The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (31 page)

“No, go ahead. I’ll sleep on top.”

“No, no, no! You’re right, you got here before me. First come, first served. That’s the law of the land. I understand, kid.”

I climbed up the rickety ladder at the end of the bunk and flung myself face-forward onto the bed.

“You sure you don’t mind?” he asked, sticking his head out and peering up at me.

“No.”

“How long you been here, anyhow?”

“Little over five weeks,” I said. More than half as long as I went to college, I noticed.

“Five weeks!” He laughed and told me I was crazy, said it in a high, amused voice. “Well,” he said, yawning, “you must be getting real good at it.”

“Yeah.”

Nobody worked these jobs more than a week or at the most two, he explained. “You’re like a prisoner, never see the light of day, never make enough money to make a difference in your life, so what you gotta do, you just gotta get your pay and leave. Get the hell out. Find a place or a job that does make a difference. Smart, good-looking kid like you,” he said, “you can do better than this. This is America, for Christ’s sake. You can do real good for yourself. How much money you got saved up?”

“Not much. Little over sixty bucks.”

“Well, there you go,” he said, as if presenting a self-evident truth.

I thanked him for the advice, explained that I was tired and needed sleep. I was on the night shift that week and had been told to fill in for a guy who’d left the morning crew, something that was happening with increasing frequency, which I had taken as a sure sign of imminent success.

Over the next few days, whenever we talked, which was often, as he was garrulous and I was lonely, we talked about Bob’s alcoholism and my refusal to take his advice, which was to leave the hotel immediately, rent a room in town, get a job in a restaurant or a store, where people could see me, as Bob explained, because, according to him, I had the kind of face people trusted. “An
honest
face,” he said, as if it communicated more than merely a commitment to telling the truth, as if intelligence, reliability, sensitivity, personal cleanliness, and high ambition all went with it. “You got an
honest
face, kid. You should get the hell out there in the real world, where you can
use
it.”

For my part, I advised him to keep going to his AA meetings, which he said he did. He was tempted daily to drink, I knew, by the flask toters in our crew, and often he’d come into the room trembling, on the verge of tears, and he’d grab me by the shoulders and beg me not to let him do it. “Don’t let me give in, kid! Don’t let the bastards get to me. Talk to me, kid,” he’d beg, and I’d talk to him, remind him of all he’d told me—his broken marriages, his lost jobs, his penniless wanderings between Florida and Chicago, his waking up sick in filthy flophouses and pan-handling on street corners—until at last he’d calm down and feel a new determination to resist temptation. I could see that it was hard on him physically. He seemed to be losing weight, and his skin, despite the red blotches and broken veins, had taken on a dull gray pallor, and he never seemed to sleep. We were both on the night shift that week, and all day long, except when he went out for what he said were his AA meetings, I’d hear him in the bunk below, tossing his body from side to side in the dim afternoon light as he struggled to fall asleep, eventually giving up, lighting a cigarette, going out for a walk, returning to try and fail again.

One afternoon, a few days before his first payday, he reached up to my bunk and woke me. “Listen, kid, I can’t sleep. Loan me a couple bucks, willya? I got to go get a bottle.” His voice was unusually firm, clear. He’d made a decision.

“Bob, don’t! You don’t want that. Stick it out.”

“Don’t lecture me, kid, just loan me a coupla bucks.” This time he was giving me an order, not making a request.

I looked into his eyes for a few seconds and saw my own stare back. “No,” I said and turned over and went defiantly to sleep.

When I woke, it was growing dark, and I knew I’d almost missed supper, so I rushed from the room and down the long tunnel that connected the dormitory to the hotel kitchen, where the night dishwashers and furniture movers were already eating. Bob wasn’t there, and no one had seen him.

“He’s working tonight!” I said. “He’s got to work tonight!”

They shrugged and went on eating. No one cared.

A half dozen rooms on the fourteenth floor were being painted, and we spent the night moving furniture out and storing it in the basement, and there was a chamber of commerce breakfast that we had to set up in the Crepe Myrtle Room. By the time I got back to my room, it was daylight. Bob was there, sound asleep in the bottom bunk.

I looked around the room, checked the tin trash can, even peered into the dresser drawers, but found no bottle. He heard me and rolled over and watched.

“Lookin’ for something?”

“You know what.”

“A bottle?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Sorry, kid.”

“You didn’t drink?”

“Nope.” He sat up and smiled. He looked rested for the first time, and his color had returned. He lit a cigarette. “Nope, I didn’t break. Close, though,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling, and he held his thumb and index finger a pencil width apart. “Close.”

I grinned, as if his triumph were mine. “You really got through it, huh? What’d you do? Where were you all night?”

“Right here. While you were working, I was sleeping like a baby. I got back here late from the AA meeting. It was a long one, and I was burnt, man. So I just told ’em I was sick, they could dock my pay, and then I came back here and slept the night away.”

“Wow! That’s great!” I shook his hand. “See, man, that’s what I’ve been telling you! You got to keep going to those AA meetings!”

He smiled tolerantly, rubbed out his cigarette, and lay back down. I pulled off my shirt and trousers, climbed up to my bed, and when I heard Bob snoring, I fell asleep.

That afternoon, when I woke, Bob was gone again. I got down from my bed and noticed that his cardboard suitcase was gone, too. His drawer in the dresser was empty, and when I looked into the medicine cabinet above the tiny sink in the corner, I saw that he’d taken his shaving kit. He’d moved out.

I was confused and suddenly, unexpectedly, sad. I stood in front of the mirror and shaved, the first time in three days, and tried to figure it all out—Bob’s alcoholism, which did indeed seem as much a part of him as his height or the color of his eyes, and my caring about it; his persistent advice to me, and mine to him; his vain dream of not drinking, my dream of … what? Success? Forgiveness? Revenge? Somehow, Bob and I were alike, I thought, especially now that he had fled from the hotel. The thought scared me. It was the first time since that snowy night I left the college on the hill that I’d been scared.

I wiped off the scraps of shaving cream, washed my razor, and opened the cabinet for my bottle of Aqua Velva. Gone. A wave of anger swirled around me and passed quickly on. I sighed. Oh, what the hell, let him have it. The man left without even one week’s pay; a morning splash of aftershave would make him feel successful for at least a minute or two. The rest of the day he’ll feel like what he is, I thought, a failure.

I picked up my shirt and pants and slowly got dressed, when, leaning down to tie my shoe, I saw the pale blue bottle in the tin trash can between the dresser and the bed. I reached in, drew it out, and saw that it was empty.

Chucking it back, as if it were a dead animal, I looked around the gray room, and I saw its pathetic poverty for the first time—the spindly furniture, the bare cinder-block walls and linoleum floor, the small window that faced the yellow-brick side of the parking garage next door. Knox’s blue Buick was probably still parked there. I looked at my half dozen paperback books on the dresser—mysteries, a Stendhal novel, an anthology of
Great American Short Stories
—and my papers, a short stack of letters from home, a sketchbook, a journal I was planning to write in soon. I’d brought it for Cuba. Then I pulled my old canvas duffle out from under the bed and began shoving clothes inside.

I rented a room from an old lady who owned a small house off Central Avenue in downtown St. Petersburg, a quiet neighborhood of bungalows and tree-lined streets that was beginning to be devoured at the edges by glass-and-concrete buildings housing condominiums, insurance companies, and banks. The room was small, but bright and clean, in the back off the kitchen, with its own bathroom and separate entrance. With the room went kitchen privileges, but I would have to eat in my bedroom. There were strict house rules that I eagerly agreed to: no visitors, by which I knew she meant women; no smoking; no drinking. I’d been meaning to give up smoking anyhow, and since the only way I could drink was more or less illegally, it seemed more or less a luxury to me. Especially after Bob O’Neil. As for women in my room, based on my experience so far, the old lady might as well have said no Martians.

“I’m a Christian,” she said, “and this is a Christian home.” Her name was Mrs. Treworgy. She was tiny, half my size, and pink—pink hair, pink skin, pink rims around her watery eyes.

“I’m a Christian too,” I assured her.

“What church?”

I hesitated. “Methodist?”

She smiled, relieved, and told me where the nearest Methodist church was located; not far, as it turned out. She herself was a Baptist, which meant that she had to walk ten blocks each way on Sundays. “But the preaching’s worth it,” she said. “And our choir is much better than the Methodist choir.”

“I’m sure.”

“Maybe you’d like to come with me some Sunday.”

“Oh, yes, I would,” I said. “But I’ll probably try the Methodist church first. You know, it being what I’m used to and all.” What I was used to was sleeping till noon on Sundays, and before that, back when my mother made me go, dozing through mass.

“Yes, of course.” Then she asked for the first and last months’ rent in advance. Eighty dollars.

“All I’ve got to my name is sixty-seven dollars,” I said and confessed, as if to a crime, that I had just quit my job at the Coquina Key Hotel and briefly described the conditions there, as if they were extenuating circumstances. “It was a very … unsavory atmosphere,” I said, looking at the floor of her living room. The room was small, crowded with large, dark furniture and portraits of Jesus, close-ups and long shots, seated by a rock at prayer and ascending like Superman into heaven.

She looked at me carefully. “You have an honest face,” she pronounced. “And I’m sure you’ll find a new job right away. Whyn’t you just pay me the first month’s rent, forty dollars, and we’ll go from there.”

“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Treworgy. Thank you. And you wait,” I said, “I’ll have a job by tomorrow!”

Which I did. Following at last the advice of my ex-roommate Bob O’Neil, I applied for a job where I could be seen, as a menswear salesman at the fashionable downtown Maas Brothers Department Store. On the application form, however, under hobbies, I wrote “drawing and painting” and was instead hired to work in the Display Department as an assistant window trimmer.

The Display Department was located in the basement of the large, modern building, and as an assistant I was expected to build and paint the backdrops for the interior and window displays designed and installed by a tall, thin, Georgia man named, appropriately, Art, and a bulky, middle-aged, black-haired woman named Sukey, who wore turquoise and silver Indian jewelry and hand-printed muumuus. Art was an agreeable man in his forties who’d worked in advertising in Atlanta until a decade ago, when his ulcers erupted and sent him to the hospital for the third time in one year, after which he’d quit and moved to Florida. He popped antacid tablets all day, and his mouth was perpetually dry and white-lipped, but he joked and smiled easily, teased Sukey for her artistic pretensions, me for my youth and ignorance, and Ray, the obese, bald sign painter, for his weight and baldness.

It was a cheerful, easygoing place, especially after the Coquina Key Hotel, and I enjoyed the work, which was not difficult. I built lightweight wood frames, usually four feet by eight feet, covered them with colored paper or foil, painted screens and backdrops, cleaned brushes and swept the floor of the shop. Afternoons, I delivered signs for Ray to the department heads upstairs, ate lunch with the salespeople and the rest of the staff in the company cafeteria on the first floor, and after work went out for beers with Art, Sukey, and Ray, and then walked whistling back to my room at Mrs. Treworgy’s, where, after supper, I drew pictures, usually somber self-portraits, read, and prepared to write in my journal.

I turned nineteen that spring, and there were pink, white, and yellow hibiscus blossoms everywhere and sweet-smelling jasmine, oleander, and poinciana trees in bloom. Palm trees fluttered in the warm breezes off the Gulf, and tamarind trees clacked their long dark pods, while citrus trees in backyards produced huge, juicy oranges for the plucking. I wore short-sleeved shirts, light cotton trousers, sandals, and felt my body gradually cease cringing from the remembered New England cold and begin to expand and move out to meet this strange new world. I was tanned and well fed, muscular and extremely healthy, and my mind, naturally, began turning obsessively to thoughts of women.

Even though it was only a respite, for the first time since the previous December I felt free of guilt for having failed at life without having first tried to succeed. Freed from such a complex, burdensome guilt, I was trapped instantly by lust. Not ordinary lust, but late-adolescent, New England virginal lust, lust engendered by chemistry crossed with curiosity, lust with no memory to restrain and train it, lust that seeks not merely to satisfy and deplete itself, but to avenge itself as well. For the first time in my life, I seemed to be happy and consequently wanted only to make up for lost time and lost opportunities, to get even with all those Catholic schoolgirls who’d said, “Stop,” and I stopped, all those passionate plunges frozen in agonizing positions in midair over car seats, sofas, daybeds, carpeted living room floors, beach blankets, and hammocks, all those semen-stained throw pillows on the asbestos tile floors of pine-paneled basement dens. This was lust with a vengeance.