The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (40 page)

“But guinea pigs are alive, for heaven’s sake!”

“There’s some would say plants are alive, too, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.”

“That’s different! These are animals!” The Captain sucked on his cold pipe, drew ash and spit into his mouth, and coughed.

“Animals, vegetables, minerals, all that matters is that they’re not like dogs and cats, which are pets, because they can cause trouble for people. They’re more like babies. That’s why they have rules against pets in places like this, sir,” she explained. “But not babies.”

“How many guinea pigs have you?” the Captain coldly inquired.

“Seventeen.”

“Males and females alike, I suppose.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, smiling broadly. “Twelve females, and eight of them is pregnant at this very moment. If you take good care of them, they thrive,” she said with pride. “Like plants,” she added, suddenly serious.

“But they’re not plants! They’re animals, and they produce … waste materials,” he said, again pointing with the stem of his pipe at the pile behind the trailer. “And they’re dirty.”

Flora stepped onto her cinder-block stairs, bringing herself to the same height as the Captain. “Sir, guinea pigs are not dirty. They’re cleaner than most people I know, and I know how most people can be. Don’t forget, I was a steward for twenty years almost. And as for producing ‘waste materials,’ even plants produce waste materials. It’s called oxygen, sir, which we human people find pretty useful, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir. And, as a matter of fact, come next spring you might want me to let you take some of that pile of waste material I got going over to your place.” She shoved her chin in the direction of Captain Knox’s trailer, where there was a now-dormant ten-foot-by-ten-foot garden plot on the slope facing the lake. Then she turned and abruptly entered her home.

That same evening, the Captain, in number 6, telephoned Leon LaRoche, in number 2, to explain the situation. “I’d take it to her myself,” he said, meaning to Marcelle Chagnon, “but she’s got it into her head that I’m trying to take over her job of running this place, so every time I ask her to do something, she does the opposite.”

LaRoche understood. “I’ll put a little data together first,” he said. “Guinea pigs are like rats, aren’t they?”

“Very much.”

LaRoche was eager to please the older man, as he admired and even envied him a little. He had once confessed to Doreen, after her ex-husband had made one of his brutal, unexpected visits and had been hauled away by the Catamount Police Department, that he was open-minded about the idea of marriage, assuming he met the right person and all, but if it turned out that he remained a bachelor all his life, he hoped he would be able to achieve the dignity and force, by the time he reached sixty or sixty-five, of a Captain Dewey Knox, say.

That night LaRoche researched guinea pigs in volume 7 of his complete
Cooper’s World Encyclopedia
, which he had obtained, volume by volume, by shopping every week at the A & P, and learned that guinea pigs, or cavies (
Rodentia caviidae
), a descendant of the Peruvian
Cavia aperea porcellus
, which were kept by the Indians for food and even today are sold as a delicacy in many South American marketplaces, have a life expectancy of eight years maximum, an average litter size of 2.5, a gestation period of sixty-three days, and reach reproductive maturity in five to six weeks. He further learned that the female goes through estrus every sixteen days for fifty hours, during which time the female will accept the male continuously, but only between the hours of 5:00
P.M
. and 5:00
A.M
. He also discovered that 8 percent of all guinea pig pregnancies end in abortion, a variable that made his calculations somewhat complicated but also somewhat more interesting to perform. He learned many other things about guinea pigs that night, but it was the numbers that he decided to present to Marcelle. He thought of telling her that guinea pigs are coprophagists, eaters of feces, a habit necessitated by their innate difficulty in digesting cellulose tissue, creating thereby a need for bacteria as an aid to digestion, but thought better of it. The numbers, he decided, would be sufficient to make her aware of the gravity of the situation.

The next morning, a crisp, early fall day, with the birches near the lake already gone to gold and shimmering in the clear air, LaRoche walked next door to Marcelle’s trailer fifteen minutes before his usual departure time for Sunday mass and presented her with the evidence and the mathematical implications of the evidence. Captain Dewey Knox’s testimony was unimpeachable, and Leon LaRoche’s logic and calculations were irrefutable. Marcelle’s course of action, therefore, was inescapable. The guinea pigs would have to go, or Flora Pease would have to go.

“I need this like I need a hole in the head,” Marcelle griped, when LaRoche had left her alone with her cup of coffee and cigarette. Winter was coming on fast, and she had to be sure all the trailers were winterized, storm windows repaired and in place, exposed water pipes insulated, heating units all cleaned and operating at maximum efficiency to avoid unnecessary breakdowns and expensive service calls, contracts for fuel oil and snowplowing made with local contractors and approved by the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, leaky roofs patched, picnic tables and waterfront equipment and docks stored away until spring, and on and on—a long list of things to do before the first snowfall in November. Not only that, she had to collect rents, not always a simple job, and sometime this month she had to testify in court in the case involving Doreen’s ex-husband, since Marcelle had been the one to control him with her shotgun when Doreen called the police, and Terry Constant had taken off again for parts unknown, so she had no one to help her, no one (since Terry had a deal with his sister whereby his work for Marcelle helped pay her rent) she could afford. And now in the middle of all this she had to cope with a fruit-cake who had a passion for raising guinea pigs and didn’t seem to realize that they were going to breed her out of her own home right into the street. No sense treating the woman like a child. Rules were rules, and it wasn’t up to Flora Pease to say whether her guinea pigs were pets, it was up to management, and Marcelle was management. The pigs would have to go, or else the woman would have to go.

Days went by, however, and, for one reason or another, Marcelle left Flora alone, let her come and go as usual without bothering to stop her and inform her that guinea pigs were pets and pets were not allowed in the trailerpark. Terry came back, evidently from New York City, where he’d gone to hear some music, he said, and she put him to work winterizing the trailers, which, for another week, as she laid out Terry’s work and checked after him to be sure he actually did it, allowed Marcelle to continue to ignore the problem. Leon LaRoche thought better of the idea of bringing up the topic again and generally avoided her, although he did get together several times with Captain Knox to discuss Marcelle’s obvious unwillingness to deal forthrightly with what would very soon turn into a sanitation problem. Something for the health department, Captain Knox pointed out.

Finally, one morning late in the month, Marcelle went looking for Terry. It was a Saturday, and ordinarily she didn’t hire him on Saturdays, because it brought forward speeches about exploitation of the minorities and complaints about not getting paid time and a half, which is what anyone else would have to pay a man to work on Saturdays, unless, of course, that man happens to be a black man in a white world. Marcelle more or less accepted the truth of Terry’s argument, but that didn’t make it any easier for her to hire him on Saturdays, since she couldn’t afford to pay him the six dollars an hour it would have required. On this day, however, she had no choice in the matter—the weather prediction was for a heavy freeze that night and Sunday, and half the trailers had water pipes that would surely burst if Terry didn’t spend the day nailing homosote skirting to the undersides.

He wasn’t home, and his sister, Carol, didn’t know where he’d gone, unless it was next door to visit that woman, Flora Pease, where he seemed to spend a considerable amount of his time lately, Carol observed cautiously. Yes, well, Marcelle didn’t know anything about that, nor did she much care where Terry spent his spare time, so long as he stayed out of her hair (Carol said she could certainly understand that), but right now she needed him to help her finish winterizing the trailerpark by nightfall or they would have to spend the next two weeks finding and fixing water pipe leaks. Carol excused herself, as she had to get dressed for work, and Marcelle left in a hurry for Flora’s trailer.

At first when she knocked on the door there was no answer. A single crow called from the sedgy swamp out back, a leafless and desolate-looking place, with a skin of ice over the reedy water. The skeletal, low trees and bushes clattered lightly in the breeze, and Marcelle pulled the collar of her denim jacket tightly against her face. The swamp, which was more of a muskeg than an actual swamp, lay at the southern end of about three thousand acres of state forest—most of the land between the northwest shore of Skitter Lake and the Turnpike, Route 28, which ran from the White Mountains, fifty miles to the north, to Boston, ninety miles to the south. The trailerpark had been placed there as a temporary measure (before local zoning restrictions could be voted into action) to hold and initiate development on the only large plot of land available between the town of Catamount and the Skitter Lake State Forest. That was right after the Korean War, when the Granite State Realty Development Corporation, anticipating a coming statewide need for low-income housing, had gone all over the state purchasing large tracts of land that also happened to lie close to cities and towns where low-income people were employed, usually mill towns like Catamount, whose tannery kept between seventy and eighty families marginally poor. As it turned out, the trailerpark was all the Granite State Realty Development Corporation could finance in Catamount, for it soon became apparent that no one in the area would be able to purchase houses, if the Corporation built single-family dwellings, or pay high enough rents to justify the expense of constructing a town house apartment complex. Soon it became clear that the best use the Corporation could make of the land and trailers was as collateral for financing projects elsewhere in the state, in the larger towns and cities where there were people who could afford to buy single-family dwellings or rent duplex apartments. In the meantime, the Corporation maintained the twelve trailers just adequately, paid the relatively low taxes, and came close to breaking even on its investment. Marcelle had been the first tenant in the trailerpark, moving out of a shabby, wood-frame tenement building in town because of her kids, who, she believed, needed more space, and she had immediately become the manager—when the company representative recognized her tough-mindedness, made evident, as soon as there were no more vacancies, by her ability to organize a rent strike to protest the open sewage and contaminated water. They had installed septic tanks and leach fields, and she had continued as resident manager ever since.

Flora’s door opened a dark inch, and Marcelle saw a bit of cheek, blond hair, and an eye looking through the inch. She shoved against the door with the flat of one hand, pushing it back against the face behind it, and stepped up the cinder blocks and in, where she discovered the owner of the cheek, blond hair, and eye—Bruce Severance, the college kid who lived in number 3, between LaRoche and Doreen.

“Hold it a minute, man,” he said uselessly, rubbing his nose from the blow it had received from the door and stepping back into the room to make space for the large, gray-haired woman. The room, though dark from the venetian blinds being drawn, was filled with at least two other people than Bruce and Marcelle, batches of oddly arranged furniture, and what looked like merchandise counters from a department store.

“Don’t you have any lights in here, for Christ’s sake?” Marcelle demanded. She stood inside the room in front of the open door, blinking as she tried to accustom herself to the gloom and see who else was there. “Why are all the blinds drawn? What the hell are you doing here, Severance?” Then she smelled it. “Grass! You smoking your goddamned hippie pot in here with Flora?”

“Hey, man, it’s cool.”

“Don’t ‘man’ me. And it isn’t cool. I don’t let nothing illegal go on here. Something illegal goes on, and I happen to find out about it, I call in the goddamned cops. Let them sort out the problems. I don’t need problems, I got enough of them already to keep me busy.”

“That’s right, baby, you don’t want no more problems,” came a soft voice from a particularly dark corner.

“Terry! What the hell are you doing here?” She could make out a lumpy shape next to him on what appeared to be a mattress on the floor. “Is that Flora over there?” Marcelle asked, her voice suddenly a bit shaky. Things were changing a little too fast for her to keep track of. You don’t mind the long-haired hippie kid smoking a little grass and maybe yakking stupidly, the way they do when they’re stoned, with probably the only person in the trailerpark who didn’t need to get stoned herself in order to understand him. You don’t really mind that. A kid like Bruce Severance, you knew he smoked marijuana, but it was harmless, because he did it for ideological reasons, the same reasons behind his vegetarian diet and his T’ai Chi exercises and his way of getting a little rest, Transcendental Meditation—he did all these things, not because they were fun, but because he believed they were good for him, and good for you, too, if only you were able to come up with the wisdom, self-discipline, and money so that you, too, could smoke marijuana instead of drink beer and rye whiskey, eat organic vegetables instead of supermarket junk, study and practice exotic, ancient Oriental forms of exercise instead of sitting around at night watching TV. You, too, could learn how to spend a half hour in the morning and a half hour in the evening meditating, instead of sleeping to the last minute before getting up and making breakfast for yourself and the kid and rushing off to work and in the evening dragging yourself home just in time to make supper for the kid. And if you could accomplish these things, you would be like Bruce Severance, a much improved person. That was one of Bruce’s favorite phrases, “much improved person,” and he believed that it ought to be a universal goal and that only ignorance (fostered by the military-industrial complex), sheer laziness, and/or purely malicious ideological opposition (that is to say, a “fascist mentality”) kept the people he lived among from participating with him in his several rites. So, unless you happened to share his ideology, you could easily view his several rites as harmless, mainly because you could also trust the good sense of the poor people he lived among, and also their self-discipline and the day-to-day realities they were forced to struggle against. A fool surrounded by sensible poor people remains a fool and is, therefore, seldom troublesome. But when it starts to occur to you that some of the poor people are not sensible—which is what occurred to Marcelle when she peered into the dingy, dim clutter of the trailer and saw Terry sprawled out on a mattress on the floor with Flora Pease clumped next to him, both with marijuana cigarettes dangling from their lips—that’s when you start to view the fool as troublesome.