The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (24 page)

Buddy wrenched open the door and stepped out of the pickup and slammed the door shut behind him. Slinging his bags quickly to the ground, he waved at the driver of the truck hissing to a stop by the ramp and showed him his thumb. The driver waved him up, and Buddy climbed aboard. Tom let the truck pass, turned slowly around in the road, and headed back to town.

Mistake

In the spring of 1960, I turned twenty. By June, I’d be married, so I was working at a second job, selling women’s shoes at a Thom McAn’s in a shopping center out in West St. Petersburg. Driving home late six nights a week in my shaky ’48 Studebaker, I cast wary glances out the open window at the causeway that looped across the bay north to Tampa, a string of lights over dark water that somehow made me think of New York City, and for a few terrifying seconds each night I wondered if I was making the biggest mistake of my life.

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 bastard 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.”