The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks (9 page)

Merle handed him the bottle. “Canadian Club.”

Leon unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow, then slowly screwed the cap back on. “Yes. So, yes, I was saying, do you do this every year?”

“Man and boy.”

“But
why
?”

“It makes the rest of the year more interesting,” Merle said wearily.

Leon was silent for a moment. “I wonder. Yes, I’ll bet it does. I couldn’t stand it, though. The isolation. And the cold, and the darkness.”

“It’s a good idea to get used to the idea. Like I said, it makes the rest of the year more interesting.”

Leon’s voice was tight and frightened. “Are you talking about dying?”

“I’m talking about living.”

“Speaking of living,” Leon said, suddenly hearty again, “you are probably wondering why I came all the way out here this evening.”

“Not particularly.”

“Yes. Well, anyhow, it has to do with the Grand Prize Drawing next week. You know, the state lottery?”

“Yep.”

“Folks in the park have been wondering, Mr. Ring, if you plan on attending that drawing over in Concord, and if not—assuming you win, for you just might win, you know—folks are wondering how you plan to pick up the prize money. You have to be there in person to pick up the prize money, you see…,” he trailed off, as if waiting to be interrupted.

Merle said nothing.

“Well. It occurred to some of us that you might not care to take the time off from your fishing to go all the way in to Concord and deal with those state officials and the reporters and so forth, seeing as how you enjoy your privacy and like to spend your winters alone out here on the lake, and we thought you might be able to empower someone else to do that chore for you. So I did a little checking around at the bank, which is where I’m employed, and, sure enough, you
can
empower someone else to pick up your prize money for you!” He waited a few seconds, but nothing more than the crackle and spit of the fire came out of the darkness, so he went on. “Anticipating your reluctance to leave your fishing at this time of year, I went ahead and took the liberty of having the necessary document drawn up by the bank attorney.” He went into his shirt pocket and brought forth a crisp, white envelope. “This document empowers me to act as your agent, should you win the Grand Prize Drawing,” he said, handing the envelope to Merle.

The old man took out the paper folded inside, and, at the sound, Leon snapped on his flashlight. “Where do I sign it?” Merle asked. His voice was strangely woeful and riddled with fatigue.

Leon directed him to a line at the bottom of the paper and handed him a pen.

Slowly, the old man placed the paper against his knee and scrawled his name on it. “There,” he said, and he handed the paper, envelope, and pen back to the bank clerk, who doused the light. “It’s your problem, now,” the old man said.

“No problem at all, Mr. Ring. None at all,” he said, as he stood and pulled his parka on. “I assume,” he went on, “that, if you win, you’ll want your check deposited in a savings account down at the bank.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Bring the money here.”

“Here?”

“In cash.”

“Cash?”

“Cash. No point letting some bank make money off my money. The government owns all the money anyhow. They just let us use it for a while. It’s the banks that foul everything up by getting in the middle. You bring me anything I win in hundred-dollar bills. You might use one of them to buy me a case of Canadian Club. I’ve always wanted a case of Canadian Club,” he said wistfully.

Leon seemed to have been struck dumb. He moved toward the door in the darkness, groping for the latch, and finally found it. Then he let himself out.

From here on out, it was as if everyone who knew Merle knew that he was going to win the lottery. Consequently, his solitude rarely went a day without being broken by a visit from someone who wanted to congratulate him and talk about the money. Also, the weather broke into what’s called the January Thaw, and people found the half-mile walk over ice and log floes of crusted snow less formidable than before. The wind died, the skies cleared to a deep blue, and daytime temperatures nudged the freezing mark, so at one time or another during the week following the visit from the bank clerk, practically everyone else in the park found an occasion to visit the old man. Even Claudel Bing (though he had not lived at the trailerpark for several years, he was still paying for a trailer there and, in his fashion, was courting Doreen Tiede, and as a result had kept up his links with the park) came out to Merle’s bob-house early one sunny afternoon.

He was already drunk when he arrived, a not uncommon occurrence that year, and, therefore, he wanted to talk about luck. In particular, his own bad luck. As compared to Merle’s good luck. Luck was Claudel’s obsession that year. It was the only way he could understand or even think about his life.

“You, you sonofabitch, you got
all
the luck,” he told Merle, who silently arranged his lines in the tip-ups and scooped ice chips away from the holes. “And that means there’s none left over for people like me! That’s the trouble with this goddamn country.” Claudel had brought his own bottle of whiskey, which he held between his legs and every now and then swigged at. “Now you take them fucking Commie bastards, like that Castro and them Chinese, their idea is to get rid of luck completely, so
nobody
gets any. That’s as bad as what we got here. Worse, actually. What I’d like to see is a system that lets everybody have a little luck. That’s what this country needs. Nobody gets a lot, and nobody gets none. Everybody gets a little.”

“How about bad luck?” Merle asked him. “Everybody going to get a little of that, too?” His beard and face and hands were pale green in the light from the holes, and as he moved slowly, smoothly over his traps and lines, checking bait and making sure the lines were laid precisely in the spools, he resembled a ghost.

“Sure! Why the hell not? When you got a little good luck, you can handle a little bad luck. It won’t break you. If I had money, for instance, it wouldn’t bother me that Ginnie run off with that goddamn sonofabitchin’ Howie Leeke,” he said earnestly. “But you wouldn’t understand. Not with your kind of luck. Shit,” he said and took a long drink from his bottle. “You ever lose a woman you loved, Merle?” he asked suddenly. “No, of course not. You’ve had all them wives, got wives and kids scattered all over the country, but none of them ever left
you
. No, you left
them
. Right? Am I right?”

“Can’t say exactly that I intended to leave them, though,” Merle said. “I guess I just willed it. You can will what you actually do, but what you intend is all you accomplish in the end.”

“You preaching to me, Merle, goddamnit?”

“Nope. Just thinking out loud. Not used to company.”

“Hey, that’s all right, I understand. Shit, it must get awful lonely out here. I’d go nuts. It’s good for thinking, though. Probably. Is that the kinda stuff you think about out here, Merle, all that shit about will and intending?”

“Yep.” A red flag on one of the tip-ups suddenly sprung free, and in a single, swift motion Merle was off the bench and huddled over the line, watching it run off the spool and then stop. He jerked it, set the hook, and started retrieving the fish. “Black bass,” he said to no one in particular. It was a small one, not two pounds. Merle drew it through the hole, removed the hook from its lip, and deposited the fish in the bucket of ice chips scooped from the holes.

“If I was you, I’d be thinking all the time about how I was going to spend all that money,” Claudel went on. “You talk about will and intentions!” he laughed. “How do you intend to spend the money, Merle? Fifty thousand bucks! Jesus H. Christ.”

“Can’t say.” He rebaited the hook and wound the line back onto the spool.

“You mean, you don’t know?”

“What d’you think my intentions toward that much money ought to be? Can’t spend it, not the way I live. ’Course, I haven’t got it yet, so it ain’t like we’re talking about reality.”

“No, we’re talking about money!” Claudel said, leering.

“All I know is death and taxes. That’s reality. I intend to pay my taxes, and I intend to die.”

“Merle, you are fucking crazy,” Claudel said. “Crazy. But smart. You’re smart, all right. You coulda been a lot of things if you’d wanted to. Big. A businessman.”

“I always did what I wanted to,” Merle said gloomily. Then, as if writing a letter, he said, “I was a carpenter, and I was married, and I fathered some children. Then I got old. Everyone gets old, though, whether he intends to or not.”

They were silent in the darkness for a moment.

“Yeah,” Claudel said, “but you got lucky. You won the lottery!”

“It don’t matter.”

“Of course, it matters, you
asshole
!”

“Not to me.”

“Well, it matters to me, goddamnit!”

Merle remained silent this time, and, after a while, Claudel’s bottle was empty. Without leaving his seat, he reached over, opened the door, and pitched the bottle out. “It’ll sink in spring,” he mumbled. Then slowly, awkwardly, he pulled his coat on and stumbled out the door, not bothering even to say good-bye.

Daily, with and without ceremony, they came out to the bob-house. The younger ones, Terry Constant, Noni Hubner, Bruce Severance, Leon LaRoche, Doreen Tiede, and poor Claudel Bing, could pretend they just happened to be in the neighborhood, ice-skating, skiing, walking, or, as in Claudel’s case, bored and lonely and thought to drop in for a visit. The older ones, however, found it difficult to be casual about their visits. As Merle had said, you expect the actions of adults to have intention behind them and therefore meaning. The adults tend to expect it of themselves, too. Carol, Terry Constant’s older sister, claimed she walked all the way out to the middle of the lake against a cold wind because she had never seen anyone ice-fishing before and wanted to learn how it was done. While there, the only question she asked Merle directly was how would he spend the money, if he won on the fifteenth. He said he didn’t know. Nancy Hubner baked Merle a minced meat pie (she said it was his favorite) and insisted on carrying it to him herself. While he ate a piece of the pie, she told him how excited she was at the prospect of his becoming a wealthy, carefree man, something she said
everyone
deserved. He agreed. Captain Dewey Knox appeared one morning at the bob-house to confirm Leon LaRoche’s claim that Merle had signed a document authorizing Leon to act as his agent at the Grand Prize Drawing. Merle said yes, he had signed such a document. “Without coercion?” the Captain asked. Merle said he couldn’t be sure, because he didn’t know how a person went about coercing someone to sign something. “But you understood fully the meaning and consequences of your act?” the Captain asked. Merle said he wasn’t drunk or crazy at the time. “And is it true,” the Captain went on, “that you requested young LaRoche to bring your winnings out here in cash? Hundred-dollar bills?” Merle said it was true. The Captain thought that extremely foolish and told Merle, at great length, why. Merle went about his business of fishing and said nothing. After a while, when the Captain had finished telling Merle why he should have Leon LaRoche deposit the money in a savings account at the bank where he was employed, he departed from the bob-house. The last person from the trailerpark to visit Merle’s bob-house came out the day of the drawing, January fifteenth. It was Marcelle Chagnon, and, as the manager of the trailerpark, she felt it was as much her duty as her privilege to announce to Merle that on that day at twelve o’clock noon he had won the $50,000 Grand Prize Drawing.

The winter continued to bear down, quite as if Merle had not won the lottery. There were snowstorms and cruel northeast winds out of Nova Scotia and days and nights, whole weeks, of subzero temperatures. Merle’s money, the five hundred one-hundred-dollar bills delivered by Leon LaRoche, remained untouched in Merle’s cigar box under the bunk in the bob-house. The brand-new bills, banded into thousand-dollar packets, filled the cigar box exactly, and the box, with an elastic band around it, sat in the darkness of the bob-house and the well-lit minds of everyone who lived in the trailerpark. Everyone carried the image of that box around in his or her head all day and night. Some even dreamed about it. Leon LaRoche told Captain Knox that when he delivered the money, the old man in stony silence, as if angry at being interrupted, took the money from the bank pouch, and, without counting it, stacked it neatly into the cigar box and tossed, literally tossed, the box under his bunk. The Captain, as if disgusted, told Marcelle Chagnon, who, worriedly, told Doreen Tiede, who told Claudel Bing that night after making mild, dispassionate love, and Claudel, stirred to anger, told Carol Constant the next morning when, on her way to work, she gave him a lift into town because he hadn’t got out of bed in time to go in with Doreen and her daughter. That evening, Carol told her brother, Terry, because she thought Merle would listen to Terry, but Terry knew better. “That man listens to no one,” he said to Bruce after telling him about the cigar box that contained $50,000, and Bruce, full of wonder and admiration, agreed with Terry and tried to explain the pure wisdom of the act to Noni Hubner, but she didn’t quite understand how it could be wise, so she asked her mother, Nancy, who thought it was senile, not wise.

In that way, within twenty-four hours of Leon’s having delivered the money to the bob-house, everyone in the trailerpark shared an obsession with the image of the cigar box full of hundred-dollar bills. They could think of little else. Merle’s earlier winnings had not achieved anything like this status, but their experience with that considerably lesser amount had gone a long way toward determining how they looked at this new money. The October lottery had dropped $4,500 into Merle’s lap, and the residents of the trailerpark each went to him and asked for some of it and directly received what he or she asked for. This new amount, however, was so incomprehensibly large that no one could apply it to his or her individual needs. Consequently, they applied it to what they saw as the needs of the community as a whole. It was not Merle who had won the $50,000; the trailerpark had won it. Merle had merely represented them in that magical cosmos where anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Of course, it’s probably true that if, on the other hand, what happened to Merle through no effort on his part had been as colossally, abstractly
bad
as the $50,000 was
good
, the residents of the trailerpark would not feel that it had happened to the community as a whole. If, for example, Merle were shot in the head by an errant bullet from the gun of a careless deer hunter out of sight in the tamaracks on the far side of the lake, the people in the park would blame Merle for having been out there wandering around on the ice during hunting season in the first place. They would mourn for him, naturally, but his death would be seen forever after as a warning, an admonition. Anyone can be a cause of his or her own destruction, but no one can claim individual responsibility for having created a great good. At least, that’s how the people in the trailerpark felt. Which is why they believed that Merle’s winnings belonged, not to Merle alone, but to the community of which he was a part. And, of course, there was their earlier experience with the $4,500. That sort of proved the rightness of their feeling, gave them something like a logic.