The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (43 page)

He closed the magazine. “I never told him to kill her. I just said how he might do it, if he wanted to kill her. The way he was going about it seemed all wrong to me.” He smiled and showed his brown teeth through his beard.

“What if he actually went and did it, shot her from the Hawthorne House some afternoon as she came out of work? How would you feel then?”

“Good.”

“Good! Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, would you feel good?”

“Because we’d know who did it.”

“But you said you’d give him an alibi!”

“That was just a trick. I wouldn’t, and that way he’d be trapped. He’d say he was with me all afternoon fishing, and then I’d come out and say no, he wasn’t. I’d fix it so there’d be no way he could prove he was with me, because I’d make sure someone else saw me fishing alone, and that way he’d be trapped, and they’d take him over to Concord and hang him by the neck until dead.”

“Why do you fool around like that with people?” she asked, genuinely curious. “I don’t understand you, old man.”

He got up, smiled, and flipped the copy of
People
magazine across the table. “It’s more interesting than reading this kind of stuff,” he said and started for the door. “I put an even dozen hornpouts in your freezer.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot,” she said absently, and he went out.

Merle heard about Flora’s guinea pigs from Nancy Hubner, the widow in number 7, who heard about them from her daughter, Noni, who was having a love affair with the college boy, Bruce Severance. He told her one night in his trailer, after they had made love and were lying in darkness on the huge water bed he’d built, smoking a joint while the stereo played the songs of the humpback whale quietly around them. Noni had been a college girl in Northern California before her nervous breakdown, so she understood and appreciated Bruce more than anyone else in the park could. Most everyone tolerated Bruce good-humoredly—he believed in knowledge and seemed to be earnest in his quest for it, and what little knowledge he had already acquired, or believed he had acquired, he dispensed liberally to anyone who would listen. He was somberly trying to explain to Noni how yogic birth control worked, and how “basically feminist” it was, because the responsibility was the man’s, not the woman’s.

“I wondered how come you never asked me if I was protected,” she said.

“No need to, man. It’s all in the breathing and certain motions with the belly, so the sperm gets separated from the ejaculatory fluid prior to emission. It’s really quite simple.”

“Amazing.”

“Yeah.”

“Overpopulation is an incredible problem.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“I believe that if we could just solve the overpopulation problem, all the rest of the world’s problems would be solved, too. Like wars.”

“Ecological balance, man. The destruction of the earth.”

“The energy crisis. Everything.”

“Yeah, man. It’s like those guinea pigs of Flora Pease’s. Flora, she’s got these guinea pigs, hundreds of them by now. And they just keep on making new guinea pigs, doubling their numbers every couple of months. It’s incredible, man.”

Noni rolled over on her belly and stretched out her legs and wiggled her toes. “Do you have the record of Dylan’s, the one where he sings all those country-and-western songs, way before anyone even
heard
of country and western? What’s it called?”

“
Nashville Skyline?
”

“Yeah, that’s it. Isn’t it incredible, how he was singing country and western way before anyone even heard of it?”

“Yeah, he’s really incredible, Dylan. Anyhow…”

“Do you have it, the record?” she interrupted.

“No, man. Listen, I was telling you something.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay, man. Anyhow, Flora’s guinea pigs, it’s like they’re a
metaphor
. I mean, it’s like Flora is some kind of god, and the first two guinea pigs, the ones she bought from the five-and-dime in town, were Adam and Eve, and that trailer of hers is the world. Be fruitful and multiply, Flora told them, and, fine, they go out and do what they’re programmed to do, and pretty soon they’re like taking over the world, which is the trailer, so that Flora, who’s like God, can’t take care of them anymore. No matter how hard she works, they eat too much, they shit too much, they take up too much room. So what happens?”

Silence.

“What happens?” Bruce repeated.

“A flood, maybe?”

“No, man, it’s not that literal, it’s a metaphor. What happens is, Flora moves out. She leaves the trailer to the guinea pigs. Twilight of the gods, man. God is dead!”

“That’s really incredible.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, drifting into still deeper pools of thought.

After a few moments, Noni got up from the bed and drew on her clothes. “I better get home, my mother’ll kill me. She thinks I’m at the movies with you.”

“Naw, man, she knows where you are. All she’s got to do is walk three doors down and see my van’s still here. C’mon, she
knows
we’re making it together. She’s not that out of it.”

Noni shrugged. “She believes what she wants to believe. Sometimes I think she still doesn’t believe Daddy’s dead, and it’s been over four years now. There’s no point in forcing things on people. You know what I mean?”

Bruce understood, but he didn’t agree. People needed to face reality, it was good for them and good for humanity as a whole, he felt. He was about to tell her why it was good for them, but Noni was already dressed and heading for the door, so he said good night instead and waved from the bed as she slipped out the door.

When later that same evening she told her mother that Flora Pease was raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer, it was not so much because Noni was interested in Flora or the guinea pigs, as because her mother, Nancy, was quizzing her about the movie she was supposed to have seen with Bruce.

“That’s not true,” the woman said.

“What’s not?” Noni switched on the TV set and sat down cross-legged on the floor.

“About the guinea pigs. Where’d you hear such a thing?”

“Bruce. Do you think I could study yoga somewhere around here?”

“Of course not. Don’t be silly.” Nancy lit a cigarette and sat down on the sofa, where she’d been reading this month’s Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a novel that gently satirized the morals and mores of Westchester County’s smart set. “Bruce. I don’t know about that boy. How can he be a college student when the nearest college is the state university in Durham, which is over forty miles from here?”

“I don’t know.” Noni was sliding into the plot intricacies of a situation comedy about two young women who worked on an assembly line in Milwaukee and made comically stupid errors of judgment and perception. “It’s a correspondence school or something, in Vermont. He has to go there and see his teachers for a couple of weeks twice a year or something. It’s the new thing in education.”

Nancy didn’t know how it could be much of an education, and it certainly didn’t explain why Bruce lived where he did and not at his college or even at his parents’ home, as Noni did.

“I don’t know,” Noni said.

“Don’t you ever ask, for heaven’s sake?”

“No.”

That was their conversation for the night. At eleven, Nancy yawned and went to bed in her room at the far end of the trailer, the rooms of which were carpeted and furnished lavishly and resembled the rooms of a fine apartment. Around midnight, Noni rolled a joint and went to her room, next to her mother’s, and smoked it, and fell asleep with her light on. She bought her marijuana from Bruce. So did Terry. Also Leon LaRoche, who had never tried smoking grass before, but certainly did not reveal that to Bruce, who knew it anyhow and charged him twice the going rate. Doreen Tiede bought grass from Bruce, too. Not often, however; about once every two or three months. She liked to smoke it in her trailer with men she went out with and came home with, so she called herself a social smoker, but Bruce knew what that meant. Over the years, Bruce had bought his grass from several people, most recently from a Jamaican named Keppie who lived in the West Roxbury area of Boston, but who did business from a motel room in Revere. Next year, Bruce had decided, he would harvest the hemp crop Flora Pease had discovered, and he could sell the grass back, running it the other direction, to Keppie and his Boston friends. He figured there must be five hundred pounds of the stuff growing wild out there, just waiting for a smart guy like him to cut, dry, chop, and pack. He might have to cut Terry Constant in, but that would be fine, because in this business you often needed a partner who happened to be black.

The next morning, on her way to town to have her hair cut and curled, Nancy Hubner picked up Merle Ring. Merle was walking out from the trailerpark and had almost reached Old Road, when he heard the high-pitched whirr of Nancy’s powerful Japanese sedan and without turning around stepped off the road into the light, leafless brush. There had been an early snow in late October that winter, and then no snow throughout November and well into December, which had made it an excellent year for ice fishing. After the first October snow, there was a brief melt and then a cold snap that lasted for five weeks now, so that the ice had thickened daily, swiftly becoming iron-hard and black and smooth. All over the lake, fishing shanties had appeared, and all day and long into the night men and sometimes women sat inside the shanties, keeping warm from tiny kerosene or coal-burning heaters, sipping from bottles of whiskey, watching their lines, and yakking slowly to friends or meditating alone and outside of time and space, until the flag went up and the line got yanked and the fisherman would come crashing back into that reality from the other. The ice had hardened sufficiently to bear even the weight of motor vehicles, and now and then you could look out from the shore and see a car or pickup truck creeping across the slick ice and stopping at one of the shanties, bringing society and a fresh six-pack or pint of rye. No one visited Merle’s shanty, though he certainly had plenty of friends of various ages and sexes. He had made it known that, when he went ice fishing, it was as if he were going into religious withdrawal and meditation, a journey into the wilderness, as it were, and if you were foolish or ignorant enough to visit him out there on the ice in his tiny, windowless shack with the stovepipe chimney sticking up and puffing smoke, you would be greeted by a man who seemed determined to be left alone. He would be cold, detached, abstracted, unable or unwilling to connect to the person standing self-consciously before him, and after a few moments you would leave, your good-bye hanging unanswered in the air, and Merle would take a sip from his fifth of Canadian Club and drift back into his trance.

Nancy braked her car to a quick stop next to Merle, lowered the window and asked if he wanted a lift into town. She liked the old man, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the old man intrigued her, as if she believed he knew something about the world they lived in together that she did not know and that would profit her greatly if she did know. So she courted him, fussed over him, seemed to be looking after his comfort and welfare, behaving the way, as she once said to Noni, his daughters ought to behave.

Merle apparently knew all this, and more, though you could never be sure with him. He got inside the low, sleek car, slammed the door shut, and surrounded himself with the smell of leather and the pressure of fan-driven heat. “Morning, Mrs. Hubner. A fine, crispy morning, isn’t it?”

She agreed and asked him where she could drop him. A fast, urgent driver, she was already flying past the intersection of Old Road and Main Street and was approaching the center of town. She drove so as to endanger, but didn’t seem to know it. It was as if her relation to the physical act of driving was the same as her relation to poverty—abstract, wholly theoretical, and sentimental—which, from Merle’s perspective, made her as dangerous a driver as she was a citizen.

Merle and Nancy exchanged brief remarks, mostly solicitous on her part as to the present condition of Merle’s arthritis and mostly whining on his part as to the same thing. Merle knew that by whining he could put Nancy at her ease, and in encounters as brief as this he, like most people, enjoyed being able to put people at their ease. It made things more interesting for him later on. Stopping in front of Hayward’s Hardware and Sporting Goods Store, where Merle was headed for traps, she suddenly asked him a direct question (since she was now sufficiently at her ease to trust that he would answer directly and honestly and in that way might be brought to reveal more than he wished to): “Tell me, Mr. Ring, is it true that that woman, Flora in number eleven, you know the one, is raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer?”

“Yes,” he said, lying, for he had heard nothing of it. “Though I’m not sure of the numbers. It’s hard to count ’em after a certain point, sixty, say.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little … disgusting? I mean, the
filth
! I think the woman ought to be put away, don’t you?” she asked, still trying to get information.

“What would you do with all those guinea pigs then?”

“Let the SPCA take them, I suppose. They know how to handle these things, when things like this get out of hand. Imagine, all those tiny animals crowded into a trailer, and remember, number eleven is not one of the larger trailers in the park, you know.”

“I guess you’re right, the SPCA could kill ’em for us, once we’d got Flora locked up someplace. The whole thing would probably drive her right over the edge, anyhow, taking away her animals and killing ’em like that, tossing ’em into that incinerator they got. That’d push ol’ Flora right over the edge. She’d be booby-hatch material for sure then, whether she is now or not.”

“You’re making fun of me, Mr. Ring. Aren’t you?”

“No, no, no, I’m not making fun of you, Mrs. Hubner,” he said, opening the door and stepping out, not without difficulty, because of the shape of the car and his stiff back. “I’ll check into it for you, ma’am. Get the facts of the situation, so to speak. Because you’re probably right. I mean, something will have to be done, eventually, by someone. Because those kinds of animals, rodents and such, they breed fast, and before you know it, one hundred is two hundred, two hundred is four, four is eight, and so on.”