Joyce Oates - Little Bird of Heaven

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.