The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (52 page)

“It’s getting to you, right?” Noonan said. “I can tell, it’s a turn-on for you, right?” He smiled back, almost forgiving her for having judged him so unfairly, and held the lobster over the pot of boiling water. Steam billowed around the creature’s twisting body, and Stacy stared, transfixed, when from the dining room she heard the rising voices of the diners, their loud exclamations and calls to one another to come and see, hurry up, come and see the bear!

Stacy and Noonan looked at each other, she in puzzlement, he with irritated resignation. “Shit,” he said. “This has got to be the worst god-damn night of my life!” He dropped the lobster into the empty sink and disappeared into the pantry, returning to the kitchen a few seconds later with a rifle cradled in his arm. “Sonofabitch, this’s the last time that bastard gets into my trash!” he declared and made for the dining room, with Stacy following close behind.

She had never seen a black bear close-up, although it was not uncommon to come upon one in the neighborhood, especially in midsummer, when the mountain streams ran dry and sent the normally shy creatures to the lower slopes and valleys, where the humans lived. Once, when driving back to college after summer vacation, she thought she spotted a large bear crossing the road a hundred yards ahead of her, and at first had assumed it couldn’t be a bear, it must be a huge dog, a Newfoundland, maybe, moving slowly, until it heard her car coming and broke into a swift, forward-tilted lope and disappeared into the brush as she passed. She wasn’t sure she hadn’t imagined it. She stopped the car and backed up to where the animal had entered the brush, but there was no sign of its ever having been there, no broken weeds or freshly fallen leaves, even.

This time, however, she intended to see the bear up close, if possible, and to know for sure that she did not imagine it. When she got to the dining room, everyone, Gail and the regulars from the bar included, was standing at the windows, gazing down at the yard in back where the land sloped away from the building, pointing and murmuring small noises of appreciation, except for the children, who were stilled by the sight, not so much frightened by the bear as in awe of it. The adults seemed to be mainly pleased by their good luck, for now they would have something novel to report to their friends and family when they returned home. This would become the night they saw the bear at Noonan’s.

Then Stacy saw Noonan and several other diners, all of them men, out on the deck. They, too, stared down into the yard below the dining room and in the direction of the basement door, where Noonan stashed his garbage and trash barrels in a locked, wooden, latticework cage. The men were somber and intent, taut and almost trembling, like hunting dogs on point.

Stacy edged up to the window. Behind the distant mountains, the sun was gloriously setting. Its last golden rays splashed across the neatly mowed yard behind the restaurant and shone like a soft spotlight upon the thick, black-pelted body of the bear. It was a large, adult male, over six feet tall on his hind legs, methodically, calmly, ripping away the sides and top of the lattice cage, sending torn boards into the air like kindling sticks, working efficiently, but at the bear’s own placid pace, as if he were utterly alone and there were no audience of men, women, and children staring down at him from the dining-room windows overhead, no small gang of men out on the deck watching him like a hunting party gathered on a cliff above a watering hole, and as if Noonan were not lifting his rifle to his shoulder, aiming it, and firing.

He shot once, and he missed the bear altogether. He fired a second time.

The bear was struck high in the back, and a tuft of black hair flew away from his chest where the bullet emerged, and the crowd in the dining room groaned and cried out, “He’s shooting it! Oh, God, he’s shooting it!” A woman screeched, “Tell him to stop!” and children began to bawl. A man yelled, “For God’s sake, is he nuts?” Gail looked beseechingly at Stacy, who simply shook her head slowly from side to side, for she could do nothing to stop him now. No one could. People shouted and cried, a few sobbed, and children wailed, and Noonan fired a third time. He hit the bear in the shoulder, and the animal spun around, still standing, searching for the source of this terrible pain, not understanding that he should look up, that the man with the rifle, barely fifty yards away, was positioned out of sight above him and, because of his extreme anger, because of his refusal to be impersonal in this grisly business, was unable to kill him, and so he wounded the poor creature again and again, in the chest, in a paw, and shot him through the muzzle, until finally the bear dropped to all fours and, unsure in which direction to flee, tumbled first away from the restaurant downhill toward the woods, when, hit in the back, he turned and came lumbering, bleeding and in pain, straight toward the deck, where Noonan fired one last shot, hitting the bear this time in the center of his forehead, and the bear rolled forward, as if he had tripped, and died.

Rifle in hand, Noonan stomped in silence past the departing crowd, his gaze fixed rigidly on something inside, a target in his mind of a silhouetted bear. No one spoke to him or caught his eye as he passed; no one looked at his back, even, when he strode into the kitchen and the door swung shut behind him. The men who had stood with him on the deck outside were ashamed now to have been there. Making as little of it as possible, they joined their wives and friends, all of whom were lined up at the cash register, paying Gail, leaving cash on the table, or paying Stacy at the bar, and quickly heading for the parking lot and their cars. There were a few stunned, silent exceptions, older kids too shocked to cry or too proud, but most of the children were weeping, and some wailed, while the parents tried vainly to comfort them, to assure them that bears don’t feel pain the same way humans do, and the man who shot the bear had to shoot it, because it was damaging his property, and not to worry, we will never come to this restaurant again, no matter what.

When everyone had left, Gail walked slowly from the dining room to the bar, where she took off her apron, folded it carefully, and set it on a barstool. “That’s it for me,” she said to Stacy. With trembling hands, she knocked a cigarette loose from the pack and lighted it and inhaled deeply. “Tell him he can mail me my pay,” she said. “The fucker.” She started for the door and then abruptly stopped. Without turning around, she said, “Stacy? Why the hell are you staying?”

“I’m not.”

In a voice so low she seemed to be talking to herself, Gail said, “Yes, girl, you are.” Then she was gone.

Stacy flipped off the lights in the bar and dining room one by one, unplugged the roadside sign, and locked the front entrance. When she pushed open the door to the kitchen, Noonan, standing at the far end of the long, stainless steel counter, looked up and scowled at her. He had cooked the last lobster and was eating it, eating it off the counter and with his hands: broken shells and the remains of its shattered carcass lay scattered in front him. He poked a forefinger into the thick, muscular tail and shoved a chunk of white meat out the other end, snatched it up, and popped it into his mouth.

“Eight fucking shots it took me!” he said, chewing. “That’s what I get for stashing that goddamn pissant .22 here instead of laying in a real gun!” He waved contemptuously with the back of his hand at the rifle propped against the counter, and with his other hand pushed more lobster meat into his mouth. His face was red, and he was breathing rapidly and heavily. “I missed the first shot, y’know, only because I was so pissed off I didn’t concentrate. But if I’d had a real gun, that second shot would’ve done the job fine. By God, tomorrow I’m bringing in my 30.06!” he declared.

Stacy picked up the .22 rifle and looked it over. She slid it into shooting position against her right shoulder and aimed along the barrel through the screened door and the fluttering cluster of moths to the outside lamp.

“Is it still loaded?” she asked.

“There’s four rounds left, so don’t fuck with it.” He yanked the spindly legs off the underbelly of the lobster and sucked the meat from each and dropped the emptied tubes, one by one, onto the counter in front of him.

Slowly, Stacy brought the rifle around and aimed it at Noonan’s skull. “Noonan,” she said, and he turned.

“Yeah, sure.”

She closed her eyes and pulled the trigger and heard the explosion, and when she opened her eyes, she saw in the middle of Noonan’s broad, white forehead a dark hole the size of a dime, which instantly expanded to a quarter, and his large body jerked once as if electrocuted and flipped backwards, his astonished face gone from her sight altogether now, and she saw instead, the back of his head and a hole in it the size of a silver dollar. His body, like a large, rubberized sack of water, fell to the floor, spinning away from her as it descended and ending flat on its back, with Noonan’s wide open eyes staring at the pot rack above the counter. Blood pumped from the hole in the rear of his skull onto the pale green linoleum and spread in a thickening, dark red puddle slowly toward her feet.

She lay the rifle on the counter beside the broken remains of the lobster and crossed to the stove, where the pot of water was still boiling, and shut off the gas flame. Slowly, as if unsure of where she was, she looked around the room, then seemed to make a decision, and perched herself on a stool next to the walk-in refrigerator. She leaned her head back against the cool, stainless steel door and closed her eyes. Never in her life, never, had Stacy known the relief she felt at that moment. And not since the moment before she was struck by lightning had she known the freedom.

A rattling Ford pickup truck stopped beside the darkened roadside sign, and the LaPierre brothers, Donny and Timmy, leaped from the truck bed to the side of the road. “Hey, good luck with ol’ Noonan, you little assholes!” the driver said, and he and a male passenger in the cab cackled with laughter. Two beery, expansive carpenters, they were cousins of the LaPierres, heading home to their wives and kids late from the bars of Lake Placid. They waved cheerfully to the boys and pulled away.

Donny and Timmy crunched across the gravel parking lot. The kitchen light and the lamp outside were still on, and when the boys were halfway across the lot, they saw Stacy through the screened door seated on the stool by the big walk-in fridge. She was asleep, it looked like, or maybe just bored out of her mind listening to one of Noonan’s dumb hunting stories.

“You think he’s screwing Stacy?” Timmy asked.

“C’mon, man. Stacy’s a babe. And he’s ancient, man,” Donny said. “It’s cool she’s still here, though,” he added. “She likes us, and he’ll hire us back just to look good.”

“I wouldn’t mind a little of that myself.”

“A little of what?”

“Stacy, man!”

Donny punched his younger brother on the shoulder. “Yeah, well, you’ll hafta wait your turn, little fella!” He laughed. He waved away the swarming cloud of moths and pulled the screened door open. Timmy entered first, and Donny, hiding his fading grin behind his hand, followed.

Notes

When I began writing, I wanted to be a poet, but had not the gift and fell in love instead with the short story, the form in prose closest to lyric poetry. In the intervening years, I’ve written a dozen or so novels, but the story form thrills me still. It invites me today, as it did back then, to behave on the page in a way that is more reckless, more sharply painful, and more broadly comic than is allowed by the steady, slow, bourgeois respectability of the novel, which, like a good marriage, demands long-term commitment, tolerance, and compromise. The novel, in order to exist at all, accrues, accretes, and accumulates itself in small increments, like a coral reef, and through that process invites from its creator leisurely, circumambulatory exploration. By contrast, stories are like perfect waves, if one is a surfer. Stories forgive one’s mercurial nature, reward one’s longing for ecstasy, and make of one’s short memory a virtue.

As this book is published, I am turning sixty, and these stories represent the best work I have done in the form over the thirty-seven years since I began trying to write in prose—at least that’s my hope. Rereading them has been like visiting my past and all-but-forgotten selves, the man I was (and was not) in my twenties, thirties, forties, and so on. To my surprise, the youth who wrote “Searching for Survivors,” one of the earliest of the stories included here, although a somewhat melancholy and self-dramatizing fellow, turns out to be not significantly different than the quickly aging man who wrote the most recent, “Lobster Night.” I suppose that should comfort me, but in fact it does not. It is, however, why I have arranged these stories thematically and dramatically, rather than in chronological order or by the titles of the collections in which they originally appeared. Because I was, when young, in many crucial ways the same writer I am today, I have felt free to take the old stories and set them beside the new, to recontextualize them. This has let me see them freshly and has allowed me to put them to a different use than when they were first written and published. In that way, in the making of this book, I’ve been able, despite my similarities to the younger person who has been using my name for these many years, to become a different writer than I was without it.

Twenty-two of the thirty-one stories selected for this volume were published in four earlier collections and have been revised for this edition. Nine are recent and uncollected. Among the early stories, I chose to include only those that did not on rereading make me cringe with embarrassment (several were written, after all, when I was in college) and that did not seem to require more than light revision. Most of the stories that I left out—and there were many more excluded than included—were failed experiments which were necessary for me to have attempted, for I would not have learned my craft if I had not written them; and while I now wish that I had not submitted them for publication, I nonetheless must admit that, if I had not published them, first in magazines and later in books, I doubt that I’d be able today to recognize them as failures. If I had tossed them out while they were still in manuscript form, strangled my darlings in their beds, as it were, I would not have learned from them as much as I have: in cold print, those stories taught me what I have no talent for or no abiding interest in.

From the beginning, my desire to write stories has been aided and abetted by editors who themselves love the form, and I would like to thank them here for that. Foremost among them is Ted Solotaroff, who published my stories early and often in
American Review
and
New American Review
and later edited the collections
Trailerpark
and
Success Stories
for HarperCollins. Then there is Daniel Halpern at
Antaeus
, Andy Ward and Rust Hills at
Esquire,
Mark Mirsky at
Fiction,
Joe David Bellamy at
Fiction International,
Rick Barthelme at
Mississippi Review,
William Phillips at
Partisan Review
, and the late James Boatwright at
Shenandoah
. I’m also grateful to Robert Jones, my present editor at HarperCollins, who escorted this volume into print with all his usual intelligence, tact, and energy. And finally, I especially want to thank my agent, Ellen Levine, who has been my faithful sidekick right from the start.

For those who care about such matters, I have listed here the previously collected stories under the titles of the collections in which they originally appeared.

From
Searching for Survivors
(1975):

“Searching for Survivors”

“With Ché in New Hampshire”

“Theory of Flight” (originally “With Ché at Kitty Hawk”)

“The Neighbor”

“The Lie”

“Defenseman”

From
The New World
(1978):

“The Rise of the Middle Class”

“Indisposed”

“The Caul”

From
Trailerpark
(1981):

“The Guinea Pig Lady”

“Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat”

“Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan”

“Comfort”

“The Burden”

“The Child Screams and Looks Back at You”

“The Fisherman”

From
Success Stories
(1986):

“Queen for a Day”

“The Fish”

“Success Story”

“Mistake”

“Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story”

“Firewood”