Little Bird of Heaven (27 page)

Daddy paused, smiling. Daddy was wiping the revolver on a corner of the chenille bedspread, tenderly, distracted.

“Every fucking place in the Thousand Islands I helped build, I’d have liked to come back at night and set on fire. I had dreams like that, and woke up laughing. But you never do.”

Daddy was sitting heavily on the bed, that creaked beneath his weight. He’d begun to sweat visibly. He’d removed the suede jacket and tossed it aside—I was surprised to see how cheap a jacket it was, lacking a lining, and wondered how I could have mistaken it for something more expensive. Daddy’s face was ravaged-radiant, oily with sweat but
he seemed hardly conscious of his discomfort, wiping the gun in that tender exacting way as if he could conjure out of its grim and obdurate ugliness something magical. I remembered how at my grandfather’s farm we’d been told not ever to touch Grandpa’s guns; now he’d become an old man, he no longer hunted; he seemed to have turned against hunting; though he refused to talk about it, there’d been a “gun accident” in the family some years ago involving an older cousin of Ben’s and mine whom we’d never known, who had died somewhere on Grandpa’s property. My mother warned us not to ask questions about this cousin, or about pheasant hunting; she’d warned us not to go anywhere near Grandpa’s old guns he kept in a cabinet in the rear of the farmhouse. And now it seemed to be my mother to whom I was pleading
But Daddy would not hurt me, Daddy loves me
. Seeing my mother’s scornful expression I protested
Daddy would not hurt himself if I am here with him.

“Krista, hey—y’sure, you don’t want a Coke?” Daddy squinted at me with a fussy kind of half-drunk courtesy just this side of coercion. “’Cause we might be here a while, in this room.”

Numbly I shook my head
no.
I wasn’t hearing this.

“We’re going to decide a matter tonight, Krista. Your mother and me. That woman is still my ‘wife’—I am her ‘husband’—that won’t change. It involves you, that’s why you are here. And also—hell, y’know—your old man loves you.”

Daddy splashed bourbon into his glass, and drank. For a long moment he sat brooding, gazing at me. Weighing the gun in his hand.

I wanted to say
I love you too, Daddy.
My throat was very dry.

Daddy’s eyes shone with such emotion, such love—I wanted to think it was love—it was frightening, for it came so strong. He was saying he had evidence to show me—and to show my mother—he’d been assembling—how long?—years?—to take his case to the public—if that was the only alternative. “See, they’ve made me a desperate man, Krista. But they’ve made me a better man, I think. Stronger. My soul like—
steel.
”

Spread out on the rumpled bed were sheets of paper covered in handwriting—notebooks—folders crammed with newspaper clippings—pho
tocopies of letters both handwritten and awkwardly typed, with numerous corrections—which, Daddy said, he’d sent to Sparta police—to local, state, federal police—to local TV stations—to national TV networks—to the Sparta
Journal,
papers in Buffalo, Albany, the
New York Times,
and
Time
magazine.

He’d written to judges, he said. Herkimer County, New York State federal judges. All the names, addresses of judges he could locate. He’d written to the attorney general of the United States and to each of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D.C.

Seeing my startled and pained expression, Daddy said quickly, “Hey sure, sweetie, I know: most of these sons of bitches won’t read mail from ordinary people. From ‘citizens.’ But they have secretaries, right? Someone opens the mail, someone reads it. Has to be, otherwise—what if a letter contains a ‘threat’? They’d have to know. They’d want to know. There’s nothing in any of my letters like that, Krista—no. I’m not a fool. I don’t even
hint.
I just state the case—the way I was treated by the ‘law’—by ‘the authorities’—just facts—no ‘threats’—my hope was that someone would take note, someone would care—I realize that—that probably—”

His voice began to falter. I was trying to smile, my face ached with smiling and with my attentiveness to what my father was saying which I knew to be crucial, knowledge he was imparting to me for a reason. In my own faltering voice I told my father that it was wonderful he’d done so much work, he’d collected so much evidence, maybe I could help him—somehow, I could help him—

“The God-damned ironical thing is, if they’d arrested me? If they’d ‘tried’ me? Like it’s said—a citizen has the right to a trial?—to ‘clear his name’? Because if they’d done that, they would’ve had to find me ‘not guilty.’” The word
ironical
was strange in my ears, in my father’s urgent voice; here was a word no one in the Diehl family was likely to utter, except now Eddy Diehl could lay claim to it; as if to punctuate its strangeness, and confirm his claim, Daddy paused to drink, wiping again at his mouth. In these recent years he’d become a transformed man: no longer young. No longer a swaggering good-looking man after whom women
gazed with longing in public places. On his jaws coarse dark whiskers had sprouted, unevenly. There was a merriment to these whiskers, Daddy resembled a pirate in a children’s adventure film, you expected such a bewhiskered figure to wink, and laugh. Instead Daddy said, “I asked to be given a second lie detector test—‘polygraph.’ The first one, they said was ‘inconclusive.’ What the hell’s that mean—‘inconclusive’?—means it didn’t show that I was lying, right? But my God-damned lawyer steps in and says no, not a good idea, don’t take a second test. Because I was in a state of nerves, my blood pressure was up, he thought the test might ‘incriminate’ me if it went the wrong way, and I’d be truly fucked. So I never took it, I listened to him. I was in a fog, I wasn’t thinking clearly. And later I realized that was a mistake. Lots of mistakes I made, back then. Now, it’s too late. I would have to pay for a private test, and I can’t afford it, and anyway the fuckers wouldn’t credit it—lie detector results are not ‘admissible’ in court. They won’t even talk to me, now. I mean the Sparta police, the persecutors—
prosecutors.
Like I have ceased to exist. They never found the guilty man because they never looked for him in the right place. Delray—he had his rotten luck with lawyers, too. Bastards suck you dry like leeches. You get the impression they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, or give a damn, it’s just a job to them. Then you run out of money and they drop you, you’re on your own. Why’d the cops never arrest Delray?
He
was the one killed her. Who else? Zoe was always saying, ‘Anything happens to me, better believe it’s Delray. But nothing is going to happen to me.’ Then she’d laugh in that way she had, like something was destined to happen, it couldn’t be averted. When you’re high—Zoe loved to get high—you can’t ever comprehend that you will crash. That was Zoe’s mistake. One of Zoe’s mistakes. She thought she knew what was coming but in her heart she couldn’t truly believe it. Like all of us, I guess.” Daddy paused, rubbing his jaws. A thought had come to him like something wedged in his brain, suddenly shifting. “You know—Delray was maybe not the one. I’m remembering now, things I’ve been told, that were a surprise to me, I mean a considerable shock—there were other men who’d been seeing Zoe. Men she’d
taken money from. Delray and me, that poor bastard—we needed to talk. Badly we needed to talk and we never did. Just Delray and me, and this gun—Delray might’ve told me what happened that night, you think?”

Daddy laughed. Daddy was not speaking very coherently, his thoughts swerved and lurched like a drunken skier rapidly descending a treacherous slope. Impatiently he’d begun to shove papers back inside folders, as if they were embarrassing to him, he fumbled and dropped some of the yellowed clippings, without thinking I stooped to gather these neatly up and place in his shaking hand.

Daddy’s knuckles were skinned, bruised. As if he’d struck something. Someone.

“Thanks, honey. You’re a sweet kid. Christ! I’m so tired.”

The shaky hand holding the gun—the heavy dull-gleaming ugly gun—relaxed; the gun slipped from Daddy’s fingers and fell softly onto the bed. I thought
I can take that from him now. He wants me to take it from him.
And yet, I could not move. I was standing less than eighteen inches from the gun where it had fallen but I could not move. Always I would recall, I could not move. Not to snatch up the gun. For if I had—what would I have done with the gun? Would I have turned it on my father?—I would not have turned it on my father. I would not have backed away, lifted the gun in both trembling hands, aimed the barrel at my astonished father. Not ever.

He was oblivious of me, swaying on his feet. The animal-smell lifted from him, my nostrils pinched with a kind of thrilled disgust. Long ago when he’d lived with us my father had sometimes smelled like this returning from work, having sweated through his clothes through the long summer day, and my mother visibly recoiled from him—not rudely, not to insult—yet of course she’d insulted him—“Excuse me, Lu
cille.”
You wanted not to be near them, not to be a witness. In Daddy’s face the instinctive male resentment of the female—the too-fastidious female—he’d have liked to slap with his open hand, in that instant.

He hadn’t slapped my mother. Not ever, that I was a witness.

I would swear to this. When I’d been “interviewed”—not “interro
gated” but just “interviewed” with my mother and a Family Court officer present—I’d sworn to this.

Again Daddy was saying Christ how tired he was. With an air of surprise and chagrin and I thought
He will lie down now, he will sleep. I can run for help.

On the bedside table a digital clock made a whirring noise like a defective heart: the time was 6:56 P.M.

At home my mother would be awaiting me. And anxious for me. And angry, and hurt knowing that in my innermost heart I loved my father more than I loved her. Despite everything
It isn’t anything I can help. Even now. Forgive me!

It was help for my father I could run for. Not for me.

Outside the motel there were uplifted voices, a sound of car doors being slammed shut. On the highway the steady hum of traffic. But no one would come to room 23 of the Days Inn. No one would come to this room registered to “John Cass” to give aid to us, who were in such need.

I must have made a sudden involuntary movement—wiping my eyes with the fingertips of both hands—Daddy’s head jerked up and his eyes were alert and wary and I saw he’d snatched up the gun.

“What’s it—somebody outside? Who’s there?”

“Nobody. Just—somebody parking a car.”

On lurching feet Daddy went to the window. I saw that he was sodden with drink, narcotized. Yet his eyes shone dangerously. Eagerly he licked his lips like a ravenous dog. He poked fingers into the Venetian blind, to peer through the slats. Whoever was out there must have seemed to him of no consequence, finally. Daddy turned back to me, that tremor of merriment in his whiskers.

“Krista, you know that I love you, honey—you know that.”

Yes, I knew. How like doom it felt, to concede this.

“You were always my heart, Krista. My ‘little bird of heaven.’”

We were both remembering how Daddy used to swoop me up in his arms when I was a little girl, toss me into the air light as a cushion, catching me almost immediately as I squealed, kicked. Never was I in danger—
Daddy held me safe. If I panicked, began to cry—if I squealed and kicked too hard—Daddy hadn’t liked that.

“I think you should call your mother, Krista. It’s time now. Tell her that you’re with me, and I want her to speak with me, not over the phone but face-to-face. Explain, ‘Daddy will not hurt you.’” Daddy paused, smiling. The effort of that smile was of a man stooping to lift a weight that will shatter his spine.

Nervously I said that my mother might hang up, before I could explain.

Nervously I said I wished that he would put away the gun. It was frightening to me, that gun.

Daddy frowned. He was a daddy who did not like to be told what to do, not ever.

Sometimes you forgot that. When he appealed to you, when he seemed to be softening toward you. When you realized that it was a mistake, a mistake you must learn not to make, to confuse Daddy’s love for you with Daddy’s respect for you. A child is loved but not respected. You forgot that.

“She won’t hang up the phone. She will know not to hang up the phone this time.”

“Well, but—You know how Mom—”

“Fuck ‘Mom’! What’s ‘Mom’ done for you. I’m your Daddy, who loves you, right?”

“Yes but Daddy, the gun makes me—”

Wanting to say
afraid.
But my voice was weak, guilty-sounding.

In reproach Daddy said, “I would not hurt you, Krista. You must know that. It would end in an instant. A heartbeat. It would spare you pain. Honey, life is mostly pain—it’s like the Bible says—‘All is vanity beneath the sun.’ Vanity, and bullshit.” He laughed, like one who has said something witty by chance. With the gun he was indicating the phone on the bedside table. “Your mother is waiting for this call, Krista. Your mother is a smart woman, a shrewd woman, she knows that her ‘former husband’ is in Sparta, and if she knows this she knows why I’m here, and that this
is the last time I am going to beg her. This is the last time for all of us. She knows this, I think. I think she knows this. I want my family back that was taken wrongfully from me. I want my life back that was taken wrongfully from me. The decision is your mother’s. It’s her responsibility. She calls herself a Christian—right? She kneels, and prays, and whoever the fuck she prays to, God the Father, or His son the Savior, they’ve got to be giving her good advice—right? ‘Till death do you part.’ ‘In sickness and in health.’
Better do as your husband wants, Lucille. He is your husband!
When I signed over the house to her, all of the property, I said, ‘I’m putting this in your trust, Lucille. I hope I will be welcomed back one day.’ Your mother did not say
no
to this. Between us was the understanding, she would say
yes
. Because I was sure that my name would be cleared. Because I had not hurt that woman, I had not hurt anyone. Not of my volition, and not ever you kids! That was my trust in her, in your mother. It was true, as she knew—I’d been an ‘adulterer.’ That was true. But not the other.” Here Daddy paused, as if acknowledging
the other
—the unspeakable act, the irrevocable act of
murder
—was exhausting to him.