The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (26 page)

He folded his paper and left the warm truck, but as he crossed to the trailer, key in hand, he glanced out across Lake Colby at the pink morning sky and the dark line of pines below, and the scenery sent him drifting again. He remembered an afternoon four years ago, shortly after the divorce. He was running the public high school job over in Elizabethtown and living in the Arsenal Motel on Route 9N at the edge of town, and one Friday when he drove in from work, a large flat package was waiting for him at the front desk.

Vann knew at once that it was from Irene—he recognized her handwriting and the return address, their old Lake Placid address. He lugged the crate back to his room and lay it flat on the bed and studied it for a while. What the hell kind of joke was she playing on him this time?

Finally, he pried open the crate and removed several layers of brown paper and plastic bubble wrap from the object inside. It was a large, framed picture. He recognized it instantly, and felt a rush of fear that made his heart pound, as if he had unwrapped a bomb. It was a signed color photograph by a well-known local photographer of Adirondack scenery. Very expensive, he knew. A few years back, when they were still happily married, he and Irene had strolled into a Lake Placid crafts shop, and Vann had glanced up at a picture on the wall and had felt himself leap straight up and into it, as if into someone’s dream. It was called
Plains of Abraham
and the scene was of a late summer day, looking across a field of tall grasses and wildflowers toward Mount Algonquin. The golden field, wide and flat, lay in sunshine in the foreground at eye level. A dark, jagged line of trees cut across the middle, and the craggy, plum-colored mountain towered in the distance, a pure and endless blue sky behind and above it.

This was the first and the only picture that Vann had ever wanted to own. He asked the saleswoman how much, figuring he could maybe spring for a hundred bucks.

“Twenty-two hundred dollars,” she said.

He felt his ears and face flush. “Pretty pricey,” he said and moved quickly on to the maple cutting boards and ceramic bowls.

For months afterwards, Irene had teased him about it, imitating his high, thin voice and pursed lips. “Pretty-pricey,” she chirped, checking out a restaurant menu. Or speculating about local real estate: “Pretty-pricey.” But she had seen the strange, distant, pained look on her husband’s face as he gazed at the picture on the wall of the crafts shop. And now here it was before him, as if staring at him from his bed, while he stood over it, confused, frightened, stubbornly resisting awe. He no more wanted to live with that picture than he wanted to live with the woman who had sent it to him. It made him feel invaded, trapped, guilty. Just as she did. If he kept it, what was he supposed to do, write her a thank-you note? What he
should
do, he thought, is return the picture to the crafts shop and pocket the money himself. Serve Irene right.

He took down the large print of an antlered deer that hung above his bed in the motel room and replaced it with
Plains of Abraham
and stepped back to examine it. It was like a window that opened onto a world larger and more inviting than any he had ever seen. No, the picture was too personal between him and Irene and too mysterious to return for cash, he decided. He would wrap it up and recrate the thing and mail it back to her tomorrow. She’s so damned smart, let
her
figure out why she sent it to him.

He washed and changed out of his work clothes and went for supper and a few drinks at the Ausable Inn in Keene Valley, where he’d arranged to meet Inger, the Norwegian, whom at that time he’d not quite decided to marry, although he was sleeping with her three and four nights a week. He didn’t return to the motel until halfway through the next day, Saturday, and by then, hungover, fuddled with sex and sleeplessness, he had all but forgotten the picture. But when he entered the small room and saw the photograph hanging above his bed, he remembered everything. He sat down on the chair facing it, and his eyes filled with tears. He could not believe that he was actually crying. Crying over what? An overpriced picture of some
scenery
? A damned
divorce
? An
ex-wife
?

He took down the photograph and rehung the deer print. Carefully, he wrapped the picture, returned it to its crate, and stuck the crate into his closet, where it remained more or less forgotten for the entire summer. When the school job was finished and Vann moved seventy miles south to Glens Falls, where a shopping mall was going in, he lugged the picture along and stashed it in the back of his motel room closet down there. He still owned the thing, although it remained in its crate, and the crate stayed in his closet, hidden, barely acknowledged by Vann, except when one job was over and he packed to move to the next. He’d pull it out and sit on the bed and study Irene’s original mailing label as if it could somehow tell him why he couldn’t seem to get rid of the damned thing.

To Irene, her mind and body muffled by sedatives, the washed-out blue tile walls of the operating room looked almost soft, as if covered with terry cloth. The operating table, shaped like a cross, was in the middle of the room under a bank of white lights. Irene felt her body being eased off the cart by a female nurse and the two male attendants who had brought her here. They arranged themselves alongside her in a line and slid her smoothly onto the table. Her body felt like cold butter. She could see what was happening, but it seemed to be going on elsewhere, in a room beyond glass, and to someone else. Her arms were extended and strapped down, and a long, dark blue curtain was drawn around her upper and lower parts, leaving only her enormous trunk exposed.

“We’re outa here, Dale,” one of the attendants said, and Irene heard the squeaky wheels of the cart and the swish of the closing door.

Hidden behind her, Alan Wheelwright, the anesthesiologist, in a blue cotton gown and cap and white surgical mask, stood at the head of the table preparing bags of blood for transfusion, while the nurse, her flecked green eyes expressionless above her mask, swabbed Irene’s belly with orange antiseptic, covering her mounded body from hip to throat, back to front, humming as she worked, as if she were home alone painting her toenails. Then, into each of Irene’s thick, chalk white arms, the nurse inserted an intravenous catheter.

Irene saw a man’s face, which she recognized, despite the mask, as Dr. Rabideau’s, and next to him another man, taller, with bushy white eyebrows, whom she did not recognize but felt she should. There were more nurses now, and the room suddenly seemed crowded and small. A man laughed, genuinely pleased. Someone sang,
I’m forever blowing bubbles.

She wondered where in the room Vann was standing. Maybe he was one of the people in the masks. She looked at the eyes; she knew Vann’s eyes. Her own eyelids seemed to be semitransparent sheets, shutting over and over, in layers. She blinked and left a film; then another. She wondered if her eyes had been shut for a long time already.

What we have here, folks, is hard labor.

Vann’s eyes were sapphire blue and crinkly at the corners, even when he wasn’t smiling, like now.

Break out the retractors, Dale. We have liftoff.

Vann was down in the dim basement of the new wing, a huge, cold, open space cluttered with cinder blocks, unused rolls of pink insulation, and stacks of conduit. It took him several tries, but finally he got the gas-powered Briggs & Stratton compressor chugging smoothly. The pump was tied to the overhead ductwork through a three-quarter-inch gate valve with a pressure gauge, which Vann had installed strictly for the purposes of the test. He had a kid, Tommy Farr, to help him, but Vann made the connections himself, using Tommy to hand him the tools as he needed them—hose clamps, screwdriver, pipe joint compound, stillson wrench. His bare hands were red and stiff from the cold; Vann didn’t like working with gloves.

The rest of his crew was scattered over the first and second floors of the wing, installing plumbing fixtures in the lavatories and running the vacuum and oxygen lines. The sheet-metal guys had been released for a new job, a supermarket in a minimall over in Tupper Lake. He figured if any blowouts or blocks in the ductwork showed up, he and Tommy could locate and fix them themselves. He wasn’t worried. It was a routine test under fairly low pressure, twenty-five pounds per square inch. It wasn’t as if the ducts were going to carry water. Just heated air from the large, dark furnace that sat ready to be fired in a shadowed corner of the basement and cooled air from the crated air-conditioning units that had been lifted to the rooftop by crane a week ago.

“All right, Tommy,” Vann said, and he stood away from the valve and handed the skinny kid the wrench. “You wanna do the honors?” Vann lit a cigarette, clenched it between his lips, and inhaled deeply and stuck his chilled hands into his jacket pockets.

“Just turn the sucker on?”

“Let ’er rip. When you hit twenty-five PSI’s on the gate valve gauge, close ’er up.”

The kid knelt down and with one large hand slowly opened the valve and released a jet of compressed air into the pipeline that led to the threaded gate valve soldered to the side of the sheet-metal duct directly overhead. That duct in turn led from the cold furnace behind them to elaborate crosses and intersections at several places in the basement, which split into smaller ducts that passed through the reinforced concrete ceiling on to the floors above. At each floor the ducts split again and snaked between and above the yet-to-be installed walls and ceilings of the new rooms and corridors. These ducts, carefully blocked and baffled at the openings, turns, T’s, and Y’s, eventually crossed out of the new wing into the old hospital and tied into its system, which carried heated air from the outdated but still adequate furnace in the basement of the main wing of the hospital to the one hundred fifty private and semiprivate rooms and wards, the scrub rooms and surgeons’ dressing rooms, the physical therapy center, the operating rooms, the emergency room, the maternity ward and nursery, and all the large and small, public and private lavatories, the janitors’ closets, kitchens, dining rooms, nurses’ lounges, computer center, labs, billing offices, administrative offices, and the gift shop and florist shop, which was closed this early in the day, and the nearly empty waiting rooms, and even into the large, glass-fronted lobby, where Frances, the daughter of Irene Moore, was at this moment strolling from the hospital, down the steps to the parking lot. Frances was on a run into town for some small present to greet her mom when she woke, something sentimental and silly, like a teddy bear, that her mom would pretend to hate, the way she always did, but Frances knew that her mom would store the gift in a secret drawer so that she could take it out and look at it whenever she wanted to realize anew how much her daughter loved her.

Something was going wrong. The first sign was a cool puff of air that carried a gray plume of ash—probably cigarette ash—from a wall register into the cafeteria on the first floor of the old wing. A janitor leaned against his mop and with some annoyance watched the gray powder float onto his clean floor.

In a laboratory on the second floor, bits of dirt fell from the ceiling vent onto the head and shoulders of a puzzled technician, causing her to jump from her seat and stare at the vent for a moment. When no further debris fell, she sat back down and resumed cataloging urine samples.

Then along one corridor after another and in the maternity ward and in several of the private rooms, on all three floors of the hospital, nurses, doctors, maintenance people, and even some patients began to see tiny scraps of paper, ashes, shreds of pink insulation, metal filings, sawdust, and unidentifiable bits of dirt fly from the registers and ceiling vents, float through the air, and land on sheets and pillows, sterilization cabinets, stainless steel counters, computers, desks, spotless equipment and tools of all kinds, dusting hairdos, nurses’ caps, starched white uniforms, and even falling onto the breakfast trays. Nurses, doctors, administrators, and staff people strode up and down hallways and made phone calls, trying to locate the cause of this invasion of flying debris. Attendants grabbed sheets and blankets and covered the newborn infants in the nursery and patients in the wards, shouting orders and firing angry questions at one another, while patients pressed their buzzers and hollered for help and brushed the floating bits of dirt and trash away from their faces, bandages, casts, and bedding. Those patients who were mobile ran, limped, and rolled in wheelchairs from their rooms and wards to the hallways and nurses’ stations, demanding to know what was happening, had there been an explosion? Was there a fire?

In the operating room, Dr. Rabideau shouted,
Close her up! For Christ’s sake, close her up and get her the hell out of here!

Down in the cold basement of the new wing, Vann stood in the light of a single bulb and puzzled over the gauge on his compressor. He rubbed his cigarette out on the cement floor.

“She’s not holding any pressure at all now. Not a damn bit,” he said to Tommy Farr. “Something’s open that shouldn’t be. Or else we’ve got one hell of a blowout someplace,” he said and reached up and shut off the air to the main duct. He switched off the compressor motor, and the basement was suddenly silent.

“How we gonna find out what’s open?” Tommy asked.

“We got to check everything that’s supposed to be closed. One of you guys must’ve left a cap off one of the register openings.”

“Hey, not me! I ain’t no sheet-metal guy. I was in the trailer counting fittings all day Friday.”

“I know, I know. I just need somebody to blame,” Vann said smiling. He clapped the kid on the shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get the drawings from the trailer. We’ll go room to room and check every vent until we find the missing cap. Then we’ll cap ’er and try again.”

Vann had done his job the way he was supposed to, and his men had done theirs. He could not have known what had occurred beyond the thick fire wall that separated the new wing from the old, could not have known that over there, when he finally shut his compressor down, the debris had instantly ceased to fall. And he could not have known that seconds after Doctors Ransome, Rabideau, and Wheel-wright in a panic had closed their incisions and rushed her from the operating room, his ex-wife Irene had gone into cardiac arrest in the recovery room. They had managed to get her heart pumping again and her blood pressure back, but an embolism had formed in her left carotid artery and had started working its way toward her neck. Shortly after noon, a blood vessel between the left temporal and parietal lobes of her brain burst, and Irene Moore suffered a massive stroke and immediately lapsed into a coma.