Little Bird of Heaven. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ age, isn’t he, Ben? In the paper it says ‘fourteen.’”

      Irritably Ben said, “What’s that got to do with it, Mom? I told you, he’s a year behind me. I don’t know him.”

      “But he isn’t from the reservation, is he? He isn’t a full-blooded Indian, is he? ‘Delray Kruller’—he isn’t an Indian.”

      “Jesus, Mom! What difference does it make? What are we talking about?” Ben was becoming frantic, furious. This doggedness in our mother—this persistence, in the most trivial details—had a way of upsetting Ben even more than it upset me.

      Let it go, Mom. Please let it go would be my silent plea.

      Still our mother persisted: “That poor boy. That’s who I feel sorry for, in all this. Just a child, to discover—her.” Even now, our mother could not bring herself to utter the name Zoe Kruller, only just her in a tone of disgust.

      Ben turned away with a shrug. He hadn’t looked at me at all.

      Of course, Ben knew Aaron Kruller. He’d known Aaron Kruller since grade school.

      But it was like Ben, not to talk about things that upset him. The fact that Zoe Kruller had died, that someone we’d known had died, seemed to embarrass him. My brother was of an age when, if you couldn’t shrug and make a wisecrack about something, you turned away with a pained smirk.

      To me he said, out of the corner of his mouth, “Kruller’s mom—that ‘Zoe’—know what she was? A slut.”

      Slut? I felt the word sharp and cracking like a slap across my silly-girl face.

      “A slut is a female that fucks. Aaron Kruller’s mom was a slut, and a junkie, too. That was why she left the dairy. That was why she left off singing. And Aaron didn’t go running out to ‘summon help’—they found him with her, where she was dead, and”—Ben’s voice lowered even further, creased and cracked with hilarity—“he’d shit his pants. That news you won’t find in the paper.”

      In the paper—in the succession of newspapers that would come into my hands—some of them hidden from us by our mother, in a drawer of her cedar bureau, others shared with me by my girlfriends at school—I would see Zoe Kruller’s smiling face gazing up at me, on the verge of winking at me Krissie! What can I do you for today?

      That riddle to which there was no answer.

      As she’d turn to Daddy lifting her fevered glamour-face like a flower taunting you to pick it Mis-ter Diehl! And what can I do you for—today?

      The most commonly printed photograph of Zoe Kruller—which in time would find its way into state-wide newspapers though never into national publications nor syndicated by the Associated Press, so far as I knew—was the one in which Zoe posed with fellow musicians from Black River Breakdown, in her spangled low-cut girl-singer attire, and with her hair crimped and springy and electric-looking cascading over one semi-bare shoulder. Another more casual photo showed a younger Zoe smiling at the camera at a sly angle as if she’d been teasing the photographer, with the exuberant ease of a high school cheerleader or prom queen. How many times these and other likenesses of Zoe Kruller, Sparta murder victim would be reprinted, how many times I would stare at them in wonderment that I had ever known her—that of course I knew her, still—never in my life would Krista Diehl not-know Zoe Kruller from Honeystone’s—and each time it seemed to me a wrongful thing, a nightmare-thing, a cruel taunting joke that in these photographs Zoe had been smiling with such trust, never imagining that, one day, her picture would be printed—reprinted—in newspapers—shown on local TV news—with the identification Zoe Kruller, Sparta Murder Victim.

      Though I was young for eleven, young in the ways of the (adult, even the adolescent) world yet the admonition came to me She should not have been smiling like that.

      The early headlines were enormous banner heads running the width of the Sparta Journal.

      SPARTA WOMAN, 34, FOUND BEATEN, STRANGLED

      Death of Local Bluegrass Singer Investigated by Police

      Focus on “Men Friends”—“Visitors”

      Later, headlines would diminish, and their tone would subtly alter in tone:

      BLUEGRASS SINGER’S PRIVATE LIFE YIELDS “SURPRISES”

      Sparta Detectives Continue Investigation Following “Leads”

      In our household, no one spoke of Zoe Kruller. It was a time—I guess it wasn’t the first time—when Daddy was often working late, or had to stay away overnight “on business”—and Mommy was edgy and impatient with Ben and me if we asked about him—“He’s away. He’s working. How do I know where he is, ask him yourself!”

      Which was so illogical, even Ben couldn’t think how to reply.

      The phone, which had not often rung, rang often now. And Mom, who hadn’t often used the phone, was using it often now. At a distance from us, upstairs in the big bedroom into which we were not welcome except by invitation—when I helped my mother houseclean and vacuum, for instance—or in the kitchen with the door so oddly, unnaturally closed—the maple wood cedar door which Daddy had installed in the kitchen was never closed.

      Except now, sometimes it was. When Ben and I returned from school on the school bus and tramped into the mudroom at the rear with our snow-wetted boots, there was the kitchen door closed over, and we could hear our mother speaking on the phone in her low urgent accusing panicky voice that was a warning to us, not to approach her But what—? What will—happen? What does this mean? Will there be an—arrest? How can there be an arrest, if—A lawyer? Why would he need a lawyer? Oh God a lawyer—we can’t afford a—

      Ben was stony-faced, kicking off his boots and stomping away upstairs loud enough so that Mom might hear. Ben ignored my entreaties as he ignored my stricken look, my wounded thumb shoved to my mouth so that I could gnaw at the nail and cause the cuticle to bleed a little more.

       What does he say, you know what he says! Well he won’t talk to me—maybe he’ll talk to you—But no lawyer, that’s—No that’s crazy—

      This excited voice of my mother’s—this tone of reproach, bewilderment, humiliation, anger—suggested that she was speaking with her older brother, or with one of her sisters. I didn’t want to hear!—quickly I pressed my hands over my ears and stomped upstairs after my brother.

       Well, say! Thought it was you.

       What can I do you for, Krissie?

      Tried to make myself cry staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and speaking in Zoe Kruller’s throaty-scratchy voice but I didn’t cry, not one tear.

       9

      DADDY, we could not ask.

      Not Krista, not Ben. Not our mother.

      Not about Mrs. Kruller-whose-picture-was-in-the-paper. Not about the homicide.

      There СКАЧАТЬ