The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (33 page)

“Larry,” I said. “This is one of the lousiest nights of my life. And what’s worse, it’s typical.”

“Typical.” He paused. “That’s what this is to you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said, and that was the end of it.

About twenty minutes later, here comes Chick and his big, yellow front-loader looking like some kind of prehistoric dinosaur with its head-high tires and great, wide-open mouth and its headlights like gigantic bug eyes flopping up and down as the vehicle made its slow, noisy way along the lane from the main road. He drew the loader up to the cow and cut the motor back to idle. He leaned out of the cab and called down, “How’d you come to shoot your cow here at the cemetery?”

Larry shrugged his shoulders. “I guess one thing just led to another.”

“I guess to hell it did,” Chick said and gave his little laugh. He backed the front-loader off a few feet and dropped the bucket to the ground, then came forward very slowly and with a surprising tenderness got the lower lip of the bucket underneath the cow. Gently he scooped the poor beast off the ground and lifted it, almost like a parent picking up a sleeping child. The body of the cow rolled heavily into the bucket and over onto its back so that it ended with all four of its legs sticking up in the air. It made a weird, almost comical sight, as Chick lifted the bucket into the air, backed around, and headed slowly away from the cemetery toward the main road.

Larry got in beside me, and I drove the Taurus behind Chick, turned left at the road, and followed him up the long stretch of Spruce Hill Road to our place. There were no other cars or trucks out at that hour, which is a good thing, because we were a peculiar, slow-moving, suspicious-looking procession. The loader was making about ten miles an hour at best, and from my position behind it I could see around the cab and catch glimpses of the cow’s spindly legs and hoofs sticking out of the bucket, which Chick kept pretty high in the air, to keep the vehicle balanced and its rear wheels on the ground. Whenever the vehicle crossed a ripple or dip in the paving, the bucket bounced some, and the cow seemed almost to be alive then and struggling like it was prey to get loose of this monstrous mouth.

Finally we got to the top of the hill and turned off the road into our driveway. I glanced behind us and saw that the eastern sky was turning pink and pale blue. It was going to be a nice day. Chick stopped the loader and called down to us, “Where d’you want me to put ’er?”

Larry checked me, and I checked him back. We both wanted the other to answer Chick’s question. Larry’s eyes were sunk into his face and bloodshot, and his cheeks had gone all saggy, and he needed a shave. He looked more exhausted than I had ever seen him before. I must have looked the same to him. He exhaled through pursed lips, a silent whistle, and said, “Oh, Jesus, Katie. It’s over, then. Isn’t it?”

“We got to let it go, Larry.”

“Do we have to? Can’t we just do like before? Like we’ve always done?”

I leaned out the car window and hollered up to Chick, “Drop her on the dock in front of the barn, where the winch and chain are. We’ll hang her up and butcher her there in a few minutes.” He said fine, and I thanked him.

“Good night,” he said to me. Then laughed, “Or good morning,” and dropped the loader into gear and headed it in the direction of the barn.

I turned back to Larry. “We better cut up that cow,” I said, “before it starts to spoil.”

“I’ll do it,” he said, and he got out of the car. I got out, too, and we stood there, looking at each other over the roof of the old Taurus. “Katie, I’m really sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t do things a different way … and better. I’m sorry about the drinking, too.”

“I know you are. I am, too.”

“How come it happened tonight?”

“Larry, I don’t know.” We were silent for a moment. “It could’ve been any night,” I said. “Could be it happened a long time ago, only we didn’t know it then. Like one of those stars that flare up and die, and you don’t see it happening until years later, because it’s so far away.”

“Maybe it’s better we didn’t see it when it happened,” he said. “Maybe it’s more peaceful this way. I don’t know. You go on inside, Katie, and get some sleep. I’ll butcher the cow.” He gave me a little wave and trudged down the driveway toward the barn. Dawn was coming on fast now, and I could see him in the pale gray light all the way to the barn. For a while I stood there by the front door of the house and continued to watch him. He hooked the chain onto the cow’s hind legs just above the hoofs. Then he slowly hoisted the animal off the ground, and soon she was clear of the ground altogether and dangling heavily above the loading dock. He clipped the end of the chain into a ring bolted to the dock. When he disappeared into the barn, going to get his knives, I went into the house, to check the kids and to sleep. That same afternoon, he moved out.

With Ché in New Hampshire

So here I am, still wandering. All over the face of the earth. Mexico, Central America, South America. Then Africa. Working my way north to the Mediterranean, resting for a season in the Balearic Islands. Then Iberia, all of Gaul, the British Isles. Scandinavia. I show up in the Near East, disappearing as suddenly and unexpectedly as I appeared. Reappearing in Moscow. Before I can be interviewed, I have dropped out of sight again, showing up further east, photographed laughing with political prisoners outside Vladivostok, getting into a taxi in Kyoto, lying on a beach near Melbourne, drinking in a nightclub in Honolulu, a club known for its underworld clientele. Chatting amiably with Indians in Peru. When I drop out of sight altogether.

All this from the file they have on me in Washington. They know that somehow I am dangerous to them, but they are unable to determine in which way I am dangerous, for everything is rumor and suspicion, and I am never seen except when alone or in the cheerful company of harmless peasant-types. My finances are easily explained: I have none. I never own anything that I can’t carry with me and can’t leave out in the rain, and I am a hitchhiker wherever I go. I accept no money whatsoever from outside sources that might be considered suspicious. Occasionally, I find employment for a few weeks at some menial job—as a dockhand in Vera Cruz, a truck driver in North Africa, a construction worker in Turkey—and occasionally I accept lavish gifts from American women traveling to forget their wrecked lives at home.

Okay, so here I am again, wandering, and everything is different from the way it is now, except that I am alone. Everything else is different. And then one day late in spring, I turn up in Catamount, New Hampshire. Home. Alone, as usual. I’m about thirty-five, say. No older. A lot has happened to me in the interim: when I step down from the Boston-to-Montreal bus at McAllister’s General Store, I am walking with an evident limp. My left leg, say, doesn’t bend at the knee. Everything I own is in the duffle bag I carry, and I own nothing that cannot be left out in the rain.

Rerun my getting off the bus.
The cumbersome Greyhound turns slowly off Route 28 just north of Pittsfield, where the small, hand-lettered sign points
CATAMOUNT
1/2
MI
., and then rumbles down into the heart of the valley, past the half dozen, century-old, decaying houses, past the Hawthorne House, past Conway’s Shell station to McAllister’s Gulf station and general store, where the bus driver applies the air brakes to his vehicle, which has been coasting since it turned off Route 28, and it hisses to a stop.

The door pops open in front of me, and I pitch my duffle down to the ground and ease my pain-racked body down the steps and out the door to where the duffle has landed.

A few old men and Bob McAllister, like turtles, sit in the late-morning sun on the roofless front porch that runs the width of the store building. Two of the men, one on each side of the screen door, are seated on straight-backed, soda-fountain chairs, which they lean back against the wall. One old man, squatting, scratches on the board floor with a penknife. The others (there should be more than three) are arrayed in various postures across the porch.

Even though the sun feels warm against my skin, the air is cool, reminding me of the winter that has just ended, the dirty remnants of snow in shady corners between buildings, snow that melted, finally, just last week, and the mushy dirt roads that are beginning to dry out at last. The old men seated on the stagelike platform stare down at me without embarrassment. They don’t recognize me. Through the glass behind their heads I can see the semidarkness of the interior of the store and the shape of Alma McAllister’s perpetually counting head. She is stationed at the checkout counter, which is actually a kitchen table. Beyond her, I can pick out the shapes of three or four parallel rows of canned foods, the meat locker, and the large refrigeration unit that holds all of McAllister’s dairy products, his frozen foods, packaged bacon and sausage, eggs, cold drinks, and beer. And farther back in the store, I can make out the dim shapes of hoses, buckets, garden tools, work clothes, fishing rods, and the other items that finish out the store’s inventory—Bob McAllister’s guess at the material needs of his neighbors.

The old men staring at me wonder who the hell I might be. They don’t recognize me at all, not yet anyway, although I was able to recognize them as soon as I saw their faces. It is I who have changed, not they, and I have thought of them many times in the last few years, whereas they probably have not once thought of me.

Bob McAllister, of course, is there. And old Henry Davis, he would have to be there, too. His sister died back in 1967, I recall as soon as I see his sun-browned, leathery face, remembering that I learned of the event from a letter my father wrote to me while I was in Florida waiting for instructions from Ché.

The others, now. There is John Alden, who claims he is a direct descendant of the original John and Priscilla Alden. He is. Gaunt, white-maned, and silent, except to speak of the time, and always dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and black necktie and drawing from his pocket the large gold watch that the Boston & Maine Railroad gave him when he retired back in 1962, drawing it out and checking its time against anybody else’s—the radio’s, the church’s, Bob McAllister’s, Timex’s, anybody’s who happens to walk into the store.

“What time you got, Henry?”

“I got ten-seventeen, John.”

“Check it again, Henry, ’cause I got ten-twenty-one.”

“Thanks, John, thanks a lot. Hell of a watch you got there. It ain’t ever wrong, is it?”

“Not yet it ain’t.”

There are two or three others. There is Bob McAllister, who comes over to the bus as he has done every day for over twenty years and takes the bundle of Boston newspapers from the driver. There is Henry Davis, who plowed the few acres that my grandfather cultivated every year with corn and potatoes and the meadows that were hayed when I was a child—but that was before Henry and his horses got too old and Grandpa had to go to Concord and buy a John Deere tractor to replace Henry. And there is John Alden, who is a direct descendant of John and Priscilla. And there would be Dr. Wickshaw, too, because it’s about ten years from now, and Dr. Wickshaw has retired, no doubt, has left his entire practice to that young Dr. Annis from Laconia, the new fellow from Laconia my father told me about in his letters.

That’s four, which is enough. They don’t recognize me. Although when Bob McAllister lifts himself off the porch and crosses between the Gulf gasoline pumps to the bus to receive the Boston papers, he stares at me quizzically, seeming to think that he knows me from some place and time, but he can’t remember from where or when, so he merely nods, for courtesy’s sake as well as safety’s, and strolls by.

I bend down and pick up my duffle, heave it easily to my right shoulder—three years in the jungles of Guatemala have left me with one leg crippled and deep scars on my face and mind forever. But the years have also toughened me, and my arms and back are as hard as rock maple.

Close-up of the scar on my face
. It starts, thin and white, like a scrap of white twine, high up on my left temple, and then runs jaggedly down to my cheekbone, where it broadens and jags suddenly back and down, eventually disappearing below my earlobe. I am reluctant to talk about how it happened, but anyone can see that it is the result of a machete blow.

The driver closes the door to his bus and releases the air brakes hurriedly, for he is no doubt relieved to be rid of a passenger whose silent intensity somehow unnerved him from the moment he left the Park Square Greyhound Bus Terminal in Boston until the moment when the man, without having said a word to anyone, finally rose from his seat immediately behind the driver and stepped down in Catamount. The driver closes the door to his bus, releases the air brakes hurriedly, and the big, slab-sided, silver vehicle pulls away, heads back to Route 28 for Alton Bay and Laconia, and then north to Montreal.

The cool, dry air feels wonderful against my face. It’s been too long. I’ve been away from this air too long this time. I had forgotten its clarity, the way it handles the light—gently, but with crispness and efficiency. I had forgotten the way a man, if he gets himself up high enough, can see through the air that fills the valley between him and a single tree or chimney or gable miles away from him, making the man feel like a hawk floating thousands of feet above the surface of the earth, looping lazily in a cloudless sky, hour after hour, while tiny creatures huddle in warm, dark niches below and wait for him to grow weary of the hunt and drift away.

Leaving Mexico City
. As I boarded the Miami-bound jet, I promised myself that, if I could make it all the way back home, I would not leave again. I renew this promise now while walking up the road, moving away from McAllister’s store and the silent chorus on the porch, past the three or four houses that sit ponderously on either side of the road north of the bus stop and south of the white Congregational church and the dirt road just beyond the church on the left, the road that leads to the northern, narrow end of the valley. I am limping. Yes, right, I am limping, but while my disabled leg slows me somewhat, it doesn’t tire me, and I think nothing of walking the three and one half miles from McAllister’s in the village to my father’s trailer in the park at the north end of the valley. With Ché in Guatemala I have walked from the Izabal Lake to San Agustín Acasaguastlán, crossing the highest peaks in Guatemala, walking, machete in hand, through clotted jungle for twenty days without stopping, walking from sunrise till sunset every day, eating only in the morning before leaving camp and at night just before falling into exhausted sleep. In three years we never set up a fixed camp, and that is why the Guatemalan Army, with their CIA and American Army advisers, never caught up with us. We kept on the move constantly, like tiny fish in an enormous, green sea.

I know that receding behind me, shrinking smaller and smaller in the distance, there are four old men who are trying to figure out who I am, where I’ve come from, and why I have come from there to Catamount. As soon as one of them, probably Dr. Wickshaw (he would be the youngest of the four, the one with the most reliable memory), figures out who I am and that I have come home to Catamount again, maybe this time for good, as soon as they have discovered that much of my identity, they will try to discover the rest—where I have been and what I have been doing all these years.

“How long’s it been since he last took off, Doc? Five, six years?”

“No, no, longer. Close to ten, actually. As I recall now, he took off for parts unknown right after he come up from Florida to see his dad, who was all laid up with a heart attack, y’know. Angina pectoris, if my memory serves me correctly, was what it was. You remember when ol’ Tom took sick, don’t you? Paralyzed him almost completely. And the boy, he drove all the way up from Florida soon’s he heard his dad was in trouble, even quit his fancy job with this big advertising company down there and everything. Just to make sure his dad was okay. Now that’s a son for you. A damn sight better than most of the sons these days, let me tell you. The boy stayed around for a few weeks till his dad got back on his feet, and then he took off again. Nobody around here knew where he went to, though. Just dropped out of sight.”

“How ’bout Boston, Doc? Used to live down in Boston, I heard. You think he went to Boston?”

“Naw, John, we’d a known it if he’d been in Boston all these years.”

“Maybe this time the boy’s come home for good. He sure looks like he’s been through hell, don’t he?”

“Smashed his patella, I’d say, Bob, though I couldn’t offer as to how, or how he picked up that scar on his face. It sure does change his looks, though. I’d hardly recognized him if it wasn’t for the fact that I was the one who brought him into the world in the first place.”

No. Erase that remark
. Wipe it out. Doc would never think such a thing, let alone say it, and Bob McAllister hates and distrusts me, I’m sure. Won’t even give me a credit for a dollar’s worth of gasoline. Be damned if I want to help those people out of their misery. If Doc Wickshaw ever saw me getting off a bus in Catamount, limping, scarred, back in town again after a mysterious three-year absence (five? ten?), he’d fear for my father’s peace of mind, and, as soon as I was safely out of sight, he’d be on the phone, warning him to be careful, Buddy’s back in town.

But that’s okay, that’s okay now, because everything is different. I’m about thirty-five, say. Maybe thirty-six, but no older. I’m wearing khaki trousers, a white shirt, open at the throat, and high, brown work shoes that have steel toes. My hair is cut fairly short, and my face and the backs of my hands are deeply tanned. I look like a construction worker, except for the limp and the scar, and when you are a tall, cold-looking man who looks like a construction worker, except that you limp badly and bear a cruel machete scar across your face, what do people think? They think they’re looking at a veteran of guerrilla warfare, that’s what they think.

Okay. So here’s these four old turtles sitting in the sun on McAllister’s porch, and the Boston-to-Montreal bus wheezes up, stopping ostensibly to let off the Boston papers as usual, but instead of just the wire-bound packet of
Boston Globe
s,
Herald-Traveler
s, and
Record-American
s being pitched out the door, I get off, too, first chucking my duffle bag down the steps ahead of me. The bus driver, moving quickly to give me a hand, is sent back to his seat by my fierce, prideful glare, which silently says to him:
I can make it on my own
. “Okay…,” he says, almost calling me Soldier, but suddenly thinking better of it, sensing somehow that I have fought not for a nation, but for a
people
, and thus have worn no uniform, have worn only what the people themselves, the peasants, wear.

I like the idea of not having a car, of arriving by bus, carrying everything I own in a single duffle bag and owning nothing that can’t be left out in the rain. No household goods are carried on
my
back, no, sir. Just a duffle, U.S. Army surplus, brought all the way home from the jungles of Guatemala. And inside it—two changes of clothing, a copy (in a waterproof plastic bag) of Régis Debray’s
Révolution dans la Révolution?
which has been as a Bible to me. Also in a waterproof plastic bag: the notes for my book (Did I come back to Catamount for this, to write my own book, a book about my experiences with Ché in Guatemala, a book which in actuality would be a theoretical textbook thinly disguised as a memoir?). And the Ten Essentials: maps (of Belknap County, New Hampshire, obtainable from the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C.), a good compass, a flashlight, sunglasses, emergency rations (raisins, chick-peas, and powdered eggs), waterproofed matches, a candle for fire starting, a U.S. Army surplus blanket, a pocketknife, and a small first-aid kit. That’s it. Everything I own is there. The Ten Essentials. No, I need to have another: I need one of those one-man Boy Scout cooking kits. And maybe I should have a gun, a small handgun. A black, snub-nosed .38, maybe. I would’ve had trouble, though, with the customs officials in Mexico City—they would’ve been alerted that I might be coming through and would be carrying something important and dangerous, like secret instructions from Ché to supporters and sympathizers inside the U.S. Maybe I should leave Mexico from Mérida, after crossing overland from Guatemala through the low jungles of the Yucatán in hundred-degree heat, walking all the way, and then suddenly in the line of American tourists checking out of Mérida for Miami. It’s when you arrive inside the United States that they check your baggage. They never bother you when you leave a place, only when you come back.