The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (29 page)

It was difficult for him, mainly because he wanted her to know, on the one hand, that he was eager for her to use his car, that, in fact, he was eager to be able to help her in any way possible (going for his wallet as the thought struck him), but also, he wanted her to know that he and her mother would be forced to endure her and the children’s day-long absence as a painful event—wanted her to know this, but didn’t want that knowledge to coerce her into changing her mind and staying at the cottage or leaving the children here while she took the car and went sight-seeing alone. After all, he reasoned with himself, they were
her
children, and right now they must seem extra-precious to her, for, without Roger, she must need to turn to them for even more love and companionship than ever before. He imagined how it would have been for Anne, his wife, if they had gotten divorced that time, years back, when Janet was not much older than Laura was now.

Yes, but what would this day be like for him and for Anne, with Janet and the children gone? A gray blanket of dread fell across his shoulders as he realized that five minutes after the car pulled away, he and his wife would sit down, each of them holding a book, and wait impatiently for the sound of the car returning. After lunch, they would take a stroll up the beach, walking back quickly so as not to miss them, if Janet and the children decided to return to the cottage early, and, because, of course, they would not have come back early, he and Anne would spend the rest of the afternoon in their chairs on the porch, holding their books, he a murder mystery, she a study of open classrooms in ghetto schools. Well, they could drink early, and maybe Anne could think of something special to fix for dinner, blue shell crabs, and could start to work on that early, and he could rake the beach again, digging a pit for the trash he found, burying it, raking over the top of the pit carefully, removing even the marks left by the teeth of the rake.

“
Sure
you can take the car, that’s a
fine
idea! Give us a chance to take care of some things around here that need taking care of anyhow. How’re you fixed for cash? Need a few dollars?” he asked without looking at her, drawing out his billfold, removing three twenties, folding them with his second finger and thumb and shoving them at her in such a way that for her to unfold and count it would be to appear slightly ungrateful. She could only accept.

Which she did, saying thanks and going directly into the living room, switching off the television as she told her daughters to hurry up and get dressed, they were going out for a ride, to see some exciting things, the Wright Brothers Memorial, for one thing, and maybe a shipwreck, and some fishing boats and a lighthouse, and who knows what else. She looked down at her hand, found that she was still holding the burnt match. She threw it into an ashtray on the end table next to the couch.

She drove fast, through the village of Kitty Hawk—several rows of cottages on stilts, a few grocery stores and filling stations, a restaurant, a bookstore, and the Fish Pier—and south along Highway 158 a few miles, to Kill Devil Hills. The overcast sky was breaking into shreds of dirty gray clouds, exposing a deep blue sky. Though the day was warm, the sun was still behind clouds. The hard light diminished colors and softened the edges of things, making it seem even cooler than it was. Janet switched the air conditioner off and lowered the windows opposite and beside her, and warm, humid air rushed into the car. In the back, the girls had taken up their usual posts, peering out the rear window, finding it more satisfying to see where they had been than to seek vainly for where they were going.

On her right, in the southwest, Kill Devil Hill appeared, a grassy lump prominent against the flattened landscape of the Outer Banks, and at the top of the hill, a stone pylon that, from this distance of a mile, resembled a castle tower.

“We’re almost there,” she called to the girls. “Look!” She pointed at the hill and the tower.

“Where?” Laura asked. “Where are we going?”

“There. See that hill and the tower on top? Actually, it’s not a tower. It’s only a stone memorial to the Wright Brothers,” she explained, knowing then why she had never come here before and simultaneously wondering why the hell she was coming here now.

“The Wright Brothers?” Laura said. “Are they the airplane men?”

“The men who invented the airplane.”

“Oh.”

“Mamma, look!” Eva chimed in. “A castle! Are we going to the castle? Can we go to the castle?”

“Yes.”

“How many brothers were there?”

“Two. Wilbur and Orville.”

“Only
two
?”

“Yes.”

“Will there be a king and queen at the castle?”

“No … yes. Sure.”

“Laura, there’s going to be a king and queen at the castle!”

“Stupid! That’s not a castle.”

“Let her call it a castle, Laura. It looks like one.”

Off the highway, they drove along the narrow, winding approach to the memorial, passing the field and the low, flat-roofed, glass-walled structure that housed the various exhibits and the scale model of the aircraft, past the two wooden structures at the northern end of the field where, she remembered reading once years ago, the brothers had stored their device and had worked and slept while preparing it for flight. Janet was surprised to find herself oddly attracted to the place, to the hill, round and symmetrical, like an Indian mound, and, atop it, the pylon that, even up close, looked the way as a child she had pictured the Tower of London.

Janet parked the Chrysler in the small parking lot on the west side of the hill. The three of them got out and walked quickly along the paved pathway that methodically switchbacked to the top. In seconds, the girls had run on ahead, and Janet was alone. The sky was almost clear now, a bright, luminous blue, and the sun shone on her face as she climbed. She was sweating and enjoying it, feeling the muscles of her back and legs working hard for the first time in weeks. The sense of entrapment she had felt a few hours ago she could recall now only with deliberate effort. She still perceived it as the primary fact of her life, but merely as if it were a statistic. Ahead of her, Laura and Eva darted about the base of the tower, scurrying around the thing as if looking for an entrance. In a few moments, she arrived at the crest, breathing hard, sweating, and the girls ran to meet her.

“It’s a castle all right!” Eva cried happily. “But we can’t get in, the door’s locked!” She pulled Janet by the hand to a padlocked, steel door. “The king and the queen had to go to work, I guess. They aren’t home.”

“I guess not, Pickle,” Janet said. They walked slowly around to the other side, where they sat on the ground and peered down the slope that the two bicycle mechanics had used for launching their strange machine. Then, as if a wonder were unfolding before her eyes, filling her with awe, Janet saw a large, clear image of the two men from the Midwest and their clumsy wire, wood, and cloth aircraft and the sustained passion, the obsession with making it work, and their love for it and for each other. It was like discovering a room in her own house that she’d never suspected existed, opening a door that she’d never opened, looking in and seeing an entirely new room, unused, unknown, altering thoroughly and from then on her view of the entire house.

The image was of her own making, but that didn’t lessen the impact. She saw the brothers as having released into their lives tremendous energy, saw it proceed directly, as if from a battery, from their shared obsession and their mad, exclusive love for each other—a positive and negative post, the one necessitated by the presence of the other. They had not permitted themselves, she decided, to live as she feared she was condemned to live: curled up inside a self that did not really exist.

For her, the image was perceived by her body as much as by her mind, and she felt lightened by it, as if she could fly, like a deliberately wonderful bird, leaping from the lip at the top of the little hill, soaring from the height of land first up and then out, in a long, powerful glide across the slope and then over the field that aproned it, drifting easily, gracefully, slowly to the ground, coming to rest at the far end of the field, where the two workshops were located, where, she decided, she would pitch herself into the task of making a machine that could fly, making it out of wires and shreds of cloth and odd remainders of wood and rough pieces of other machinery—the junk of her life so far. Her daughters careened uphill past her, mocking and singing at each other, asserting their differences to each other, and she knew, from the way her face felt, that she would be tireless.

Standing, she turned and waved for the girls to follow, and the three of them descended the hill, holding hands, and talking brilliantly.

Comfort

Leon LaRoche, the bank teller, tried to tell this story once to his friend and neighbor, Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.). Leon was in his late twenties when he made the attempt, and he had been drinking beer with the Captain in the Captain’s trailer for several hours, so he was slightly drunk, or he probably would not have tried to tell it at all. When drunk, it’s your judgment about the sayable that goes, not your inhibitions.

The two men had been talking about a kid who used to live at the trailerpark, Buddy Smith, who had been a thief and a liar and whose father, Tom Smith, had finally thrown him out of the trailer he’d shared with his son for most of the kid’s life. Six months after the son departed, the father shot himself, and nobody understood any of it. Buddy Smith never showed up in Catamount again, not even for the funeral, and that had been the end of the matter, except when folks now and then wondered whatever happened to him and wondered why his father, a sociable, though utterly private man, had killed himself. Most people believed that by now the kid was locked up in jail somewhere out West, where his mother was supposed to live, and that Tom Smith had shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun because, since he had been living alone, his drinking had got out of hand, and too much drinking alone can make you depressed. Nobody thought the two events, the son’s departure and the father’s suicide, were connected. At least not in such a way as to think the suicide could have been avoided, which is to say, at least not in such a way as you could blame the son for the death of the father.

“I liked Buddy,” Leon said, gazing into his glass. “I really did.” The two men were seated at the Captain’s kitchen table, the television set still rumbling behind them in the living room, for when Leon knocked on the door and offered to share a six-pack of beer with him, the Captain had been watching the evening news and in his pleasure had neglected to shut the machine off. The older man was grateful for the interruption—it was a frosty November night, and people generally don’t go calling on people uninvited on nights like this—and when the first six-pack was drunk, the Captain started offering beer from his refrigerator, until they found themselves working their way through a third six-pack. The Captain said he didn’t mind, it was a Friday night anyhow, and he was restless and felt like having company, so what the hell, crack open another, Leon, and relax, for Chrissakes, you’re too uptight, boy. “You remind me of myself when I was your age,” he told Leon. “Some people have to learn to relax, have to force themselves to do it, and then after a while it comes naturally,” he said laughing, as if to prove how finally it had come naturally to him.

“No, I really liked Buddy, although I can’t say I knew him very well. He was a chess player. I never knew that, until this one night after work, and I went into the Hawthorne House for a drink, because I was angry, pissed off, from having been yelled at once too often by Bob Fosse at the bank. You wouldn’t believe that man,
I
don’t believe that man. After what, seven years, and he still treats me like shit. Anyhow, I went into the Hawthorne House, which is unusual for me, because that place can be kind of rough, you know, and I hate the
smell
of it, like urine and old beer, but like I said, I was angry at Bob Fosse and needed a drink to calm down.

“Buddy was playing one of the pinball machines, alone, as usual. He never seemed to have friends in town, even though there are plenty of kids his age in town, too many of them, if you want my opinion, who don’t seem to do anything except hang around drinking beer and flexing their muscles and getting themselves tattooed. Buddy was like that, too, or at least he seemed like that, except that he kept pretty much to himself. Also he didn’t exactly
look
like those guys. I mean, he was always clean-looking, and he wore his hair short, and he took good care of his clothes. He looked like an Army recruit home on leave from boot camp. Even so, he never seemed to do much except hang around the trailerpark or up at the Hawthorne House, as if waiting for someplace far away and very different from this place. Those other guys his age, they were made in Catamount, New Hampshire, to stay in Catamount, New Hampshire, and eventually to die in Catamount, New Hampshire. It was stamped all over their faces, all over their bulky muscles, all over the way they talked and laughed and punched each other around.”

The Captain knew the type. He shoved his paw across his white crew cut and sighed. “Bring back the draft,” he intoned, “and in a year the streets of America will be cleared of that type and safe to walk in again.”

“Buddy had spent a year in the service, actually. The Marines, I think he told me, and just as he was about to be shipped overseas to Germany or someplace, he was in a motorcycle accident that put a metal plate into his head and got him discharged. He told me this while we were sitting at the bar, but I don’t think I believed him, because while he was telling me all this, he kept smiling at me and watching my eyes, as if he was putting me on, just to see if I’d believe some lie.

“He was a chess player. He said he wasn’t very good, but he liked to play, which is true for me, too, so I said we should get together to play chess sometime, and he thought that was a great idea. He didn’t know anyone around here who played chess, he said, and neither did I. He had a way of watching the point of his cigarette while he smoked that was unusual. I bought him a second beer, and we talked about how hard it was, living in a small town in New Hampshire, how boring it was, and how mean-minded the people were. He said as soon as he got some money that was owed him by a guy in the Marines he was leaving for the West Coast, and then he asked me why I stayed here, living in Catamount, going back and forth every day from the trailerpark to the bank. I explained how my mother lives in Concord, where I grew up, and this was the best job I could find when I got out of New Hampshire Commercial College, and I go to Boston sometimes on weekends, I told him. He was curious about that, about what I do in Boston on weekends, and I told him the truth, that I go around to the bars and maybe take a meal at a fancy restaurant and go to a movie. That’s all. He didn’t believe me, but he was very nice, very cheerful and friendly. He said I probably stayed home every weekend and watched TV.

“By then the place was filling up and had got pretty noisy. The jukebox was playing, and two or three couples were dancing, and you had to holler to be heard, so I asked Buddy to come back to my place for some supper and a few games of chess. He asked me if I had anything to drink, apologizing as he asked, explaining that he was broke or else he’d offer to buy the beer. I had plenty of beer in the fridge plus a bottle of Scotch I keep around, and I had planned to go on home and cook up a couple of hamburgers for myself, anyhow. I hadn’t played any chess in over a year, not since my brother was back East visiting my mother two Thanksgivings ago. Buddy said fine, so I paid, and we left in my car.

“When we got to the trailer, he opened a beer and set up the chessboard in the living room, while I cooked hamburgers. He had the television on and was watching it and drinking beer and seemed very relaxed to me. But he seemed sad, too. It’s hard to explain. He probably reminded me of myself, somehow, sitting there alone, with the television set on and a chessboard set up in front of him. I walked into the living room to say something to him, I don’t know what, just something that wouldn’t make him seem so sad and alone to me, maybe, and when I passed behind his chair, I lay my hand on his shoulder in a friendly way. You know. Just lay my hand on his shoulder as I passed behind his chair.

“What happened then was … embarrassing. I don’t know why I’m telling this to you, I’ve never told anyone else. But it’s bothered me ever since. He grabbed at my hand as if it were an insect, a spider or something, and threw it off his shoulder. When he stood up and turned to face me, he was red-faced and enraged, sputtering at me, calling me a fairy, all kinds of names. He knocked over the chessboard, made a few wild moves around the room like he was trying to find a way out without passing me, and finally went by me like I had some kind of disease he could catch, and slammed the door.”

The Captain was at the refrigerator and had drawn out a pair of beers. He let the door shut on its own and stood facing it. “Well,” he said. “Well, then … so he decided you had … unnatural desires, eh?”

“Apparently. Yes, he did. But I didn’t.”

“Of course not.” The Captain was still facing the closed refrigerator door.

“It was just that he looked so sad and alone there. So pitiful. I can’t describe it. Sometimes you can have a feeling toward a person that makes you want to do that, to place a hand on him and that’s all, just to comfort him, even though he doesn’t know he needs comfort—no, especially because he doesn’t know he needs comfort. But I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I must need comfort myself and not know it or something,” Leon said, and he laughed lightly, nervously.

The Captain laughed with him and turned and sat back down at the table. Leon, his face pinched in thought, opened the bottle and filled his glass, then studied the glass carefully, watching the bubbles rise inside and the moisture drip down the outside. The Captain filled his pipe from a brown leather pouch and lit it, drawing in the smoke rapidly, until he had it going on its own. Then he asked Leon if it was true, was he a fairy?

Leon slowly looked up at the older man, the way you would look at a falling tree if you had got unexpectedly caught beneath it. It was too late to step out of its path. “Yes,” he said. “A fairy. I suppose I am.”

The Captain smiled and said that he had always thought so, but Leon was not to worry, because his secret was safe with him. He understood that sort of thing, it happened all the time in the service. Well, not all the time, but often enough that you had to learn to be tolerant, so long as people kept these things to themselves. He continued talking a few seconds longer, but Leon was already standing and pulling on his jacket, moving for the door.

At the door, he apologized for having drunk so much of the Captain’s beer, and quickly stepped outside to the cold night air. It was a clear sky, with falling stars and a crescent moon that looked like a narrow streak against the dark blue sky.