Joyce Oates - Little Bird of Heaven

And my nose leaking blood from a mean girl’s swift elbow before the referee could blow her ear-shattering whistle.

“Poor baby. Poor li’l white-gal. Man, I am sor -ry!”

After-school basketball at Sparta High. To play with these girls you had to be tall, strong, tough, quick on your feet. Or reckless.

There were other girls I could have played with, if I’d wanted to. Girls my own age, my own size and not so athletic as I was so I’d have been the star player in their midst as I’d been in eighth and ninth grades at the junior high. But I wanted to play with these girls: Billie, Swansea, Kiki, Dolores. They were older, and bigger. They were sixteen, seventeen years old. Dolores may have been eighteen. She and Kiki lived on the Seneca Indian reservation a few miles north of Sparta—they had sleek black straight hair that lashed and swung about their shoulders heads like scimitars, their black eyes shone with malice and merriment. Driving out into the countryside north of the city—the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains—you were made to see the wreckage of long-ago glaciers in their slow violence causing the rocky landscape to contort like something forced through a meat grinder. You were made to see how, being given such untillable and near-uninhabitable land by the U.S. government in treaties they had no choice but to sign generations ago, the descendants of the original Six Tribes of upstate New York might wish to exact some sort of revenge upon their Caucasian benefactors whenever the opportunity arose.

My classmates thought that I was crazy to play with these older girls. I was the youngest, in tenth grade, slender-boned and wily as a snake weaving and darting unpredictably and my silky-blond ponytail flying behind me as if to provoke; more than once as I’d leapt to shoot a basket, I’d felt a sharp little tug on my ponytail to throw me off-stride. I weighed no more than one hundred six pounds and if I was hit—and often, you can be sure, I was hit—by one of the larger girls, I fell to the polished hardwood floor so stunned sometimes I couldn’t get up for several seconds.

“Krista sweetie—you O.K.? C’mon girl, get up. ”

Mostly they liked me. Things they said to me—crude, funny, obscene—they said to one another. They were fluent in profanities meant to be endearments—“Out of my face, bitch”—“Fuckin’ white bitch”—“Fuckin’ cunt.” (Most of us were in fact “white”—but there were gradations of “white.” As there were gradations of what was never given a name—“social class”—“background.” At Sparta High there were students, among them Dolores and Kiki, and several other girl-athletes, who had relatives, neighbors, friends, and boyfriends in or recently paroled from juvenile detention facilities and prisons; their obscenity-laced speech was prison-speech, a kind of roughshod poetry.) In their midst I was “Krissie” who didn’t have to be taken seriously, like a team mascot. If I sometimes surprised them by sinking a basket unexpectedly, appropriating a wayward ball, running in my liquid-snaky way beneath their elbows and darting to the front of the court before anyone could stop me, still I was no competition for even the second-best players, I lacked the true athlete’s aggressiveness, the willingness to be mean. When play on the court got rough—as it was sure to do at least once per game—I shrank away, never held on to the ball if I was in danger of being hurt. And if you’d been knocked down and fouled you might then be caressed, if a 150-pound girl collided with you like a dump truck colliding with a baby carriage, knocked you skidding on your skinny little ass on the floor, this same girl might stoop over you to help you to your feet: with a sly slit of a smile she might rub her knuckles against your scalp, or give your ponytail a tug, or pinch the nape of your neck murmuring, “Fuckin’ sorry, baby. You got in my way.”

Not so bad, then. Even a blood-dripping nose.

Limping to the foul line as girls lined up to watch: shooting fouls was what Krissie Diehl became damned good at, having had plenty of opportunities.

“‘Way to go, Krissie! C’mon girl.”

“You go, girl! Show us you’ li’l thang. ”

Late-afternoon Thursday, my father appeared at basketball practice. No warning, never any warning for that wasn’t Eddy Diehl’s way.

Lucille would accuse me of making plans with “your father” behind her back but how could I have possibly planned to meet him, my father had made no attempt to contact me in months and I had no way of contacting him except through the Diehls who weren’t very nice to me (as Lucille’s daughter and a co-conspirator they believed); I wasn’t even sure where he was living now—Buffalo? Batavia? Not a day, not an hour passed that I didn’t think of my father and when I wasn’t consciously thinking of him he was a dull throb of an ache in my throat and yet I could not have said with certainty where he might be.

Wake in the night, perspiring and anxious: that throb-ache.

My brother Ben said contemptuously it was like an infection, he had it, too. “Some damn fever. As long as we live here in Sparta and people know our name, we’re sick with it: Eddy Diehl’s kids.”

AFTER BASKETBALL, unless I was staying overnight in town with a classmate, I took the 4:30 P.M. bus home, which was called the “late bus.” (The “regular” bus left at 3:30 P.M.) Our house on the Huron Pike Road was about three miles from Sparta High and I would have been home just after 5 P.M. except: I never got on the bus.

Just inside the gym doors he was standing. Rare to see adults in the gym at such times. As the game ended I limped off the court wiping my sweaty face on my T-shirt and I heard a male voice—startling, in that context—a thrilling growly undertone: “Krista.”

At once I looked up. Looked around. A man not twenty feet away, in a fawn-colored suede jacket, dark trousers, cap pulled low over his forehead. Was he signaling to me?

Now I heard him, more clearly: “Krista. Outside.”

I felt weak. I could not reply. Staring after my father as he pushed through the doors to the corridor beyond, and was gone.

Other girls had seen him, heard him. Of course. They’d sighted him—a man—Krista Diehl’s father?—before I had.

We shuffled into the locker room together. Girls who’d been laughing loudly had quieted. Girls who felt a certain tenderness for me, or, at least, some measure of tolerance, glanced at me with expressions of curiosity, concern.

Diehl? The one who…?

That woman who was killed, he’s the one who…? Why’s he out of prison so soon?

Someone—I think it was our gym teacher—was watching me. Asking me some question but I pretended not to hear. Through the excited buzzing in my ears there was little I might have heard, that I wished to hear.

Wanting to laugh in all their faces. For what did any of them know about my father Eddy Diehl, and me? Thinking He has come for me, you can see how special I am after all.

“IT’S OVER.”

Or, “It’s finished.”

These were my mother’s words. There was dignity in my mother’s posture—erect, not visibly tremulous, head held high and eyes unflinching—as there was dignity in the brevity of such a reply: her response to questions put to her about her (ex)-husband Eddy Diehl. For it was not to be avoided, Lucille Bauer was asked about Eddy Diehl, this now muchtalked-of and “controversial” individual to whom she’d been married for eighteen years, which was most of her adult life; and when Lucille wasn’t asked in actual blunt rude pushy words she was asked by implication, indirection.

Oh Lucille! How is it with—? And so she’d taken to replying in this brief cool but perfectly polite way, with a knife-cut of a smile that suggested hurt, or the mockery thereof.