The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (8 page)

In a short time, a fire was crackling inside the round belly of the stove, the kerosene lantern was lit, and the bob-house was warmed sufficiently for Merle to pull off his mackinaw and gloves and hang them on pegs behind the bunk. Bruce laid in the wood carefully below the bunk, then looked up at Merle as if for approval, but Merle ignored him.

“Now,” the kid said, shaking off his blue parka and, following Merle’s example, placing it on a peg, “show me what you got there, those whachacallits from the fields.” He sat down next to Merle and rolled a joint. “Smoke?” he said, holding out the cigarette.

“No, thanks, I got whiskey.”

“You oughta smoke grass instead,” the kid said, lighting up.

“You oughta drink whiskey. ’Course, you got to be smarter to handle whiskey than you do that stuff.” He was silent and watched Bruce sucking on the joint.

The kid started to argue with the old man. Grass never did to you what whiskey surely did, made you depressed and angry, ruined your liver, destroyed your brain cells, and so on.

“What does grass do to you?” Merle asked.

“Gets you high, man.” He grinned.

Merle grunted and stood up. “If it can’t hurt you, I don’t see how it can get you high.” He opened the trapdoors in the floor, exposing the white ice below, and with his chisel went to work cutting holes. With the lip of the steel, he flaked ice neatly away, making a circle eight or nine inches across, then dug deeper, until suddenly the hole filled with water. Moving efficiently and quickly, he soon had a half dozen holes cut, their tops and bottoms carefully beveled so as not to cut the line, and with a small strainer he scooped the floating ice chips away, until there was only clear, pale blue water in the holes.

On a lapboard he proceeded to chop hunks of flesh off several hand-sized minnows he’d plucked from a bait pail. This done, he placed the chum into a tin cone with a line attached to the top through a lever that released the hinged bottom of the cone when the line was jerked. He let the cone slowly down the center hole, slightly larger than the others and, hand over hand, let out about thirty feet of line, until he felt the cone touch bottom. He jerked the line once, retrieved it, and brought the cone back into the bob-house, dripping and empty.

Bruce watched with obvious admiration as the old man moved about the confines of the bob-house, adjusting the draft of the stove, taking out, using, and wiping dry and putting back his tools and equipment, drawing his bottle of Canadian Club from under the bunk, loosening his boots, when suddenly the old man leaned down and blew out the lantern, and the bob-house went black.

“What? What’d you do
that
for?” Bruce’s voice was high and thin.

“Don’t need it now.” From the darkness came the sound of Merle unscrewing the cap of the whiskey bottle. Then silence.

“How long you plan to stay out here tonight?” The kid sounded a little frightened.

“Till morning,” came the answer. “Then for as long as the fishing’s any good and the ice holds.”

“Days and nights both?”

“Sure. I only have to come in when I run outa whiskey. There’s plenty wood along the banks, I’ll have to step out now and then for that, and, of course, you got to piss and shit once in a while. Otherwise…”

They sat in darkness and silence awhile longer, when finally the kid stood up and groped behind him for his coat. “I… I gotta go back in.”

“Suit yourself.”

He took a step toward the door, and Merle said to him, “Those goldenrod galls you was asking about?”

“Oh, yeah,” the kid said.

Merle struck a match, and suddenly his face was visible, red in the glow of the match as he sucked the flame into the barrel of his pipe, his bearded face lurching ominously in and out of the light when the flame brightened and dimmed. When he had his pipe lit, he snuffed out the match, and all the kid could see was the red glow of the smoldering tobacco. “Bait.”

“Bait?”

“Yep. Old Indian trick.”

The kid was silent for a few seconds. “Bait. You mean, that’s how you got me to push this thing way the hell out here tonight?”

“Old Indian trick.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said coldly. He drew open the door and stepped quickly out to the ice and wind, looked into the darkness for the lights of the trailerpark, found them way off and dimly in the west, and started the walk back.

No one brought Merle any Christmas gifts or invited him to any of the several small parties at the park. The reasons may have been complicated and may have had to do with the “loans” they all had received from him, but more likely the residents of the trailerpark, as usual, simply forgot about him. Once in a while, someone mentioned having seen him walk through the park on his way to town and return later carrying a bag of groceries and a state liquor store bag, but otherwise it was almost as if the old man had moved away, had gone west to Albany like Buddy Smith or south to Florida like Captain Knox’s mother and father or into town to the Hawthorne House like Claudel Bing.

The week before Christmas, there was a snowstorm that left a foot and a half of snow on the ground and on the lake, followed by a day and a night of high, cold winds that scraped the snow into shoulder-high drifts along the shore, and that further isolated Merle from the community. Now it was almost as if he had died, and when in the morning you happened to look out at the lake and saw way out there in the brilliant white plain a red cube with a string of woodsmoke unraveling from the stovepipe chimney on top, you studied it the way you would the distant gravestone of a stranger reddening in the light of the rising sun.

A week later, just after Christmas and before the turn of the year, Noni Hubner’s mother was reading the Manchester
Union Leader
at breakfast, when she started up excitedly, grabbed the paper off the table, and hurried back through the trailer to her daughter’s bedroom.

“Noni! Noni, wake up!” She shook the girl roughly by the shoulder.

Slowly Noni came to. She lay in the bed on her back, blinking like a seal on a rock. “What?”

“The Grand Prize Drawing! They’re going to have the Grand Prize Drawing, dear! Think of it! What if he won! Wouldn’t that be wonderful for him? The poor old man.”

“Who? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t curse, dear. Merle Ring, the old fellow out on the lake. He won the lottery back in October, remember? And now, on January fifteenth, they’re going to hold the Grand Prize Drawing. Apparently, they put all the winning numbers for the year into a basket or something, and the governor or somebody draws out one number, and whoever holds that number wins fifty thousand dollars! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“Yeah,” the girl said, and rolled over, yanking the covers over her head.

“No, you can’t go back to sleep! You’ve got to go out there and tell him! He hasn’t been out of that cabin of his for days, or even weeks, so he can’t know yet. You can ski out there with the news! Won’t that be
fun
, dear?”

“Let someone else do it,” Noni mumbled from under the covers. “It’s too cold.”

“You’re the only who has skis, dear,” the mother said.

“Most of the snow is off the ice.”

“Then you can skate out!”

“Oh, God,” Noni groaned. “Can’t you leave people alone?”

“He’s such a sweet old man, and he’s been
very
generous. It’s the least we can do.”

“He’s a grumpy pain in the ass, if you ask me. And he’s weird, not generous.” She got out of bed and looked at her reflection in the mirror.

“Well, no one asked you. You just do as I say. You have to involve yourself more in the fates of others, dear. You can’t always be thinking only of yourself.”

It took Noni an hour to prepare for the journey—first breakfast and then, as she ate and dressed herself in three layers of clothing, bickering with her mother about the necessity for the trip in the first place— and another hour for the trip itself. It was a white world out there, white sky, white earth beneath, and a thin, gray horizon all around, the whole of it centered on the red cubicle where the old man fished through the ice.

At the bob-house, sweating from the work of skating against the wind and, having come to rest, suddenly chilled, Noni leaned for a few seconds against the leeward wall, knocked at the door, and, without waiting for an answer, entered. The door closed behind her, and instantly she was enveloped by darkness and warmth, as if she had been swallowed whole by an enormous mammal.

“Oh!” she cried. “I can’t see!”

“Seat’s to your right,” came the old man’s gravelly voice. The interior space was so small that you couldn’t tell where in the darkness the voice was coming from, whether from the farthest corner of the bob-house or right up next to your ear.

Noni groped to her right, found the bench, and sat down. A moment of silence passed. Gradually, her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and she was able at last to see the six holes in the ice, and in the green light that rose from the holes she saw the hooked shape of the old man seated at the other end of the bunk next to the stove. He held a drop line in one hand and jiggled it with the other, and he seemed to be staring into the space directly in front of him, as if he were a blind man.

“Why is it so dark in here?” she asked timidly.

“Window’s shut.”

“No, I mean how come?”

“So I can see the fish and they can’t see me,” he said slowly.

More silence passed. Finally, in a low voice, Noni spoke. “How strange you are.”

Merle didn’t respond.

“I have some news for you, Mr. Ring.”

Still nothing.

“You know the lottery you won back in October?”

Merle jiggled his handline and continued staring straight ahead. It was almost as if he’d entered a state of suspended animation, as if his systems had been banked down to their minimal operating capacity, with his heart and lungs, all his vital organs, working at one-fourth their normal rate, so that he could survive and even thrive in the deprivation caused by the cold and the ice and the darkness.

“It seems ridiculous,” the girl said, almost to herself. “You don’t care about things like lotteries and Grand Prize Drawings and all.”

A few seconds passed. Merle said, “I bought the ticket. I cared.”

“Of course. I’m sorry,” Noni said. “I just meant … well, no matter. My mother saw in the paper this morning that they’re holding the Grand Prize Drawing in Concord on January fifteenth at noon, and you ought to be there. In case you win.”

Merle said nothing.

“It’s a lot of money. Fifty thousand dollars. You have a good chance to win it, you know.” He didn’t respond, so she went on, chattering nervously now. “Think of what that would mean. Fifty thousand dollars! You could have a wonderful old age. I mean, retirement. You could go to Florida in the winter months. You could go deep-sea fishing in Florida. Maybe buy one of those condominiums, play shuffleboard, have lots of friends…” She trailed off. “God, I sound like my mother.” She stood up and moved toward the door. Tenderly, she said, “I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Ring. My mother … she wanted you to know about the drawing, that’s why I came out here. She thought you’d be … excited, I guess.”

“I haven’t won yet.”

“But you have a good chance of winning.”

“Good chance of dying, too. Better.”

“Not by January fifteenth, Mr. Ring.”

“About the same. I’m old. Not much left to do but think, and then, in the middle of a thought, die.”

“Oh, no,” she said heartily. “There’s
lots
for you to do.”

“Like what?”

“Well … fishing, for instance. And spending all that lottery money you’re going to win.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, there’s that.” Then he lapsed back into silence again.

The girl opened the door and slipped out, and the bob-house filled again with darkness and solitude.

The door to the bob-house was flung open, and a blinding light entered, bringing with it a blast of cold air and the hulking shape of a man in a hooded parka. The man splashed the light from his flashlight around the chamber, located Merle stretched out in his blanket roll on the bunk, and let the beam droop deferentially to the floor. The man closed the door behind him.

“Mr. Ring?”

“Yep.”

“I’m… I’m Leon LaRoche. You know, from the trailerpark?”

Merle swung his body into a sitting position. “You can shut out that light.”

Leon apologized and snapped off the flashlight. “May I sit down and get warm? It’s mighty cold out there tonight.” He chuckled. “Yes, sir, mighty cold.”

“Suit yourself.”

They were silent for a moment. Merle opened the stove front, throwing shadows and sheets of dancing red and yellow light into the room; he tossed a chunk of wood onto the crimson coals and closed the fire door again.

The young man nervously cleared his throat. “Well, Mr. Ring, how’s the fishing?”

“Slow.”

“I’ve been hearing a lot about you lately, from folks at the park, I mean … how you stay out here night and day, only coming in now and then for supplies…”

“Whiskey,” Merle said, and he went under the bench with one hand and drew out his bottle. “Drink?”

“No. No, thank you.”

Merle took a slow pull from the bottle.

“Anyhow, it’s all very interesting to me. Yes, maybe I will have a drink,” he said, and Merle fetched the bottle again and passed it over. “So tell me, Mr. Ring, what do you eat out here? How do you cook and all?”

“Fish, mostly. A man can live a long time in this climate on fish and whiskey.”

“Very interesting. And you use lake water for washing, I suppose?”

Merle grunted.

“How long do you plan on staying out here, Mr. Ring?” Leon took another drink from the bottle and passed it back.

Merle said nothing.

As if his question had been answered, Leon went on. “And do you do this every winter, Mr. Ring? I mean, stay out on the ice, isolated like this, living off fish and whiskey and solitude?” He chuckled again. “I’m relatively new to the park,” he explained.

“I know.”

“Yes, of course. Well.” He wrestled himself free of his parka and flexed his shoulders and hands. “Say, it’s really comfortable in here, isn’t it? Smells a bit of whiskey and fried fish, though,” he said with a light laugh. “You wouldn’t mind if I had another sip of that, would you? What is it, by the way? It’s quite good! Really warms a man’s insides, doesn’t it?”