The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (4 page)

The following day, I arrived early at the Industrial Park, distracted and cross. From the start of the day to its end, I couldn’t seem to cope with the usual difficulties of training the natives. I could not accept those difficulties as being natural and legitimate. This was not like me. I was trying to teach them to operate the German-made lathes that turned the heels of our sandals out of mahogany that we imported at great expense from the Cambodian highlands, milled in Goa, and transshipped here to Katonga. For hundreds of thousands of years, these people, our Katongan employees, had been equatorial rain-forest hunters and subsistence farmers, and I probably should not have expected them to adapt as quickly as nineteenth-century New Englanders to working with industrial machinery, day in and day out, year in and year out, on assembly lines manufacturing products that they themselves would never use or even see used by others. Ordinarily, I understood the obstacles they faced and, without prejudice, scaled my expectations accordingly. But today, for some reason, I was baffled by their ineptitude and inattention and consequently found myself screaming at them for the slightest offense or oversight. By midafternoon, whenever I approached the line, the workers looked down or away, and when I retreated to the office, the clerks and managers started shuffling through their files as if searching for a lost letter. Finally, I gave it up and called for my driver and returned to town.

I asked to be let off at Binga Park, and walked straightaway to the café at the end of the cul-de-sac near my hotel. When I reached the corner of the narrow street, and from the square peered down its length to the deserted café and bar at the end, where Andrew calmly washed yesterday’s mud and Djinn’s blood off the cobblestones of the courtyard that surrounded his tables, something turned me away—a
felt
, rather than heard or seen, warning was issued to me. This place is terribly cold, I thought. Quickly, I walked on and went directly to my hotel room, where I poured myself a tumbler of whiskey and sat by the window, looked out on the park, and waited for dark.

Several drinks later, night had arrived. From my window, I saw the lights of the town come up—strings and chains of lights brightening rooms and lobbies and public spaces and along streets and alleys, illuminating in strips and spots the lives of the people who lived with one another in the cramped tenements and worker-hotels, the boardinghouses and restaurants and outdoor cafés of Gbandeh. My gloom lifted somewhat then, and, for the first time since the previous night, solitude and difference eased their grip on my sense of myself. I left my hotel for the street, and made for the café.

At the crowded bar, I signaled to Andrew, who broke off his conversation with an attractive young woman, Japanese or Korean, in jeans and T-shirt and, without being asked, he brought me an opened Rhino and glass. “Welcome back, sir,” he said.

“Andrew, I have to ask you something. About Djinn.”

“No problem, sir. What about him?”

I said that I had been shocked by what had happened to him. And shocked even more that no one had objected or even seemed to care when he was shot and killed. “Killed for what? For climbing the wall of a building? For refusing to come down when the policeman ordered him to? Andrew, that hardly deserves shooting,” I said.

“He broke the rules, sir. He never should have climbed the wall.”

“But he’s a madman! That could have been you!” I said. “Or me! Any one of us could be mad. Maybe we are mad, and he’s the sane one. Who can say for sure?”

“Doesn’t matter, sir. It’s the rules that matter, and he broke them.”

“But they were small rules that he broke. He was killed for it!”

Andrew shrugged, then abruptly asked me how I had enjoyed my meat and vegetable pie.

“What? Well, fine,” I said. “I mean, it was actually delicious.”

Did I wonder about the meat? he wanted to know. He no longer looked at me, but seemed to be trying to catch the eye of the Asian woman at the far side of the bar.

“What has this to do with Djinn, may I ask? And by the way, Andrew, I don’t want this beer, I want a whiskey. Neat.”

He smiled graciously and poured from the best bottle in the place, and when he set the glass before me, he said, “I hope you’re not upset there was no bush meat for it, sir. No chimp.”

“Upset?” I laughed. “Certainly not!”

“Green monkey can taste just as fine, you know, if you cook it right. But you probably noticed the difference, since you are a smart man mighty familiar with our nation. So my apologies, sir, for having to replace the bush meat with the green monkey.”

I backed away, staring at him in disbelief. He kept a thin smile on his face and poured my untouched beer into the sink, wiped the counter, and returned to his pretty Asian customer.

I didn’t feel it, but I must have been drunk, because I have difficulty otherwise explaining my actions then. At the time, though, everything I did made great good sense and had a strict purpose. It was only afterwards that it made no sense and seemed purposeless. By then, however, it was too late. By then, my actions had filled me with feelings that would not leave me, just as a dream will, and those feelings I would eventually be forced to act upon, for they had already begun to act deeply upon me.

I walked through the crowded café directly to the place where Djinn had started his fatal climb the night before. Reaching up, I grabbed onto the wooden support of the balcony and swung myself up onto the balcony itself, and from there, just as Djinn had, shinnied up a rainspout and inched my way along a secondary drain to a further balcony on the left and just above me. By now, the café and bar customers had spotted me and were watching from their tables, giving me the same rapt attention they had given Djinn the night before. I quickly scanned the crowd for the policeman, but didn’t see him. With one hand, I grasped the bottom rail of the balcony overhead, and, with the other, clung to an adjacent ledge, and in that way managed to swing myself from the drainpipe up and onto the balcony. I was three stories high now, over forty feet from the cobblestoned street. I was sweating, but it was more from excitement than exertion, and breathing in rapid gulps, like a tiny, trapped animal, and my heart drummed loudly against my ribs. This was the strangest, most unpredictable thing I had ever done in my life, and while it thrilled me to be doing it, it also terrified me. I had no
reason
for doing it, only a compulsion.

I climbed atop the upper rail of the balcony, as Djinn had, and, balancing there, turned and looked down upon the people, many of whom had left their tables and had gathered excitedly below me, staring up with the same awestruck, slack-jawed gaze they had given the madman, as if they saw in me tonight what we had seen in him the night before, as if I were transforming them into beloved subjects.

Now I saw the policeman—not the same man as last night: this was a taller, darker man with a nearly bald head. He wore the same blue shirt and retrieved his pistol from under it. Slowly, almost casually, he aimed the gun at me and called out, “Sir, you must come down now! You cannot climb these walls!” I laughed in response, a laugh of sheer hilarity, of great good humor. I felt nothing but warmth and affection toward this man with his gun, and for that reason alone the absurdity of his command delighted me.

I was three stories from the ground now, with only the tile roof above and, beyond that, the African night sky. I turned away from the crowd and, exposing my back to them, reached up and grabbed hold of the lip of the roof, swung both feet onto a narrow wall molding, where I managed a toehold, and drew myself slowly into the air, moving my body inch by inch toward the roof. I was dangling from the edge of the roof, with my shoulders and head above it, but just barely, and most of my weight still suspended out there in the air. I heard the policeman call to me, “You must come down, or I’ll have to shoot you!” Then he said, “Come down, Djinn, or I’ll shoot.” I know he said it; I know he called me that. It meant many things, but at that moment, it meant to me only that, if he could kill me, he would.

It was impossible now to turn back. If I groped blindly in the air behind me with my feet, trying to find the railing of the balcony below, in seconds I’d surely lose my grip on the roof tiles and fall, as good as shot. It was taking all my strength just to hold on to the tiles, just to stay where I was. Somehow, though, I found enough strength in my hands and arms to draw my body slowly, agonizingly, up and over the lip of the roof—first my chest, then belly, pelvis, and thighs, and finally one knee—when I heard the crack of a gunshot. The bullet ricocheted off the tile closest to my face, stinging my cheek with bits of clay, and I made one final lunge to safety, over the edge entirely and onto the sloped roof, out of the shooter’s line of sight.

I scrambled to the high ridge of the roof and over, turned, and made my way along the far side of it, out of sight for the length of the roof to the gable at the end, where I finally stopped and sat, hunched like a large bird with my legs crossed beneath me and my arms wrapping my shoulders like feathered wings. In the distance, I could see from my perch the crowd at the café, still milling about, peering up at the place where I had disappeared from sight. In the other direction, I overlooked the park. Palm trees clattered dryly in the night breeze. A strange weightlessness and euphoria had come over me. I checked again at the café and saw the policeman put away his gun, and he and the others returned to their tables and to the bar and resumed their normal evening activities. Andrew, with feigned delight, was serving an Asian man who had joined the Asian woman at the bar. A great thing had been inflicted upon me, but it was clear, nothing had happened to anyone else.

Soon, the red dust would return: this was, indeed, the season of in-between. I leaned back and looked away from Gbandeh, away from Katonga, away from the continent and the planet itself. The clouds had parted, and the dark blue sky billowed overhead like a bedouin’s tent. The equator, cut from north to south by the prime meridian, crossed the sky from east to west, and beyond the lines of empire, the stars, like endless grains of desert sands, flowed in vast, uncharted waves across the universe. All night long, I perched on the roof of the old colonial warehouse, staring away from myself until dawn, and when at last I climbed down to the ground, the sky had turned milky white. The stars were gone from sight, as invisible as the equator and the time line now, and the streets and sidewalks of Gbandeh were deserted. I was alone.

Defenseman

For my father, the idea of loneliness was early on separated from the idea of solitude, a condition imposed on him by geography. Or it may be something he picked up from his father. Regardless, it’s a distinction that served him well. It enabled him to be literally fearless in the face of constant loneliness, and later on, when the pressure of geography had been removed, it explained to him his continuing solitude.

He played hockey, of course. Like almost all Canadian boys, even solitaries. A tough defenseman with great maneuverability, but not too much speed, he had the will, size, and ability, but especially the will, to break up a three-on-one rush for the goal by rapping one kid with his stick (up under the jaw, usually), taking out the second with a hard check to the kidneys, and the third by hurling his entire body across the oncoming skater’s path, slapping wildly with his stick at the skittering puck, his back, slammed against the third boy’s rush, blocking any view of the puck, the goal, and the kid’s own feet, bringing the kid finally crashing down to the ice as, at the same time, his own stick discovered the puck and punched it back to one of his grinning, slightly embarrassed, slightly envious teammates.

Hockey, especially as played by Canadian schoolboys, is a violent game. But the violence usually lies dormant until the game is played by older, heavier, more motivated, and darkly competitive adolescents. Until then, a boy’s violence is ordinarily a clumsy, harmless imitation of what a man-sized player can do gracefully with harm. Hundred-pound kids skating like the wind, barking and yelling at each other in French or Nova Scotia English, growling through red, contorted faces, bumping theatrically against one another, they only rarely, and then almost always by accident, enact violence upon one another. For them, the game, insofar as it is violent, is pure theater, with themselves, their opponents, their own friends, and their opponents’ friends as audience.

Whether for my father it was merely an extreme version of this theater, I couldn’t say, but I do know that for others his violence was real enough (I’ve been told by those who knew him then) and that consequently, before he was twelve, he had earned a reputation as a hatchet man on the ponds and public rinks of Halifax, which is very unusual. Also, until one is old enough to play in the tough, even brutal, Junior League, such a reputation is useless, is possibly even a liability.

To understand him, I try to recall how it was for me at that age, because as a skater I had about the same ability and lack of it that he had—maneuverable, with quick hands and feet, large for my age, but not very fast and with a weak slap shot no amount of solitary, early morning practice could improve. I could never combine the hard charge for the net with the sudden shot from fifteen feet out that sent the puck like a rifle slug about eight inches off the ice all the way without once touching down past the goalie’s dropping glove and lifting stick and into the net with a neat, quick, kissing thud.

Like my father, I was a defenseman, and to increase my value as a defenseman, I, too, relied on the will to extremity that I knew the other players neither possessed nor expected to encounter in anyone else. Though we expected each other to imitate the older players, it was merely to mimic their threats and gestures, the textures of their violence. Consequently, anyone willing at that age to go all the way, unhesitatingly checking, tripping, body-blocking, rapping hands, heads, and legs with his hockey stick, anyone willing actually to
be
violent, had the considerable advantage of surprise going for him.

Though I’m not sure why I should happen to seize onto how as a child my father, or for that matter I myself, played hockey, it is certain that, for a child raised in the northeastern United States and southern Canadian provinces, hockey and ice skating in general are of surprising emotional significance, combining as they do, so early and for so long, social and private experience. Also, they provide an arena in which other people and an intense physical environment are positioned precisely to confront one’s young and relatively untested, unknown body. As evidence of the staying power the experience holds, this past winter I’ve walked down to the pond in the meadow in front of my house perhaps as many as eight or nine times, where, lacing on my skates, pushing off, gliding in slow, rhythmic ovals around the pond, alone and out of sight of the house, my mind backtracks in time, until, before I am aware of it, my physical responses (
to the glassy smoothness of the ice, a slight pinch of the toe in the left skate, ears, nose, and chin crystallizing in the breeze caused by my body’s swift movement through still, cold air…
) and the loose flow of my fantasies (
of suddenly breaking free of a tie-up at the boards, he’s got the puck, he’s going all the way in, the goaltender’s ready for him … and, whap! a slapper, and the goaltender goes down to his right for the puck, too late, and HE SCORES! glides humbly, suddenly relaxed, past the net, shakes loose clumps of ice shavings from his skate blades, moves like a gentle bear down the ice toward his own goal and his jubilant teammates…
), at times like that, when I’m skating alone, my physical responses and my fantasies are coming straight out of childhood.

I’ve noticed in men from the Midwest a certain glazed, timeless look drift over their faces when they’re bouncing and heaving a basketball around and through a hoop tacked to the side of their own or a neighbor’s garage. For Southerners, at least the ones I have known, it happens around hound dogs, shotguns, and rolling, tangled, half-cleared farmland in fall and early winter. I suspect at these times they’re making the same restful, return trip that I make when skating on the pond down in front of my house. Besides being a connection to one’s childhood, a brief slip backwards into the subjectivity of one’s ordinarily objectified past, it’s a connection with other men, as well. Including my father, I suppose.

It’s never been clear to me whether for my father the realities of ice and dreamlike motion across its surface evoked images of family and origin, as they do for me. I don’t think my grandfather even knew how to skate, and I always assumed that my father had to learn to skate on his own, with boys from the neighborhood. But because when I was a child we lived far from anything even vaguely resembling a neighborhood, I was allowed to learn to skate with my father on Saturday and Sunday afternoons the winter I turned six. It was an event, formally announced as such. One Friday night in November, my father simply said, “This winter I’m going to put that boy up on skates.”

My mother chuckled that I wasn’t old enough. They were in the kitchen, after supper. My mother was sitting at the table over the clutter of dishes, resting a few moments before moving to the sink to clean up her kitchen and utensils one more time. She was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. My father was restless that night, pacing, stopping occasionally to peer out the window into the frosty darkness. My brother and I were playing on the floor like small dogs, nipping and yipping, imagining tails. At the sound of my name, I stopped playing and sat attentively, a human again. My brother, two years younger, went on barking and growling.

The fire in the stove crackled softly, the kitchen was close and warm, dimly lit by kerosene lanterns that filled the room with a fluid, golden light darting and disintegrating into flat planes of light and shadow, as my father, huge in the low-ceilinged room, moved from window to door to woodbox to black cookstove and back to the window again, talking throughout in a low, rumbling voice of his work, how it had gone this week, the men he worked with and for: his inestimable value to the larger world. The air was filled with the odors of hardwood chunks slowly burning and food, Friday night supper, fish, though we were not Catholic.

“I bet it hits zero tonight,” my father announced.

My mother observed that at least there’d been no snow yet. She stubbed out her cigarette in the wet saucer.

“I haven’t had my skates on in years,” he said. “They’re still up in the attic, aren’t they? I remember hanging them on a nail up there two summers ago, when we unpacked.”

“No one’s touched them, so they must be where you put them,” she said.

He left the kitchen and in a few seconds could be heard clumping around overhead in the attic, looking for his skates.

In the morning, after breakfast, my father said to me, “C’mere, we’re going to get you some ice skates and teach you how to use ’em.” And with his, to me, enormous, blocky, leather-and-steel skates tied together by their thick laces and slung over his shoulder, he headed out the door to the barn to start the car.

Recalling her own freezing discomfort from some night years ago, the abject misery of the nonskater who must stand at the edge of the ice stamping heavy, numbed feet or else must skid in small, choppy circles on rubber soles, waiting like a cripple while the others glide gracefully past in long arcs that sweep them into the darkness at the far side of the pond, my mother tried to buffer me against the force of her remembered misery by wrapping me in heavy layers of wool and rubber clothing, until I stood in the kitchen stiff and immobile as a chair, red-faced and sweating. My father had backed the car out of the barn, idling, then racing the motor. He rapped impatiently on the horn. My mother swung the door open for me, and I entered the cold morning air, moving like a penguin.

The air was crystalline, almost absent. The fields lay like aged plates of bone—dry, scoured by the cold until barren of possibility, incapable even of decomposition. Clumps of trees, mostly pine and spruce in roadside woodlots, stood in the windless cold like bears crossly aching to sleep.

When we got to Maxfield’s store in Pittsfield, my father peeled off several layers of the clothing my mother had laced onto me at the house, and I was able to move my arms somewhat and bend my legs at the knees. My new skates were beautiful. Just like my father’s, but about one-quarter scale. They were stiff outside, as if carved from blocks of wood, yet when laced onto my feet they felt like a gentle pair of hands. Brown and black, hockey-style skates, the shoe was cut fairly low, except for the tendon guard at the back, and the blades, the lovely steel strands that were going to lift me off the ice and free me from the yank of gravity, were toughly snubbed at the toe and heel. And sharp.

“Hollow-ground,” the salesman assured my father, who tied the two skates together by their thick, yellow laces and draped them over my shoulder. I felt the sudden, surprising, downward tug of their weight.

Returning to the car, we got in and drove the half mile or so to the east end of town, to White’s Pond, a small, shallow, man-made pond used in summer months as the municipal swimming pool, in winter as a public skating rink. A log touching the shore, frozen where it had floated months ago, was the obvious place to sit and exchange shoes for skates. A dozen pairs of various-sized and -shaped shoes lay in the vicinity of the log, and out on the ice a couple of men and a crowd of boys were slapping a puck erratically back and forth in furious, structureless sport. It was early, and they had been on the ice only a short time and were merely testing themselves, each other, and their equipment before choosing sides for a game.

My father pulled my shoes off and replaced them with the new skates and laced them up for me, asking me, when he had finished, if from now on I thought I could do it for myself, telling me that I must remember to lace them each time all the way from the toe. “And
tight
, as tight as you can get them. That is lesson number one,” he said seriously.

Then he put on his own skates and stepped gingerly from the bank to the ice. As if he had suddenly taken flight, he was gone.

I stood, and my weight wobbled on the short, thin lines that the blades had become, and then my ankles gave way, and I tipped and fell on the ground behind the log, wondering what had happened. I could not see my father anywhere.

Deciding that ice would make the difference and that, once on it, I, too, would fly off with incredible, weightless grace, I dragged my body like a bundle of sticks and cloth down to the log, over it, and out onto the surface of the pond. Once again, I stood. Then I waited for it to happen, for the beautiful speed to come.

But in seconds my body, seeking balance from some point in space high above the blades, overcompensated and tipped, pitching me to the ice, where I remained for some time, utterly bewildered, my ears reddening with shame. My vision was rapidly narrowing, closing in on me, and now I was afraid that I
would
see my father, would see him watching me with scorn in his eyes.

Again and again, I struggled with my body and lifted it to a position that roughly approximated a standing position, and before I had a chance to locate it relative to the bank and log behind me and the vast expanse of ice in front of me, it was lying facedown again, arms and legs splayed, as if thrown to the ice from a great height.

Eventually, knees and elbows aching, the base of my spine a star of pain, I was able to hold my body in a standing position for what seemed like hours. Slowly, carefully, I raised my eyes from my feet, trusting them finally not to betray me, and saw that I had traveled halfway across the pond. The shore looked like a horizon. Not twenty feet away, a crowd of large boys and larger men slashed viciously at the ice with hockey sticks. They surged back and forth, like a dogfight in water, skate blades like ravening teeth against the ice.

Then, suddenly, they were gone, racing away in raucous pursuit of the tiny, black, fleeing puck. Their legs and shoulders seemed to move only from side to side. It was as if the skaters were casually bouncing off the opposite banks of a narrow stream in the middle of a large, flat field—and yet they flowed smoothly away from me. Attempting to imitate that powerful side-to-side motion, I pushed off my right skate and toppled over like a stack of bricks.

This went on for a long time, until I discovered that I could move—slowly, clumsily, and with great pain—in a forward direction. The cold, from my having lain on the ice so often and for so long, had crept through my coat, sweater, and flannel shirt, and I was shivering. The small of my back and my neck had contracted into icy knots that were spreading quickly through the rest of my body. I ached everywhere, and my ankles felt like thick drums of gum rubber.