The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  It’s occurred to me lately that in a few years, if I want to, I can put together a team of these rugged Arctic dogs, and I can race them in nearby Laconia, where the annual National Sled Dog Championship Races are held. The prize money isn’t much, but it’s said that great satisfaction derives from handling a team of dogs under such strenuous circumstances. There’s a regular racecourse, and you’re supposed to end up back where you started, on Main Street in Laconia, after a couple hours of following red triangular flags through the surrounding countryside. I know that I would pull off the course after a while, never finishing the race. I’d light out for the backcountry, where you can drive all day on top of ten feet of snow and ice. Imagine driving a dozen half-wild, Norwegian elkhound sled dogs into billowing sheets of snow, leaving the settlement and swiftly disappearing behind the dogs into timeless, silent whiteness.

  When spring came, I’d be circling the muddied edge of Hudson Bay on foot, looking at the wet ground for pieces of old iron or charred wood, or maybe a yellowed, half-rotted journal—signs that Hudson had made it to shore. If he made it that far, the Cree or the Esquimaux would have helped him, and he would have survived there peacefully into old age, telling and retelling to the few of us who’d elected to leave the Discovery with him the amazing tales of earlier voyages.

  There was the 1607 attempt for the Moscovy Company to cut across the Arctic, north from Norway all the way to 80 degrees latitude at Hakluyt’s Headland on Spitsbergen, before fields of ice finally stopped him. There was the second voyage for the Muscovy, in 1608, eastward around the top of Russia, until he was blocked by ice, headlands, and headwinds.

  There was the 1609 voyage, for the Dutch East India Company. This time, headed northeast around Russia again, mutiny stopped him, and he turned back.

  Then there was the year, 1610, financed by a group of Englishmen, that Hudson and his entire crew in the Discovery lay icebound in his bay atop the North American continent.

  After the second and final mutiny, there was the year it took for Hudson and his three loyal sailors to cross the bay to the western shore, dragging the shallop filled with their dwindling supplies all the way across the endless silent ice pack.

  Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat

  It was the third day of an August heat wave. Within an hour of the sun’s rising above the spruce and pine trees that grew along the eastern hills, a blue-gray haze had settled over the lake and trailerpark, so that from the short, sandy spit that served as a swimming place for the residents of the trailerpark you couldn’t see the far shore of the lake. Around seven, a man in plaid bathing trunks and white bathing cap, in his sixties but still straight and apparently in good physical condition, left one of the trailers and walked along the paved lane to the beach. He draped his white towel over the bow of a flaking, bottle green rowboat that had been dragged onto the sand and walked directly into the water and when the water was up to his waist he began to swim, smoothly, slowly, straight out in the still water for two hundred yards or so, where he turned, treaded water for a few moments, and then started swimming back toward shore. When he reached the shore, he dried himself and walked back to his trailer and went inside. By the time he closed his door the water was smooth again, a dark green plain beneath the thick, gray-blue sky. No birds moved or sang; even the insects were silent.

  In the next few hours, people left their trailers to go to their jobs in town, those who had jobs—the nurse, the bank teller, the carpenter, the woman who worked in the office at the tannery, and her little girl, who would spend the day with a baby-sitter in town. They moved slowly, heavily, as if with regret, even the child.

  Time passed, and the trailerpark was silent again, while the sun baked the metal roofs and sides of the trailers, heating them up inside, so that by midmorning it was cooler outside than in, and the people came out and tried to find a shady place to sit. First to appear was a middle-aged woman in large sunglasses and white shorts and halter, her head hidden by a floppy, wide-brimmed, cloth hat. She carried a book and sat on the shaded side of her trailer in an aluminum and plastic-webbing lawn chair and began to read her book. Then from his trailer came the man in the plaid bathing trunks, bareheaded now and shirtless and tanned to a chestnut color, his skin the texture of old leather. He wore rubber sandals and proceeded to hook up a garden hose and water the small, meticulously weeded vegetable garden on the slope behind his trailer. Every now and then he aimed the hose down and sprayed his bony feet. From the first trailer in from the road, where a sign that said MANAGER had been attached over the door, a tall, thick-bodied woman in her forties with cropped, graying hair, wearing faded jeans cut off at midthigh and a floppy T-shirt that had turned pink in the wash, walked slowly out to the main road, a half mile, to get her mail. When she returned she sat on her steps and read the letters and advertisements and the newspaper. About that time a blond boy in his late teens with shoulder-length hair, skinny, tanned, shirtless, and barefoot in jeans, emerged from his trailer, sighed, and sat down on the stoop and smoked a joint. At the last trailer in the park, the one next to the beach, an old man smoking a cob pipe and wearing a sleeveless undershirt and beltless khaki trousers slowly scraped paint from the bottom of an overturned rowboat. He ceased working and watched carefully as, walking slowly past him toward a dark green rowboat on the sand, there came a young black man with a fishing rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other. The man was tall and, though slender, muscular. He wore jeans and a pale blue, unbuttoned, short-sleeved shirt.

  The old man said it was too hot for fishing, they wouldn’t feed in this weather, and the young man said he didn’t care, it had to be cooler on the lake than here on shore. The old man agreed with that, but why bother carrying your fishing rod and tackle box with you when you don’t expect to catch any fish?

  “Right,” the young man said, smiling. “Good question.” Placing his box and the rod into the rowboat, he turned to wait for the young woman who was stepping away from the trailer where, earlier, the middle-aged woman in shorts, halter, and floppy hat had come out and sat in the lawn chair to read. The young woman was a girl, actually, twenty or maybe twenty-one. She wore a lime green terry-cloth bikini and carried a large yellow towel in one hand and a fashion magazine and small brown bottle of tanning lotion in the other. Her long, honey blond hair swung from side to side across her tanned shoulders as she walked down the lane to the beach, where both the young man and the old man watched her approach them. She made a brief remark about the heat to the old man, said good morning to the young man, placed her towel, magazine, and tanning lotion into the dark green rowboat, and helped the young man shove the boat off the hot sand into the water. Then she jumped into the boat and sat herself in the stern, and the man, barefoot, with the bottoms of his jeans rolled to his knees, waded out, got into the boat, and began to row.

  For a while, as the man rowed and the girl rubbed tanning lotion slowly over her arms and legs and across her shoulders and belly, they said nothing. The man pulled smoothly on the oars and watched the girl, and she examined her light brown skin and stroked it and rubbed the oily, sweet-smelling fluid onto it. After a few moments, holding to the gunwales with her hands so that her entire body got exposed to the powerful sun, she leaned back, closed her eyes, and stretched her legs toward the man, placing her small, white feet over his large, dark feet. The man studied the wedge of her crotch, then her navel, where a puddle of sweat was collecting, then the rise of her small breasts, and finally her long throat glistening in the sunlight. The man was sweating from the effort of rowing and he said he should have brought a hat. He stopped rowing, let the blades of the oars float in the water, and removed his shirt and wrapped it around his head like a turban. The girl, realizing that he had ceased rowing, looked up and smiled at him. “You look like an Arab. A sheik.”

  “A galley slave, more likely.”

  “No, really. Honestly.” She lay her head back again and closed her eyes, and the man took up the oars and r
esumed rowing. They were a long ways out now, perhaps a half-mile from the trailerpark. The trailers looked like pastel-colored shoe boxes from here, six of them lined up on one side of the lane, six on the other, with a cleared bit of low ground and marsh off to one side and the outlet of the lake, the Catamount River it was called, on the other. The water was deep there, and below the surface and buried in the mud were blocks of stone and wooden lattices, the remains of fishing weirs the Indians constructed here and used for centuries, until the arrival of the Europeans. In the fall when the lake was low you could see the tops of the huge boulders the Indians placed into the stream to make channels for their nets and traps. There were weirs like this all over northern New England, most of them considerably more elaborate than this, so no one here paid much attention to these, except perhaps to mention the fact of their existence to a visitor from Massachusetts or New York. It gave the place a history and a certain significance when outsiders were present that it did not otherwise seem to have.

  The girl lifted her feet away from the man’s feet, drawing them back so that her knees pointed straight at his. She turned slightly to one side and stroked her cheekbone and lower jaw with the fingertips and thumb of one hand, leaning her weight on the other forearm and hand. “I’m already putting on weight,” she said.

  “It doesn’t work that way. You’re just eating too much.”

  “I told Mother.”

  The man stopped rowing and looked at her.

  “I told Mother,” she repeated. Her eyes were closed and her face was directed toward the sun and she continued to stroke her cheekbone and lower jaw.

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I told her that I love you very much.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No. I told her everything.”

  He started rowing again, faster this time and not as smoothly as before. They were nearing a small, tree-covered island. Large, rounded rocks lay around the island, half-submerged in the shallow water, like the backs of huge, coal-colored hippos. The man peered over his shoulder and observed the distance to the island, then drew in the oars and lifted a broken chunk of cinder block tied to a length of clothesline rope and slid it into the water. The rope went out swiftly and cleanly as the anchor sank and then suddenly stopped. The man opened his tackle box and started poking through it, searching for a deepwater spinner.

  The girl was sitting up now, studying the island with her head canted to one side, as if planning a photograph. “Actually, Mother was a lot better than I’d expected her to be. If Daddy were alive, it would be different,” she said. “Daddy…”

  “Hated niggers.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “And Mother loves ’em.” He located the spinner and attached it to the line.

  “My mother likes you. She’s a decent woman, and she’s tired and lonely. And she’s not your enemy, any more than I am.”

  “You’re sure of that.” He made a long cast and dropped the spinner between two large rocks and started winding it back in. “No, I know your mamma’s okay. I’m sorry. Tell me what she said.”

  “She thought it was great. She likes you. I’m happy, and that’s what is really important to her, and she likes you. She worries about me a lot, you know. She’s afraid for me, she thinks I’m fragile. Especially now, because I’ve had some close calls. At least that’s how she sees them.”

  “Sees what?”

  “Oh, you know. Depression.”

  “Yeah.” He cast again, slightly to the left of where he’d put the spinner the first time.

  “Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this, but I might as well come right out and say it. I’m going to do it. This afternoon. Mother’s coming with me. She called and set it up this morning.”

  He kept reeling in the spinner, slowly, steadily, as if he hadn’t heard her, until the spinner clunked against the side of the boat and he lifted it dripping from the water, and he said, “I hate this whole thing. Hate! Just know that much, will you?”

  She reached out and placed a hand on his arm. “I know you do. So do I. But it’ll be all right again afterwards. I promise. It’ll be just like it was.”

  “You can’t promise that. No one can. It won’t be all right afterwards. It’ll be lousy.”

  “I suppose you’d rather I just did nothing.”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  “Well. We’ve been through all this before. A hundred times.” She sat up straight and peered back at the trailerpark in the distance. “How long do you plan to fish?”

  “An hour or so. Why? If you want to swim, I’ll row you around to the other side of the island and drop you and come back and get you later.”

  “No. No. That’s all right. There are too many rocks anyhow. I’ll go in when we get back to the beach. I have to be ready to go by three-thirty.”

  “Yeah. I’ll make sure you get there on time,” he said, and he made a long cast off to his right in deeper water.

  “I love to sweat,” she said, lying back and showing herself once again to the full sun. “I love to just lie back and sweat.”

  The man fished, and the girl sunbathed. The water was as slick as oil, the air thick and still. After a while, the man reeled in his line and removed the silvery spinner and went back to poking through his tackle box. “Where the hell is the damn plug?” he mumbled.

  The girl sat up and watched him, his long, dark back twisted toward her, the vanilla bottoms of his feet, the fluttering muscles of his shoulders and arms, when suddenly he yelped and yanked his hand free of the box and put the meat of his hand directly into his mouth. He looked up at the girl in rage.

  “What? Are you all right?” She slid back in her seat and drew her legs up close to her and wrapped her arms around her knees.

  In silence, still sucking on his hand, he reached with the other hand into the tackle box and came back with a pale green and scarlet plug with six double hooks attached to the sides and tail. He held it as if by the head delicately with thumb and forefinger and showed it to her.

  The girl grimaced. “Ow! You poor thing.”

  He took his hand from his mouth and clipped the plug to his line and cast it toward the island, dropping it about twenty feet from the rocky shore, a short ways to the right of a pair of dog-sized boulders. The girl picked up her magazine and began to leaf through the pages, stopping every now and then to examine an advertisement or photograph. Again and again, the man cast the flashing plug into the water and drew it back to the boat, twitching its path from side to side to imitate the motions of an injured, fleeing, pale-colored animal.

  Finally, lifting the plug from the water next to the boat, the man said, “Let’s go. Old Merle was right, no sense fishing when the fish ain’t feeding. The whole point is catching fish, right?” he said, and he removed the plug from the line and tossed it into his open tackle box.

  “I suppose so. I don’t like fishing anyhow.” Then after a few seconds, as if she were pondering the subject, “But I guess it’s relaxing. Even if you don’t catch anything.”

  The man drew up the anchor, pulling in the wet rope hand over hand, and finally he pulled the cinder block free of the water and set it dripping behind him in the bow of the boat. They had drifted closer to the island now and were in the cooling shade of the thicket of oaks and birches that crowded together over the island. The water turned suddenly shallow here, only a few feet deep, and they could see the rocky bottom clearly.

  “Be careful,” the girl said. “We’ll run aground in a minute.” She watched the bottom nervously. “Take care.”

  The man looked over her head and beyond, all the way to the shore and the trailerpark. The shapes of the trailers were blurred together in the distance so that you could not tell where one trailer left off and another began. “I wish I could just leave you here,” the man said, still not looking at her.

  “What?”

  The boat drifted silentl
y in the smooth water between a pair of large rocks, barely disturbing the surface. The man’s dark face was somber and ancient beneath the turban that covered his head and the back of his neck. He leaned forward on his seat, his forearms resting wearily on his thighs, his large hands hanging limply between his knees. “I said, I wish I could just leave you here,” he said in a soft voice, and he looked down at his hands.

  She looked nervously around her, as if for an ally or a witness. “We have to go back.”

  “You mean, you have to go back.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  He slipped the oars into the oarlocks and started rowing, turning the boat and shoving it quickly away from the island. Facing the trailerpark, he rowed along the side of the island, then around behind it, out of sight of the trailerpark and the people who lived there, emerging again in a few moments on the far side of the island, rowing steadily, smoothly, powerfully. Now his back was to the trailerpark, and the girl was facing it, looking grimly past the man toward the shore.

  He rowed, and they said nothing more. In a while they had returned to shore and life among the people who lived there. A few of them were in the water and on the beach when the dark green rowboat touched land and the black man stepped out and drew the boat onto the sand. The old man in the white bathing cap was standing in waist-deep water, and the woman who was the manager of the trailerpark stood near the edge of the water, cooling her feet and ankles. The old man with the cob pipe was still chipping at the bottom of his rowboat, and next to him, watching and idly chatting, stood the kid with the long blond hair. They all watched silently as the black man turned away from the dark green rowboat and carried his fishing rod and tackle box away, and then they watched the girl, carrying her yellow towel, magazine, and bottle of tanning lotion, step carefully out of the boat and walk to where she lived with her mother.