Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates
I smiled to think Mom wouldn’t like to see this!
I was feeling light-headed again. Wanting to slip down, curl onto the stained linoleum floor of the little bathroom and sleep.
A tight-curled little white grub. The kind you might crush underfoot, without noticing.
“No, hon! Not that. You aren’t going to nod off, hon. You know that’s not a good idea, in the state you’re in, hon. Bet-ter not. No-oo—” Briskly the woman shook my shoulders to keep me awake. With weak fingers I fumbled for one of her hands, gripped it with a tenacity that must have surprised her. I could not recall when I had last gripped any adult’s hand in such a way. “O.K., hon. I got you. You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.”
Behind us Aaron spoke—startling how close his voice was—I’d forgotten he was there—“If I can get her out of here and get her home, if she’d sober up”—and the woman said, “God damn Aaron, you should’ve thought of that before you brought her here,” and Aaron said, “This was the closest of any place I knew. Vi, you’d have done the same thing,” and the woman said, “Why didn’t you take her to the hospital, if you thought she was O.D.’ing,” and Aaron said, “She was breathing O.K. and she could walk,” and the woman said, “So—you could take her now, get her off our hands,” and Aaron said, “I’m scared of fucking up my probation,” and the woman said, “Your probation? What about mine? God damn you, Aaron. Kids like you don’t think.”
Scolded, Aaron fell silent. You could tell that this was a familiar routine. There was an exasperated fondness in the aunt’s voice, something conciliatory and trusting in the nephew. I thought how fascinating it was, these strangers were speaking of me as if I mattered. As if, if I O.D.’d on drugs, that would matter. And how strange, that they spoke of me as if I were a young child, not responsible for my behavior. The woman asked another time if I’d been hurt—I knew to translate this as raped—and Aaron said he was pretty sure not, there’d be “signs” of that if I had been. “Looks like she wetted herself, poor child,” the woman said, dabbing at my clothes with a wet towel, and Aaron said, with that harsh mirthless laugh, “Long as the wet isn’t blood, I don’t mind wet.”
They laughed together. Aunt and nephew laughing together. Krullers laughing together. The woman slapped my face with the wet washcloth sharply scolding—“I told you, hon. Don’t fall asleep.” To Aaron she said, “If she goes into a coma, if she dies on the floor right here that will fuck up your probation real good, mister smart-ass,” and Aaron said, “Fuck, Auntie. She’d be dead by now, she was going to die.”
My lips twitched in childish relief. I wasn’t going to die!
The woman went away. Seeing that I was steady on the toilet seat and not about to fall off. In another room I heard her on the phone. I didn’t think that it was an emergency number she was calling.
Alone together, Aaron Kruller and me. It seemed a different kind of alone than before.
As if we were known to each other now. We’d been identified and declared to each other now.
“You. You’re ‘Krista’—right? Some days, after school—I’d see you.”
Meaning I’d seen you following me. And I’d known why.
This was not a question. Aaron knew the answer.
I had only to remain silent, Aaron knew the answer.
“That asshole brother of yours—‘Ben.’ He knows to stay out of my way.”
Such contempt in Aaron’s voice. The ugly fishhook scar in his eyebrow glared waxy-white.
It was disconcerting to think how young my brother Ben was—my “white” brother Ben—set beside Aaron Kruller. How Ben hardly needed to shave, his voice was a cracked boy’s-voice, and there was stubble on Aaron Kruller’s jaws, and his voice was deep and mocking and his big hands more resembled my father’s hands than my brother’s that were still the hands of a boy and so the hatred between them might be dangerous, for Ben. I wanted to plead for him But Ben never hurt you!
In the doorway Aaron Kruller loomed over me. In the close air of the little bathroom I could smell his body, and I could smell the briny beer-odor of his breath. He’d removed his jacket and was wearing a black T-shirt with a faded lilac logo—Black River Breakdown. His shoulders were broad and his arms were ropey-muscled and both his forearms were covered in mocking little hieroglyphics of tattoos that gave his dark-tinted skin a purplish-phosphorescent glimmer.
These tattoos were new, I thought. Since Aaron had been expelled permanently from high school.
Delray Kruller, too, was “covered” in tattoos. So it was said. My mother’s relatives spoke of the man with disgust, indignation. They believed the husband of Zoe Kruller to be not only a mixed-blood half-breed but a crack-head Hells Angel murderer.
Openly they said—many in Sparta said—at least, those who were sympathetic with my father—that a man who’d done time in Attica, a known convict and biker, it’s no surprise a man like that would kill his wife by beating her with a hammer and strangling her and whatever else he’d done to her, sick and perverted as Delray Kruller was.
As if hearing these thoughts Aaron said suddenly, crudely: “Y’know, Krista—you stink, Krista. You stink of puke. Better rinse your mouth.”
Such hatred in Aaron Kruller’s voice! His face seemed to shift shape, triangular as a cobra’s.
Roughly then Aaron nudged behind me—pressed me against the hard unyielding rim of the sink and ran cold water into a sparkly pink plastic cup he’d taken from a windowsill—that had to be his aunt’s cup, that held her toothbrush. The plastic rim was crusty with old lipstick yet when Aaron lifted the cup to my lips I didn’t turn aside in revulsion but like an eager child hoping to forestall punishment I rinsed my mouth obediently and spat discolored water into the sink.
My mouth was bleeding, inside. Blood mixed with saliva mixed with tepid tap-water.
Shutting my eyes then and leaning my forehead against the sink wanting to slip into a dream and sleep on the filthy linoleum floor but Aaron shook me again: “God damn! I said no.”
My lips moved, too faintly for the incensed boy to hear. I was trying to say But I just want to sleep for a few minutes. Then I can go home.
“Just keep your damn eyes open, Krista. You can do it.”
In your arms, I could sleep. Then I could go home.
Aaron was saying, in a lowered voice so that his aunt couldn’t hear, “Your father was screwing around with my mother, wasn’t he? ‘Eddy Diehl.’ I saw them together. Plenty of times. ‘Eddy Diehl’ is the one, not my dad—whoever killed her, it was him.”
In his excitement Aaron wasn’t speaking very coherently. Yet I understood him perfectly.
“You want to get me in trouble too, don’t you? Why you were following me! Looking at me! Like saying, ‘Here I am. Come after me. Try it.’”
Aaron was pressing hard against me, hunched over me as in a clumsy wrestler’s grip. His heavy upper body, his groin, I could feel tension in him like the crude vibrating of a motor, a sudden hot wave of sexual need. I knew boys’ bodies—I knew what boys’ bodies were—though the only naked boy I had ever seen was my brother, when he’d been much younger—I knew that it was Aaron Kruller’s penis pressing against my buttocks, ropey-hard, urgent, and Aaron’s big-knuckled hands were closing around my throat “This how he did it? Like this? This?” Faintly I was struggling, too weak to throw him off, the big fingers tightening around my neck, the big boy hunched over me grunting and his weight on my back, his weight jamming my belly, my pelvis, the sharp little wishbone of my pelvis against the porcelain rim of the sink. Oh! Oh! Oh!—I tried to hold myself still, knowing that if I continued to struggle Aaron might squeeze my throat harder. This was my instinct, to surrender. To placate the one who hated me, who wished to hurt me. I believed that if I did not resist he would take pity on me. I thought I must make him love me, so he will not want to hurt me.
This knowledge came to me from such a distance, through my life I would attribute it to God.
For God spea
Or maybe I was beginning to die. Maybe these were symptoms of the onset of death. When you can’t breathe but the will to breathe is so powerful you begin to hallucinate your breathing and you begin to hallucinate the prospect of being all right in another moment so long as you hold yourself very still and don’t resist your assailant. You do not ever want your assailant to know that you are resisting him, he will want to punish you more harshly. And maybe I was beginning to faint for lack of oxygen to the brain, maybe the hands around my throat were tighter than I wished to believe, maybe Aaron Kruller was no brother to me but wished only to hurt me and to take pleasure in hurting me and I could have no way of resisting him for to resist would be to provoke further rage and this was a sexual rage, once begun it must run its course.
What little I knew of sex, I knew that. Once begun sex is a stream into which frantic little tributaries flow, swelling the stream, accelerating the current, rushing downhill, flooding the senses to bursting.
In sex, there is the little death, drowning. You fear it and you anticipate it and there is no alternative but to rush to it as one rushes to a precipice, to sink into the flooding abyss, and drown.
“This is how he did it—huh? Like this—”
It was my father Aaron Kruller meant, I knew. My father, his hands around Zoe Kruller’s neck. Strangling, assaulting. That was what Aaron Kruller meant.
In the other room the woman was still speaking on the phone. It was not that she was ignoring what her nephew was doing to the under-aged girl he’d brought home with him, in fact she had no awareness of it. She had utterly no awareness of it. For I did not scream, if I had tried to scream Aaron Kruller would have clamped his hand over my mouth. If I had tried to struggle Aaron Kruller would have hurt me, there was such rage in him.
Very little time had passed. Scarcely two minutes had passed. Through the splotched mirror of the medicine cabinet I might have seen Aunt Viola in the other room, turned away, speaking into a plastic phone receiver and oblivious of us in the bathroom not fifteen feet away.
A strangled little cry issued from Aaron’s throat, his panting breath ceased, his thrashing body froze. It was over.
“Jesus…”
In a delirium he pushed me from him. He’d finished with me, he had used me up. Pushing me away like a soiled rag.
When he caught his breath he said: “Hey. You’re O.K. Nobody hurt you, girl. Look here.”
I could not look at him. His fingers clutched at my face now, as you’d lift a mask.
I was dazed, I wasn’t thinking clearly. My shoulders where he’d gripped me—my back, my belly—much of my body—throbbed with pain.
I was trying to breathe again, trying to breathe normally, gasping for air. An artery in my throat was pounding.
“God damn. I said, nobody hurt you. Breathe.”
I did as I was told: I breathed.
I managed to stand, shakily. I did not whimper, and I did not flinch with pain. I was able to show this furious boy with the blood-heavy face and glaring eyes like something chipped with an ice pick that I was breathing, and I was breathing normally.
Nobody had hurt me. This was so.
Not Duncan Metz. Not Aaron Kruller. If my body ached from their rough hands and if my throat was reddened from the grip of steely fingers and by the next morning my skin would be luridly bruised I would disguise myself, I would wear a turtleneck sweater, no one would see, no one would know, if my mother were to discover the more obvious of my bruises, if my mother were to pull away my clothes and scream seeing the marks of my assailants on my arms, my thighs, my ribs I would tell her as Jacky DeLucca had told police Didn’t see who it was, who hurt me. Never knew his name.
HE DROVE ME HOME. To the house on the Huron Pike Road, Aaron Kruller dared to drive me that night.
We spoke little on the drive. It was late, near midnight. Aaron’s aunt Viola had made instant coffee for me to drink, grimly she’d said Some caffeine will help you. What you’re going to tell your mother is anybody’s guess but don’t involve Aaron and for sure girl, don’t involve me.
I promised, I would not.
I’d gagged at the first taste of the hot strong black coffee but I managed to drink it, all that the woman gave me.
As I’d rinsed my mouth that stank of vomit, using the woman’s sparkly plastic cup.
Close to dying, you learn to obey. You learn to take pleasure in obeying, a sweet piercing pleasure you could not imagine otherwise.
Good thing you didn’t die, back there. They’d have dumped your body, girl. In a freight car. Down the river embankment. Aaron saved your life so don’t get him trouble girl, hear me?
I heard. I thanked her. Seeing in her face—as in his—how they wished to be rid of me as if this night had never happened.
Aaron drove me home without needing to ask where I lived. He might’ve pretended he didn’t know the location of Eddy Diehl’s house but sure, where Eddy Diehl had lived all the Krullers would know.
Aaron Kruller would know. As I’d bicycled past his family home and his father’s auto shop on Quarry Road, so it might’ve been, Aaron Kruller had once bicycled past our house on the Huron Pike Road.
Mostly in silence we drove. Now I was sobered up—or almost—my face rubbed hard with a wash rag in Aunt Viola’s chiding hand so it felt like my skin had been scraped with sandpaper and the last of the vomit-clots picked out of my hair—every question I had to ask seemed foolish to me as words in a balloon floating over some cartoon-character’s head.
I do remember asking Aaron what was it—“What’s that m-moving thing?”—in a voice of sudden fright. I’d been trying to focus my aching eyes on the road rushing at us in Aaron’s yellow-tinged headlights and in the corner of my vision like a crack at the edge of my brain there’d emerged something liquidy and shivery like molten lead or mercury not fully visible or identifiable in the shadows to the left of the road and Aaron said it was the river.
“R-river?”
“The river. Where you live.”
I was staring at this shadowy rippling thing like something molten. It did not seem to me that I’d ever seen this thing before though I’d been living on the Huron Pike Road beside the Black River for all of my life.
Maybe Aaron saw the fear in my face. Maybe Aaron looked away not wanting to see it.
After a moment saying, “You’re O.K. Get some sleep, you’ll be O.K. How you feel won’t be permanent.”
I thought Yes. It will.
At the end of our driveway Aaron stopped his car. Wary and cautious seeing the length of the driveway Aaron hesitated, scowled—“Think you can make it? I’m not going in there.”
Quickly I told him yes.
“See, if I drive in there, it’d be a hell of a time turning around. If your mother wants to see who I am.”
I told him yes I could make it on my own and I told him yes I’d explain to my mother some plausible excuse to make sense of why I was so late, why I hadn’t called her, no I would not tell her where I’d been or with whom.
23
April 17, 1985
Dear Aaron,
Thank you for saving my life.
Krista Diehl
But this wasn’t right. Probably not. This was an exaggeration.
Duncan Metz would not have killed me, I didn’t think so. The more thought I gave to it, which was considerable, the more I’d come to see that he’d been teasing me, maybe he’d been intending to hurt me, yes maybe rape me, but I didn’t think that he would have killed me, and I didn’t think that the dope I’d smoked would have killed me, either.
Say Duncan had dumped me in the freight car. Say I’d been left there. All night. My mother would have called the police when I hadn’t returned by midnight at least and in whatever state I was in, comatose, part-conscious, groaning and whimpering and crying for help in the morning a railroad worker would have discovered me.
Or better yet, as I thought about it harder, in
I was sure of this. They’d have found me, I would not have died.
Duncan Metz and his friends wouldn’t have wanted me dead.
April 17, 1985
Dear Aaron,
Thank you.
Your friend
Krista Diehl
But I couldn’t send this, either. So terse, so plain, it sounded stingy, silly. It wasn’t anything like what I meant.
Like the silence that surrounds the tolling of a bell allows you to hear the bell. Without the silence there would be only noise. That was how I needed to speak to Aaron Kruller. In short simple words cutting as sharp stones.
But I could not, in writing. I had not the ability. The words I wrote in my schoolgirl hand were not adequate.
These little notes I tore into pieces and threw away. I could imagine Aaron Kruller tearing open an envelope, frowning as he unfolded the sheet of notebook paper. This might have been the first “letter” Aaron Kruller had received in his life and it would have embarrassed him, or made him flush with annoyance.
If his father had brought in the mail that day, Delray would have teased him.
Some girl writing to you? Who the fuck—?
May 23, 1985
Dear Aaron—
I think there was a time when I was a little girl when I loved your mother. Don’t hate me for saying “Zoe” was a name I loved. “Zoe” was like music to me. Like the songs “Zoe” sang at the bandstand to make you smile. Sometimes cry but most of the time smile. When your mother worked at Honeystone’s & remembered each time that my name was Krissie. A little girl can love someone else’s mother as much as her own. A little girl can wish that someone else’s mother was her own. Even when she doesn’t know that person really. As I don’t know you really. Yet I love you.