Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates
Somehow, Zoe Kruller was consoling me. On tiptoes leaning over the counter at Honeystone’s asking What can I do you for Krissie? Desperately I needed to know if Zoe had been here, too. If this was a place she’d been brought to. And when she’d known, what would be done to her. Where she was going, and would not come back from. When she knew that she would die. When he began to strike her with the hammer, when he cracked her head like a melon, threw her onto the bed, unless already Zoe had been thrown onto the bed, must’ve been such rage in him, such a need to do harm, a frenzy, a madness as he twisted the towel around her neck and tightened it until her terrible thrashing waned, and ceased—until she’d ceased breathing—ceased struggling. And beyond this, there is no Zoe. And three and a half years later no one knows why. No one knows who. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been resolved. The man’s face is a blur, the man’s name is not known. Not a day, not an hour I am not aware of whose daughter. To this very day as an adult woman and as powerfully then as a girl of fifteen thinking defiantly But I love him, I will never not love him. I will never not believe him.
Early afternoon in fifth period study hall that day where I was staring at my geometry text, chewing at my lower lip, that emptiness inside me like a hole that can never be filled and there was Mira Roche whom I scarcely knew, an older girl, a senior with the face and figure of an adult woman, smiling at me leaning over to whisper to me Hey Krista: want to party with us? Tonight? And Bernadette Hedwig who sat behind me leaned close so I could feel her fluttery breath against the back of my neck saying There’s this guy Krissie, this really cool guy wants to meet you. And Mira says Yeah he does! He told me. And in the girls’ lavatory afterward where they followed me Mira on one side of me, Bernadette on the other, I was blushing so flattered, so confused, why’d these older girls care about me?—and Mira said I was sexy as hell, that blond hair to die for and Bernadette was stroking my hair, leaning close as if to kiss me and I felt a sudden happiness, I believed that these girls were a way to Aaron Kruller, it was Aaron Kruller of whom they spoke. The thrill of being chosen like this! The thrill of being liked thinking These girls want to be my friends. My special friends. For I no longer had any friends at Sparta High. The girls in my class I had believed I could trust, I could no longer trust. Or I did not wish to trust. It had been a long time since I’d stayed overnight with a girlfriend in Sparta, as I’d once done. Before the trouble had come into our lives changing our lives so Ben and I were conscious of people feeling sorry for us, pitying us and we’d come to hate them, it was a mistake to confide in a friend, both Ben and I had learned. If I confessed to a friend that I missed my father, if I told her where Daddy was living now (which was Buffalo), and what kind of work he was doing (“Like his work here”—which wasn’t exactly the truth), if I said how the fact was he’d never been arrested, the Sparta police had never arrested him because they had no reason to arrest him, no proof, no “evidence,” they’d never had any and yet so many people thought he’d killed Zoe Kruller, more and more recklessly I might be led to confess to my friend, I might begin to cry, my friend might console me, and encourage me to say more, and so I would say more, I would tell her how sad my mother was, how sad my brother Ben was, how angry we were, how unfair it was and how unjust, so much about Edward Diehl on TV, in the papers, and none of it was true, and there was no way to erase it, or make it right. And this girl would pretend to be sympathetic, pretending to be my friend, saying Oh Krista it must be so hard, it’s like somebody dying in the family, my mother feels so sorry for you and for your mother she says she can’t imagine how your mother has lived through it having to wonder if he’d hurt that woman maybe he’d hurt her?
But Mira and Bernadette are not like that, I think.
Her and me goin for a ride. Just us.
Duncan is taking me outside he says. Twisting my hair in his fist. He’s the kind of guy, a girl would go easy for, a girl would go with him not fearful and not needing to be forced but Duncan doesn’t want that, that is boring to Duncan, in a loud braying voice Duncan declares Bor-ring! Which is why Duncan requires a change of scene and a change of people often. He’s angry at Baby Tits/Baby Cunt or maybe just pretending—pretending to be angry, and to scold—like a stern daddy—pulling me by the hair so I’m limping after him like a dog on a short leash trying to laugh, I know that Duncan Metz is a joker, Duncan Metz takes pride in making people laugh and so if I’m laughing like the others it isn’t cruel—is it? If I’m laughing and not whimpering in fear or pleading for him to stop this isn’t going to hurt—is it? Or, if it hurts, if my scalp is screaming with pain, it’s an accident and not intentional, Duncan is just joking.
Outside the depot it’s been raining. A wet sweetly-rotted smell of earth, spilled fertilizer in the Chautauqua & Buffalo freight car Duncan is trying to lift me into—C’mon baby, cooperate! One two three—there’s a logic to this, Duncan Metz is going to dump me inside the abandoned freight car and crawl in after me maybe, or Duncan Metz is going to dump me inside the abandoned freight car and force the sliding door shut trapping me inside, there must be a logic to what Duncan is trying to do and to my panicked laughter but my brain seems to have shut down except to register that someone seems to have intervened—a stranger—another guy grabbing at Duncan’s arm furious and disgusted Let the girl alone, Metz get the fuck away from her—suddenly the two guys are struggling, exchanging curses, quick hard blows—Duncan falters and backs off—lets me go—even shoves me at the other guy with a muttered obscenity Fuck you Kruller!—I see that the second boy is Aaron Kruller—Aaron is incensed as if he’s been watching Duncan and me from a distance not wanting to get involved but somehow he has become involved, God damn he has no choice.
When Duncan shoved me, I lost my balance and fell to the ground. No strength in my legs. So tired!—so exhausted!—wanting suddenly desperately just to sleep, to escape into sleep on the wet pavement except Aaron Kruller is crouched over me pulling at me Get up, c’mon girl get up you can’t go to sleep here—
He manages to get me on my feet. At a little distance, Duncan is jeering at us. Aaron ignores him saying Okay lean on me don’t shut your eyes try to stay awake. Jesus, come on!
How badly I want to sleep. Lie on the ground curled into the shape of a little white grub, no eyes, no ears, scarcely a heartbeat and my bones are hollow filling with sleep like ether except that Aaron Kruller is shaking me, gripping my shoulders and shaking me, won’t let me sleep Wham! Wham! the flat of Aaron Kruller’s hand against my face waking me so that my eyes fly open.
Later, I will see the logic of this. I will think This was meant to be, in just this way.
My mouth is bleeding. My upper lip has been cut. Maybe from Aaron Kruller’s slap, or one of Duncan Metz’s blows. There’s vomit dribbling from my mouth down the front of my clothes. Silky blond hair falling in vomit-clotted tatters in my face. Stay awake Aaron says. Keep your eyes open. Fall asleep you’ll O.D. Roughly walking me as you’d walk a staggering drunk. Half-dragging me to the street his arm tight around my waist supporting my weight while Duncan Metz shouts after us like someone crazed.
Aaron ignores Duncan Metz. Aaron is saying, urging C’mon girl, you can walk. We’re almost there.
There’s a car parked on the street, motor running. Aaron helps me into the passenger’s seat. My legs are limp, I seem to have lost one shoe. My head feels loose on my neck as if it might fall off. Still I am so sleepy, so dazed!—stricken by another spasm of nausea—gagging and vomiting though there is virtually nothing to throw up—my guts are sick—poisoned—so ashamed you would think This can’t be happening to me, I am not a girl to whom such an ugly thing can happen but when the vomiting seems to have run its course Aaron Kruller wipes my mouth matter-of-factly with a wadded tissue out of his jacket pocket. He has to be disgusted with me but half-marveling too Jesus, girl! Look at you.
And I know that I am safe with him. Thinking He knows me. All these years Aaron Kruller has known who I am.
I
My mother and her people said this. In Sparta, Caucasians said this. Not in contempt or disdain or anyway not always but in a kind of guilty wonder.
They grow up fast. They don’t have much choice.
And so it seemed to me Aaron Kruller was no boy like my brother Ben. Aaron Kruller wasn’t a kid. Not yet eighteen—I think this is right—yet Aaron behaved like an adult man tall and decisive and cursing beneath his breath as if knowing that what he was doing was bad luck, damned bad luck but he had no choice.
Getting involved with Krista Diehl. He’d had no choice.
He drove us to a brick row house. Somewhere in Sparta, not far from the train depot. A red-brick row house dripping rain and inside smelling of fried potatoes, grease. Walked me into the house his arm slung hard around my waist and I was slipping-down, near-falling, near-fainting and too dazed even to cry. Briskly Aaron walked me past an astonished-looking woman—a relative of his—middle-aged, a stranger to me—she’d come to open the door when Aaron rapped on the door with his fist and called to be let in—“It’s me, Aaron!”—walking me then past this woman and down a narrow corridor tilting like something in a fun house and into a cubbyhole of a bathroom ordering me to wash my face, clean myself up, if he drove me home and my mother saw me looking like this she’d freak and call the cops.
And if the cops saw me, I’d be busted.
At the sink I had difficulty turning on a faucet. My knees were weak, I could not seem to keep my balance. Aaron cursed faintly beneath his breath—what sounded like fuck fuck fuck this—but pushed down my head, ran cold water from a faucet and splashed it onto my heated face until I was coughing, sputtering, part-revived.
Aaron asked how old I was. I told him. Aaron shook his head in that way of his half-disgusted half-marveling. “Fuck.”
Meaning, I was under-age. I was a minor. Being in my company, in my drugged state, and looking the way I did, as if something had been done to me, something crude and nasty and sexual, meant trouble.
“Aaron? Who’s this?”
The woman pushed into the bathroom behind us excited and blustery as if her patience were beyond frayed, she was seriously pissed. In the exasperated familiarity with which she spoke Aaron’s name you could hear an accent echoing Aaron’s, they were of the same family, the same kin. Aaron gave her a highly truncated account of what had happened at the depot. He spoke of she, her as if I were not present. As if I were a problem that had been presented to him, he had not wished for and could not abandon.
“Oh, Jesus. Did she—is she—hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“She’s high on—what?”
“Ask her.”
The woman pushed Aaron aside. She would fuss over me now as you’d fuss over a sick child. Her breath smelled warmly of beer, her red flannel shirt strained over her wide heavy breasts. Her name was Viola: it seemed to me, I’d seen VIOLA on a name tag somewhere, maybe at Kmart.
Viola was an aunt of Aaron Kruller’s—a sister of Delray Kruller—with some of the same facial features, the swarthy skin, heavy dark eyebrows.
Aaron’s aunt Viola might more plausibly have been Aaron Kruller’s mother than Zoe Hawkson had been.
Vaguely I was made aware of a stained porcelain sink with exposed pipes, an antiquated toilet with a pink chenille toilet-seat cover, a large scarred bathtub into which laundry seemed to have been dumped—dirty towels, bedding, women’s underwear. I was made to think how revolted my mother would have been by such untidiness. Such slovenliness. Such letting-go. Viola was asking Aaron if anyone had followed us here and Aaron said he didn’t think so. She asked if he’d seen police cruisers in the neighborhood and Aaron said he didn’t think so. She asked if this had anything to do with—the name sounded like Dutch-boy—and Aaron said, “Fuck, no.”
Aaron didn’t care for this line of questioning. Aaron left me with his aunt whose breath came fiercely as if she’d been running up a steep stairs. Roughly she was swiping and slashing at my hair with a grimy hairbrush and with her fingers—her nails were oddly shaped, square, and had been painted a lurid red-orange, now chipped—she picked out snarls and clots of what she hadn’t immediately recognized as vomit. In exasperation she gave a breathy little scream: “Ohhh shit.”
“What’s the problem?”
Aaron had returned, with a fresh-opened can of beer. Through my stuck-together eyelashes I saw him drink in thirsty swallows as a drowning man might suck at air. I fell in love with him then. I fell more deeply in love.
The Kruller boy, Aaron. The boy I had so long pursued and dreamt-of and seeing now how coarse his face was, a bristly dark beard pushing out on his lower jaws, the heaviness of his jaws, in his forehead and cheeks old acne-scars or lacrosse scars or maybe scars from fights and in his left eyebrow a particularly nasty-looking scar like a fishhook. And seeing him now at such quarters I thought that I might not have recognized him, I was frightened of him and yet hopelessly I loved him, a sick sinking love must have shone in my bloodshot eyes for Aaron stared at me, and looked quickly away.
Muttering again what sounded like Fuck fuck fuck this under his breath.
Viola was asking Aaron why he’d brought me here “stoned out of her head”—and “so young”—and Aaron said it wasn’t like he’d had any choice. Viola asked if he knew who I was and Aaron didn’t answer at first and then he said, with a harsh mirthless laugh, “Guess.”
“‘Guess’? How the hell am I going to ‘guess’?”
“Her last name is ‘Diehl.’”
“Last name—what?”
“Diehl.’”
Viola was standing at the sink beside me and she lifted her head now to stare into the splotched mirror above the sink, at Aaron who stood behind us lounging in the doorway drinking beer.
“‘ Diehl’—? You mean—him?”
“Fuck who else I mean, Vi. How many ‘Diehls’ are there.”
Aaron shrugged. In the mirror Viola continued to regard me with something like fascinated dismay. More clearly now than before I could see the family likeness between her and her nephew: not just the facial features and the dark-tinted skin but her way of tensing her jaws as if she were trying to bite back terrible words, she dare not reveal.
I wanted to take comfort in this woman’s nearness. I wanted to take comfort in her physical warmth, the way the material of her frayed flannel shirt strained at her breasts and the way in which she stared at me as if unable to know what she felt for me. She was my mother’s age, perhaps. Fine worry-lines beside her eyes and a tiny pinch of flesh beneath her chin, but still Viola Kruller was a good-looking woman, men would turn to stare after her in the street.
In a kind of delayed rebuke, she gave me a little push.
“Ed Diehl’s daughter! Jesus.”
I had no response to this. At the sink, my face flushed and my hair in my eyes, I could pretend that I didn’t understand. I was high—“stoned.” I could pretend to not understand many things.
Viola said, relenting, working her mouth into a kind of forced smile, “Well. I guess it isn’t your fault, is it. You’re just a girl. His kid. Like it isn’t anybody’s fault whose kid they turn out to be, murderer or not.”
I wanted to protest But my father is not! Daddy is not but my throat was shut up.
Suddenly I felt faint. The faintness came and went in waves and this was a bad one. The woman caught me beneath the arms and helped me to sit on the lowered toilet seat. Fuzzy-chenille toilet seat. Viola Kruller and Lucille Bauer had at least one thing in common: toilet-seat covers of fuzzy chenille.
In the downstairs bathroom Mom had a yellow cover. In the upstairs bathroom rosy-pink.