Little Bird of Heaven by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

resembled the Novocain injected into my tender gums, when I went to the dentist; a dream that left me short of breath, dazed and strangely aroused, headachey; a dream of the most intense yearning, and the most intense revulsion. For to these facts were added, in what was invariably an altered tone of voice, like the shifting of a radio station on the verge of dissolving into static, the fact that Zoe Kruller was sharing quarters with another woman, at 349 West Ferry.
    Sharing quarters with a woman! Not living with her husband and son but with a woman! And the woman’s name too seemed exotic: DeLucca.
    West Ferry Street was miles away from Huron Pike Road. West Ferry Street was not a street familiar to me. I thought it might be near the railroad yard. Off Depot Street, a block or two before the bridge. At the edge of the warehouse district, the waterfront. That part of Sparta. There were taverns there, late-night diners and restaurants. There was XXX-Rated Adult Books & Videos. There were rubble-strewn vacant lots, and there was a raw-looking windswept stretch along the river advertising itself as Sparta Renaissance Park where “high-rise condominiums” were being built.
    And somehow too I knew that men came to visit Zoe Kruller in that brownstone, male visitors.
    These male visitors were to be interviewed by Sparta police.
    Why these facts so agitated my mother, I had no idea. Why mymother slammed and locked the door against me, against both Ben and me, refusing to answer our frightened queries— Mom? Mommy? What’s wrong? —I had no idea.
    It was a very cold February. There were joke-cartoons in the local paper about the Ice Age returning. Comical drawings of glaciers, mastodons and woolly mammoths with curving ice-encrusted tusks. I was in sixth grade at Harpwell Elementary and my brother Ben was in ninth grade at Sparta Middle School which was also Aaron Kruller’s school. When my mother asked Ben if he knew Aaron Kruller quickly Ben said no: “He’s a year behind me at school.”
    Adding, with a look of disdain: “He’s part-Indian, Kruller. He doesn’t like people like us.”
    “He’s your 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 shrugand 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