The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  * * *

  By mid-November, the sun was setting early and rising late, and the daily temperatures rarely got above freezing, the nights often falling to zero and below. Except for where the water rushed across the weirs, the lake was frozen over entirely. The bob-house was ready, and Merle’s tipups, lines, jigs, and chisels were repaired, cleaned, oiled, and packed neatly into the bob-house. First thing every morning, Merle pulled on his cap and mackinaw and trotted from his trailer down to the shore to read the ice. It was going to be a good winter for ice—no snow so far, very little wind, and lots of steady, unbroken cold. A Canadian high had moved southeast in late October and hunkered over northern New England for two weeks straight, so that, with clear nighttime skies, the ice had formed, spread, and thickened several weeks ahead of schedule.

  So far as fishing went, winter or summer, Skitter Lake was Merle’s. Three sides of the lake adjoined the Skitter Lake State Forest, which made it fairly inaccessible from the road, except through the trailerpark, and people, strangers especially, were reluctant to drive through the trailerpark and stop their cars before the short, sandy beach at the end of the peninsula, get out their gear, launch their boats, canoes, or bob-houses, and commence fishing. It was a little too public, and also a little too private, as if the trailerpark were actually a boardinghouse with all the tenants watching you cross their shared front yard to get to their shared fishing place. The same went for ice skating and swimming. The residents of the trailerpark skated and swam Skitter Lake, but other people went elsewhere, which wasn’t much of an inconvenience, since in town there was the mill pond, and throughout the surrounding countryside there were dozens of small, accessible ponds and lakes where the fishing was as good as, if not better than, the fishing at Skitter Lake.

  As a result, when Merle decided at the end of the first week in December that the ice was thick enough to support the weight of his bob-house, he made the decision alone. He couldn’t wait until someone less cautious or patient than he had dragged his bob-house safely out to the middle of the lake. He couldn’t wait until schoolboys from town, eager to play hockey, had crossed and crisscrossed the lake a dozen times the way they did down at the millpond, whacking the ice with hockey sticks and listening to the cracks and fault lines race away from the blow, rather than down, revealing in that way that the ice was now thick enough to support the weight of large human beings.

  Merle took his long-handled chisel in hand and, tapping lightly in front of him as he walked, moved like a blind man carefully onto the ice. He walked twenty or so feet from the shore and parallel to the shore toward the marshy area west of the park, where the hermit they called the Guinea Pig Lady had built her shack. Here, he knew, the water was late to freeze, because of the several trickling inlets and the marsh grass and bushes, and here, too, the water was not very deep, so that if, indeed, it was not safe and he fell through, he would not be in any danger. It was late in the day, and the sky was peach-colored near the horizon and blue-gray where thin clouds had scudded in from the northeast. Merle, in his dark green mackinaw and plaid trooper’s cap with the fur earflaps tied down, tapped his way away from the trailerpark toward the swamp, then past the swamp and out along the point, crossing the cove, and then beyond the point, until he was over deep water. Below him, the lake was a hundred feet deep, and the ice was black and smooth, like polished obsidian. This first solitary walk on the ice is almost like flying. You leave the safe and solid earth and move over what you know and can see is an ether, supported by a membrane that you can feel, but cannot quite see, as if the difference between the ice below and the air above were merely a difference in atmospheric pressures. Later, your mind will accept the information coming from your body, and then there will be no difference between ice with a hundred feet of water below it and the frozen ground itself, so that when you cut a hole in the ice, and it fills with water, you will be surprised, but no more frightened than if you had dug a hole in sand at the beach and watched it fill with water.

  Confident now that he could safely put his bob-house onto the ice, Merle spent the following day picking through the brushy, overgrown fields out by Old Road, collecting galls from dried stalks of goldenrod. Inside each gall slept a small, white grub, excellent bait for bluegills, and it wasn’t long before Merle had collected in his mackinaw pockets half a hundred of the woody containers. On returning to the trailerpark, he was hailed on the roadway just opposite Marcelle Chagnon’s trailer by Bruce Severance. Bruce drove his black Chevy van with the Rocky Mountain sunsets on the sides up behind the old man—it was midafternoon, but almost dark, and he probably hadn’t seen Merle until he was almost upon him. He stopped a few feet away, raced his motor until Merle turned, then waved him over to the driver’s side and cranked down the window.

  “Hey, man, what’s happening?” The sweet smell of marijuana exhaled from the vehicle, and the kid took a last hit, knocked the lit end off the roach, and popped it into his mouth.

  “Temperature’s dropping,” Merle said with a slight smile. He peered up at the boy, and his blue, crinkly-lidded eyes filled and glistened in the wind.

  “Yeah. Wow. Temperature’s dropping. That’s what’s happening, all right.” Bruce swallowed the roach.

  “Yep.” Merle turned to walk on.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you, man, I saw you this morning, when I came in from Boston, you were in those old fields out by the road. Then later I came back out, and you were still there. And now here you are again, this time coming in from the fields. What’s going on out there, man?”

  “Nothing. Temperature’s dropping there, too. That’s all.”

  “No, man. I’m curious. I know you know things, about herbs and things, I mean.”

  Merle said, “You want to know what I was out there for? Is that what you’re wondering, boy?”

  “Yeah.”

  The old man reached into his mackinaw pocket and drew out one of the goldenrod galls. “These.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Goldenrod gall.”

  “What’s it for, man?”

  “I’ll show you. But you’ll have to spend a while first, helping me move my bob-house out on the ice tonight.”

  “Tonight? In the dark?”

  “Yep. Got to bait the camp with chum tonight, so’s I can start to fish tomorrow.”

  With a slow and maybe reluctant nod, the kid agreed to help him. Merle walked around and climbed into the van, and the two drove through the park to Merle’s trailer.

  When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who’s in charge. If the young man’s in charge or won’t let the old man take over, the young man’s brute strength becomes destructive and inefficient, and the old man’s intelligence, out of frustration, grows cruel and inefficient. Sometimes the old man forgets that he is old and tries to compete with the young man’s strength, and then it’s a sad sight. Or the young man forgets that he is young and argues with the old man about how to do the work, and that’s a sad sight, too.

  In this case, however, the young man and the old man worked well together. Merle told Bruce where to place his pole so he could lift the front of the bob-house, while Merle slid a second pole underneath. The same at the back, until, practically on its own, the bob-house started to roll down the slope toward the ice. As each roller emerged from the back, Merle told Bruce to grab it and run around to the front and lay it down, which the young man did, quickly and without stumbling, until, in a few moments, the structure was sliding onto the ice, and then it was free of the ground altogether. It slid a few feet from the bank, and the momentum left it, and it stopped, silent, solid, dark in the wind off the lake.

  “Incredible!” the kid said.

  “Everything’s in the bob-house except firewood,” Merle said. “Put them poles inside, we’ll cut them up out on the lake.”

  The kid did as he was told.

  Merle walked around to the front of the bob-house, away f
rom the land, and took up a length of rope tied to a quarter-inch-thick U-bolt. “I’ll steer, you push,” he called to the kid.

  “Don’t you have a flashlight?” Bruce yelled nervously. The wind was building and shoved noisily against the bob-house.

  “Nothing out there but ice, and it’s flat all the way across.”

  “How’ll I get back?”

  “There’s lights on here at the park. You just aim for them. You don’t need a light to see light. You need dark. Stop gabbing and start pushing,” he said.

  The kid leaned against the bob-house, grunted, and the building started to move. It slid easily over the ice on its waxed runners, at times seeming to carry itself forward on its own, even though against the wind. As if he were leading a large, dumb animal, Merle steered the bob-house straight out from the shore for about a quarter mile, then abruptly turned to the right, and headed east, until he was a few hundred yards from the weirs, where the lake narrowed and where, Merle knew, there were in one place a gathering current, thirty to forty feet of water, and a weedy, fertile bottom. It was a good spot, and he spun the bob-house slowly over it until the side with the door faced away from the prevailing wind.

  “Let it sit,” he said to the kid. “Its weight’ll burn the ice and keep it from moving.” He went inside and soon returned with a small bucksaw and his long chisel. “You cut the wood into stove lengths, and I’ll dig us in,” he said, handing the saw to the kid.

  “This is really fucking incredible,” Bruce said.

  Merle looked at him silently for a second, then went quickly to work chipping the ice around the runners and stamping the chips back with his feet, moving swiftly up one side and down the other, until the sills of the house were packed in ice. By then Bruce had cut two of the four poles into firewood. “Finish up, and I’ll get us a fire going,” Merle told him, and the kid went energetically back to work.

  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 t
o 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.”