Little Bird of Heaven Read online

  “Jesus, Puss! It’s been a hell of a long time.”

  My father grabbed me: rough bear-hug, wet-scratchy kiss, unshaven jaws, fumey smell of his breath.

  “Sweet li’l Puss”—“Krissie-baby.” Names no one had called me in a very long time.

  As no one had hugged, kissed me like this in a very long time.

  Daddy must have been forty-five—forty-six?—now. A large tall man—six foot four, 220 pounds—mostly solid meaty-muscle though beginning to slacken at the waist. He’d been a high school athlete (football, baseball) and in his early twenties he’d been a Private First Class in the U.S. Army (Vietnam) and he walked now with a slight limp in his right leg (shrapnel, wartime). He had declined to tell Ben and me about his Vietnam experiences, or adventures—we were certain that he’d had some—though we had never located any Vietnam snapshots, souvenirs, even Daddy’s medals (Purple Heart, Distinguished Service Medal) or letters from friends—he’d had to have had friends in his platoon, Eddy Diehl was such a gregarious man—but always he’d shrug us off evasively muttering It’s over, kids. Don’t go there.

  Our mother didn’t encourage us to “provoke” Daddy. He was hurt, he was in the hospital for eight weeks. His mother told me, they thought he might not live.

  And another time our mother told us, in a lowered voice He has never talked about it with me and it’s best that way.

  In scorn I’d thought: What kind of selfish wife doesn’t even want to know about her husband in the war?

  How easily, Daddy could have crushed me in his embrace. I would not realize until afterward—I mean years afterward—that Daddy may have been frightened of me, of the fact of me so suddenly with him, in his car; his laughter was loud, delighted. Possibly it was the laughter of disbelief, wonder, a pang of conscience—My daughter? My daughter I am forbidden to see? She has come to me, this is—her?

  “That’s my good girl. My good—brave—girl.”

  Tenderly my father’s large hands framed my face. My father’s large calloused hands. Once I had seen my father seize my mother’s face in his hands like this—not in love but in fury, exasperation—to make my mother listen, to make my mother see—and the long-ago memory came to me now, with a stab of panic. And yet, how unresisting I was: like a child whose anxiety has at last been quelled, all fear banished even fear of Daddy. Such luxury to be so gripped, so kissed and so loved. I knew that my father would never hurt me. Tears stung my eyes, ran down my face that throbbed with hurt from having been struck by a carelessly thrown basketball within the past hour. I could not have recalled when my mother had last kissed or even hugged me—could not have recalled when I’d last wished to be kissed or hugged by her. Such displays of emotion would have embarrassed us both. We’d have steeled ourselves to hear my brother say—this was one of Ben’s too-frequent household remarks delivered in a droll dry voice of disgust—Cut the crap for Christ’s sake. This ain’t TV.

  This was not TV, I thought. This was improvised, unknown. This had not happened before. Or, if it had happened, it had not happened to me.

  School buses were idling nearby, sending up sprays of exhaust. My classmates were running through the rain and there was much commotion in the parking lot as the buses were loading, preparing to leave. Headlights would have illuminated my father’s and my excited faces which Eddy Diehl would not have wished.

  Is that—Eddy Diehl? The one who—

  Is he with his daughter? What’s-her-name—

  Quickly Daddy put his car in gear, drove out of the parking lot.

  In the rain we drove for some confused yet exhilarant minutes. Not knowing where he was taking us—Edgehill Street, East End Avenue, Union Avenue—lower Main Street, a turn and steeply downhill to Depot-these streets of Sparta so familiar, in truth they lacked names to me—they were but directions, impulses—taking us away from my school where we might be recognized but lacking a destination since there was no longer a common destination in our lives.

  With something of his old pride in such showy purchases my father was telling me about the car he was driving, a 1976 Caddie he’d acquired just in time for this visit. The finish was “Red Canyon” and the interior was “cream-colored leather, genuine.” This “beaut” of a car naturally came with power steering, whitewall tires, V-eight engine, air-conditioning, radio and tape deck, more mileage for the gallon than any other U.S. “luxury car.”

  It was so, Daddy conceded, the Caddie’s chassis had had to be rebuilt after a rear-ending but the engine was in “damned good shape—you can hear it.”

  I listened, I could hear it. Eagerly I nodded Yes yes! I can hear it.

  Stammering with schoolgirl emotion I told my father that this was the most beautiful car of his, ever. The most fantastic car I’d ever ridden in.

  “Well. Pretty close, Puss.”

  Maybe what I said was true. Daddy’s specialty-autos had all been spectacular. But each spectacular vehicle—Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, Lincoln Versailles, Chevy Corvair, vintage Thunderbird and vintage Studebaker—had a way of displacing its predecessor as the most vivid and seductive dreams are displaced by their predecessors, and begin at once to fade.

  There was a pause, I knew that my father would have liked to ask what kind of car Lucille was driving now. By implication Your life with your mother is pitiable. Like the love you get from your mother. But then I thought that Eddy Diehl would probably know exactly what sort of car Lucille was driving—which of the not-new but serviceable cars sold to her by relatives, or given to her outright.

  Yes, my father would surely have known what my mother was driving at this time. Before seeking me out at school Daddy would have sighted and observed my mother at the Second Time ’Round Shop—he’d have parked up the street, or in the parking lot at the rear. It was known that Eddy Diehl kept “close tabs” on his former wife Lucille by way of those several Diehl cousins with whom he remained close, conspiratorial; most of the Diehls continued to “believe in” Eddy, and detested Eddy’s former wife for not having “stood by him” when he’d needed her so badly.

  And so it seemed to me suddenly, my father probably knew more about my mother’s private life than Ben and I knew, who would not have had the thought that our middle-aged, fretting and deeply unhappy mother could have a private life!

  “—a little surprised, Krista but it’s a good surprise, how you’ve grown. I mean—tall. You’re going to be a tall girl. And pretty. You’re going to be damn pretty. Not that you aren’t pretty now, Puss—but—”

  Daddy spoke distractedly as he drove the showy Cadillac through the rain, now beneath a railroad overpass where skeins of water lifted like wings behind us and I feared something might happen to the high-caliber engine, and we’d be stuck in a foot of water, “—and playing basketball with those girls—big tough Indian-looking girls—frankly, Puss, your Daddy was—” In a kind of genial-Daddy wonderment his voice trailed off. This was the sort of praise you might direct toward a child about whom you are thinking very different thoughts.

  When my father wasn’t speaking in his loud blustery in-control Daddy voice, I’d come to hear another sort of voice: one that bore a wounded sweetness. Sometimes I woke from tumultuous dreams hearing this voice, recalling no coherent words but shivering with yearning. Observing my father now I saw that—of course, this should not have been suprising—he looked older. His face had thickened at the jawline, his skin was weathered and creased with a look like hard-baked bread. The thick rust-red hair threaded with mica-gray was in fact thinning at the back of his head where he was spared having to see it as he was spared having to see, and kept hidden from the world, the mass of swirling scar tissue, of the color of lard, that disfigured much of his right leg and knee.

  Never did Eddy Diehl wear shorts, on the hottest days of summer. Never had he gone swimming with us, at Wolf’s Head Lake.

  Though I’d glimpsed the injured leg, from time to time. I’d had to wonder if my mother saw it often, in my parents’ bedroom; if my mot
her was suffused with love for Daddy, for having suffered in wartime combat, or whether she felt a subtle revulsion for the disfigured flesh.

  If she felt a subtle revulsion for my father’s maleness. His sexuality.

  Daddy was saying now, how he’d been missing me. How he’d missed his “beautiful daughter”—how “God-damned depressed and in despair” he’d been missing his daughter he loved “more than anything on this earth.”

  Steering the car through deep puddles of rainwater with one hand and with the other groping for my hand, capturing both my hands, clasping both hands together in his single hand, hard.

  I tried not to wince. I loved such sudden pain!

  I said, shyly, “Daddy, I missed you, too. I don’t know why Mom—”

  “No ‘Mom,’ Krista. Not right now.”

  Despite his unshaven jaws and slightly disheveled hair threaded with gray, my father was looking handsome, I thought. Even with his battered face, discolored pouches of skin beneath his eyes as if he hadn’t been sleeping well, or had been rubbing his fists into his eyes, and his forehead creased in thought or worry, Eddy Diehl was a handsome man. The suede coat he wore seemed to be padded with a woolly down like a large upright tongue—what comfort such a burly coat could give, if you were squeezed against it. And dark-graying hairs sprouting up from Daddy’s chest visible at his throat, what comfort in pressing my face against that throat, hiding my face there.

  We’d ascended from the rain-pelted dark of Depot Street, the warehouse district, the scrubby waterfront of the Black River, now turning onto the Highlands Bridge that was a beautiful suspension bridge above the river with a wire-net surface that hummed beneath our car tires. A wild happiness was loosed inside the 1976 Caddie Seville with the cream-colored leather interior, Canyon Red finish and whitewall tires—“Fasten your seat belt! Taking off!” Daddy was laughing, of sheer delight, or defiance; I heard myself laugh, excited and uneasy.

  Where was Daddy taking me? Across the suspension bridge, into a now lightly falling rain, mist rising from the invisible river below and a blurred vision of lights along the river, the dim stretch of derelict riverfront brick mills and factories shut down for as long as I could remember—Link Ladies Luxury Hosiery, Reynolds Bros. Paper Goods, Johnston Tomato Cannery.

  These familiar Sparta landmarks I’d been seeing all my life long before the trouble had destroyed my family.

  “—damned proud, Krista. Seeing my li’l girl mixing it up with those big hulking girls.”

  Big hulking girls seemed to mean something other than its words. Big hulking girls contained something sexy, sniggering.

  I asked Daddy how he’d known where I was? That I’d stayed after school, and was in the gym? Daddy tapped the side of his nose saying, “Your old man has you on his radar, Krista. Better believe it.”

  Was he drunk, I wondered. Growly-teasing voice, his words just perceptibly slurred.

  And yet: there is no happiness like being fifteen years old and being driven by your (forbidden) father to a destination you can’t—yet—guess. Your handsome (forbidden) father so clearly exulting in your presence as in his possession of you as a thief might gloat over having made away with the most precious of valuables, and no one in pursuit.

  I was thinking how no one else loved me like this. No one else would wish to possess me.

  Years ago before my father had moved from Sparta, in that interregnum of confusion and nightmare when Edward Diehl was being “taken into police custody”—“released from police custody”—banished from our household but living with relatives locally, it would happen that, as if by accident, Daddy would turn up at places where Ben and I were: boarding the school bus after school, at the mall while our mother was shopping for groceries, riding our bicycles along the Huron Pike Road. I was thrilled to see Daddy waving at us but Ben stiffened and turned away.

  Muttering under his breath Like some damn ghost haunting us. Wish he would die!

  It was a nasty side of Ben, I’ve never forgiven him, the eager way he reported back to our mother: “Daddy was following us! Daddy waved at us!” My mother was terrified—or wished to declare that she was terrified—that my father might “kidnap” us, such incidents left her semihysterical with indecision. Should she call the police, should she call my father’s family, should she try to ignore Eddy Diehl’s “harassment” or—what should would a responsible mother do?

  No one knew. Many opinions were offered but no one knew. If you believed that Edward Diehl might have murdered—“strangled in her bed”—a Sparta woman who’d been his “mistress”—yes, “mistress” was the very term, boldly printed in local papers and pronounced on local radio and TV—you would naturally think that Edward Diehl should be forbidden to approach his children; if you believed that Edward Diehl was an innocent man, in fact a “good and loving” father to those children, you naturally felt otherwise.

  A family splits apart just once, all that you learn will be for the first time.

  “…but if you want to hold your own with tough girls like that, sweetie, you need to be more aggressive. You aren’t actually the shortest girl I saw on the court but you’re the least ‘developed’—I mean that muscularly—and you need to be meaner, and to take more chances. A good athlete isn’t thinking of herself but the team. If you’re cautious thinking you might be hurt—’cause you can always be hurt, for sure, in any sport—you’ll be a deficit not an asset to your teammates.”

  Deficit. Asset. In my father’s voice was an echo of a long-ago high school coach.

  I was hurt, Daddy was criticizing me! Daddy was not praising me as I’d expected he would.

  “I was watching those girls. Three or four of them are pretty impressive for their age. The one with the black hair shaved up the sides like a guy, must be a Seneca Indian?—yes?—the way she was ducking, using her elbows, twisting in midair tossing the basket—she’s dynamite. You can tell she’s been playing with guys, out there on the rez. And that big busty gal, with the peroxide streaks, the way she got the ball from you, just whipped it out of your hands. And that six-foot girl who almost trampled you, straight black hair and face like a hatchet—”

  “Dolores Stillwater.”

  “She’s Indian, right? From the rez?”

  Why are we talking about these girls! Why aren’t we talking about me!

  “If you want athletes like that to take you seriously, Krissie, you’ll have to work a little harder. Not just shooting baskets—from a stationary position, that isn’t hard. But on the run, playing defensively, holding your own, showing them you’re willing to hurt them—foul them—if those little bitches get in your way. An athlete has to make a decision, early on—Coach told us, in junior high—‘Either it’s you, or it’s them.’ Either you spare yourself the risk, and they take the risk—or you take it, and run right over them. A player who gets fouled all the time isn’t worth crap. If you don’t want to take the risk, Puss, maybe you shouldn’t be playing any sport at all.”

  I was remembering: how like our father this was. Ben’s father, and mine. You thought you might be praised for something—anyway, not found lacking—but somehow, as Daddy pondered the subject, turning it this way and that in his thoughts as we’d see him turn a defective work tool in his fingers—it wasn’t praise that was deserved after all but a harsh but honest critique.

  In his work, Daddy was something of a perfectionist: his shrewd professional eye picked up mistakes invisible to other eyes. So Daddy once tore out tile in our kitchen floor he’d laid laboriously himself, cursing and red-faced he ripped out wallpaper over which he’d toiled for hours in summer heat, he repainted walls because the shade of paint he’d chosen “wasn’t right” and it was “driving him crazy” he’d built a redwood deck at the rear of our house to which he was always adding features, or subtracting features; on our property, work was “never done”—there was “always something to fix up” but it was dangerous to offer to help Daddy, for Daddy’s standards were high, and Daddy was incl
ined to be impatient snatching away from my brother’s fumbling fingers a hammer, a screwdriver, an electric sander—when, years ago, poor Ben was eager to be Daddy’s apprentice carpenter around the house.

  Fucking up was what Eddy Diehl hated. Fucking up—his own mistakes, or others’ mistakes—drove him crazy.

  If you’d known my parents socially—not intimately—you’d have assumed that my mother might be difficult to please, and Eddy Diehl with his feckless smile and easy demeanor the one to let things go as they would, but in fact my father was the one whom any kind of fuckup enraged for it was a sign of a man losing control of his surroundings. In the confrontation of a fuckup anywhere in our vicinity my mother Lucille became alarmed and frightened, anxious how my father would react.

  Not until the time of the court order banishing Eddy Diehl from our property and our lives would I learn the extent to which my mother was terrified of my father’s quick, hot, “blind” temper.

  Maybe I should give up basketball?—sulkily I asked my father.

  My heart that had been swollen with elation, pride, wanting-to-impress Daddy was now shriveled as a prune.

  Steering the Caddie Seville onto an exit ramp, frowning and squinting through the rain-splotched windshield, my father seemed not to have heard me at first; then he said, more tenderly, “I didn’t say that, Krissie. Hell no. You’re learning. You’re promising. Sports is all about who you’re contending with, see? Like life, maybe. You’re only as good as your opponents let you be. They’re only as good as you let them be.”

  This was so. Uncontestably, this was so. Now I had an idea of what my father might be feeling, his opponents thwarting him, blocking him, trampling on his life. And I had a sharper memory of how when we’d all lived together in the house on Huron Pike Road the very air reverberated with the swelling and shrinking, the waning and waxing of my father’s mood.