The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (34 page)

Say I picked up the gun
after
I arrived in Miami, picked it up in a pawnshop. Say I managed to lose the agent assigned to follow me, ducked into an obscure little pawnshop in the west end of the city, and purchased a .38 revolver for twenty-seven fifty. Later, at the airport coffee shop, I spot the agent. He’s seated three tables from me, pretending to read his paper while waiting, like me, for his plane to Boston. He pretends to read, and he watches my every move. I get up from my chair, leaving a small tip, walk over to him, and say quietly: “I’m leaving now.” Then smile. Probably they would arrest me at some point during my journey, but they would be unable to muster proof that I have been working in Bolivia with Ché for these three—no, five no, ten—years. They lost me in Mexico City, and so far as they can say for sure, that is, so far as they can legally prove, I’ve been in Mexico all that time. At least twice or three times a year, I slip back across the border to make my presence in Mexico known to the officials—I simply let myself be seen conspicuously drunk in a well-known restaurant—and then, taking off at night from a field near Cuernavaca in a small Beechcraft Bonanza piloted by a mercenary, a gunrunner from New Orleans, I return to the jungles of Bolivia. I am valuable to Ché for many reasons, one of which is my American citizenship, and so it is very important that I do not become persona non grata, at least not officially. “Conejo,” Ché calls me, using my code name. “Conejo, you are valuable man to me y también a la revolución como soldad, pero también como norteamericano usted es muy borracho en los cafés. Comprendes, amigo?”

“Sí, Ché, yo comprendo.” We embrace each other manfully, the way Latins will, and I leave with the pilot, slashing through the jungle to his plane, which he has cleverly camouflaged at the edge of a small clearing several miles down the valley from where we have camped.

Now, three thousand miles away
. I have just disembarked, from a Greyhound bus in Catamount, New Hampshire. I stand next to the idling bus for a few moments, gazing passively at the scene before me, and upon receiving the blows of so much that is familiar and so much that subtly has grown strange to me, I become immobilized. I remember things that I didn’t know I had forgotten. Everything comes into my sight as if somehow it were brand-new, virginally so, and yet also clearly, reassuringly, familiar. It would be the way my own face appeared to me when, after having grown a beard and worn it for almost two years, I went into a barbershop and asked to have it shaved off. And because I had to lie back in the chair and look up at the ceiling, while the barber first snipped my beard with scissors and then shaved me with a razor, I was unable to watch my beard gradually disappear and my face concurrently appear from behind it, and when I was swung back down into a seated position and peered at my face for the first time in several years, I was stunned by the familiarity of it, and also by its remarkable strangeness.

Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan

It was mid-October. The leaves were already off the trees and leathery brown on the frozen ground, and in the gray skies and early darkness you could feel winter coming on, when one afternoon around four-thirty a blue, late model Oldsmobile sedan with Massachusetts plates slowly entered the trailerpark. It was dark enough so that you couldn’t see who was inside the car, but strange cars, especially out-of-state cars, were sufficiently unusual an event at the trailerpark that you wanted to see who was inside. Terry Constant had just left the manager’s trailer with his week’s pay for helping winterize the trailers, as he did every year at this time, when the car pulled alongside him on the lane, halfway to the trailer he shared with his sister, and Terry, who was tall, wearing an orange parka and Navy watch cap, leaned over and down to see who was inside and saw the face of a black man, which naturally surprised him, since Terry and his sister were the only black people he knew for miles around.

The car stopped, and the man inside rolled down the window, and Terry saw that there was a second man inside, a white man. Both looked to be in their late thirties and wore expensive wool sweaters and smoked cigars. The black man was very dark, darker than Terry, and not so much fat as thick, as if his flesh were packed in wads around him. The white man was gray-faced and unshaven and wore a sour expression, as if he had just picked a foul-tasting substance from behind a tooth.

“Hey, brudder,” the black man said, and Terry knew the man was West Indian.

“What’s happening,” Terry said. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets and looked down from his full height.

“Me wan’ t’ find a particular youth-mon, him call himself Severance. You know dis mon, brudder?” The man smiled and showed Terry his gold.

“Bruce Severance?”

He grunted and said, “Dat de mon.”

“He ain’t here.”

The man smiled steadily up at Terry for a few seconds. Finally he said, “But him live here.”

“That trailer there,” Terry said, pointing at a pale yellow Kenwood with a mansard roof. The trailer sat on cinder blocks next to a dirt driveway, and the yard was unkempt and bare, without shrubbery or lawn.

Terry stood and watched the car leave, then walked on, turning in at his sister’s trailer, which was dark, for she wasn’t home from work yet, and made to unlock the door, when he heard his name coming at him from the darkness.

“Terry!” A blond, long-haired kid in a faded Levi’s jacket stepped around the back end of the trailer and came up to him.

“Yo, some dudes was just here looking for you.”

“I know, I know, get the fuck inside,” the kid said urgently, and he pushed at Terry’s shoulder.

“Take it easy, man.” He unlocked the door and stepped inside, and the skinny kid followed him like a shadow.

“Don’t turn on the lights. No, go back to your room and turn on one light, then come here. If they know you were coming home and no lights go on, they’ll figure something’s up.”

“What the hell you talking about, Severance? You high?”

“Just do it. I’ll explain.”

Terry did as he was told and came back to the darkened kitchen, where the white kid stood at the window and peeked out at the entrance to the trailerpark. Terry opened the refrigerator, throwing a wedge of yellow light into the room.

“Shut that fucking thing!” the kid cried.

“Take it easy, man. Jesus. Want a beer?”

“No. Yeah, okay, just shut the fucking door, will you?”

He took out two cans of Miller, quickly shut the refrigerator door, and dropped the room into darkness again. Handing one can to the kid, he slid onto a tall stool at the kitchen counter and snapped open his beer and took a long swallow. Across the room by the window, the kid opened his beer and started slurping it down.

“I thought you was down in Boston,” Terry said.

“I was. But I came back up this morning.”

“Where’s your van? I didn’t see it.”

“I put it someplace.”

“You put it someplace.”

“Yeah. Listen, man, there’s some heavy shit going down. When’s your sister come home?”

“Around five-thirty,” Terry said.

They sat in silence for a few seconds, and Terry said in a low voice, “Your deal came apart, huh? And that’s your Jamaican dude out there, and his friend, right?”

“Right.”

“They didn’t want to buy your New Hampshire homegrown? Good old Granite State hemp grown wild in the bushes ain’t smoke enough for the big boys. Funny.” He paused and sipped his beer. “I’m not surprised.”

“You’re not, eh?”

“Not with those kinda guys. People get mad if you try to change the rules. But I guess you know that now.”

The kid said nothing. A minute passed, and in a low voice, almost in a whisper, he said, “If you’re not surprised, how come you never said anything?”

“You wouldn’t have heard me.”

“They just said they didn’t want to buy, they wanted to sell.”

“You let ’em try some smoke?”

“Yeah, sure. We met, just like usual. In the motel in Revere. And I gave them both a taste. Without telling them what it was, you know?”

“And first whack, they knew you had something they didn’t sell you.”

“Yeah. So they thought I was dealing boo for somebody else. They knew it wasn’t red or gold or ganja or anything they’d smoked before, but they wouldn’t believe this shit is growing wild all over the place up here. I told them all about the war, and the stuff about the Philippines and the government paying the farmers to grow hemp for rope and how the stuff went wild after the war, et cetera, et cetera. All of it! But they thought I was shitting them, man.”

“I wouldn’t have believed you, either.”

“But it’s true! You know that. You’ve seen it, you even helped me dry the damned stuff and brick and bale it. Jesus, Terry, you even smoke it yourself!”

“No more, man. The shit makes me irritable.”

“It makes you high, too,” the kid said quickly.

“You, maybe. But not me. So how come those dudes are up here now?”

“Yeah, well, I told them I have like five one-hundred-pound bales of the shit,” the kid said in a low voice.

Terry sat in silence, took a sip of his beer, and said, “You’re stupid, you know. Stupid. You oughta be selling insurance, not dope.”

“I thought it would let them know I was like in business for myself and not dealing for some other supplier, if they knew I had five bales of my own. The Jamaican, Keppie, he just looked at me like I wasn’t there anymore and said I should go to California, and I knew the whole thing had come apart. So I left them at the motel and drove back up. My van’s parked on one of the lumber roads in the state park west of the lake. I walked in through the woods, and then I saw them, Keppie and Royce, his muscle guy. I was coming to get you,” the kid added.

“Me! What the fuck do you want me for? I wouldn’t touch this with a stick, man!”

“I need to get rid of the stuff.”

“No shit. What are you going to do with it, throw it in the lake?”

“We can lug it into the woods, man. Just leave it. Nobody’ll find it for months, and by then it’ll be rotted out and nobody’ll know what the hell it is anyhow.” After a pause, the kid said, “I need you to help me, Terry.”

“You’re strong enough to carry one of those bales five times. You don’t need me.” Terry’s voice was cold and angry. “You’re an asshole. You know that?”

“Please. You can take your sister’s car and we can do it in one trip. Alone on foot, it’ll take me all night, maybe longer, and someone might see me.” He talked rapidly, like a beggar explaining his poverty. He whined, and his voice almost broke with the fear and the shame. He was a nice enough kid, and most people liked him right away, because he enjoyed talking and usually talked about things that at first were interesting, organic gardening, solar energy, Transcendental Meditation, but he tended to lecture people on these subjects, which made him and the subjects soon boring. Terry hung out with him anyhow, smoked grass and drank in town with him at the Hawthorne House, mainly because the kid, Bruce, admired Terry for being black. Terry knew what that meant, but he was lonely and everyone else in town either feared or disliked him for being black. The kid usually had plenty of money, and he spent it generously on Terry, who usually had none, since, except for the occasional chores and repair work tossed his way by Marcelle Chagnon, the manager of the trailerpark, it was impossible for him to find a job here. Outside of his sister, who was his entire family and who, through happenstance, had located herself in this small mill town in New Hampshire working as a nurse for the only doctor in town, Terry had no one he could talk to, no one he could gossip with, no one he could think of as his friend. When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike. Terry had attached himself to Bruce Severance, the kid who sold grass to the local high school students and the dozen or so adults in town who smoked marijuana, the kid who drove around in the posh, black and purple van with the painting of a Rocky Mountain sunset on the sides and the bumper stickers attacking nuclear energy and urging people to heat their homes with wood, the kid who had furnished his trailer with a huge water bed and Day-Glo posters of Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, the kid who, to the amusement of his neighbors, practiced the one hundred twenty-eight postures of T’ai Chi outside his trailer every morning of the year, the kid who was now sitting across the darkened kitchen of the trailer owned by Terry’s sister, his voice trembling as he begged Terry, four years older than he, a grown man despite his being penniless and dependent and alone, to please, please, please, help him.

Terry sighed. “All right,” he said. “But not now.”

“When?” The kid peered out the window again. “They probably went back to town, to drink or for something to eat. We should do it now. As soon as your sister gets home with the car.”

“No. That’s what I mean, I don’t want my sister to know anything about this. This ain’t her kind of scene. We can go over to your place and wait awhile, and I’ll come home and ask her for the car for a few hours, and we’ll load that bad shit of yours into the car and get it the hell out of here, and you can tell those dudes you were only kidding or some damned thing. I don’t care what you tell them. Just don’t tell them I helped you. Don’t even tell them I
know
you, man.” Terry got off the stool and headed for the door. “C’mon. I don’t want to be here when my sister gets home.”

“Terry,” the kid said in a quick, light voice.

“What?”

“What
should
I tell them? I can’t say I was only kidding. They know what that means.”

“Tell them you were stoned. Tripping. Tell them you took some acid. I don’t know. Beg.”

“Yeah. Maybe that’ll cool it with them,” he said somberly, and he followed Terry out the door.

Keeping to the shadows behind the trailers, they walked to the far end of the park, crossed the short beach there, and came up along the lake, behind the other row of trailers, until they were behind the trailer where Bruce lived. “Go on in,” Terry instructed him. “They couldn’t see you now even if they were parked right at the gate.”

The kid made a dash for the door, unlocked it, and slipped inside, with Terry right behind. When the kid had locked the door again, Terry suggested he prop a chair against the knob.

“Why? You think they’ll break in?”

“A precaution. Who knows?”

“A dumb chair’s not gonna stop guys like Keppie and Royce. Jesus, maybe we should’ve waited out in the woods till your sister got home!”

“No, man, forget it, will you?” Terry walked through the room, stumbling against a beanbag chair and giving it a kick. “You got any beer here? I shoulda grabbed a couple of beers from my sister.”

“No. Nothing. Don’t open the refrigerator, man. The light.”

“Yeah,” Terry said, his voice suddenly weary. He sat down heavily in the beanbag chair, and it hissed under his weight. “Jesus, it’s cold in here. Can’t you get some heat into this place?”

“I can’t make a fire. They’ll see the smoke.”

“Forget the fucking woodstove, you goddamn freak. Turn up the damn thermostat. You got an oil heater, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but no oil. I only use wood,” the kid said with a touch of his old pride.

“Jesus.” Terry wrapped his arms around himself and tried to settle deeper into the chair. He was wearing his orange parka and knit cap, but sitting still like this chilled him. Bruce had gone down the hall to a window where he could see the entrance to the trailerpark.

“Hey, man!” Terry called to him. “Your fucking pipes are gonna freeze, you know! You can’t put a woodstove in a trailer and not have any oil heat and keep your pipes from freezing! It’s a known fact!”

There was a knock on the door, softly, almost politely.

Terry stood up and faced the door.

When the second knock came, louder, Bruce was standing next to Terry. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he said.

“Shut up!”

A clear voice spoke on the other side of the door. “Severance! Come now!”

There was the sound of a metal object working against the latch, and the lock was sprung, and the door swung open. The Jamaican stepped quickly inside, and the white man followed, showing the way with a flashlight.

“Much too dark in here, mon,” the Jamaican said.

The man with the flashlight closed the door, found the wall switch, and flicked it on, and the four men faced each other.

“Ah! Severance! We got to have some more chat, mon,” the Jamaican said. Then to Terry, “So, my brudder, my soul-bwoy. You gwan home now, we don’t got no bidniss wit’ you, mon.” He flashed his gold teeth at Terry. Inside the small space of the trailer, both the Jamaican and his companion seemed much larger than they had in the car. They were taller and thicker than Terry, and in their presence Bruce looked like an adolescent boy.

“I was just telling him you were asking for him,” Terry said slowly. Bruce was moving away, toward the kitchen area.

“Wait, mon! Stan’ still!” the Jamaican ordered.

The other man switched off his flashlight and leaned his sweatered bulk against the door. “You,” he said to Terry. “You live here?”