The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (46 page)

Around one, Carol Constant arrived in her little blue sedan, dressed in a white nurse’s uniform and looking, to Marcelle, very much like a medical authority. Marcelle led her into Flora’s trailer, after warning her about the clutter and the smell—“It’s like some kinda burrow in there,” she said as they stepped through the door—and Carol, placing a plastic tape against Flora’s forehead, determined that Flora was indeed quite ill, her temperature was 105 degrees. She turned to Marcelle and told her to call the ambulance.

Immediately, Flora went wild, bellowing and moaning about her babies and how she couldn’t leave them, they needed her. She thrashed against Carol’s strong grip for a moment and then gave up and fell weakly back into the cot.

“Go ahead and call,” Carol told Marcelle. “I’ll hold on to things here until they come.” When Marcelle had gone, Carol commenced talking to the ill woman in a low, soothing voice, stroking her forehead with one hand and holding her by the shoulder with the other, until, after a few moments, Flora began to whimper and then to weep, and finally, as if her heart were broken, to sob. Marcelle had returned from calling the ambulance and stood in the background almost out of sight, while Carol soothed the woman and crooned, “Poor thing, you poor thing.”

“My babies, who’ll take care of my babies?” she wailed.

“I’ll get my brother Terry to take care of them,” Carol promised, and for a second that seemed to placate the woman.

Then she began to wail again, because she knew it was a lie and when she came back her babies would be gone.

No, no, no, no, both Carol and Marcelle insisted. When she got back, the guinea pigs would be here, all of them, every last one. Terry would water and feed them, and he’d clean out the cages every day, just as she did.

“I’ll make sure he does,” Marcelle promised, “or he’ll have his ass in a sling.”

That calmed the woman, but just then two young men dressed in white, the ambulance attendants, stepped into the room, and when Flora saw them, their large, grim faces and, from her vantage point, their enormous, uniformed bodies, her eyes rolled back, and she began to wail, “No, no, no! I’m not going! I’m not going!”

The force of her thrashing movements tossed Carol off the cot onto the floor. Moving swiftly, the two young men reached down and pinned Flora against her cot. One of them, the larger one, told the other to bring his bag, and the smaller man rushed out of the trailer to the ambulance parked outside.

“I’m just going to give you something to calm yourself, ma’am,” the big man said in a mechanical way. The other man was back, and Carol and Marcelle, regarding one another with slight regret and apprehension, stepped out of his way.

In seconds, Flora had been injected with a tranquilizer, and while the two hard-faced men in white strapped her body into a four-wheeled, chromium and canvas stretcher, she descended swiftly into slumber. They wheeled her efficiently out of the trailer as if she were a piece of furniture and slid her into the back of the ambulance and were gone, with Marcelle following in her car.

Alone by the roadway outside Flora’s trailer, Carol watched the ambulance and Marcelle’s battered old Ford head out toward Old Road and away. After a moment or two, drifting from their trailers one by one, came Nancy Hubner, her face stricken with concern, and Captain Dewey Knox, his face firmed to hear the grim news, and Merle Ring, his face smiling benignly.

“Where’s my brother Terry?” Carol asked the three as they drew near.

It was near midnight that same night. Most of the trailers were dark, except for Bruce Severance’s, where Terry, after having fed, watered, and cleaned the ravenous, thirsty, and dirty guinea pigs, was considering a business proposition from Bruce that would not demand humiliating labor for mere monkey-money, and Doreen Tiede’s trailer, where Claudel Bing’s naked, muscular arm was reaching over Doreen’s head to snap off the lamp next to the bed—when, out by Old Road, the Guinea Pig Lady came shuffling along the lane between the pinewoods. She moved quickly and purposefully, just as she always moved, but silently now. She wore the clothes she’d worn in the morning when the men had taken her from her cot and strapped her onto the stretcher—old bib overalls and a faded, stained, plaid flannel shirt. Her face was ablaze with fever. Her red hair ringed her head in a stiff, wet halo that made her look like an especially blessed peasant figure in a medieval fresco, a shepherd or stonemason rushing to see the Divine Child.

When she neared the trailerpark, sufficiently close to glimpse the few remaining lights and the dully shining, geometric shapes of the trailers through the trees and, here and there, a dark strip of the lake beyond, she cut to her left and departed from the road and made for the swamp. Without hesitation, she darted into the swamp, locating even in darkness the pathways and patches of dry ground, moving slowly through the mushy, brush-covered muskeg, emerging from the deep shadows of the swamp after a while at the edge of the clearing directly behind her own trailer. Soundlessly, she crossed her backyard, passed the head-high pyramids standing like dolmens in the dim light, and stepped through the broken door of the trailer.

The trailer was in pitch darkness, and the only sound was that of the animals as they chirped, bred, and scuffled in their cages through the nighttime. With the same familiarity she had shown cutting across the swamp, Flora moved in darkness to the kitchen area, where she opened a cupboard and drew from a clutter of cans and bottles a red one-gallon can of kerosene. Then, starting at the farthest corner of the trailer, she dribbled the kerosene through every room, looping through and around every one of the cages, until she arrived at the door. She placed the can on the floor next to the broken door, then stepped nimbly outside, where she took a single step toward the ground, lit a wooden match against her thumbnail, tossed it into the trailer, and ran.

Instantly, the trailer was a box of flame, roaring and snapping and sending a dark cloud and poisonous fumes into the night sky as the paneling and walls ignited and burst into flame. Next door, wakened by the first explosion and terrified by the sight of the flames and the roar of the fire, Carol Constant rushed from her bed to the road, where everyone else in the park was gathering, wide-eyed, confused, struck with wonder and fear.

Marcelle hollered at Terry and Bruce, ordering them to hook up garden hoses and wash down the trailers next to Flora’s. Then she yelled to Doreen. Dressed in a filmy nightgown, with the naked Claudel Bing standing in darkness behind her, the woman peered through her half-open door at the long, flame-filled coffin across the lane. “Call the fire department, for Christ’s sake! And tell Bing to get his clothes on and get out here and help us!” Captain Knox gave orders to people who were already doing what he ordered them to do, and Nancy Hubner, in nightgown, dressing gown, and slippers, hauled her garden hose from under the trailer and dragged it toward the front, screeching as she passed each window along the way for Noni to wake up, wake up and get out here and help, while inside, Noni slid along a stoned slope of sleep—dreamless, and genuinely happy. Leon LaRoche appeared fully dressed in clean and pressed khaki work clothes with gloves and silver-colored hard hat, looking like an ad agency’s version of a construction worker. He asked the Captain what he should do, and the Captain pointed him toward Bruce and Terry, who were hosing down the steaming sides of the trailers next to the fire. At the far end of the row of trailers, in darkness at the edge of the glow cast by the flames, stood Merle Ring, uniquely somber, his arms limply at his sides, in one hand a fishing rod, in the other a string of hornpout.

A few moments later, the fire engines arrived, but it was already too late to save Flora’s trailer or anything that had been inside it. All they could accomplish, they realized immediately, was to attempt to save the rest of the trailers, which they instantly set about doing, washing down the metal sides and sending huge, billowing columns of steam into the air. Gradually, as the flames subsided, the firemen turned their hoses and doused the dying fire completely. An hour before daylight, they left, and behind them, where Flora’s trailer had been, was a cold, charred, shapeless mass of indistinguishable materials—melted plastic, crumbled wood and ash, blackened, bent sheet metal, and charred flesh and fur.

By the pink light of dawn, Flora emerged from the swamp and came to stand before the remains of the pyre. She was alone, for the others, as soon as the fire engines left, had trudged heavily and exhausted to bed. Around nine, Marcelle Chagnon was stirred from her sleep by the telephone—it was the Concord Hospital, informing her that the woman she had signed in the day before, Flora Pease, had left sometime during the night without permission, and they did not know her whereabouts.

Marcelle wearily peered out the window next to the bed and saw Flora standing before the long, black heap across the lane. She told the woman from the hospital that Flora was here. She must have heard last night that her trailer burned down, over the radio, maybe, and hitchhiked back to Catamount. She assured the woman that she would look after her, but the woman said not to bother, she only had the flu and probably would be fine in a few days, unless, of course, she caught pneumonia hitchhiking last night without a hat or coat on.

Marcelle hung up the phone and continued to watch Flora, who stood as if before a grave. The others in the park, as they rose from their beds, looked out at the wreckage, and, seeing Flora there, stayed inside, and left her alone. Eventually, around midday, she slowly turned and walked back to the swamp.

Marcelle saw her leaving and ran out to stop her. “Flora!” she cried, and the woman turned back and waited in the middle of the clearing. Marcelle trotted heavily across the open space, and when she came up to her, said to Flora, “I’m sorry.”

Flora stared at her blankly, as if she didn’t understand.

“Flora, I’m sorry … about your babies.” Marcelle put one arm around the woman’s shoulders, and they stood side by side, facing away from the trailerpark.

Flora said nothing for a few moments. “They wasn’t my babies. Babies make me nervous,” she said, shrugging the arm away. Then, when she looked up into Marcelle’s big face, she must have seen that she had hurt her, for her tone softened. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Chagnon. But they wasn’t my babies. I know the difference, and babies make me nervous.”

That was in September. The fire was determined to have been “of suspicious origin,” and everyone concluded that some drunken kids from town had set it. The several young men suspected of the crime, however, came up with alibis, and no further investigation seemed reasonable.

By the middle of October, Flora Pease had built an awkwardly pitched shanty on the land where the swamp behind the trailerpark rose slightly and met the pinewoods, land that might have belonged to the Corporation and might have been New Hampshire state property. But it was going to take a judge, a battery of lawyers, and a pair of surveyors before anyone could say for sure. As long as neither the Corporation nor the state fussed about it, no one was willing to make Flora tear down her shanty and move.

She built it herself from stuff she dragged from the town dump down the road and into the woods to the swamp—old boards, galvanized sheet metal, strips of tar paper, cast-off shingles—and furnished it the same way, with a discolored, torn mattress, a three-legged card table, an easy chair with the stuffing blossoming at the seams, and a moldy rug that had been in a children’s playhouse. It was a single room, with a tin woodstove for cooking and heat, a privy out back, and a kerosene lantern for light.

For a while, a few people from the trailerpark went on occasion to the edge of the swamp and visited with her. You could see her shack easily from the park, as she had situated it on a low rise where she had the clearest view of the charred wreckage of old number 11. Bruce Severance, the college kid, dropped by fairly often, especially in early summer, when he was busily locating the feral hemp plants in the area and needed her expert help, and Terry Constant went out there, “just for laughs,” he said. He used to sit peacefully on a stump in the sun and get stoned on hemp and rap with her about his childhood and dead mother. Whether Flora talked about her childhood and her dead mother Terry never said. It got hard to talk about Flora. She was just there, the Guinea Pig Lady, even though she didn’t have any guinea pigs, and there wasn’t much anyone could say about it anymore, since everyone more or less knew how she had got to be who she was, and everyone more or less knew who she was going to be from here on out.

Merle used to walk out there in warm weather, and he continued to visit Flora long after everyone else had ceased doing it. The reason he went out, he said, was because you got a different perspective on the trailerpark from out there, practically the same perspective he said he got in winter from the lake when he was in his ice house. And though Marcelle never visited Flora’s shack herself, every time she passed it with her gaze, she stopped her gaze and for a long time looked at the place and Flora sitting outside on an old metal folding chair, smoking her cob pipe and staring back at the trailerpark. She gazed at Flora mournfully and with an anger longing for a shape, for Marcelle believed that she alone knew the woman’s secret.

Queen for a Day

The elder of the two boys, Earl, turns from the dimly lit worktable, a door on sawhorses, where he is writing. He pauses a second and says to his brother, “Cut that out, willya? Getcha feet off the walls.”

The other boy says, “You’re not the boss of this family, you know.” He is dark-haired with large brown eyes, a moody ten-year-old lying bored on his cot with sneakered feet slapped against the faded green, floral print wallpaper.

Earl crosses his arms over his narrow chest and stares down at his brother from a considerable height. The room is cluttered with model airplanes, schoolbooks, papers, clothing, hockey sticks and skates, a set of barbells. Earl says, “We’re supposed to be doing homework, you know. If she hears you tramping your feet on the walls, she’ll come screaming in here.”

“She can’t hear me. Besides, you’re not doing homework. And
I’m
reading,” he says, waving a geography book at him.

The older boy sucks his breath through his front teeth and glares. “You really piss me off, George. With you doing that, rubbing your feet all over the wallpaper like you’re doing, it makes me all distracted.” He turns back to his writing, scribbling with a ballpoint pen on lined paper in a schoolboy’s three-ring binder. Earl has sandy blond hair and pale blue eyes that turn downward at the corners and a full red mouth. He’s more scrawny than skinny, hard and flat-muscled, and suddenly tall for his age, making him a head taller than his brother, taller even than his mother now, and able to pat their sister’s head as if he were a full-grown adult already.

He turned twelve eight months ago, in March, and in May their father left. Their father is a union carpenter who works on projects in distant corners of the state—schools, hospitals, post offices—and for a whole year the man came home only on weekends. Then, for a while, every other weekend. Finally, he was gone for a month, and when he came home the last time, it was to say good-bye to Earl, George, and their sister, Louise, and to their mother, too, of course, she who had been saying (for what seemed to the children years) that she never wanted to see the man again anyhow, ever, under any circumstances, because he just causes trouble when he’s home and more trouble when he doesn’t come home, so he might as well stay away for good. They can all get along better without him, she insisted, which was true, Earl was sure, but that was before the man left for good and stopped sending them money, so that now, six months later, Earl is not so sure anymore that they can get along better without their father than with him.

It happened on a Saturday morning, a day washed with new sunshine and dry air, with the whole family standing somberly in the kitchen, summoned there from their rooms by their mother’s taut, high-pitched voice, a voice that had an awful point to prove. “Come out here! Your father has something important to say to you!”

They obeyed, one by one, and gathered in a line before their father, who, dressed in pressed khakis and shined work shoes and cap, sat at the kitchen table, a pair of suitcases beside him, and in front of him a cup of coffee, which he stirred slowly with a spoon. His eyes were filled with dense water, the way they almost always were on Sunday mornings, from his drinking the night before, the children knew, and he had trouble looking them in the face, because of the sorts of things he and their mother were heard saying to one another when they were at home together late Saturday nights. This Sunday morning it was only a little worse than usual—his hands shook some, and he could barely hold his cigarette; he let it smolder in the ashtray and kept on stirring his coffee while he talked. “Your mother and me,” he said in his low, roughened voice, “we’ve decided on some things you kids should know about.” He cleared his throat. “Your mother, she thinks you oughta hear it from me, though I don’t quite know so much about that as she does, seeing as how it’s not completely my idea alone.” He studied his coffee cup for a few seconds.

“They should hear it from you because it’s what you
want
!” their mother finally said. She stood by the sink, her hands wringing each other dry, and stared at the man. Her face was swollen from crying, which, for the children, was not an unusual thing on a Sunday morning when their father was home. They still did not know what was coming.

“Adele, it’s
not
what I want,” he said. “It’s what’s got to be, that’s all. Kids,” he said, “I got to leave you folks, for a while. A long while. And I won’t be comin’ back, I guess.” He grabbed his cigarette with thumb and forefinger and inhaled the smoke fiercely, then placed the butt back into the ashtray and went on talking, as if to the table: “I don’t want to do this, I hate it, but I got to. It’s too hard to explain, and I’m hoping that someday you’ll understand it all, but I just… I just got to live someplace else now.”

Louise, the girl, barely six years old, was the only one of the three children who could speak. She said, “Where are you going, Daddy?”

“Upstate,” he said. “Back up to Holderness. I got me an apartment up there, small place.”

“That’s not all he’s got up there!” their mother said.

“Adele, I can walk outa here right this second,” he said smoothly. “I don’t have to explain a goddamned thing, if you keep that kinda stuff up. We had an agreement.”

“Yup, yup. Sorry,” she said, pursing her lips, locking them with an invisible key, throwing the key away.

Finally, Earl could speak. “Will … will you come and see us? Or can we maybe come visit you, on weekends and like that?”

“Sure, son, you can visit me, anytime you want. It’ll take a while for me to get the place set up right, but soon’s I get it all set up for kids, I’ll call you, and we’ll work out some nice visits. I shouldn’t come here, though, not for a while. You understand.”

Earl shook his head somberly up and down, as if his one anxiety concerning the event had been put satisfactorily to rest.

George, however, had turned his back on his father, and now he was taking tiny, mincing half-steps across the linoleum-covered kitchen floor toward the outside door. He stopped a second, opened the door, and stood on the landing at the top of the stairs, and no one tried to stop him, because he was doing what they wanted to do themselves, and then they heard him running pell-mell, as if falling, down the darkened stairs, two flights, to the front door of the building, heard it slam behind him, and knew he was gone, up Perley Street, between parked cars, down alleys, to a hiding place where they knew he’d stop, sit, and bawl, knew it because it was what they wanted to do themselves, especially Earl, who was too old, too scared, too confused, and too angry. Earl said, “I hope everyone can be more happy now.”

His father smiled and looked at him for the first time and clapped him on the shoulder. “Right, son,” he said. “You, you’re the man of the house now. I know you can do it. You’re a good kid, and, listen, I’m proud of you. Your mother, your brother and sister, they’re all going to need you a hell of a lot more than they have before, but I know you’re up to it, son. I’m countin’ on you,” he said, and he stood up and rubbed out his cigarette. Then he reached beyond Earl with both hands and hugged Earl’s sister, lifted her off her feet and squeezed her tight, and when the man set her down, he wiped tears away from his eyes. “Tell Georgie … well, maybe I’ll see him downstairs or something. He’s upset, I guess…” He shook Earl’s hand, drew him close, quickly hugged him, and let go and stepped away. Grabbing up his suitcases in silence, without looking once at his wife or back at his children, he left the apartment.

For good. “And good riddance, too,” as their mother immediately started saying to anyone who would listen. Louise said she missed her daddy, but she seemed to be quickly forgetting that, since for most of her life he had worked away from home, and George, who stayed mad, went deep inside himself and said nothing about it at all, and Earl—who did not know how he felt about their father’s abandoning them, for he knew that in many ways it was the best their father could do for them and in many other ways it was the worst—spoke of the man as if he had died in an accident, as if their mother were a widow and they half orphaned. This freed him, though he did not know it then, to concentrate on survival, survival for them all, which he now understood to be his personal responsibility, for his mother seemed utterly incapable of guaranteeing it, and his brother and sister were still practically babies. Often, late at night, lying in his squeaky, narrow cot next to his brother’s, Earl would say to himself, “I’m the man of the house now,” and somehow just saying it, over and over, “I’m the man of the house now,” like a prayer, made his terror ease back from his face, and he could finally slip into sleep.

Now, with his father gone six months and their mother still fragile, still denouncing the man to everyone who listens, and even to those who don’t listen but merely show her their faces for a moment or two, it’s as if the man were still coming home weekends drunk and raging against her and the world, were still betraying her, were telling all her secrets to another woman in a motel room in the northern part of the state. It’s as if he were daily abandoning her and their three children over and over again, agreeing to send money, and then sending nothing, promising to call and write letters, and then going silent on them, planning visits and trips together on weekends and holidays, and then leaving them with not even a forwarding address, forbidding them, almost, from adjusting to a new life, a life in which the man who is their father and her husband does not betray them anymore.

Earl decides to solve their problems himself. He hatches and implements, as best he can, plans, schemes, designs, all intended to find a substitute for the lost father. He introduces his mother to his hockey coach, who turns out to be married and a new father; and he invites in for breakfast and to meet his ma the cigar-smoking vet with the metal plate in his skull who drops off the newspapers at dawn for Earl to deliver before school. But the man turns out to dislike women actively enough to tell Earl, right to his face: “No offense, kid, I’m sure your ma’s a nice lady, but I got no use for ’em is why I’m single, not ’cause I ain’t met the right one yet or something.” And to the guy who comes to read the electric meter one afternoon when Earl’s home from school with the flu and his mother’s at work down at the tannery, where they’ve taken her on as an assistant bookkeeper, Earl says that he can’t let the man into the basement because it’s locked, he’ll have to come back later when his mom’s home, so she can let him in herself. The man says, “Hey, no problem, I can use last month’s reading and make the correction next month,” and waves cheerfully good-bye, leaving Earl suddenly, utterly, shockingly aware of his foolishness, his pathetic, helpless longing for a man of the house.

For a moment, he blames his mother for his longing and hates her for his fantasies. But then quickly he forgives her and blames himself and commences to concoct what he thinks of as more realistic, more dignified plans, schemes, designs: sweepstakes tickets; lotteries; raffles—Earl buys tickets on the sly with his paper route money. And he enters contests: essay contests for junior high school students that provide the winner with a weeklong trip for him and a parent to Washington, D.C.; and the National Spelling Bee, which takes Earl only to the county level before he fails to spell
alligator
correctly. A prize, any kind of award from the world outside their tiny, besieged family, Earl believes, will make their mother happy at last. He believes that a prize will validate their new life somehow and will thus separate it, once and for all, from their father. It will be as if their father never existed.

“So what are you writing?” George demands from the bed. He walks his feet up the wall as high as he can reach, then retreats. “I know it ain’t homework, you don’t write that fast when you’re doing homework. What is it, a
love
letter?”

“No, asshole. Just take your damned feet off the wall, will you? Ma’s gonna be in here in a minute screaming at both of us.” Earl closes the notebook and pushes it away from him carefully, as if it is the Bible and he has just finished reading aloud from it.

“I want to see what you wrote,” George says, flipping around and setting his feet, at last, onto the floor. He reaches toward the notebook. “Lemme see it.”

“C’mon, willya? Cut the shit.”

“Naw, lemme see it.” He stands up and swipes the notebook from the table as Earl moves to protect it.

“You little sonofabitch!” Earl says, and he clamps onto the notebook with both hands and yanks, pulling George off his feet and forward onto Earl’s lap, and they both tumble to the floor, where they begin to fight, swing fists and knees, roll and grab, bumping against furniture in the tiny, crowded room, until a lamp falls over, books tumble to the floor, model airplanes crash. In seconds, George is getting the worst of it and scrambles across the floor to the door, with Earl crawling along behind, yanking his brother’s shirt with one hand and pounding at his head and back with the other, when suddenly the bedroom door swings open, and their mother stands over them. She grabs both boys by their collars and shrieks, “What’s the matter with you! What’re you doing! What’re you doing!” They stop and collapse into a bundle of legs and arms, but she goes on shrieking at them. “I can’t
stand
it when you fight! Don’t you know that? I can’t
stand
it!”

George cries, “I didn’t do anything! I just wanted to see his homework!”

“Yeah, sure,” Earl says. “Innocent as a baby.”

“Shut up! Both of you!” their mother screams. She is wild-eyed, glaring at them, and, as he has done so many times, Earl looks at her face as if he’s outside his body, and he sees that she’s not angry at them at all, she’s frightened and in pain, as if her sons are little animals, rats or ferrets, with tiny, razor-sharp teeth biting at her ankles and feet.

Quickly, he gets to his feet and says, “I’m sorry, Ma. I guess I’m just a little tired or something lately.” He pats his mother on her shoulder and offers a small smile. George crawls on hands and knees to his bed and lies on it, while Earl gently turns their mother around and steers her out the door to the living room, where the television set drones on, Les Paul and Mary Ford, playing their guitars and singing bland harmonies. “We’ll be out in a few minutes for
Dobie Gillis
, Ma. Don’t worry,” Earl says.