The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (50 page)

Rettstadt walked ahead of me, pointing out the changes, while I saw only the house that lay hidden beneath this one, the white house under the blue one, the drab, decaying farmhouse in the woods where a young man had stuck his unhappy wife and bewildered children while he drove into town to work every day and to drink every night and tried to invent a man he could never become.

On that snowy Saturday long ago, while my mother shrieked at my father and he barked back like an angry dog at her small, spitting face, I finally darted past them and fled the kitchen for the bedroom upstairs that I shared with my brother. It was a corner room with a pair of long windows on one side and our twin beds on the other. I remember lying on my bed, the one nearer the windows, reading a comic book, probably, with my wet feet on the clean bedspread, my arm crooked back to support my head, when suddenly the door flew open, and my mother was hovering above me like a great bird, clutching my shirt, and yanking me up beside her on the bed.

“Tell me!” she cried. “Tell me where you went! Don’t
you
lie to me, too!” She raised her hand and held it, palm out, a few inches from my face, as if she wanted me to read it, and she said, “Don’t you lie to me, or I swear, I’ll go crazy. Tell me where you went all afternoon! I know he took you to the bar, and he didn’t go to the depot. He just went to the bar. And a woman was there, I know it. Tell me the truth.”

I did not protest, I did not hesitate. I nodded my head up and down, and said, “We went to the bar in town. Nowhere else. A woman was there.”

She smiled, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and stood. “Good boy,” she said. “Good boy.” She turned and left the room. I lay back down trembling, and in a few seconds the buzz of the electric trains from the attic room in back replaced the buzz in my head, and I believe I fell asleep.

When George Rettstadt asked me if I wanted to see how he’d changed the rooms upstairs, where he said he had fixed up a large apartment for himself and his wife, I felt my chest tighten. “No,” I said very quickly, as if he had invited me to look steadily at a gruesome object. “No, that’s okay, I’m in kind of a hurry, anyhow,” I said, easing toward the door. “I wanted to walk around the yard a minute. I wanted to see where my brother and sister and I used to play. You know.”

Rettstadt said, “Sure, take all the time you want. Look at whatever you want to look at, everything’s unlocked. We never lock our doors out here, you know.” He opened the door, we shook hands, and I stepped out, breathing rapidly.

I did poke into the barn, but there was nothing about it that spoke to me. I stood inside the dark, cluttered building, and it was as if I were resting, idling, conserving energy for a more strenuous exertion to come.

A moment later, I had walked around the back of the house, crossed through the tangled brush and crumbling stone walls in the gathering dusk, and had come to stand next to the house on the far side, just below my old bedroom window.

My father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs had wakened me. He swung open the bedroom door, and I knew instantly, as if I had been standing downstairs in the kitchen between my mother and father, what had happened between them when she returned from my room armed with my betrayal, and with utter clarity and an almost welcoming acceptance, I knew what would happen now between him and me.

Violence produces white light and heat inside the head, and it happens both to the person who administers the beating and to the person who is beaten. It is never dark and cold. It happens at the instant of violent contact, before pain is felt, or fear, even, or guilt, so that pain, fear, and guilt come to be seen as merely the price one pays after the fact for this extraordinary immolation. It’s as if violence were a gift worth any price. Beyond the light and the heat, it’s a gift that engenders gorgeous dreams of retribution, and they last for tens of generations of fathers and children, husbands and wives—it’s a gift that shapes and drives fantasies of becoming huge as a glacier and hard as iron, fast as light, and sudden, like a volcano.

When you are hit in the head or slammed in the ribs and thrown to the floor by a powerful man, you find instantly that you are already halfway into a narrative that portrays your return to that moment, a narrative whose primary function is to provide reversal: to make the child into the man, the weak into the strong, the bad into the good.
Listen to me
: you are locked into that narrative, and no other terms, except those present at its inception, at the very opening of the drama, are available for the reversal—and,
oh!
when that happens, I have risen up from my narrow bed in the upstairs corner room I shared with my brother in Tobyhanna in 1952, and I overwhelm my dead father’s rage with an awful, endless rage of my own.

I eventually moved away from that spot beneath the window of the bedroom and got into my car and drove back to Tobyhanna and then on down to East Stroudsburg University, where that evening I gave my lecture to a small gathering of students and teachers, who seemed appreciative and expressed it with good-natured, gentle applause. Afterwards, we ate and drank a little wine in a local restaurant, and I drove home to New York City.

I will not go back to the house in Tobyhanna or to the bar in town, just as—after having been there once—I have not returned to any of the other houses we lived in when I was growing up, or to the apartments and barrooms in Florida and Boston and New Hampshire, where I first learned the need to protect other people from myself, people who loved me, male and female, and utter strangers, male and female. I go back to each, one time only, and I stand silently outside a window or a door, and I deliberately play back the horrible events that took place there. Then I move on.

I have traveled a lot in recent years, and consequently have completed almost all my journeys now. And when I have returned to every place where someone beat me or I beat someone, when there is no place left to go back to, then for the rest of my life I will have only my memories, these stories, to go to—for the heat, for the light, for the awful, endlessly recurring end of it.

Lobster Night

Stacy didn’t mean to tell Noonan that when she was seventeen she was struck by lightning. She rarely told anyone and never a man she was attracted to or hoped soon to be sleeping with. Always, at the last second, an alarm in the center of her brain went off, and she changed the subject, asked a question, like, “How’s your wife?” or, “You ready for another?” She was a summertime bartender at Noonan’s, a sprawling log building with the main entrance and kitchen door facing the road and three large, plate-glass, dining-room windows in back and a wide, redwood deck cantilevered above the yard for taking in the great sunset views of the Adirondack Mountains. The sign said
NOONAN’S FAMILY RESTAURANT
, but in fact it was a roadhouse, a bar that—except in ski season and on summer weekends when drive-by tourists with kids mistakenly pulled in for lunch or supper—catered mostly to heavy drinkers from the several nearby hamlets.

The night that Stacy told Noonan about the lightning was also the night she shot and killed him. She had rented an A-frame at off-season rates in one of the hamlets and was working for Noonan only till the winter snows blew in from Quebec and Ontario. From May to November, she usually waited tables or tended bar in one or another of the area restaurants and the rest of the year taught alpine skiing at Whiteface Mountain. That was her real job, her profession, and she had the healthy, ash blond good looks of a poster girl for women’s Nordic sports: tall, broad-shouldered, flat-muscled, with square jaw and high cheekbones. Despite appearances, however, she viewed herself as a plain-faced, twenty-eight-year-old ex-athlete, with the emphasis on
ex-
. Eight years ago, she was captain of the nationally ranked St. Regis University downhill ski team, only a sophomore and already a star. Then in the Eastern Regionals she pushed her luck, took a spectacular, cartwheeling spill in the giant slalom, and shattered her left thigh. The video of the last ten seconds of her fall was still being shown at the front of the sports segment on the evening news from Plattsburgh.

A year of physical therapy, and she returned to college and the slopes, but she’d lost her fearlessness and, with it, her interest in college, and dropped out before fall break. Her parents had long since swapped their house for an RV and retired to a semipermanent campground outside Phoenix; her three older brothers had drifted downstate to Albany for work in construction; but Stacy came back anyhow to where she’d grown up. She had friends from high school there, mostly women, who still thought of her as a star: “Stace was headed for the Olympics, y’know,” they told strangers. Over time, she lived briefly and serially with three local men in their early thirties, men she called losers even when she was living with them—slow-talking guys with beards and ponytails, rusted-out pickup trucks, and large dogs with bandannas tied around their necks. Otherwise and most of the time, she lived alone.

Stacy had never tended bar for Noonan before this, and the place was a little rougher than she was used to. But she was experienced and had cultivated a set of open-faced, wise-guy ways and a laid-back manner that protected her from her male customers’ presumptions. Which, in spite of her ways and manner, she needed: she was a shy, northcountry girl who, when it came to personal matters, volunteered very little about herself, not because she had secrets, but because there was so much about herself that she did not yet understand. She did understand, however, that the last thing she wanted or needed was a love affair with a man like Noonan—married, twenty years older than she, and her boss. She was seriously attracted to him, though. And not just sexually. Which was why she got caught off guard.

It was late August, a Thursday, the afternoon of Lobster Night. The place was empty, and she and Noonan were standing hip to hip behind the bar, studying the lobster tank. Back in June, Noonan, who did all the cooking himself, had decided that he could attract a better class of clientele and simplify the menu at the same time if during the week he offered nightly specials, which he advertised on a chalkboard hung from the Family Restaurant sign outside. Monday became Mexican Night, with dollar margaritas and all the rice and refried beans you can eat. Tuesday was Liver ’n’ Onions Night. Wednesday was Fresh Local Corn Night, although, until mid-August, the corn came, not from Adirondack gardens, but from southern New Jersey and Pennsylvania by way of the Grand Union supermarket in Lake Placid. And Thursday—when local folks rarely ate out and therefore needed something more than merely special—was designated Lobster Night. Weekends, he figured, took care of themselves.

Noonan had set his teenage son’s unused tropical fish tank at the end of the bar, filled it with water, and arranged with the Albany wholesaler to stock the tank on his Monday runs to Lake Placid with a dozen live lobsters. All week, the lobsters rose and sank in the cloudy tank like dark thoughts. Usually, by Tuesday afternoon, the regulars at the bar had given the lobsters names like Marsh and Redeye and Honest Abe, local drinking, hunting, and bar-brawling legends, and had handicapped the order of their execution. In the villages around, Thursday quickly became everyone’s favorite night for eating out, and soon Noonan was doubling his weekly order, jamming the fish tank, and making Lobster Night an almost merciful event for the poor crowded creatures.

“You ought to either get a bigger tank or else just don’t buy so many of them,” Stacy said.

Noonan laughed. “Stace,” he said. “Compared to the cardboard boxes these guys’ve been in, the fish tank is lobster heaven. Four days of swimmin’ in this, they’re free range, practically.” He draped a heavy hand across her shoulder and drummed her collarbone with a fingertip. “They don’t know the difference, anyhow. They’re dumber than fish, y’know.”

“You don’t know what they feel or don’t feel. Maybe they spend the last few days before they die flipping out from being so confined. I sure would.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t go there, Stace. Trying to figure what lobsters feel, that’s the road to vegetarianism. The road to vegans-ville.”

She smiled at that. Like most of the Adirondack men she knew, Noonan was a dedicated, lifelong hunter—mainly of deer, but also of game birds and rabbits, which he fed to his family and sometimes put on the restaurant menu as well. He shot and trapped animals he didn’t eat, too—foxes, coyotes, lynxes, even bear—and sold their pelts. Normally, this would disgust Stacy or at least seriously test her acceptance of Noonan’s character. She wasn’t noticeably softhearted when it came to animals or sentimental, but shooting and trapping creatures you didn’t intend to eat made no sense to her. She was sure it was cruel and was almost ready to say it was sadistic.

In Noonan, though, it oddly attracted her, this cruelty. He was a tall, good-looking man in an awkward, rough-hewn way, large in the shoulders and arms, with a clean-shaven face and buzz-cut head one or two sizes too small for his body. It made him look boyish to her, and whenever he showed signs of cruelty—his relentless, not quite good-natured teasing of Gail, his regular waitress, and the LaPierre brothers, two high-school kids he hired in summers to wash dishes and bus tables—to her he seemed even more boyish than usual. It was all somehow innocent, she thought. It had the same strange, otherworldly innocence of the animals that he liked to kill. A man that manly, that
different
from a woman, can actually make you feel more womanly—as if you were of a different species. It freed you from having to compare yourself to him.

“You ever try that? Vegetarianism?” Noonan asked. He tapped the glass of the tank with a knuckle, as if signaling one of the lobsters to come on over.

“Once. When I was seventeen. I kept it up for a while, two years, as a matter of fact. Till I busted up my leg and had to quit college.” He knew the story of her accident; everyone knew it. She’d been a local hero before the break and had become a celebrity afterwards. “It’s hard to keep being a vegetarian in the hospital, though. That’s what got me off it.”

“No shit. What got you
on
it?”

That’s when she told him. “I was struck by lightning.”

He looked at her. “Lightning! Jesus! Are you kidding me? How the hell did
that
happen?”

“The way it always happens, I guess. I was doing something else at the time. Going up the stairs to bed, actually, in my parents’ house. It was in a thunderstorm, and I reached for the light switch on the wall, and, Bam! Just like they say, a bolt out of the blue.”

“But it didn’t kill you,” Noonan tenderly observed.

“No. But it sure could’ve. You could say it
almost
killed me, though.”

“But it didn’t.”

“Right. But it
almost
killed me. That’s not the same as ‘it didn’t kill me.’ If you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, but you’re okay now, right? No lingering aftereffects, I mean. Except, of course, for your brief flirtation with the veg-world.” He squeezed the meat of her shoulder and smiled warmly.

She sighed. Then smiled back—she liked his touch—and tried again: “No, it really changed me. It did. A bolt of lightning went through my body and my brain, and I almost died from it, even though it only lasted a fraction of a second and then was over.”

“But you’re okay now, right?”

“Sure.”

“So what was it like, getting hit by lightning?”

She hesitated a moment before answering. “Well, I thought I was shot. With a gun. Seriously. There was this loud noise, like an explosion, and when I woke up, I was lying at the bottom of the stairs, and Daddy and Mom were standing over me like I was dead, and I said, ‘Who shot me, Daddy?’ It really messed with my mind for a long time. I tried to find out if anybody else I knew had been struck by lightning, but nobody had. Although a few people said they knew someone or heard of someone who’d been hit and survived it. But nobody I ever met myself had been through it. I was the only person I knew who’d had this particular experience. Still am. It’s strange, but when you’re the only person you know who’s gone through something that’s changed you into a completely different person, for a while it’s like you’re on your own planet, like if you’re a Vietnam vet and don’t know anyone else who was in Vietnam, too.”

“I can dig it,” Noonan said somberly, although he himself had not been in Vietnam.

“You get used to it, though. And then it turns out to be like life. I mean, there’s you, and there’s everybody else. Only, unlike the way it is for everybody else, this happened to me in a flash, not over years and so slow you don’t even realize how true it is. Know what I mean?”

“How true what is?”

“Well, just that there’s you, and there’s everybody else. And that’s life.”

“Sure, I can understand that.” He turned away from the tank and looked into Stacy’s blue eyes. “It’s the same for me. Only with me it was on account of this goddamned bear. Did I ever tell you about the bear that tore my camp down?”

She said, “No, Noonan. You didn’t.”

“It’s the same thing, like getting struck by lightning and afterwards feeling like you’re a changed man.” It was years ago, he said, when he was between marriages and drinking way too much and living in his hunting camp up on Baxter Mountain because his first wife had got the house in the divorce. He got drunk every night in town at the Spread Eagle or the Elm Tree or the old Dew Drop Inn, and afterwards, when he drove back to Baxter Mountain, he’d park his truck at the side of the road, because the trail was too rough even for a four-by-four, and walk the two miles through the woods to his camp. It was a windblown, one-room cabin with a sleeping loft and a woodstove, and one night, when he stumbled back from the village, the place had been trashed by a bear. “An adolescent male, I figured, it being springtime, who’d been kicked out of his own house and home. Not unlike myself. I had a certain sympathy for him, therefore. But he’d wrecked my cabin looking for food and had busted a window going out, and I knew he’d come back, so I had to take him down.”

The next evening, Noonan blew out his kerosene lantern, climbed into the sleeping loft with a bottle of Jim Beam, his Winchester 30.06, and his flashlight, and waited. Around midnight, as if brushing away a cobweb, the bear tore off the sheet of polyurethane that Noonan had tacked over the broken window, crawled into the cabin, and made for the same cupboard he’d emptied the night before. Noonan, half-drunk by now, clicked on his flashlight, caught the startled bear in its beam, and fired, but only wounded him. Maddened with pain, the bear roared and stood on his hind legs, flinging his forelegs in the air right and left, and before Noonan could fire again, the animal had grabbed onto a timber that held up the loft and ripped it from its place, tearing out several other supporting timbers with it, until the entire cabin was collapsing around Noonan and the wounded bear. The structure was feeble anyhow, made of old cast-off boards tacked together in a hurry twenty years ago, never rebuilt, never renovated, and it came down upon Noonan’s head with ease. The bear escaped into the night, but Noonan lay trapped under the fallen roof of the cabin, unable to move, his right arm broken, he assumed, and possibly several ribs. “That’s when it happened,” he said.

“What?” Stacy dipped a dozen beer mugs two at a time into cold water, pulled them out, and stuck them into the freezer to frost for later on.

“Just like you said. It changed my life, Stace.”

“No kidding. How?” She refilled the salt shakers on the bar.

“Well, I stopped drinking, for one thing. That was a few years later, though. But I lay there all that night and most of the next day. Until this beautiful young woman out looking for her lost dog came wandering by. And, Stace,” he said, his voice suddenly lowered, “I married her.”

She put her fists on her hips and checked him out. “Seriously?”

He smiled. “Well, yeah, sort of. I’d actually known her a long time beforehand, and she’d visited me a few times at my camp, let us say. But, yeah, I did marry her … eventually. And we were very happy. For a while.”

“Uh-huh. For a while.”

Noonan nodded, smiled, winked. Then bumped her hip with his and said, “I gotta get the kitchen set up. We can pursue this later, Stace. If you want.”