never know if it was true as our mother claimed, that our father had asked her to “lie” for him. To tell police he’d been home by at least midnight on the night that Zoe Kruller was murdered, some hours later. Ben himself said he’d been asleep—“Like Mom, I can’t say”—and whatever I seemed to remember, whatever I’d have been willing to tell police, to swear to police—that yes, I thought Daddy had been home by midnight at least—no one took seriously.

  One glance at Eddy Diehl’s daughter, you’d see that here was a girl desperate to lie for her daddy. Here was a girl who’d say anything for her Daddy. Here was a girl whose testimony you could not rely upon, even Eddy Diehl’s defense attorney doubted the worth of such an “alibi witness.”

  For much of that night, Eddy Diehl claimed he’d been alone. He had not been “conscious” of the time. In his Jeep driving out into the country and feeling so bad—about
Zoe—at one point possibly he’d been passed out in the Jeep in a parking lot—or by the roadside—where he’d pulled over to shut his eyes, a half-hour, forty minutes, motor still running—maybe someone had seen him but probably not—earlier that evening he’d been at the County Line, he’d been at the Iroquois—maybe at the River Tree Inn—drinking alone at the bar in his black depressed/anxious mood but there’d been guys who knew him—guys he knew—had to be—maybe a woman—women—Eddy Diehl was likely to know both women and men in any tavern he’d step into, in Herkimer County, on a Saturday night—but it was suspicious, how vague Eddy was about providing names—nor could bartenders recall exactly when he’d been drinking in their presence—and so Eddy Diehl couldn’t provide an “alibi” that the detectives could corroborate.

  And he’d lied to them, initially. Like a fool, yes he’d lied. His hungover drunk, that quick ill-advised swallow of Jim Beam in his office before they’d come for him, makes you think you can say anything, get away with anything, if he’d been stone cold sober he would have known better, Eddy Diehl wasn’t a stupid man. Well, he’d wanted to “protect” his family—there was that. Out of embarrassment and shame—shame for what Lucille would be feeling, if so exposed—he’d lied to the detectives. In that way making enemies of them and of their superior officer at the precinct, all the way up to the Sparta chief of police.

  Delray, on the other hand, had not lied. From the first, Delray’s story was exactly his son’s story: the two had been together all that night, in the house on Quarry Road from which, months previously, Zoe Kruller had departed.

  Saying, what?—I just need to get somewhere to breathe. I just need to live my own life while I can, please don’t try to stop me and please don’t follow after me I am not coming back until it’s time.

  This you would believe, if you believed Delray Kruller and his son Aaron. More or less, this is what you’d believe Zoe had told them.