The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  Days I worked as a window trimmer for Webb’s City, after I’d been let go at Maas Brothers. Webb’s City was an early cut-rate department store parked on an invisible line that separated the neighborhood where middle-class blacks lived from the neighborhood where poor whites lived. There were eight of us in the Display Department, as it was called—art school dropouts, alcoholic ex-stagehands, sign painters and me—and from the small warehouse on the edge of the Webb’s City parking lot where we toiled through the long, hot, Florida day building frames, cutting and stretching paper, carving homosote, painting signs, and repairing old mannequins, we looked out the open door one way and watched the black people stroll their streets, turned and looked out the door on the opposite side and watched the white people, mostly runaway Georgia farmers and their wives and skinny children, pass their days on the broken-down porches of rented bungalows.

  It could have been depressing, but I was twenty years old and going to be married soon to a very pretty eighteen-year-old blond girl with green eyes that made me feel crazy. Also, I was thought to be unusually talented at this business of decorating department store windows. I had a future. When you think you have a future, you’re not easily depressed.

  My roommate at the time, Martin Schram, who worked with me at Webb’s City, did not think he had a future. He was thirty-one, had spent two years in Cleveland studying art, then had joined the Navy. He learned to paint signs and after four years on an aircraft carrier went back for four more, until he got frightened by what he seemed to be doing to his life, so he came home to Cleveland, where he found that he’d already done it, and moved to Florida.

  We shared a railroad flat that was half a bungalow. Martin, since he was older, claimed the more desirable front room, which had windows and a door to the porch. I got the middle room, which was small and dark, a damp, hot cavern between Martin’s room and the kitchen and bath in back. I figured that, with my two jobs, I wasn’t home much, anyhow, and besides, by the time I got married to Eleanor I’d have enough money saved to buy a whole house. As a result, I didn’t complain about the darkness and the heat and the occasional slugs that inched their way up the gray walls, fell back to the floor, and after a while started over again.

  Martin envied me because Eleanor loved me. “I don’t mean that I’m in love with your Eleanor or anything,” he said the night this all came out. “I don’t even particularly like her.” It was past midnight, a Friday in late April, and I had come home from Thom McAn’s exhausted, as I’d been working five days and nights straight, angry, because I still had another night to go, and more than usually frightened, for I’d endured an especially horrifying vision of the causeway lights over Tampa Bay on the drive home, had felt my legs turn to water, because the awful question did not go away when I forced my gaze back to the white line in the road ahead of me, and I almost cracked and cried out, Yes, yes, I am about to make the biggest mistake of my life!

  We were drinking beer. Colt 45 was new then, and I liked the snow-covered mountains and blue sky on the label, especially when it was hot and like tonight had recently rained and the live oak trees and Spanish moss were still dripping noisily onto the muddy front yard and sidewalk beyond. I stripped as I passed through my room, walked shirtless and barefoot out to the dark kitchen, and swung open the refrigerator, let the pale, cool light wash the room, and there on the top shelf, frosty and brilliant, was a pair of unopened six-packs of blue-white-and-gold cans of beer.

  By the time he told me that he envied me, Martin and I had finished the first six-pack and were halfway through the second. Martin Schram could drink beer. He was German and thick-bodied, built like an overstuffed sofa. He had dark, short hair that he was losing, a heavy brow and large, square chin, and a grim, thin mouth. His blue eyes, though small, were the most expressive and easily read part of his face, and when I wanted to know what he was thinking, which wasn’t all that often, I looked at his eyes. Tonight, however, we were out on the unlit porch, bare feet on the wooden rail, seated side by side in plastic-and-aluminum folding chairs, and I could not see his eyes and had to ask him what he meant.

  He sighed.

  “No, I mean it. What do you mean, you envy me because of Eleanor?”

  “Forget it, kid,” he said. He emptied the can and crunched it with one hand. The light-weight cans had just come out, and we liked smashing them as if they were the rigid cans that took two hands to crush.

  “Kid,” I said.

  That’s when the noise next door started. A man and woman lived there, the Smiths, known to me and Martin only by the nameplate on the door next to ours and by sight, when they went out to work in the morning and returned at night. They spent the rest of the time inside their apartment, no matter how hot it got, which left the porch entirely to us, a circumstance we did not complain of. We figured they stayed inside because the man was deformed. Mr. Smith’s arms were like flippers, half as long as normal arms and dwindled at the wrists and hands. Evidently, he was able to drive, and judging from the way he dressed— sport coat altered especially for his arms, slacks, dress shirt and tie—he held a decent job. Mrs. Smith was normal-looking. Actually, she was on the attractive side (as was he, except for the arms) and went out every morning dressed like a salesgirl at a first-class department store, Maas Brothers, say, a place that wouldn’t hire any of the short, dumpy, gum-chewing, acne-covered women and girls who could get work at Webb’s City. My fiancée Eleanor worked at Maas Brothers, in beachwear.

  We had heard noises from next door on several occasions that year, always late at night, and always Friday, payday. It was the sound of a man beating a woman. More precisely, it was the sound of a woman hollering that she was being beaten by a man, something that we, of course, discounted, because we could not imagine how he could do it. There would be a thump and a bang or two, then a shriek, a wail, some long drawn-out sobs, and some more thumps. Then quiet. That was it. If both Martin and I happened to be home and in the same room at the same time, he would look over at me and shake his head and smile. “Sonofabitch’s at it again.”

  “Can’t really be hurting her, though.”

  “No. She’s as big as he is, and she’s got regular arms.”

  “Yeah! It’s just probably something they do.”

  “You can never tell what people like.”

  “Yeah!”

  This time, though, was different. The noises went on too long, and they got louder. Mr. Smith sounded drunk, and we could hear him snapping and snarling like a dog in a dogfight, and she was wailing, a high, unbroken keening sound, like an old Greek woman who’d been told her favorite son was dead.

  “Jesus Christ,” Martin said. “They’re really going at it tonight.”

  “What do you think?” I said. I got up from my chair and walked across the porch and faced the closed door to their apartment. “Maybe the bastard’s hitting her with a stick or something.”

  “Naw, they’re like a coupla alley cats, that’s all. Forget it.” I heard Martin crack open another beer. Three left. If I didn’t open a fresh one now, he’d get two, and I’d get one. But then I’d have two warm beers instead of one cold one. Hard to choose.

  “I don’t know, I think we oughta do something,” I said.

  “Like what? Call the cops? I don’t believe in that. Husband and wife, they got to work these things out themselves. You’ll see.”

  I opened the screened door to our apartment and went back to the kitchen and got myself a cold beer. When I came out to the porch, I put the unopened can on the floor next to my chair and went on drinking from the open one.

  Then Mrs. Smith started screaming. “No, no, no!” Mr. Smith’s voice was muffled, but it sounded like he was threatening to kill her, over and over.

  “I think he’s trying to kill her,” I said.

  “No,” Martin said, but he got up from his chair and joined me in front of their door.

  “What if he’s got a gun?” I asked.

  “I don’t think the bastar
d can shoot it. All he’s got is those little grippers, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Yeah, but the sonofabitch can drive a car!”

  “True.”

  “You think we should do something?” I asked.

  “He’s just a crippled little guy taking it out on his wife. It’s just something they do,” Martin said, and he moved slowly away and down the steps to the front yard.

  “Where you going?”

  “I want to see if maybe I can see inside,” he said from the darkness. “They got all the blinds drawn.”

  “I heard a gun!”

  “What? I didn’t hear it.”

  “No, a click. I heard it click, like maybe he’s only clicking it at her. You know?”

  Martin came back onto the porch and sat himself heavily into the folding chair. “Look, if the gun goes off, then I’ll worry. Not before.” He took a long pull from his beer. “‘Clicks.’” He laughed lightly.

  Mrs. Smith screamed, and I reached forward and pushed the doorbell. Silence on the other side of the door. I waited a few seconds and pushed the bell again, a long, loud buzz, and slowly the door opened, and I saw Mr. Smith standing there in T-shirt and slacks, panting, red-faced. Without a gun.

  “What do you want?” He was several inches shorter than I and slender, almost delicate-looking. His lank blond hair had fallen across his face, and his mouth was working angrily, as if trying to rid itself of something objectionable. His tiny, shriveled arms hung at his sides like the wings of a newly hatched bird. He looked pathetic, but very angry, and I was surprised to find myself afraid of him, afraid of his intensity, his breathlessness and flushed face and hard eyes, the desperation these things signified to me. I had none of it, and, until that moment I had not known it even existed in the world, despite the signals I had been getting every night on my drive home from the shoe store. And despite Martin Schram, whose envy of me I understood so feebly that I could barely hide my lack of interest.

  “We heard a lotta noise,” I said gruffly.

  He looked me over with care, without apology. “You trying to sleep?”

  “No … but we were wondering…”

  “Who’s that?” Mrs. Smith called from somewhere behind him. I could see furniture overturned beyond the man, rugs rippled and out of place, an empty quart beer bottle, still rolling. The light in the room cut a blond swath across the far wall at an oblique, useless angle, as if a table lamp had been placed on its side on the floor. I imagined Mrs. Smith lying in a corner of the room, holding mournfully to her rib cage, her legs splayed out in front of her, and I forgot my fear and was glad I had interrupted them.

  “It’s just the kid next door,” Mr. Smith said, as if disappointed.

  “Are you all right?” I called.

  “Get the hell out of here,” he said. “Mind your own damned business.”

  I drew open the screened door. “Are you all right, Mrs. Smith?”

  She entered the living room from the darkness of a further room and leaned against the doorframe there, wearing a filmy, pink nightgown, her bare arms crossed over her breasts, her legs crossed at the ankles. She looked bored, impatient, and irritated all at once.

  I took a single step toward her and, halfway into the room, said to her, “I’m sorry. I just… I thought he…”

  Suddenly, the man was shoving me back with his tiny arms, pushing them against my chest, astonishing me with the hard force of the shoves. “Get outa here! G’wan, get the fuck outa here!”

  I leapt out of his way and yelled, “Leave her alone, you sonofabitch! Leave the woman alone!”

  Then Martin was behind me, grabbing me from behind and yanking me away from the door.

  “Close your door!” he said to Smith. “And shut the hell up. For God’s sake.”

  Smith closed the door, and Martin turned to me. His face in the brown light off the shaded windows had collapsed in on itself, and I saw him as I’d never seen him before. He was frightened and very sad and deeply, painfully weary of me. His small eyes were watered over, and his thin lips trembled.

  I took a step backward, turned, and sat down. Martin came around and sat down next to me, and I could tell, even without looking at him, that his whole body was shaking.

  I was stone-cold calm. “I’m sorry,” I said. I leaned over and plucked the unopened can of Colt 45 from the floor and opened it and took a slug.

  “You…,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You don’t know a damned thing. About anything.”

  “You’re right.”

  “You just say that. You say it so easy,” he said. He lit a cigarette. The rain had stopped a long time before, and now the dripping from the trees and Spanish moss had stopped too. Crickets started up. I heard trucks on Route 19, three blocks away, change gears.

  “You’re right about that too,” I said. “I say it so easy.” I stood up, leaned against the railing, and looked at his silhouette. “But I mean it.”

  “You probably do,” he said, as if he no longer cared. It was too late to matter to him. He got up then and went inside and lay down on his bed and fell asleep.

  I did marry the girl with the green eyes, Eleanor from beachwear, and it was not the biggest mistake I ever made, even though it was, of course, a mistake. Two weeks before the wedding, I was hired as display director for the Montgomery Ward’s store in Lakeland, youngest display director in the state of Florida, and moved out of the apartment I shared with Martin Schram.

  “You better come to the wedding, pal,” I said. We were on the porch, a midafternoon, with a rented trailer behind my Studebaker, all my worldly belongings inside.

  “I’ll be there,” he said, and he clapped me on both shoulders. “You’ll be okay, kid.”

  “You will too,” I said.

  “Right.”

  We shook hands, and I left.

  Plains of Abraham

  Had he known everything then that he’d know later, Vann still would have called it a coincidence, nothing more. His was a compact, layered mind with only a few compartments connected. He had been married three times and was unmarried now, and this morning he couldn’t shake Irene, his second wife, from his mind. He shaved and dressed for work, tightened the covers, and slid the bed back under the sofa, all the while swatting at thoughts of Irene, the force of his swipes banging doors and walls, making him feel clumsy and off-balance. Thinking about problems only aggravates problems, but the way these random scraps of memory, emotion, and reflection flew at him—even now, four years after the divorce from Irene, with the lump of a whole third marriage and divorce in between—was strange. Vann and Irene had not seen or spoken to each other in person once in those years.

  It was a coincidence, that’s all, and would have been one even if Vann had known that on this particular morning, a Wednesday in November, Irene, who was forty-eight years old and close to a hundred pounds overweight and suffering from severe coronary disease, who normally would herself be getting ready for work, was instead being prepared at Saranac Lake General Hospital for open-heart surgery. The procedure, to be performed by the highly regarded vascular surgeon, Dr. Carl Ransome, was to be a multiple bypass. It was a dangerous, although not an uncommon operation, even up here in the north-country, and had Irene not collapsed in pain two days earlier while grocery-shopping at the Grand Union in Lake Placid with her daughter Frances, the procedure would have been put off until she had lost a considerable part of her excess weight. Too late for that now.

  “Jesus,” Dr. Ransome had said to the night nurse, after visiting Irene in her room for the first time, “this’ll be like flaying a goddamned whale.” The nurse winced and looked away, and the young surgeon strode whistling down the corridor.

  Vann stirred a cup of instant coffee and wondered if he ever crowded Irene’s mornings the way she did his. Probably not. Irene was tougher than he, a big-bellied joker who had seemed nothing but relieved when he left her, although he himself had been almost surprised by his departure, as i
f she had tricked him into it.

  “Good riddance,” she liked saying to Frances, her daughter. “Never marry a construction man, doll baby. They’re hound dogs with hardhats,” she said.

  Vann wasn’t quite that bad. He was one of those men who protect themselves by dividing themselves. He regarded love and work as opposites—he loved to work but had to work at love. Yet, with Irene, what Vann thought of as love had come easy, at least at first. When they married, Irene and Vann had been in their mid-thirties, lonely, and still shaky from the aftershocks of belligerent first divorces, and for a few years they had managed to meet each other’s needs almost without trying. Vann was a small man, wiry, with muscles like doorknobs, and back then he had liked Irene’s size, her soft amplitude. He had regarded her as a large woman, not fat. And she had liked and admired his crisp, intense precision, his pale crew-cut hair, his tight smile.

  To please her, and to suit himself, too, he had come in off the road and for a while kept his tools in the trunk of his car and worked locally. He started his own one-man plumbing and heating business, limited mostly to small repairs and renovations, operating out of an office and shop that he built into the basement of Irene’s house in Lake Placid. Frances, who was barely a teenager then, had resented Vann’s sudden, large, hard presence in her mother’s life and home and stayed away at boarding school, except for holidays, which was fine by Vann, especially since Irene’s first husband was paying the tuition.

  Irene quit her job at the real estate office and kept Vann’s books. But after four barely break-even and two losing years in a row, his credit at the bank ran out, and the business collapsed, and Vann went on the road again. Soon he saw his needs differently. He guessed Irene saw her needs differently then, too. He knew he had disappointed her. He allowed himself a couple of short-term dalliances, and she found out about one. He told her about one other. He drank a lot, maybe too much, and there were some dalliances he barely remembered. Those he kept to himself. A year later, they were divorced.