Читать книгу Little Bird of Heaven - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 11

“KRISTA. CLIMB IN.”

Outside, at the rear exit of the school, Daddy’s car was waiting.

A vehicle unknown to me, I was sure I’d never seen before. A shiny expanse of dark-coppery metallic finish, gleaming chrome fixtures, new-looking, you might say flashy-looking, with whitewall tires and hubcaps like roulette wheels: one of Eddy Diehl’s specialty-autos.

These were purchases of secondhand cars of some distinction which Daddy would rebuild or “customize”—drive for a while, and resell, presumably at a profit. They were older-vintage cars—Caddies, Lincolns, Olds—or newer-vintage Thunderbirds, Corvettes, Stingrays, Mustangs, Barracudas; they were mysteriously acquired through a friend of a friend needing money suddenly, or bankruptcy sales, police auctions. Through my childhood these specialty-autos were both thrilling and fraught with peril for the purchases upset my mother even as they were wonderful surprises for my brother and me. Typical of Daddy to simply arrive home with a new car, without warning or explanation. There in the doorway stood Daddy rattling car keys, with his foxy-Daddy grin: “Look out in the driveway. Who wants a ride?”

We did! Ben and me! We adored our unpredictable Daddy!

It was like that now, this abruptness. My father showing up at school, in the gym. And now here. The demand that if you loved him you leapt unquestioning into the happiness that Eddy Diehl was offering you—otherwise the foxy-smile would cease abruptly, a hard cruel light would come into the narrowed eyes.

Without thinking—not a glimmer of caution—Do I want this? Where will he take me? What will happen to me?—nor recalling that my mother expected me home as usual within forty minutes, in this season in which dusk came early, before 5 P.M.—I climbed into the passenger’s seat of this impressive vehicle my father was driving and dropped my backpack onto the floor.

“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 mother 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 inclined 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.

“Baby, no. You don’t ever give up.”

Daddy wasn’t staying with relatives or friends here in Sparta but, surprising to me, in the Days Inn on route 31. Maybe there was a reason for this, he’d explained. He was going to be “in the vicinity” until the following Monday—“seeing people”—“doing some business”—“tying up loose ends.” I hoped that this didn’t include trying to see my mother or any of her family. None of the Bauers wanted to see Eddy Diehl, ever again.

Your father is not welcome with us.

Your father is dead to us.

Some of my father’s business in Sparta had to do with “litigation”—he’d been trying for years, with one lawyer or another, to sue local law enforcement officers and the Herkimer County prosecutor’s office on grounds of harassment, character assassination, criminal slander and misuse of authority. So far as anyone knew, nothing had come of my father’s lawsuits except legal fees.

I dreaded to hear that he might be seeing yet another lawyer. Or that he might be planning on speaking again with the police, the prosecutors, the local newspapers and media. Demanding that his name be cleared.

Whatever my father’s specific business in Sparta, I knew better than to ask about it. For though Daddy seemed always to be speaking openly and frankly and in a tone of belligerent optimism you could not speak like this to him, in turn. I’d come to recognize a certain mode of adult speech that, seeming intimate, is a way of precluding intimacy. I am telling you all that you need to know! What I don’t tell you, you will not be told.

We’d exited the eerily humming suspension bridge from downtown Sparta to East Sparta, a no-man’s-land of small factories, gas stations, vacated warehouses, acres of asphalt parking lots creased and cracked and overgrown with gigantic thistles. In litter-strewn fields, in trash-choked gutters you saw lifeless bodies—you saw what appeared to be bodies—trussed and wrapped in twine, humanoid, part-decomposed. You saw, and looked again: only just garbage bags, more trash. East Sparta had lost most of its industries, now East Sparta was filling up with debris.

I asked my father where was he living now?—and my father said, “Me? Living now?” meant to be a joke and so I laughed nervously.

Maybe he wanted me to guess? I guessed Buffalo, Batavia, Port Oriskany, Strykersville…He said, “I’m between habitats, right now. Left some things in storage in Buffalo. Mostly I’m in motion, y’know?—in this car that’s my newest purchase/investment. Like it?”

Though I was listening intently to my father yet I seemed not to know what he was asking me. This car? Do I like—this car?

I had already told my father yes, I liked this car. This was a beautiful car. But he wasn’t living in his car, was he? Was he living in his car?

The backseat was piled with things. Boxes, files, folders. A pair of men’s shoes, what appeared to be clothing: outer garments. Suitcase. Suitcases. Duffel bag. More boxes.

Dead to us. Doesn’t he know it?

Damn dumb ghost wish to hell he’d die.

“Anywhere I am, Krista. In my—y’know—soul. Like in my thoughts, except deeper. That’s what a soul is. In my soul I’m here, in Sparta. Lots of times in my sleep in our house, on the Huron Road. That’s where I wake up, until—I’m awake and I see hey no—nooooo!—that isn’t where I am, after all.”

To this, I had no idea how to reply. I was thinking how I loved my Daddy, and how strange it was that a girl has a Daddy, and a girl loves a Daddy, a girl does not judge a Daddy. I was thinking how I hated my brother Ben, who was free of having to love Daddy.

Ben didn’t love me, either. I was sure.

“It’s my birthplace here,” Daddy said. “My birthright. Nights when I can’t sleep I just shut my eyes, I’m here. I’m home.”

“I wish…”

“Yes? What d’you wish, Puss?”

“…you could come live with us again, Daddy. That’s what I wish.” Daddy laughed, kindly. Or maybe Daddy’s laugh was resigned, wounded.

“…wish you could come back tonight…It isn’t the same without you, Daddy. Anywhere in the house. Anywhere…” I was wiping at my eyes, that ached as if I’d been staring into a blinding light. Maybe one of the guards on the opposing team had thumbed my eye, out of pure meanness.

Pissy little white girl get out of my face! “I miss you, Daddy. So does Ben. He doesn’t say so, but he does.”

This was a lie. Why I said it, impulsively, I don’t know: to make Daddy happy, maybe. A little happier.

“Well, honey. Thank you. I miss you, too. Real bad.” There was a pause, Daddy pondered. “And your brother.”

I said yes, I’d tell him. I’d tell Ben.

It had been one of the shocks of my father’s life, how his son had turned against him. His son, against him.

And maybe he’d loved Ben better than he’d loved me. Or he’d wanted to. Having a son was the card you led with, in Daddy’s circle of men friends.

“…she’s getting along, O.K.? Is she?”

She. We were talking about my mother, were we? All along, since I’d scrambled to climb into the Caddie Seville, the subject had been my mother.

“…to that church? The new one? How’s that turning out?”

I told him it was turning out all right. My mother had joined a new church, my mother had “new friends” or claimed to have. I had not yet met these “new friends” but one of them was named Eve Hurtle or Huddle, the brassy-haired dump truck-shaped woman who owned Second Time ‘Round.

I was uneasy thinking that my father might ask if my mother was “seeing” anyone—any man—and I prepared what I might say. Daddy I don’t know! I don’t think so. Hoping he wouldn’t ask, this would be demeaning to him.

But Daddy didn’t ask. Not that. If Eddy Diehl felt sexual jealousy, sexual rage, he had too much manly pride to ask. Though I could sense how badly he wanted to ask.

“…doesn’t pass on much information about me, I guess? To you and Ben?”

Information? I wasn’t sure what Daddy meant.

“It’s like I’m dead, yes? ‘Dead to me’—that’s what she says?”

It’s over. Finished. That’s what she says.

Carefully I told Daddy I wasn’t sure. I thought maybe he was right, she didn’t pass on much information to Ben and me but then she didn’t confide in us on “personal” things. I didn’t think that she confided in anyone, there was too much shame involved.

Naked female strangled in her bed. Eddy Diehl’s tramp mistress.

On the highway ahead of us was a school bus, carrot-colored, Herkimer Co. School District, red lights flashing as it braked to a stop to let several passengers out. Almost too late, Daddy braked the Caddie. He’d been distracted, cursing and gripping the steering wheel.

“Fuck! God damn school buses.”

Both Daddy and I were wearing seat belts. Daddy was sharp-eyed about seat belts. Daddy had had a friend, an old high school friend, who’d been killed in some awful way like impaled on a steering wheel or his head half sheared off from his shoulders by broken glass, Daddy had always warned Ben and me about belting in.

“She cashes my checks, though. I hope she tells you that.”

Cashes his checks? Was this so? All I knew, or was made to know by my mother and the Bauers, was that my father was derelict in his duty. Neglects his family. Behind on alimony/child support.

“Of course, it’s the least I can do. I don’t begrudge her. I mean, you are my family. What kind of crap ‘salary’ would she get from selling secondhand clothes? Least I can do, ruining that woman’s life…”

Daddy’s voice trailed off, embarrassed. And angry. Clumsily he was lighting up a cigarette, sucking in a deep deep breath like the sweetest purest oxygen he’d been missing.

You could not tell if Daddy’s embarrassment provoked his anger or whether the anger was always there, smoldering like burnt rubber in the rain, and embarrassment screened it fleetingly as a scrim of clouds screens a fierce glaring sun.

“…I never said I wasn’t responsible, for that. Not…not the other, Krissie, but…that. Your mother, and you and Ben…ruining your lives. Jesus! If I had to do it over again…”

This was new, I thought. I was uneasy, hearing such words from my father. Ruining your lives. Ruining that woman’s life. For a moment I hadn’t known which woman my father was speaking of, my mother or—the other woman.

My father had never once spoken of Zoe Kruller to me, or to Ben. I was sure he had not spoken of her to Ben. In his claims of innocence and his protestations that he’d had nothing to do with that woman’s death he had never given a name to Zoe Kruller. And he would not now, I knew.

“…grateful to be alive. And free. That’s the miracle, Krissie—I am not in Attica, serving a life sentence. They say you go crazy in a few months in Attica, the inmates are crazy especially the older ones, the white ones, the guards are crazy—who else’d be a C.O. at Attica? You can’t make it alone, I’d have had to join up with the Aryan Nation—there’s some bikers in Attica, guys I knew from the army, already they’d sent word to me—if I got sent to Attica, I’d be O.K. Imagine, Krissie, my ‘future’ was being prepared for, this was what I had to look forward to, as some kind of good news.” My father laughed, harshly. His laughter turned into a fit of coughing, in disgust he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray that opened out of the dashboard beside his knee. “What I am trying to determine, Krissie, is: maybe there is a God, but does God give a shit for justice on earth? For any of us, on earth? I was reading some science discovery, that God is a ‘principle’—some kind of ‘equation’—so there is a God, but what kind of a God is that? A man has got to forge his own justice. As a man has got to forgive his own soul. This justice can’t spring forth too fast, it has to bide its time. So when it’s least expected. Most of humankind, they don’t give any more of a shit than ‘God.’ I guess you can’t blame them, there’s hurricanes, floods, every kind of terrible thing erupting out of the earth, every time you see a paper or turn on TV—how’d you keep up with it? I was a kid, I had to go to Sunday school for a while, till I was eleven when I wouldn’t go any more, I remember how we were told about Jesus performing his miracles, how impressed everyone was, it was ‘miracles’ that impressed them not Jesus as a preacher, anyway—my point is—you are made to think that Jesus could raise the dead, Jesus could save his people, but in actual fact, how could Jesus ‘save’ the teeming multitudes that populate the world now? There’s millions—maybe billions—of people alive, and they are all in peril. As for the God-damned ‘authorities’—the ‘leaders’—they don’t give a damn. It’s all about power. It’s about raking in cash, hiding it in Switzerland. Some banks where they don’t reveal your identity. You don’t pay taxes. The ‘authorities’—they’d sell their own grandmother’s soul, to put an innocent man in prison, or on death row—bottom line is, they want to ‘close the case.’ God-damned hypocrite fuckers…”

I was confused, frightened. It had seemed at first—hadn’t it?—that my father was speaking of something painful with which he’d come to terms, something for which he acknowledged responsibility; he’d sounded remorseful at the outset of his speech but then abruptly the tone shifted, he’d become angry, indignant. His jaw jutted like a fist. His eyes stared straight ahead. Despite warm air from the Caddie’s heater I felt a sensation of chill wash over me.

Can’t trust a drinker. Krista promise me never never get in any vehicle with a drinker you will regret it.

Hadn’t my mother warned me, many times! For surely her mother had warned her, too; and she had not listened.

It seemed that we were headed into the country on route 31, a two-lane state highway north of Sparta. The strip of fast-food restaurants, gas stations and motels where the Days Inn was located was behind us. I thought that, if Daddy had intended to kidnap me, he would not be driving in this direction—would he? In a more genial Daddy-voice he was saying now that for my sixteenth birthday just maybe he’d give me a car—“How’s about a convertible coupe? Just right for sweet sixteen.”

Was Daddy joking? A car, for me? I wondered if Daddy even knew when my birthday was.

From a cloverleaf ramp I could look into the fleeting rears of houses: sheds, animal pens, clotheslines drooping in the rain. A dispirited-looking trailer “village,” a smoldering trash dump that smelled of burning rubber.

We were headed east on route 31, we seemed to have a destination. I had to wonder if Daddy was planning to meet up with someone, there was such urgency in his driving. Those places that Zoe Kruller had frequented were miles behind us: Tip Top Club, Chet’s Keyboard Lounge, Houlihan’s, the Grotto, Swank’s Go-Go, bars at the new Marriott and the Sheraton-Hilton. There was the HiLo Lounge at the Holiday Inn. There was Little Las Vegas at the traffic circle. These were neon-glamorous places by night and by day mostly deserted. In the raw light of day you were made aware of the crude unlit signs sporting semi-nude female figures like cartoon drawings and of overflowing Dumpsters, parking lots littered like acne. After Eddy Diehl had been taken into police custody it would be revealed that he had not been the only “family man” who moved in such circles, as his friends and companions were made to inform upon him and upon one another. No one was arrested for any crime. Yet lives were ruined.

I’d been too young then to know. I was still too young at fifteen to have a grasp of what it might be, that I didn’t yet know.

Here in the country, in a township of Herkimer County known as the Rapids, we were in hilly farmland where by day we’d be seeing herds of Guernsey cows grazing placid and near-motionless in pastures on either side of the road. There were odd-shaped hills called drumlins, exposed shale and limestone like bone broken through skin. Eddy Diehl had relatives who lived in the Rapids but we were not going to visit them, I knew.

“Wish I could see where we were, Daddy. Where we’re going.”

My voice was little-girl wistful, I took care not to sound whiny or reproachful. I guessed we were headed for the County Line Tavern which was one of Eddy Diehl’s places. I wished it was another time and Daddy was taking me for a sight-seeing drive along the Black River and into the countryside in his showy new car as he’d done when Ben and I were young children and sometimes our mother would come with us. This car! I can’t get over this car! What on earth are you going to do with this car! Oh Eddy. Oh my God.

On Sunday drives Daddy would take us out to Uncle Sean’s farm.

Uncle Sean was an uncle of my mother’s, an old man with stark white fluffy hair and skin roughened as the skin of a pineapple. Ben and I were allowed to stroke the velvety noses of horses in their stalls, in the company of our cousin Ty who kept a close watch over us—“Careful! Walk on this side”—and we were allowed to brush the horses’ sides with a wire brush, warm rippling shivery sides, always you are astonished at the size of a horse, the height of a horse, the ceaseless switching of the coarse mane and the coarse stinging tail, the fresh manure underfoot, horseflies hovering in the air, repulsive. Yet I had wanted a horse of my own. I loved to press my face against the horses’ warm sides. My favorite was a mare named Molly-O, one of my uncle’s smaller horses, pebble-gray, with liquidy dark eyes that knew me, I was certain.

I wondered what it meant: here was a horse, but I was a girl.

I wondered if it was just an accident, how we are born: horse, girl.

The way after my father was lost to us in defiance of my mother I would bicycle into Sparta and past the row house where Zoe Kruller was said to have been strangled in her bed and the thought came to me unbidden, illogical If I’d lived here. Anyone who lived here. Death was meant to come here.

You want to blame them, those who’ve been killed. Any woman naked and strangled in her bed you certainly want to blame.

“…shouldn’t have shut me out like that. Your ‘Uncle Sean.’”

“Uncle Sean” was uttered in a tone of contempt, hurt. Daddy seemed to have been following my thoughts.

“All of your mother’s people, that I’d thought liked me. I mean, some of them. The men. Your ‘Uncle Sean’—”

“He isn’t my uncle, Daddy. He’s Mom’s uncle.”

“He’s your great-uncle. That’s what he is.”

I wanted to protest, that wasn’t my fault!

I wanted to protest, Uncle Sean was just an old, ignorant man. Why should Daddy care what he thinks…

“…should know that I won’t give up. A guilty man, he’d give up, he’d move away. By now he’d be vanished from Sparta. But I’m not a guilty man—anyway not guilty of that—and I mean to alter the judgment of bastards like ‘Uncle Sean’ that had no faith in me. You tell your mother, Krista: I am not going to slink away like a kicked dog, I am still fighting this. It’s been—how long—going on five years—a guilty man would’ve given up by now, but not Eddy Diehl.”

Moved by sudden emotion, Daddy reached out another time to grope for my arm, my hand. His fingers were strong, closing around my wrist. I felt a pang of alarm, a moment’s unthinking panic. Always you are astonished. Their size, their height. Their strength. That they could hurt you so easily without meaning to.