Little Bird of Heaven Read online

  How to answer this? I laughed, embarrassed.

  “You’re the first ‘Krista’ I ever met. That’s good!”

  Jacky’s speech was, like her appearance, exuberant, over-animated. Spilling out of her black-lace nightgown and her flannel shirt, her frizzed dyed-beet hair stirring in the wind like a mad halo about her head, this woman-friend of Zoe Kruller looked as if she were about to clap her hands in childish delight. Though I wanted very badly not to come inside Jacky DeLucca’s house with her somehow I had no way of politely saying no.

  No warning came to me, of the countless warnings of my mother regarding the danger of being spoken-to, beguiled-by, strangers.

  Inside the cluttered kitchen that smelled of something sweetish like wine, whiskey, cooking odors and scorched food Jacky was saying in her drawling-Zoe voice that I was a “pretty girl” but would have to “smile more” so that people felt good in my company, and not “heavy-hearted”: “What life is, is people want to be happy, not unhappy. Men, most of all. All-age-men. It’s a man’s world and if you make a man unhappy, he will sure as hell unvoid you. Don’t matter if you are beautiful as—what’s-her-name—now she’s fat and old, but—‘Liz Taylor’—don’t matter if you look like her, if you cause a man to be heavy-hearted, guilty and ponderous like some weight hanging around his neck, you will be left alone.”

  Jacky gripped her fleshy arms with her hands and shuddered at the prospect, or the memory, of being alone.

  Unvoid was a word new to me. I guessed that Jacky meant to say avoid.

  How horrified my mother would have been at the condition of this kitchen: so small, so cramped, with ugly discolored walls, cupboards lacking doors so you could see stacked plates, cups, cereal boxes, cans on shelves, a torn and sticky linoleum floor. Food-encrusted dishes not even soaking in the sink—which my mother abhorred as a lazy habit—but strewn about on every available surface. Though it wasn’t yet warm weather flies were buzzing lazily about as if this was their breeding ground. Chattering happily and nervously Jacky cleared a space for us to sit at a table, she reheated hot chocolate in a pan on the stove, and served it to us in heavy chipped mugs with red valentine hearts on them. The rim of my cup was just visibly stained with lipstick, I tried inconspicuously to rub off. It seemed important not to insult or upset this friendly woman, whose mood might abruptly turn to its opposite. “Damn! Guess it was boiling.” There was a scummy film on the surface of the hot chocolate, but the hot chocolate was delicious. And stale chocolate chip cookies, eagerly dumped out of a package and onto the chipped-pebbles Formica tabletop, delicious too.

  “See, Krista—‘Krissie’—is that what people call you, who love you?—‘Krissie’—I saw you out there in the alley, and I thought That little girl is a friend of Zoe’s. I just know it.”

  A kind of pinching sensation came into my face. My eyes shifted down, I could not meet Jacky’s shining eyes.

  “Am I right? Am I? I am! From when Zoe worked at the dairy, was it? I thought so.”

  Jacky asked me how old I was, what grade I was at school, and where I lived. Her voice rattled on like a runaway locomotive while her eyes fixed on me in that eager hungry-Zoe way that was disconcerting. Her manner was furtive, flirtatious. On her neck and right forearm—what I could see of her forearm—there were faint purplish bruises like fading clouds, which, unconsciously, Jacky stroked tenderly. I was made to remember how Zoe had stroked her freckled arms, at the dairy. Zoe’s arms that were slender and milky-pale and stippled with freckles and moles like tiny ants….

  “D’you miss her, Krissie? D’you miss Zoe? I guess she wasn’t a friend of your mom’s, was she. But she was a damn good friend to her friends.”

  Jacky spoke vehemently. I could think of no reply. I had not told Jacky my last name—had I?—but this question seemed to suggest that she knew who I was. After a moment Jacky lurched from her chair and groped about in a cupboard and retrieved a bottle of Jamaican rum and poured an inch or two of dark liquid into her mug and drank thirstily. She smiled, with relief. She smiled and winked at me. Close up I saw now that her crimson lipstick was chipped. Her nails were broken and uneven and nothing like Zoe Kruller’s perfect nails.

  Out on West Ferry a dump truck lumbered past. The house vibrated like something alive, shivering. Somewhere up the street boys were shouting. It was a neighborhood of continuous noise, noises: a mixed neighborhood as my mother would say carefully. Not a safe neighborhood.

  Jacky was glancing past my head now, distracted. It seemed urgent to her to keep speaking: “—eleven, you said? Or—twelve? And you live out—by the river? Huron Road?”

  I was hurt to realize that Jacky DeLucca wasn’t really so interested in me, only in my presence. As if she wanted badly not to be alone.

  “‘Mrs. Kruller’—the lady who lived here, who died—she was a friend of my mother’s.” I spoke suddenly, defiantly. Why these words came to me I have no idea. “Yes. She was.”

  “Oh—she was? Well—good.”

  “My mother’s name is Lucille. Lucille Diehl.”

  “Diehl.’ Oh.”

  Jacky regarded me with widened eyes. Startled and distrustful eyes. As you would look at someone who has just surprised you by saying something wholly unexpected, and unlikely.

  “You’re their daughter, are you. ‘Diehl.’”

  “My father’s name is Eddy Diehl.”

  “Yes. ‘Eddy.’ I knew—I know—‘Eddy,’ too.”

  Clumsily Jacky poured more rum into her mug, and drank. I was waiting for her to offer rum to me, but she did not. Her face was so amazing in its smeared smudged clownish glamour, her eyes so glassy-bright, it was painful to look at her, as at a picture too close to your eyes, but impossible to look away. She reminded me of one of my mother’s older, widowed aunts—a woman made permanently bereaved by the loss of her husband, whom I scarcely knew; a woman in continuous need of attention, affection. It was not enough to be hugged by Aunt Marlene once, you must be hugged by her twice, three times. You must be kissed numerous times. There was no way to fill the hole in Aunt Marlene’s heart, you wanted finally to push away from her, run away from her, call back to her Leave me alone, I hate you except you were not so cruel, and you did not hate Aunt Marlene only just Aunt Marlene’s terrible need. And here was Jacky DeLucca breathing heavily, pressing the edge of her hand against her bosom like an aggrieved woman in a late-night TV film. Despite the kitchen odors I could smell the perfumy-sweaty odor of Jacky’s flesh, her clothes that needed laundering; I could smell the rum. A sweet cloying delicious smell it seemed to me. I thought She is a friend of Daddy’s, too. Daddy has been here where I am now.

  All this while I was drinking the scummy hot chocolate Jacky had prepared from a mix on the stove. Afterward for hours my mouth would throb with a pleasurable hurt.

  “Zoe was my closest friend, see. Zoe was my sister, like. Zoe and I had known each other from—oh Christ years ago. Before she was married, even. Ohhh that Delray Kruller! The way Delray is now, you’d never know how Delray was then, him and Zoe, she was just a kid fifteen-sixteen years old when they met, and crazy for him, and Delray was crazy for her except—you know—these ‘mixed-blood’ guys—it’s said they get the worst of the Seneca blood, that can be blind crazy scary as hell, and the worst of the Caucasians—the ‘whites’—that’s us—the white race is pretty damn crazy too, y’know—like—Nazis? Germans? Vikings—is it? They’d as soon hang you upside-down and light a ‘pire’—fire—in the name of religion, or whatever”—Jacky floundered, uncertain what she was talking about; then recalled—“that Delray! He was damn good-looking, that Indian-hatchet face, and that Indian-black hair that’s so sexy, you’d be surprised to learn that he was—he is—only one-fourth Indian—that’s what Zoe said—Delray’s actual father was some kind of—Aust-ian?—like, German?—‘Kruller’ is some kind of—I forget what it is, but that side of Delray is not Seneca Indian, for sure. And Zoe, she was always so beautiful, at least she was to me, some fat pig
like me, Jesus!—there’s Zoe like some kind of—what’s it—fairy—with wings—just kind of flitting around—you wouldn’t be able to catch anything like that in your hands—I mean, you’d have to grab it, and squeeze hard, or it would get away. There were people—still are—who never thought that Zoe was anything special, with those freckles. The two of them, on Delray’s Harley-Davidson. Zoe is a little younger than me. She was real young when they hooked up, could be Delray ‘violated’ some statute—some law—like it is called ‘statue-tory rape’—meaning under-age girl—‘jail bait’—but Zoe was sure willing, and Zoe was hot to get married, she got pregnant with Delray’s baby that was like, for her, finding Christ in your heart—y’know? Like for other people finding their savior in their heart, that’s how it was for Zoe. Why she got married so young, dropped out of school, and had her baby—Aaron—so young—you’d see the two of them, like a few years ago, you’d think for sure they were a sister and kid brother, not mother and son. I mean, you’d never think that Zoe had a kid that old, and that size, as Aaron!” Jacky paused, smiling. Jacky poured more rum into her mug and drank slowly.

  Another time there was a sound of shouts in the street, but Jacky didn’t seem to hear. “Hell it’s true, Zoe and I were not always friends. Zoe and Jacky were not always ‘sisters.’ Men will come between you, in certain circumstances. Once Zoe left Delray, and it didn’t work out with—y’know—Eddy Diehl—once that did not work out as she’d thought—there was tension between us having to do with men. Because there was always a man—there was always men—interested in Zoe. She had a wild streak, nobody can blame me. Once she got onstage and singing and the audiences loved her, it got too hard to say no. Ask who turned Zoe onto drugs, it wasn’t me. Nor heavy drinking, either. I mean, we were drinking back in high school, guys supplied us. Guys supplied us with pot, speed, ‘coke.’ Not ‘crack cocaine’—that came later. Now, high school kids are into that shit, but not us. We’d drink beer, and pass out. We’d smoke pot, and pass out. We were like—‘flower children’! We were kind of innocent, back then. I grew up a half-mile from Zoe, on North Fork Road. We’d walk to the school bus stop together. Later, we got rides with guys together. Zoe could be the sweetest thing, but kind of devious. She’d never s a y what she wanted but she’d get her way. A kind of corkscrew way. Her family was the Hawksons. They could’ve taken her in—when she kind of collapsed, and came here to live with me—but they wouldn’t. ‘Washed their hands’ of Zoe was the word. The fuckers! Call themselves Christians—‘Presbatyrians’—the worst kind of prigs. Well, things I would not have done, ever—guys I wouldn’t have broken promises to, ever—Zoe did. She had a dangerous way of thinking that, sexy as she was, good-looking and a girl country-and-western singer with a band, she’d be forgiven for doing things that others of us, not so good-looking, with maybe not so sexy a figure and not so great a voice, would not.” Jacky paused, shaking her jowly face with a look of bulldog satisfaction. Then she continued, in a higher-pitched voice as if confronting her accusers: “There’s people blame me, Zoe’s God-damn family blames me, that I was the one turned her onto hard drugs—heroin—Jesus!—that’s a joke. God damn hypercrites—hypocrites?—saying such things about me to the police, quoted in the damn newspaper, coming right out and saying—this ‘woman friend’ of Zoe Kruller—this ‘Jacqueline DeLucca’—she is to be held responsible for Zoe ‘going bad.’ Bullshit! That is such crude, cruel bullshit! Between her and Del, whatever it was, how’d I have anything to do with that?—or Zoe quitting her dairy job ’cause she was God-damned bored there she said, the smell of milk was making her puke, not to mention you never get tips in a job like that having to wait half the time on God-damn fucking kids. And if there’s no liquor license in a place, forget it. ’Cause you are not going to get fucking tips. You are not. Especially around here, in the Adirondacks where there’s a scarcity of jobs. So, out on the strip, Zoe could make serious money. At the Tip Top, at Chet’s Keyboard, Zoe was real popular, made more tips than any of the cocktail waitresses, but she was hoping to get a gig there singing, and there was the hope that her band—Black River Breakdown—would get a recording contract, one of these days. That never happened, but it could have. And on the Strip, guys were tripping over one another’s feet to get to Zoe to buy her a drink, or dinner, or take her to Montreal, or Atlantic City, or Vegas—which was where she was going, to Vegas, with some new man friend she’d only just met. At least that was Zoe’s belief, when”—Jacky paused as if a bad taste had come into her mouth, she had no choice but to swallow it down—“it happened. But see, Zoe never needed me. Sure I introduced her to a few guys, guys I knew like Csaba, who owns Chet’s Keyboard Lounge, and some other guys out on the Strip, ’cause I know them, and they know me, and they wanted to meet Zoe. And these guys, out on the Strip, that frequent the clubs, and have money, they’re not guys from Sparta, weren’t born here and didn’t know Delray Kruller, never heard of him. ‘Kruller Cycle Shop’—‘Kruller Auto Repair’—nothing they ever heard of, or gave a damn about. Things that are such a big deal in Sparta—in some circles in Sparta—people don’t know anything about nor give a damn about elsewhere. Sure some of the guys must’ve known that Zoe was married, or used to be married, but—so what? She’d tell them she was ‘separated,’ she was filing for ‘divorce.’ No way anybody could guess her husband was a kind of dangerous hothead—part-Seneca Indian, and a drinker—or if they knew, they didn’t take it seriously or give a damn, like I said none of them would’ve known Delray Kruller, who he was. Zoe was hoping this trip she was going on—to Vegas—might lead to something more permanent, not that Zoe wanted to get married again—she did not—but, say, if a man wanted to invest in Zoe’s singing career, and kind of take care of her—that, she’d have liked. There was a way of Zoe being so hopeful, like a young girl sometimes. Could’ve been your age! ‘I need a change of scene, Jacky,’ Zoe told me, ‘I feel like there is another world somewhere else, waiting for me. Ohhh I feel like I will suffocate here.’ In mimicry of her friend Jacky spoke in a low throaty girlish voice. A look of slow-delayed horror came into her face. “I just can’t believe that Zoe is—gone. There was nobody more alive than Zoe, of anybody I knew. And now—to think—that”—Tears came into Jacky’s eyes, compulsively she caressed her bruised, soft-raddled throat. “It was my belief that Delray was making trouble for Zoe again. ’Cause he was still in love with her—he’d always been crazy for her, and Zoe was crazy for him—except, you know, how things get in the way—‘intervene’—he’d go through a spell he was agreed they could get divorced, then he’d change his mind, and stall, and Delray, or one of Delray’s friends, would turn up where Zoe was, like ‘stalking’ her. Zoe told me, ‘Anything bad happens to me, Jacky, it will be Delray.’ I told the police this but so far as I know they have not arrested him, or anybody, only just questioned him and let him go—took him into ‘custody’ then let him go—it’s been how long now, since February? How many weeks? My God! Poor Zoe! You can know a thing like your friend is gone but—you can’t believe it, somehow. I keep thinking that Zoe will come down the stairs there—right through there, see?—the stairs—sleepy and yawning or maybe all dressed up, in her high heels, looking good, and some guy is coming in a few minutes to pick her up, and I’m asking when is she going to be back, does she have any idea, and Zoe laughs and says, ‘When I’m good and ready to be back, Jacky. Just like you.’ That night, Krista, it was my fault maybe, I was away. That night and half the next day. This guy, this friend of mine from Watertown, just showed up and wanted to see me, wanted to party, I was with him when Zoe was killed here, at that very hour I was miles away. I have given the police my statement about this. I didn’t get back to Sparta until around noon and by that time this place was all opened up like there’d been a fire and police were here and poor Zoe—her body—had been taken away to—I guess—the county morgue. Just like that! I come up the walk here and there’s this big barrel-chested guy looking at me—‘Jacqueline DeLucca, is
that your name?’ with a look in his face like he’s smelling something bad. Because they’d been looking through this house, in all the rooms, that wasn’t so clean, I guess, and talking to neighbors. Because they judge you, sons of bitches just looking at you, thinking they know you. Thinking they can put a name to you—‘hooker,’ ‘whore.’

  This detective is saying to me, ‘Jacqueline DeLucca, you will come with us’ not even giving me time to take in what had happened to my friend, no time to cry for Zoe, I was in such shock they were telling me she’d been murdered, ‘There’s been a homicide here, this is a homicide scene’ they were saying, nobody gave a damn how I was crying, I was close to fainting with the shock of it, and them not letting me go upstairs—not letting me into my own house—my health is not so good—I have had ‘complications’ after some surgery—my blood pressure is high—there is diabetes in my family I am so afraid of getting—shaking and crying and the Sparta PD bastards did not give a damn like I was not sincere in my grief for Zoe—‘Chill it, Jacky. Tone it down’—like they knew me, and had a right to call me Jacky. I had to stay with friends, couldn’t even return to my own house for days, and then I had to—nobody warned me—I had to clean Zoe’s bedroom. You would think the police or somebody would do that awful work but no, you must do it yourself no matter how exhausted and grief-stricken. And now, I can’t even go upstairs. I sleep downstairs on a couch. I can’t sleep anyway, it’s like whoever came in here and hurt Zoe the way he did has hurt me, my heart pounds sometimes so hard I think it will burst. I keep thinking—what if he comes back, to kill me? What if he does the terrible things to me, he did to Zoe? The police say that I have to tell them everything I know, all the men’s names, they’ve had me looking at photographs, till I am exhausted. I was begging them, ‘I don’t want to die, officers! You can’t protect me every hour of my life.’ I told them that, and I told them that I knew of ‘police witnesses’ who were killed, and they looked at me like I was scum, and they said, ‘If you don’t tell us all that you know you can be arrested, Jacky,’—’cause they’d found some drugs in the house, only just painkillers, and a nickel bag of coke. There’s a law, they said, about ‘controlled substances’ on the premises, saying I am going to be charged with narcotics possession with intention to distribute if I don’t cooperate. A charge like that, you can be incarcerated for twenty years! Right then I near-about broke down. I could hardly get to a bathroom in time. They were more disgusted than I was, like I was sick to my stomach on purpose. What disgusts me is—if there is less than one hundred dollars’ narcotics in this house—that came in with Zoe, and not with me—it is any kind of big deal compared to all the thousands of dollars these guys sell every day, all across the state, that the cops know about, and are getting a percentage of? Like they need to go after Jacky DeLucca, to tell them what they already know! As if I would give them the names of my friends. And the ones who are not my friends, I would be crazy to give them. I had the shakes so bad! Damn cops have no sympathy for a person like me, a woman who is not a wife or a mother, saying, ‘You need to go into rehab, Jacky. You’re a drunk and a junkie’—saying such insults, to my face. ‘You’re going to wind up like your friend Zoe, unless you cooperate with us.’ I told them that I didn’t know every single thing about Zoe’s private life, and this is so. I didn’t know who the man was, Zoe’s new friend she was so hopeful about, or even if he was a ‘new’ friend or some guy she’d been seeing in the past. Because Zoe was like that, if she broke up with a guy he wouldn’t go away, exactly. Like Delray did not ever go away, he was always trying to get back together with her. And Zoe had another man friend—I won’t say his name, Krista—he was a married man and crazy for her, she said, but there was ‘no future’ with him, he would not ever leave his family. His wife he might leave, but not his children, he just could not. So Zoe said it was hopeless and didn’t want to see him, but he’d call her, and he’d come around, they were like each other’s bad habit, that couldn’t be shaken. This man’s name, I had to give to the police—they’d have found out anyway, and make trouble for me. I was so scared, they would arrest me on ‘obstruction of justice’—‘interfering with a police investigation.’ They never did believe me that I didn’t know the man’s name—the one who was taking her to Vegas, that Zoe was so hopeful about. One night at Chet’s she was invited to sing with the jazz players there—just three of them—and Zoe was asked to sing—‘Both Sides Now’ was one of her best songs—and this guy is at the bar listening, he’s impressed he says, really impressed—he can arrange for an audition for her in Vegas at one of the casinos he says, where he has contacts. So I think it was the next day, they were headed for Vegas. I think that’s what Zoe told me. She was saying, ‘Maybe I won’t ever come back, Jacky!’—kind of excited, kissing my cheek and hugging me and too nervous to sit still, ‘Tell Aaron good-bye from his mom, and for sure I will be calling him, maybe in a few months I will be a headliner there, at one of the casinos, I can send a plane ticket for Aaron and he can come join me.’ So I said sure Zoe, I would do that. And Zoe says, ‘And you too, Jacky—you can come visit me in Vegas’ like it’s going to happen, the way people talk when they’re high. When you are high you are hopeful. Take away the high and you take away hope. And that night…Jesus!” Jacky paused, wiping at her mascara-smeared eyes with a paper napkin. On her cheeks were streaks of something ashy-dark like muddy tears. “I don’t know what is worse—to think that, if I’d been here, and I wasn’t, Zoe would not have been killed; or, if I’d been here, and this guy came for Zoe, he’d have killed me, too. I tried to tell the police this, but they just kept asking me the same questions. Like I did not know the man from Vegas’s name, or if I did, it didn’t sink in. And this guy I was with that night, we drove over to the Oneida casino where he got drunk and lost big at blackjack—staked me to five hundred dollars which I wish to hell I’d saved some out of instead of losing it all—like I said when you get high you get hopeful and that fucks you up. The thing was, the name he gave me was a fake name it turned out, ‘Cornell George Hardy’ he called himself like he was from a classy family but the police found out that wasn’t his name, naturally they act like I was the one who made it up—‘Cornell George Hardy.’ Says he was some kind of ‘investment banker’ in Syracuse—he’d turn up sometimes, weekends—stayed at a big suite at the Marriott, he’d have parties—lots of coke, he was generous with—how’d I know that ‘Cornell George Hardy’ wasn’t his name? First thing, I’d thought he was saying ‘Colonel’—like in the army. Or is it navy? But it wasn’t ‘Colonel’ it was ‘Cornel.’ Anyway it was a fake. But we had good times together. He treated me O.K. He wasn’t a mean drunk but got funny-sad and sleepy. Police checked with the desk clerk at the motel we stayed in to see if I was telling them the truth and it turns out I am, so why’d they need to even know the name of the guy I was with, if ‘Cornell George Hardy’ was with me all night and I was with him? No matter his name he couldn’t be the one who’d hurt Zoe—could he? No more than I could be! So, finally they let me go. ‘We ain’t gonna bust you, Jacky. We’re homicide not vice.’ Ha-ha. How’d I get back here that day?—had to call some guy I knew, woke him in the middle of the day and asked him to get me. Bastards wouldn’t even drive me. Because I didn’t know where else to go. Because if I went home, my mother would say, ‘Jacqueline, Jesus can help you if you give Him room in your heart.’ This is scary to me, I believe that my mother is probably right but it isn’t the time for Jesus in my heart right now—there is too much else there. I am not worthy. Most days I feel just so sick about Zoe. Oh God, I mean losing Zoe. My closest friend and my sister Zoe. And there was poor Zoe’s blood smeared on the wall. Soaked into the bed. All the bedclothes, she’d borrowed from me. There was a nice pink comforter. And he’ d strangled her, too—with a towel, they said. Some people would say with his hands but that was not correct, it was with a towel. And he’d hit her head so bad, he cracked the skull. That caused all the blood. A head wound bleeds like hell, t
he detective said. He said whoever did it used the towel like a ‘garrote’—you can tighten, and loosen, and tighten again. He’d hit her with something like a claw hammer, they said. They did not find this hammer on the premises. The killer took it with him, threw it into the river probably and it will never be found. Who’d ever find it? They were asking did I keep a hammer in the house and I told them no, I didn’t think so, but the house is rented, it might’ve been in the cellar or some closet somewhere. But if he’d brought it with him into the house it would mean that he’d meant to kill her ahead of time and this really scared me—maybe he’d come back, and kill me? This guy opened a window, they said, so snow was blown into the bedroom so the air was real cold and Zoe’s body got to be part-frozen they said, and he’d pulled some covers up over her, and some of her clothes he covered her with, and—this makes me shiver—he took talcum powder of mine, white talcum powder—‘White Shoulders’—he sprinkled on Zoe, and on the bed—all over. On the walls where the blood was wet and sticky, and it froze there. And all over the floor. He’d tracked his footprints in it on the floor. So it looked like a ‘frost’ the cops said. First thing they thought it had to be coke, cocaine—but no, ‘White Shoulders’—that smells like lily of the valley—talcum powder Zoe shared with me. And this powder everywhere mixed in with blood, I had to clean up, too. I was sobbing, and trembling, this was so awful! I couldn’t just vacuum up the powder—the blood would’ve gotten inside the vacuum and ruined it. Had to use paper towels, a sponge mop, till I got sick, and now I am not going upstairs anymore…not anywhere near that room, not ever. ‘Why’d he do that, with the talcum powder,’ I asked the detective, the one who’s always looking at me like there’s a bad smell on me, but he’s kind of teasing and smirking, too, and calls me ‘Jacky’ like we are old friends—his name is Egloff—I never heard of any ‘Egloff ’ and wonder what nationality it is—I don’t like him, and I don’t trust him—and he says, ‘Why’d any of them do anything, there’s no logic to what an animal will do.’ A sneer in his face like he’s thinking Friends of yours, aren’t they?