Little Bird of Heaven

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The heavyset man fumbled to hang up the receiver, turned and blundered into me, muttered Hey sor-ry! His breath stank like diesel fuel. In exaggerated surprise his bloodshot eyes blinked at me. “Debbie, is it? Debbie Hansen? You lookin for company, Deb-bie?”

  I told him no. I wasn’t Debbie and I wasn’t looking for company.

  “No? Not Debbie? Shit—you’re too young, what’re you—a kid? High school? You callin’ a boyfriend, honey? You don’t need to call no boyfriend if—like—you need a ride home? You need a ride home? My name’s Brent, I’m like your daddy’s age—you need any help, honey.”

  Again I told him no. Told him I only just wanted to make a telephone call.

  “You need some—change for the phone? I got a pocketful—see—”

  He was teetering over me. I told him please leave me alone.

  “—lots of change, see—help y’self—”

  On his sweaty palm coins glinted. I had a sudden impulse to slap his hand, send the coins flying. With a nervous little laugh I ducked beneath the bristly-haired man’s elbow as I ducked beneath the older girls’ upraised elbows on the basketball court, and before he knew it I’d escaped him into the women’s restroom. Laughing to show that I wasn’t frightened, I knew he meant me no harm. “Now go away! I don’t need anything from you.”

  There came a bark of laughter and the rap of knuckles on the door.

  It wasn’t a restroom door you could lock. I would have to run to hide inside one of the toilet stalls, to lock a door.

  If I did, he’d have me trapped.

  Still it was just a joke, playful-drunk joking that would not escalate into anything serious as through the ill-fitting door the bristling man with the bloodshot eyes called me honey, baby-girl and went on to speak of something more complicated, something I could not follow and so I cupped my hands to my mouth to say: “I’m not alone here! My father is here! My father is in the barroom! My father is Eddy Diehl, he’s in the barroom, you’d better leave me alone or—”

  Desperately I counted to ten, counted to twenty, now thinking Why here, will something happen here, will my father hurt someone here recalling how when we’d first entered the barroom from the parking lot my father had led me inside with his arm around my shoulders, fluffing my ponytail with his fingers, proudly he was showing me off, God-damned proud of his pretty blond daughter who was nothing like the wife who’d cast him aside, nothing like Lucille Bauer who had come to know Eddy Diehl too well. Entering the smoky barroom where much of the light was a lurid-neon rippling cast from beer and liquor advertisements and from the squat color TV above the bar, entering this clamorous place immediately we’d attracted attention, we’d attracted glances, and more than glances. The bartender, doughy-faced guy with Elvis sideburns, swiping at the sticky bar top with a rag, calling out, “Jesus! Is that—Ed Diehl?” It wasn’t clear immediately if the greeting was a friendly one—a warily friendly one, perhaps—but the men shook hands, they were of a height, and of a certain stature, and in their early forties; near enough in kind to be brothers.

  At the bar, as Daddy and the bartender spoke together, other men paused in their conversations to observe, and to listen: and these too were wary, friendly-wary, as if recognizing my father but uncertain how to address him.

  Daddy said happily, excitedly: “This is my daughter Krista, my little girl Krista, she’s older than she looks, she plays basketball at the high school, say H’lo to my buddies, Krista.”

  Buddies! This was pathetic, I thought.

  This was not like Daddy, I thought.

  Still like a three-year-old on display I smiled and said H’lo. My face beat with a pleasurable sort of pain and I saw that Daddy was pleased with me, I had not let him down.

  Now it seemed that Brent had departed. Cautiously I pushed open the restroom door—he’d gone. Quickly I went then to the pay phone and faced the wall making myself as unobtrusive as possible. Men were trailing in and out of the men’s room a few feet away, and I did not want them to take note of me. Dropped in one of Daddy’s quarters and prayed for Mom to answer when I dialed the number but in immediate rebuke there came a busy signal.

  “Mom, pick up! Please, Mom. It’s me.”

  Though I had no idea what I would say to my mother if she answered the phone. That I’d been complicit with my father, who’d violated the court order forbidding him to approach me? forbidding him even to speak with me? That I had violated my mother’s trust by going with her enemy, willingly? By wanting to be with him, and not wanting—at least at this moment—to be with her? By loving him—at least at this moment—more than I loved her?

  Or maybe none of this was so. Maybe it was a desperate story that I was telling myself, at fifteen. I loved my father not because he was a good father or a good man—how could I have judged him, that he was a “good” man or otherwise—but because he was my father, he was my only father.

  And maybe he’d been showing me off, a little—and why was that so terrible? Why couldn’t that be forgiven?

  Daddy hadn’t truly expected Mom to take him up on his invitation, to come out to the County Line for dinner—had he? He’d spoken wistfully, an edge of hurt in his voice. He’d winked at me, he’d been joking.

  Your daddy’s a tease, sweetie. Don’t think that I pay your damn ol’ daddy much mind.

  I was becoming excited, nervous hearing the busy signal at the other end of the line. Hung up the phone and waited for the coin to drop into the return slot and another time I tried my mother’s number, and this time a stranger, a man, answered the phone—“Yeh? Who’s this?” and it turned out that I had misdialed, I’d dialed a wrong number. And all this while the door to the men’s room was being pushed open, allowed to swing closed. I tried not to inhale odors of spilled beer, spilled urine. And a powerful stench of disinfectant beneath. How men are their bodies, there is no escaping men’s bodies came to me as a dismal epiphany. I was hiding from men who whistled at me in passing, called me Honey-babe in passing, fluffed my ponytail with rude playful fingers; I was hiding from them pressing my forehead against the smudged black-plastic surface of the pay phone. Another time I dialed my mother’s number—that is, our home number—and another time the busy signal came like jeering.

  Of course, my mother was likely to be on the phone. Relatives were always calling her. She spoke with her mother and her sisters several times a day. She spoke with “new friends” at her church and with the minister and the minister’s wife. She spoke with individuals at the county family court and she may have spoken with a lawyer. Yet it seemed to me that my mother was being deliberately irresponsible, indifferent to me, keeping the phone in use at a time when I might have tried to call her.

  I don’t need you! I hate you. Daddy has come to take me with him away from you.

  Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.

  I snatched up the coin from the return slot and went back to the booth where Daddy was waiting for me, drinking. By this time most of the barroom was filled. I had to make my way through a maze of tables. I had to make my way through the crowd at the bar, which was a horseshoe-shaped bar, long, curving, fraught with obstacles. I saw just one woman at the bar—the laughing young women had left, together—and she was a woman in her late thirties with springy curly flyaway hair in the style worn by Zoe Kruller which was a style from the popular TV show of an earlier era, Charlie’s Angels; it was a young glamorous style but the woman at the bar was not young and glamorous but thick-jowled, with lipstick so dark it appeared black. As I approached she glanced up at me with sudden stricken attention. And others at the bar glanced up at me. Self-consciously I smiled, it was my instinct to smile, as perhaps an animal will cringe, bare its teeth in a simulacrum of a smile, to forestall harm. I pulled at my pony tail to straighten it. Loose damp tendrils of hair were stuck to my forehead. There was a way of walking I envied in some of the older girls at
the high school, a kind of self-exhibiting, heads lifted high and eyes bemused Don’t interfere with me! but this way of walking was beyond me, I lacked the sexual assurance. And there was a man stepping out to block my way. He was no one known to me—was he? He had a straggly goatee, his mouth a wide wet scar. “You’re his daughter? Diehl? Why’d he come here? Why’d he bring you here? What’s he doing here? The fucker.”

  I was stunned. Too surprised to react other than to stammer foolishly—“I’m s-sorry….”

  This man, this angry goatee-man whom I’d never seen before, dared to take hold of my arm. Asking again in a righteous drunken voice why had my father come here? Why’d he come back to Sparta where he sure as hell wasn’t wanted? And I tried to say, stammering and apologetic, that my father was “visiting.”

  “Visiting who?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  Wanting to throw off the man’s hand. For my fear was, Daddy would see us. And something terrible would happen, and possibly to Daddy. I hoped that Daddy wasn’t seeing this confrontation.

  “Your old man never did time, did he? For what he did to Delray Kruller’s wife? Y’know who that was—Zoe? How old are you? Why’d he bring a kid like you here? How’d he get away with what he did? Why’s he back here? ‘Visiting’—who? God-damned murderer motherfucker.”

  I tried to protest. I was being jostled, pulled-at by someone else—the big doughy-faced bartender who had shaken my father’s hand. And there was another man, a friend of the goatee-man. Saying, “Shit, Mack, let the girl go. She’s got nothing to do with it. Come on.”

  “Son of a bitch killed Delray’s wife, and never paid shit for it. Is that him over there, in the booth? That’s Diehl?”

  I tried to protest, my father had not murdered anyone. My father had not been arrested, even. My father had not been indicted….

  Spittle-mouthed Mack was pulled aside. There came someone shoving at the bartender, who grabbed him by the shirt collar as in a cartoon, shook and unsettled him and shoved him back. There were raised vehement voices. The bartender—his name was Deke—said “Chill out. C’mon chill out. Settle down”—as now the woman with the springy flyaway hair and a creased-monkey made-up face intervened: “Don’t listen to these assholes, honey! Your father has every right to drink any damn place he wants, this is the United States of America for Christ’s sake.” I was grateful to think that this woman was my friend, she wore a hot-pink satin designer blouse and tight-fitting jeans, she teetered on ridiculous high heels of a kind Zoe Kruller might have worn on the bandstand at Chautauqua Park. Her breath reeked of cheap whiskey, she was leaning into my face aggressively. “That Kruller woman what’s her name—God-damned Zoe—hot-shit ‘Zoe’—she was asking for it. Everybody knew what Zoe was. It hadn’t been one man it’d been another. ‘Get the bed you lay down in’—the bed you deserve, see?—who the fuck fault’s that?”

  I escaped back to my father in the booth. It was amazing to me, Daddy had not been aware of the commotion at the bar.

  In fact Daddy was sitting with his shoulders hunched, like a bear that has been wounded and is trying to summon back his strength. A few minutes alone without the pretty blond ponytail daughter, a man like Eddy Diehl can sink into a mood. A man like Eddy Diehl is a sucker for such a mood. Elbows on the scarred tabletop and his heavy jaw brooding on his fists, eyes half-shut as if he was very tired suddenly, so fucking tired. He had ordered another Coke for me and a shot glass of whiskey and a tall glass of foaming dark ale for himself. Glancing up at me with the quick Daddy-smile, as I half-fell back into the booth.

  I was dazed, but I was smiling. Another Daddy might have noted the daze beneath the smile but not this Daddy who finished off half his shot glass in a single swallow. “Listen to the song I’m playing for you—know what it is?”

  I tried to listen. I thought this might be important. So much commotion in the barroom, more men at the bar staring in our direction, I couldn’t concentrate very well.

  Delia’s gone, one more round!

  Delia’s gone

  A man’s deep baritone voice—a country-and-western drawl—was this Johnny Cash? I tried, but could scarcely hear.

  Strange how my father lowered his head, as if it was urgent to hear the words of the song, as if the song conveyed some special meaning to him; as if Eddy Diehl had recently been in some place (but what place could that have been?) where he hadn’t been allowed to hear such music. Or hadn’t been allowed to sit like this drinking whiskey, drinking beer, smoking a cigarette, in a luxury of sensuousness, solitude; the peculiar solitude of the drinker-in-public.

  Delia oh Delia

  Where you been so long?

  One more round, Delia’s gone,

  One more round.

  Still at the bar we were under scrutiny. I could not bring myself to look but in the corner of my eye I was aware of the angry goatee-man—and others—observing Daddy and me. (But why wasn’t Daddy aware? Was Daddy drunk, or was Daddy deliberately not seeing?) I felt an absurd leap of hope, that the drunk woman in the shiny hot-pink blouse would come to our defense; she would enlist others, in support of my father.

  Of course I knew that the name Diehl carried certain associations now, in Sparta. In all of Herkimer County. Maybe in all of the Adirondacks. As Zoe Kruller would be known, and the bluegrass group Black River Breakdown. Cassettes and CDs of the band’s music were passed about locally; Daddy had several in the glove compartment of the Willys Jeep, which I’d often asked him to play, when I was riding with him in that vehicle.

  “Mister? Here y’are.”

  A waitress brought a platter of French fries to our table, and another bottle of ale. Daddy roused himself from his music-trance to offer some fries to me—“I ordered these for just now. This isn’t our dinner yet—we’ll go somewhere special for dinner—only right now, I’m so God-damned hungry.”

  He began to eat with his fingers. He’d removed his baseball cap, his hair was disheveled, dark with feathery streaks of gray, alternately thick and sparse, receding at his temples which appeared flushed and lightly beaded with sweat. It made me uneasy, that Daddy was beginning to resemble his father—Grandpa Diehl who’d always been so old—whom Daddy and his brothers had called the old man with an exasperated sort of affection—the old bastard—can’t put anything over on the old bastard. A man begins to lose his hair, his skull takes on a different shape, he begins to assume a different identity. I felt such tenderness for Daddy, I wanted to stroke Daddy’s face, that was looking so battered and leathery as if wind-burnt; clearly he’d been working outside. In his early forties Eddy Diehl was no longer a man for whom a fresh-laundered white cotton shirt was appropriate work-attire.

  No longer a husband/father of whom his wife said boastfully he was of the managerial class.

  “Krista? Have some. C’mon eat with your old man.”

  “No thanks, Daddy! I don’t like fries.”

  “Must be hungry, Puss, the way you were running around on that basketball court. C’mon.”

  I was hungry. I was very hungry. But could not bring myself to eat the thick greasy-salty fries, reheated in a microwave oven behind the bar, doused with ketchup, the kind of food my mother was quick to perceive was likely to be leftovers from other meals, scraped off other customers’ plates.

  Daddy shoved the platter of fries in my direction. I thought Ben would eat these! and so I picked up one or two fries, to break into smaller pieces and pretend to eat.

  I saw that my father’s knuckles were freshly scratched, bruised. And maybe scarred, beneath. I knew he’d done treework at one time recently—working with chainsaws—I knew that there were men at Sparta Construction who’d had terrible accidents with chainsaws—I wanted to take up my father’s big, scarred hand in mine—to tell him that I loved him, and I did not believe what some people said about him, I knew it could not be true.

  Yet with his unshaven jaws and something heavy-lidded, sulky, about his eyes Daddy exuded a sharkish air; here was a
man of pride, to whom you did not condescend; the voice on the jukebox, penetrating the smoky interior of the crowded County Line Tavern on a weekday evening, was the very voice of this man’s soul, and you did not condescend to such a soul. I felt a warning shiver of the kind a swimmer might feel as something not-quite-visible—dark, finned, silent—passes close beneath him, he can’t quite see.

  The jukebox song was ending. There was a deep-baritone masculine robustness that seemed inappropriate to its subject:

  So if your woman’s devilish

  You can let her run,

  Or you can bring her down and

  Do her like Delia got done.

  Delia’s gone, one more round!

  Delia’s gone

  Daddy was nodding with grave satisfaction, chewing French fries. Big lardy-greasy fries the size of his big fingers lavishly doused with ketchup. Whatever the Johnny Cash song meant to him, it had struck a powerful chord. He’d finished his shot of whiskey and signaled for another. Took a hearty swig from the bottle of ale. Fixed me with a squinting wink and a terse Daddy-smile to finally ask what he’d been putting off asking, since I’d returned to the booth. “Well, Krista: what did your mom say?”

  Mom! I had not heard this word in my father’s mouth for a very long time. I saw that he’d been hopeful that my mother would be joining us, his eyes shone with a crazy hope.

  12

  MARCH 1983

  THE TROUBLE corroding our lives like deep pockets of rust in the hulks of abandoned vehicles. The trouble sucking all the joy out of our lives. And the very awareness the trouble slow to be absorbed by us, who wished each day to think that this! this would surely be the day when the trouble is cleared up.