The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (32 page)

The male of the species ceased to exist. Walking to work in the morning, I saw only women and girls getting on and off buses, stepping from parked cars, long brown legs drawing skirts tightly against tender thighs, blouses whose sole function seemed to be to draw my attention to breasts. At lunch in the cafeteria, I looked watery-eyed and swollen across the food counter at the black women, the first I’d seen up close, all shades of brown and black, from pale gold and coffee to maple red and mahogany, their dark eyes looking straight through me, as if I were invisible, and when I tried to smile, to be seen, and now and then succeeded, I quickly dropped my eyes and moved down the line to the cash register, where, as I paid, I searched the cafeteria for the girl who’d been standing next to me in line, a salesgirl I’d once heard talking to Sukey in the basement shop about eye makeup and had watched from then on every chance I got, always from a safe distance, however, as she had strawberry blond, wavy, shoulder-length hair that made my hands open and close involuntarily, large green eyes that made my lips dry out, a soft Southern accent that made my breath come in tiny packets.

It was as if my awareness of my surroundings were determined by a glandular condition. After work, I sat with Art, Sukey, and Ray in the bar on the corner across from the store, and while they spoke to one another and to me, I watched, like a panther about to pounce, the girls from the store, watched them smoke their cigarettes and talk, slender wrists flicking, gold bracelets catching light and bouncing it through smoke off the walls, moist red lips nipping at the air, parting for white teeth, pink wet tongues, little cries of laughter. I began to wonder what Sukey looked like under her throat-to-ground muumuu and pictured hot loaves of flesh. Delivering signs for Ray to swimwear on the second floor, I rode the escalator up from the first and sniffed the air eagerly and caught the scent of perfume, lipstick, shaved underarms, and nearly tripped at the top. I went to church with Mrs. Treworgy, got lost watching the teenage girls in the choir, and as we left I inadvertently crossed myself, which I knew Protestants did not do, though I told Mrs. Treworgy that we Methodists sometimes did. I was invited by Art to have dinner with him and his wife, and throughout the meal wondered how Art would take it if I had a brief love affair with his dark, bouffant-haired wife, who asked me if people from New England really did say, “Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd,” and if so, why didn’t I talk that way? I told her they did and I did, and for the rest of the evening I did.

To save myself from abject humiliation and worse, I did what men usually do in this situation. I went back to guilt and became obsessed with my work. I decided to succeed in this new trade, to become the best assistant window trimmer that had ever worked at Maas Brothers. It was time, I decided, for me to make my move. In my room at night, I drew window displays—anything to keep my mind and hands busy at the same time. Some of the designs were for windows that exhibited spring dresses, but more often they portrayed less agitating merchandise, like air conditioners, men’s shoes, lawn mowers, and lamps. Many of them were inventive and well-drawn designs that the next day I left lying around Art’s workbench and Sukey’s easel, even leaving my pad open next to Ray’s brushes when I went upstairs for his midmorning snack. I figured that once I was permitted to design and install my own window, my talent would be recognized and I’d be promoted. On my way. With a new kid hired to replace me as assistant, Art or Sukey would be moved to the larger store in Tampa or shifted to the Maas Brothers about to open in Miami. I’d follow a few years later, only to pass them by, moving swiftly up the ladder of window trimming to where the only moves left would be horizontal, into management, vice president in charge of advertising, and on up from there.

Then it happened. One morning in May, I came whistling cheerfully into the shop, as was my habit, and Art called me aside and said that there was going to be a fashion show in swimwear that afternoon and they needed a tropical-island floor display right away. “Sukey and me’re all tied up getting them damned Memorial Day windows done,” he drawled. “Whyn’t you-all try your hand on the tropical island?”

“Why, sure,” I said. I flipped open my sketchbook. “What’ve you got in mind, Art? I’ll work up some sketches.”

“Just some kind of backdrop, some grass or sand, a mannequin in a swimsuit, maybe a coupla colored spots. You can do it. I seen your drawings lying around. Now’s your opportunity to show us what you can do on your own.” He smiled down at me and winked.

I made my sketches, a four-by-eight-foot panel with broad streaks of rose, silver, and orange to signify a tropical sunset, three or four long palm fronds on the upper left corner of the panel, and two women, one standing, looking mournfully out to sea, her hands at her eyes, as if watching eagerly for her lover’s return, the other seated, resigned to his absence, contemplating the pink and white gauze blossoms that I planned to scatter over the earth. The two faces of Penelope, thought, waiting for Odysseus, me.

I cut two-by-fours for the frame, instead of the usual one-by-twos, nailed them together with eightpenny nails, cross-braced it horizontally and vertically, cut and nailed on plywood triangles to square the corners, and covered both sides with tautly drawn metallic paper, stapling back and hiding the seams neatly, so that, finished, it resembled nothing so much as a solid block of sea blue steel. They’ll use this panel for years, I gloated, and indeed, when I stood the panel up, it was like a well-made house, an oak tree, a piece of public sculpture that would outlive the culture that had produced it.

The others went up to lunch, but I stayed down in the shop, painting streaks of cloud and sunlight on my panel. “Don’t fuss with that thing too long now,” Art called back. “You got to have that display done and installed by two. The fashion show starts up at two.”

“No sweat!” I hollered. I had everything I needed out and arranged neatly before me: the two mannequins, wigs, one blond, one brunette, gauze blossoms, palm fronds, colored spots and extension cords, and the tools I’d need to set them up—hammer, screwdriver, screws, and angle iron to fasten the panel to the island, tape, staple gun, and so on. All I needed now was the bathing suits.

I telephoned swimwear from Art’s office. One of the salesgirls answered, and instantly, though she said nothing more than “Swimwear,” I recognized the voice. Two notes, and I knew the entire tune. It was the girl I’d overheard talking to Sukey about eye makeup, the strawberry blond I’d studied from a distance in the cafeteria, the green-eyed beauty in the crowd at whom I’d aimed my hunter’s gaze from the corner booth after work.

I cleared my throat and stammered that I needed a pair of bathing suits for the fashion show display.

“Okay,” she sang. “We’re trying on bathing suits right now, for the show and all, so whyn’t you come on up and just pick out what you-all want?”

“Sure, fine. Sure, that’s great, a great idea. Ah … who’ll I ask for? What’s your name?”

“Eleanor,” she said, and the word rose in my mind like an elegant seabird against a silver moon over dark Caribbean waters.

“Sure. Fine. Eleanor, then. Okay, then…”

“G’bye,” her voice chimed in my ear.

I put down the phone and decided to take my panel to the second floor right away, to set it up first and then see which bathing suits matched the colors of my sunset before I made my selection. It was surprisingly heavy. In fact, I could barely lift it. I tipped it, got leverage, lifted, and carried the panel out of the shop, ducking at the door to keep it from scraping, and managed to get it all the way up the wide stairs from the basement to the first floor, before I had to stop and rest a minute. The store was jammed with lunch-hour shoppers, women mostly, many of whom gazed with what I took to be admiration at my blue panel, which I now regarded as very nearly a work of art.

The escalators were located at the center of the large, crowded floor, where the ceiling swooped and opened up to reveal the second floor as a kind of mezzanine. I could see young women strolling about in bathing suits up there, bare shoulders, naked arms and legs, bare feet, pink arches, toes.

I hefted my panel, got it balanced, and moved carefully through the throng of shoppers to the escalator and got in line. By the time I stepped onto the metal stairs, the panel had grown heavy again, so I set it down, placing one corner on the step. I peered around it and up and caught a glimpse of the girl named Eleanor, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, blood red it was, and very revealing, for in that instant I saw that she had large, high breasts, and a navel, my God, a female navel—when I noticed something falling lightly past my face like sprinkles of dust. I heard a loud, grinding noise from overhead, screams from below, and debris started falling all about me. I looked up and saw that the top edge of my panel was digging a trench into the ceiling, a gouge that ripped away plaster, wires, pipes, and tubes, and the higher we rode on the escalator, my panel and I, the deeper into the ceiling it dug, relentlessly, as if with rage, while women above and below me, pushing and grabbing one another in fear, shrieked and ran to escape falling chunks of ceiling.

I let go of the panel, but it held there, rigid, like a plow blade, jammed now between the metal tread of the escalator and the ceiling above, which curved lower and lower as we neared the second floor, until the ceiling was almost low enough for me to reach up and touch, when the top of the panel ground against the reinforced-concrete floor of the mezzanine itself, and promptly the metal stair began to give. The panel, however, refused to give. It creaked, bowed a little, but it held. The escalator kept on moving, while the noise level rose—screams, shouts, cries for help, falling debris, wood grinding against concrete, metal bending under wood—until, at last, the ceiling curved up and away from the stairwell, and my panel sprung free, rising like a main-sail, floating over the rail, and tumbling onto the adjacent down escalator, where people ran in horror as it bounced heavily end over end toward glass counters filled with cosmetics, notions, jewelry, perfumes.

Up above, still riding the escalator, I watched with almost scientific detachment as the stair, bent by the panel into a shallow V, neared the slot in the floor where the stairs in front of it one by one flattened neatly and slid away. I saw the bent stair hit the slot, felt the whole escalator beneath my feet buckle and jump, heard the motor grind on stubbornly, until at last it stopped.

All the electricity in the building had gone off. We were in a dusky haze, as if after a terrorist’s attack. It was silent, with smoke and dust hovering in the air. A chunk of rubble rolled into a corner. Water splashed aimlessly from a broken pipe. A fluorescent light fixture held by a single wire broke loose and fell to the floor. A woman sobbed. A mother called her child.

I was at the top of the stairs, facing swimwear. Before me stood several girls in bathing suits, their hands fisted in horror before open mouths, their eyes wild with fear. One or two wept quietly. I saw the girl named Eleanor among them, and I turned and ran blindly back down the way I had just ridden to the top, leaping over rubble and shoving my way past terrified shoppers, stunned men in business suits, janitors, salesgirls, crunching over broken glass toward the door and away from the crowd that had emerged from the cafeteria, past a white-faced Art and Sukey, and out, finally, to the street. My chest heaved furiously, my ears rang, and still I ran, charging through traffic without looking, as fire trucks and police cars with sirens wailing pulled up at the store.

I was in a small park, walking slower and slower along a white crushed-stone pathway that curved around flower beds. There were live oak trees overhead with Spanish moss hanging down, and small birds flitted in and out of the pale green leaves. Finally, I stopped. I sat down on a bench and put my head in my hands. I believed that my life had all but ended. I was wrapped entirely in shame, as if in a shroud. It was a new feeling, a horrible one, for it surrounded me, enveloping my mind and body totally.

There was no way out of it. In those few moments in the park in St. Petersburg, immolated by endless shame, I was every man who had failed, who had run out on job, family, children, friends—who had run out on
opportunity.
I was Bob O’Neil, drunk and lying about it in Florida; I was my father, silent and withdrawn in northern New Hampshire. I was the boy who went up the hill and then, inexplicably, turned around and came back empty-handed. I was Little Boy Blue asleep with his horn, while the sheep roamed the meadow, and the cows ate the corn. I was ashamed for all of us, every one.

Then, gradually, I felt the presence of a hand on my shoulder. I sat up and turned and followed the delicate, white hand on my shoulder out to a woman’s arm. It was Eleanor’s, and her green eyes were filled with pity, endless pity that matched perfectly my endless shame. She was wearing the dark red bathing suit that I had loved, and she reached forward and placed her naked arms around my chest and laid her head on my shoulder. I smelled her hair, felt her smooth skin against mine.

We stayed like that for a long time, I on the bench, she standing behind me, both of us weeping silently, me in shame and she in pity, until it was almost dark. And that is how I met my first wife, and why I married her.

Cow-Cow

We were living in the same double-wide up on Spruce Hill as we had since before we got married, before we had any kids, even, and this one night last August me and Larry are heading home from the Spread, not shitfaced, but pretty buzzed, lifted a little, I guess you could say, which was a fairly typical condition for us then. It’s only been not quite a year, and I’m completely aware that I could get back there in a minute if I wasn’t watching myself. Larry I can’t speak for. Not anymore. His drinking is his problem now, mine is mine.

So we’re just pulling into the driveway in Larry’s old bucket-of-rust Taurus—he’s driving, and I’m enjoying the view, so to speak, as there was an almost full moon, and the woods and fields and the roofs of the houses and barns were covered with silver-gray light like frost—when Larry says, “Shit, the cow’s out!” This was not a small thing, nor was it a thing that hadn’t happened to us numerous times already, especially with that particular cow. We raise and butcher all our meat. Or we used to. And there are bears up there on Spruce Hill and wild dogs, which I did not especially want to see eat our cow before we did. Besides, cows can get into all kinds of trouble on their own, break their legs on old fencing or fall down an open well or quarry, and by the time you got to it it’d be dead and rotted and useless to butcher for meat.

She wasn’t a fancy cow, a Hereford or Black Angus or something, just a cow-cow. But she was important to us, as we never had much for cash income, except summers, when Larry could get work house painting or the odd job that came his way from the tourist industry, from summer people and the such. Come winter, that cow was food on the table for us and the kids. Protein, was how I looked at her, and consequently, since we only raised one at a time, Protein was the name I gave to all our cows, so as not to get too attached to the beast. So as not to forget the reason for its existence, I explained to the kids.

Although it didn’t really work for them. They always ended up thinking of the cow as a member of the family, practically. To them, Protein was a word like any other and could be turned into a name as easily as Bossy or Elsie. Or my name, even, or Larry’s. For that reason we butchered our animals only on days when the kids were in school or up to my mother’s or sleeping over at a friend’s house. To spare them the actual dispatching and final departure of the cow. If the kids didn’t have to watch it in person, they had no problem with killing animals and butchering them, and they could talk about how they missed old Protein even as they sat at the table chewing on one of her steaks. Kids are like that. They can hold contrary opinions or opposite feelings in their heads without the slightest sense of illogic.

The barnyard gate was wide open, which is how Larry knew the cow was out. Typically, in a hurry to get to the Spread, he’d probably neglected to latch it after he fed and watered her. I’d been inside, putting the kids down. “Hold your horses, for Christ’s sake, I’m coming!” I told him when I got into the car.

“Just ’cause it’s still light out don’t mean it ain’t late,” he grumbled.

“No, Larry, it doesn’t,” I said, and sighed so he could notice. “It certainly does not.” I don’t think I was any more pissed at Larry than usual, but it did feel different to me that night. Heavier somehow, like the force of gravity was dragging my feelings to the ground and staking them there. Although I didn’t pay any heed to it at the time. I’d gotten used to him long ago. Larry’s not a bad man, not as-such, anyhow, and he wasn’t behaving that night any differently than the way he always behaved. Impatient, distracted, self-centered, and critical—that was Larry for as long as I’d known him. But sentimental, too, and, for a man, weepy. Sorrowful is a word I would use. I think that’s what kept me around so long. His sorrow. And I think he knew it.

I went into the house to check on the kids, while Larry went to the barn and in the moonlight, too late now, closed the gate. I watched him from the window of the darkened kitchen. He made sure this time that it was latched. He moved slowly and deliberately, as if he needed to keep telling himself where he was and what he was doing there. The movements of a drunk man. The kids were all in bed asleep, except for Lydia, who was watching Letterman and had to be reminded that she had school tomorrow so get the hell to bed. “Right now!” I said, and she skulked off, angry and wounded, the way only a thirteen-year-old girl can be. Larry hit the car horn a couple times, and I went out to shut him up so the kids wouldn’t wake. He had the motor running and the car turned around in the driveway, heading out.

“Where’re you going?” I asked him.

“The cemetery. She’s probably gone there again, same as last time. Cows are stupid. They keep going back to the same place they got caught last time. Get in,” he said. “It’s dark, I’ll need you to shine the headlights while I catch her.”

“You bring a bucket of grain?”

“Yes, I brought a bucket of grain.” Sarcastic.

“Flashlight?”

He didn’t answer. I got into the car beside him. “What about your gun? You got your gun?”

“No. Why?”

“Get your gun, Larry. Jesus!”

“Why?”

“To shoot her, for Christ’s sake! Get your gun! Get your fucking gun!” I don’t know why I was hollering, but I was.

He got out of the car and went into the house and came back a minute later with his twelve-gauge. “I don’t see the point of shooting her,” he said, laying the gun on the backseat.

“You need to shoot her, Larry, because you keep forgetting to latch the gate, and she’ll be back down there tomorrow and the next day and the next, until the board of selectmen finally decides to shoot her themselves. And we’ll be out five hundred pounds of beef this winter. Our freezer will be empty, Larry,” I said through gritted teeth. “Don’t you
get
it?”

He mumbled something that I took to be a concession and drove out to the road, turned left, and headed down the mile-long hill to the bottom, where we turned onto the narrow, unpaved lane that leads to the town cemetery. The moon had dropped behind the mountains now, and it was pitch dark. It was spooky, in a way, being in a cemetery at night like this. The headlights carved out some space in front of the car, but everything else was lost in blackness, until suddenly a leafy tree branch would drop in front of the windshield or a tombstone loomed up beside the car.

“We’re never gonna find her here this late,” Larry said. “I’m thinking we should wait for daylight.” He was dead tired and still feeling the booze, I knew, and so was I, but no way was I going to let that cow wander around all night, I told him. Who knows where she’d be by morning? She could easily stroll from the cemetery onto Spruce Hill Road and get creamed by a semi hauling logs to Montreal. She could fall into the river and drown. Either way, she’d end up useless to us, I told him. A total loss cow.

Larry says, “Katie, is that her?” He stops the car, backs it up a few feet, and half-turns it off the road, so the headlights splash light uphill a distant ways into the graveyard. There’s all kinds of gravestones up there casting these huge, long shadows against the grass and across the gravestones behind them. And here comes the cow, Protein, meandering her way between the granite stones and grave markers, munching on the fresh, dew-wet grass as she goes, swinging and swaying her big, bony hips, and totally ignoring us, like she’s exactly where she belongs and we’re not. She’s nearly full grown but still a heifer, with big black and white splotches across her back and haunches and a mostly white head. I can see why she likes it here. The grass is thick and bright green and plentiful compared to the grass at our place. Also there’s flowers that people have put on the graves, and she’s eating them as well as the grass. It’s peaceful here, unmolested and quiet, except for the occasional diesel moan of a truck climbing Spruce Hill on its way to the Northway and beyond. If I was a cow, and somebody’d left my gate unhitched, this is where I’d be, too.

Larry got out and told me to keep the lights on her. Then he opened the trunk and took out the bucket of grain. I slid into the driver’s seat. The cow strolled slowly into the light, when, for the first time, she looked up at us. Holding the bucket like it was a peace offering, Larry walked tippy-toe toward her. “C’mon, girl, come an’ get your supper,” he sort of sang to her. “Supper, girl. Supper.”

She ignored him and went back to munching on the abundant graveyard grass. Larry tried a few minutes longer to get her attention, but she wouldn’t even raise her head. Finally he returned to the car, and I rolled down the window.

“What?” I said.

“I can’t get her to eat from the bucket.”

“Try setting it on the ground out there in front of the car a ways, and then step back into the shadows. Try that,” I said.

He did as instructed, and after a while, ten minutes maybe—during which time I smoked a cigarette and Larry stood in the dark next to the car, watching silently—the cow at last edged up to the bucket and stuck her snout into it and began eating the grain.

“Get the gun!” I said to him.

“What?”

“Larry, get the fucking gun!”

He came over to the car, opened the rear door, and took out his twelve-gauge. “I don’t need the damn gun,” he said. Then he carried it into the glare of the headlights and stood next to the cow.

“Shoot her, Larry!”

He didn’t say or do anything. Just stood there slump-shouldered with the gun in his right hand, watching the cow chomp away on the grain in the bucket. Finally, she pulled her head from the pail, slurped her lips with her thick gray tongue, and looked at Larry as if to thank him.

“Shoot her, for Christ’s sake!”

“Why?”

“Because we don’t have any more grain! Because I want you to! I don’t know. Shoot the fucking cow, Larry. Just shoot her!”

He lifted the bucket, as if to check it for grain one last time, and the cow again stuck her muzzle into it. “All gone,” Larry said to the cow. “Nothing left.” Then he brought the barrel of the shotgun up and placed it next to the hard, flat forehead of the cow and fired. I jumped at the sound, as if I hadn’t expected it. Yet I had expected it. I’d been calling for it. But it was as if I had been calling from a dream, not reality. Her eyes bulged in astonishment and rolled back, and blood spurted from her head. Her forelegs buckled at the knees, and she fell forward and flopped onto her side and was absolutely still. She seemed enormous then, bigger than the car. Blood poured from the large hole in her head onto the dewy grass. The light splashed over the body of the cow, the spreading puddle of blood, and the grass.

“What do we do now?” Larry said.

I didn’t have a clue, but I said, “Your trouble is you just think one step at a time.”

“You’re the one wanted her dead.” He got into the car on the passenger’s side and lit a cigarette. “Shut the motor and lights off,” he said. “We don’t need ’em now.”

I complied, and we sat there in the total dark for a while, smoking and not saying anything. It was almost like the cow wasn’t there, like she was still up in the barn at our place, and Larry and I were sitting here in the car in the dark talking in low voices about the future.

“We need a front-loader,” Larry said. “We can’t leave her here. The dogs or a bear’ll get into her.”

He was right, so I started the car again, and while Larry stayed behind with the flashlight and his gun and guarded the cow, I drove into the village. By this time it was very late, two or three o’clock in the morning, not a car on the road, not a light. I knew whoever I called would be asleep, but at that moment it didn’t seem like I had a choice. I pulled up beside the pay phone at Chick Lawrence’s garage and got out and dialed Wade Whitney first, since he and Larry are old hunting buddies, but Wade said no, his front-loader was up on Adrian’s Acres, where he was digging a cellar. Then I tried Randy LeClair, but all I got was an answering machine. “Hey, Randy,” I said. “This is Katie Burks, and me and Larry was hoping you could give us a hand moving a dead cow. But I guess you’re not around.”

I was trying to remember who else in town owned a front-loader, when I looked beyond the gas pumps and saw in the shadows exactly what I was looking for. Chick Lawrence had a loader! Because he used it mainly for snow removal, not excavation, I’d forgotten it existed. His house was next door to his garage, so all I had to do was walk up to it and knock, which I did. Chick’s a friendly guy and neighborly. He came to the door in his underwear, worried-looking, expecting an emergency, probably, a car wreck or something, as he’s got the only tow truck in town. He seemed to relax when I explained our fix. “Well, okay,” he said. “I’ll meet you over to the cemetery in fifteen minutes or so,” he said. “It sure is a nice night,” he said, looking up at the starry sky. Then he laughed, like he’d told a little joke. That’s a mannerism of his.

I drove back to the cemetery and with the headlights of the car and a tap on the horn woke up Larry, who had fallen asleep against one of the tombstones. He stood and strolled over to the car snapping his flashlight. “Batteries’re dead,” he said, as if that explained everything. The cow was still there, a huge, black and white mound surrounded by a spreading puddle of blood.

“Watch where you walk,” I said, just as he was about to step in the blood. Then I told him Chick Lawrence was coming right over, and he seemed visibly relieved and leaned against the fender and smoked a cigarette and studied the stars. I kept the motor running and the lights on and stared straight out over the hood at that damned cow. I don’t know why, but at that moment I despised that poor animal. It was like she had done something unforgivable and had done it to me personally. It wasn’t just the alcohol, which had pretty much worn off by then. There was lots about that night that I didn’t understand. My telling Larry to bring the gun, for instance, and then hollering for him to shoot the cow. And I didn’t understand how it had come to this, to sitting around in a graveyard in the middle of the night waiting for Chick Lawrence to show up with his front-loader so we can haul a dead cow back up the hill to our place. I wanted to blame Larry, but I couldn’t. All he’d done was whatever I’d asked him to do. From the beginning, from when we first met in high school and started screwing in the backseat of his old Camaro right up to tonight, fourteen years later, Larry always did whatever I asked him to. The problem, I was beginning to see, lay in the asking.