The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  Yes, my dear friend, you write to Cullen, scratch-scratch against the parchment. I shall arrive one week from tomorrow, probably rather late in the day, for your Jamaican roadways are not much smoother or straighter than my beloved Venezuelan mountain paths.

  You put down the pen, and the first of the assassins to reach the island, one López Martínez Martínez, springs through the open door from the balcony outside, grabs you by the ruffled collar of your shirt, and raises his knife. You note absurdly that he smells of goat cheese and wet canvas. Though you are the victim and he the killer, he grins in fear, his tongue afloat in his toothless mouth.

  When your shirt tears in his grip, you yank yourself away from him, knocking over the escritoire, and your letter to Cullen falls to the parquet floor like a leaf, slips onto the balcony and off, drifting to the sunny courtyard below, where it is seen by a black man, an English slave named Jack, commonly called Three-Fingered Jack, for two fingers of his right hand were chopped off in childhood as punishment. He squints and stares up, as if to see where the paper might have come from. He could, if he wished, peer across the balcony outside your room and through the open doors and could watch you struggle with the assassin.

  Jack says nothing. He walks slowly over and picks up your unfinished letter to Cullen, folds it carefully in half and half again, and slides it between his sweaty belly and leather belt. Jack does not worry about your welfare. He knows that you are an important man, that you have two British soldiers from Fort Charles posted outside your door, and that they will hear your struggle with Martínez Martínez and will save you. Jack wants your piece of paper. Paper is useful and not cheap.

  Later in the day, you look around your room for your letter to Cullen. You search under the bed and the dresser, even inside the mahogany wardrobe. It’s nowhere to be seen. Where could it have flown to? Curious.

  Finally, you sit down at the escritoire and begin again, even more wearily and gratefully than when you wrote the first letter. My dear Henry, your kind offer to remove me from the swelter and the crowds of Kingston to the refreshing luxury of your Great House has been received here with delight and great relief, for I was beginning to believe that I…

  When you have completed the letter and have sealed it with wax, you rise from the table, go to the door of your chamber, and hand the letter to the guard outside, instructing him to post it immediately to Falmouth. Then, feeling both enervated and oddly agitated—because of Martínez Martínez, you tell yourself, in spite of the fact that he is now quite dead, a chunk of meat with a mouth shuddering with flies—you walk to the balcony and peer down into the courtyard.

  The packed earth is the color of cream. A black man works alone down there, raking away the tracks of the horses, smoothing the grounds, pulling slowly on his split-bamboo rake, moving the riffles and ripples in the dirt, clods kicked loose by the horses, droppings, and the leaf or stalk that may have idly fallen to the ground after having been blown into the courtyard from beyond the walls by an errant puff of wind off the bay. Slowly, tediously, he pulls these tiny disturbances in gradually closing, concentric circles. From above, you examine the circles closely, and eventually you realize that they are spirals, coils, moving toward a still center which, with a wide, square-bladed shovel, the black man will remove and deposit outside the gate. The design will be gone. Without the center, there will be no spiral, no coil.

  You study the man for a moment. He is a slave. A man wholly inside history, you reflect. No one will assassinate him. He can only be murdered. To be assassinated, you must first step outside history; you have to be guilty of trying to affect history from outside. Like God. The slave, by definition, can never obtain that prerogative, you observe. You envy him. More and more often, in recent months, you have found yourself envying people you regard as being wholly determined by the sweep of history. The shepherd in Peru. The Inca baby outside the cathedral in Bogotá. The sailor on the British frigate that brought you to Kingston. And now this one, a slave.

  You think: That man probably has my letter to Cullen, the first one. He probably saw it skitter out the open door to the balcony, the very door that the assassin entered. He probably saw the assassin climb the tile drain to the narrow ledge and watched him crawl along the ledge to the balcony, saw him swing his legs over the balcony rail, open the door an inch wider, and stroll into my room, the knife already in his hand.

  Even so, you bear the slave no malice. Quite the contrary. No, to be free to stand there below and watch one man attempt to assassinate another, and to be able to do nothing—what a respite! You squint and look closely, and you realize that the black man has seen you staring down at him. He is staring back. He probably envies me, you think. What an irony. To envy the man who envies you.

  It is late. The sun drifts closer to the horizon above the bay and the flatlands to the west of Kingston. Beyond the fortress walls lies the turquoise sea, now smeared red by the setting sun. You are growing morose, so you “pull yourself together,” as the English say, and in your mind compose the first sentence of yet another letter to the editors of the Kingston newspapers, The Royal Gazette and The St. Jago Gazette. Here is the sentence: Sir: To the everlasting credit and glory of His Royal Majesty King George III and the Royal Governor of Jamaica, the Duke of Manchester, it is true today that the lowliest blackamoor in this paradise, a three-fingered Negro slave named Jack, is more to be envied than the founder of a Republic torn from the darkly bleeding heart of the mighty South American continent.

  You believe that the English will believe that this is true; you know that at this moment, for you, it is true; and you also know that Three-Fingered Jack, if he could read your letter, would laugh. But the obligation to shape a future history forbids you to say what is true for everyone. That crude freedom would only allow you to doodle and dribble, to waste time and paper while sitting here in a fortress by the sea, helplessly waiting for the Spanish Empire to crack at its feeble feet and drop its heavy head down parapets, cliffs, palisades, campaniles. You think of equestrian statues toppling from building-sized bases. You think of armored Arab horses stumbling on the pampas and shattering their thin, brittle legs. You think of cashew trees sprawling heavily across spindly trunks. You think of a waterspout. “If only,” you murmur, and the images of collapse multiply.

  It is dark. The room is filled with maroon and purple wedges of shadow. Again, you stroll to the balcony and look into the courtyard. Down there it is now wholly dark. You can see nothing definite. A pit of blackness. Noise of leather moving against leather, of horses breathing, of a man’s callused hand moving across his forearm against the hairs—these carefully rise through the silence to you.

  He’s still down there. You know he’s down there, buried in the darkness the same way he’s buried in history. You light the lantern behind you and place it on the escritoire. You step in front of it to the edge of the balcony. You show yourself in sharp profile. A shot rings out.

  The Burden

  Because of the shabby character of the boy’s mother and also that of the man she married the same day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years later, Tom had raised Buddy practically by himself. And he had seen his son through hard times, especially as the boy got older, such as when he was in the service for one year and later when he got himself beat up by the guy with the baseball bat and spent six months flat on his back in Tom’s trailer learning how to talk again. So, of course, when Tom walked into the Hawthorne House for a beer, even though, after the bright afternoon sunlight outside, he wasn’t used to the darkness inside, he recognized the boy right away. You can do that with your children, you can tell who they are even in darkness and all you can see of them is their height and the position they happen to be standing in. You just glance over, and you say, Oh, yeah, there’s my son.

  Tom didn’t know the girl with him, tho
ugh. Not even when he drew close to her and could see her face clearly in the dim light of the bar. She was sitting alone in the booth next to the jukebox where Buddy stood studying the songs. Tom could tell she was with Buddy and not alone because of the way she watched him while he studied the names of the songs on the jukebox. It was the way girls always watched Buddy, as if they couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to disappear from in front of them any second—just poof! and he’d be gone, a curl of smoke hanging in the air where a second ago he had been smiling and chattering in that circular way of his. Nobody knew where Buddy got it from, his good looks and that way he had of talking so interestingly that people hated to see him come to a stop or ask a question, even. His mother, Maggie, Tom’s ex-wife, had been pretty (back when she was Buddy’s age, that is) but she had never been as outstandingly good-looking as Buddy was, and Tom, even though he had a square and regular-featured face, was not the kind of man you’d compliment for his looks, and neither Tom nor his ex-wife owned what you’d call a gift of gab, especially not Tom, who usually seemed more interested in listening than in talking, anyhow.

  Tom walked past the girl, who looked around twenty-five, which made her four years older than Buddy and which was also usual for him. The girl was dark-haired and pretty, but actually more stylish than pretty, when you got up close, with a round face and a grim little mouth. Her short hair was all kinked up in a way that was fashionable just then, which made her somewhat resemble a dandelion, until you looked into her eyes and saw that she was awfully worried about something. You couldn’t tell what it was, actually, but it was clear that she was not at peace with her circumstances.

  Tom stopped behind his son and next to the bar, and, as he moved on to the bar, he reached out and absently tapped his son on the shoulder, and the boy turned around and smiled nicely. Tom didn’t smile back, he didn’t even look at Buddy. He looked across at Gary, the bartender who also owned the place, and ordered a bottle of beer.

  “You’re keeping your door locked now, Dad,” Buddy said, as if Tom didn’t realize it.

  “I know.” Tom turned around and faced him.

  Buddy reached out and shook his father’s hand. “This here’s Donna,” he said, nodding toward the girl. “Donna picked me up hitching outside Portland on the Maine Pike, and we sorta got to be friends in a very short order, which is certainly nice for me, because I’m nothing special, and you can see that she is.”

  Donna gave Tom a thin smile and did not look like a person who was glad to find herself where she had found herself, stopped in a dingy New Hampshire mill town barroom to have a chat with her new boyfriend’s father. Tom didn’t give a damn about her, though, one way or the other. If she wanted to drive all over the countryside just because she thought Buddy looked good beside her, it didn’t matter to Tom, because women were always doing things like that, and so were men.

  “How long you in town this time?” Tom asked his son. Gary delivered the bottle of beer, and Tom turned back to the bar and drank off half the bottle. He was feeling weighted down and metallic inside, as if his stomach were filled with tangled stovepipe wire, because even though Buddy was his son and he could recognize him in the darkness, he didn’t like it when he saw him. Not anymore.

  “So, Dad, you’re keeping your door locked nowadays,” he said again.

  Tom was silent for a few seconds and did not look at the boy. “That’s right. Ever since you left and took with you every damned thing of mine you could fit into that duffel of yours. My tape deck, tapes. You even took my cuff links.” He looked down at his shirt cuffs. “I must be stupid.” He finished off the bottle of beer, and Gary automatically slid a second over. Gary was a tall, skinny, dark-haired man with a toothpick in his mouth that made him look wiser than he probably was. He was the fourth owner of the bar in the last ten years.

  Once again, Buddy smiled in that easy way he had, like a summer sun coming up, and Tom felt his stomach clank and tangle. “C’mon, Dad, I only borrowed that stuff. I only planned to be gone for the weekend, me and Bilodeau, that kid from Concord. It was a weekend, the weather suddenly got warm, you probably don’t remember, but it did. And we were planning to chase some girls Bilodeau knew over on the coast near Kittery. But things just got screwed up, and before the weekend was over, we ended up going in different directions with different people. You know how it goes.” He showed Tom both his palms, as if to prove he wasn’t hiding anything.

  “That was last April.” Tom knew his son was lying, and there was no damned sense trying to catch him out or somehow prove the boy was lying or get him to admit it, because he’d just go on lying, topping one lie with another, canceling one out with a new one, on and on, until, out of fatigue and boredom, you just gave up. Buddy was one of those people who are always ready to go a step further than anyone else, and after a while you could see that about him, so you’d stop, and he’d be standing there just ahead of you, smiling back. It was almost as if he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong.

  “April?” the girl said. She lit a cigarette and looked at Buddy through the smoke. “So what’s been happening since April? This is June,” she observed, as if she had just got a glimpse, from the conversation between the father and the son, of what might be in store for her if she went ahead with her plans and hooked up for a while with this good-looking, smooth-talking, slender young man. It probably started out as a whim, picking up and spending the weekend with a guy she’d seen hitchhiking in Maine. It would make a funny story she could tell on herself to friends in Boston or Hartford or wherever she had originally been headed. But now things were starting to look a little off-center to her, not quite lined up, which is how it always was with Buddy, how it always had been. He was so damned good-looking, all white teeth and high cheekbones and quick-sloping, narrow nose and deep blue eyes, the American dream-boy, and he talked sweetly and in a strangely elaborate way, all in circles and curls that kept you listening, so that pretty soon you forgot what it was you were planning on doing, and instead you plugged into his plans, not your own, but then, someplace down along the line, things started to look a little bit off-center, as if a couple of basic pieces hadn’t been cut right. And you couldn’t tell which pieces were off, because the whole damned thing was off.

  Buddy peered down at her as if he couldn’t quite place her. “What’s been happening since April?” he asked. “You really want to know?”

  “No. Not really. It just seemed a funny thing, that’s all…”

  “Funny. What’s funny?” Buddy asked. Tom watched the two carefully from the bar.

  “Nothing,” the girl said. “Forget it.” She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them, her expression had changed, as if she had turned Buddy into a stranger, as if she were seeing him for the first time all over again, but this time with the knowledge that she had gained since morning, when she first saw him at the Portland exit with his thumb out and his duffel and suitcase on the road beside him.

  “Forget funny?” Buddy said, smiling broadly. “Who can forget funny?” He turned away from the girl and faced his father and suddenly started talking to him. “Listen, Dad, that’s why I stopped down at the trailer, before I came up here. To give your stuff back, I mean. Hey, I couldn’t do it way the hell up there in Maine among the trees and lakes, and then Donna here was nice enough to drive all this distance out of her way just to help me drop these things off at your place, before we resume our wanderings. Listen, Dad, since April I’ve been way the hell out on a narrow neck of land in northern Maine, working on this lobster boat.” He laid a hand on his father’s shoulder.

  Tom didn’t believe a word the boy said. He had decided long ago, as policy, not to believe anything his son told him. And that, he told himself, was one of the reasons he kept his trailer locked now for the first time in his entire life. You’re supposed to love your son and trust him and protect him, and that had always been easy for Tom, but this new way of treating him was a burden, and he hated it. For ye
ars, Tom had loved his son and trusted him and protected him, behaving precisely the way he knew the boy’s mother, his ex-wife, Maggie, would not have behaved. Maggie would have let the boy down. Maggie wouldn’t have been home the night the state troopers brought him in all drunk and raving, and the boy would have ended up in jail. Maggie wouldn’t have known how to handle it when he got his head bashed in by that guy with the baseball bat in Florida. She would have let him rot in that charity ward in the Florida hospital, before she’d have brought him home, set him up on the living-room couch in front of the TV, and then every night for six months taught the boy how to talk again, until finally he could make those looping, charming sentences of his again, and people would sit back in their chairs and listen with light smiles on their faces to see such a clever, good-looking young man perform for them. Maggie never would have borne up under the weight of Buddy, Tom knew. The proof of her weakness, as if he needed proof, he’d obtained the summer Buddy turned twelve, when he had taken the boy by Greyhound all the way to Phoenix, Arizona, to visit his mother, at her request. Tom took a two-week holiday alone farther west, visiting Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, and Universal Studios and watching the surfers at Huntington Beach, the only time he had ever seen real-life surfers. When the two weeks were up and Tom called back at Phoenix for his son, things had changed, and he left the boy in Phoenix, at the boy’s request, presumably for good (at least that was Maggie’s and her husband’s intention and Buddy’s as well). Tom returned to New Hampshire and didn’t hear anything from his son until September, when the boy showed up at the trailer. Maggie had put him alone on a Boston-bound bus in Phoenix connecting to another bus to Concord, New Hampshire, and the boy, more travel-wise by now than he’d been in June, had hitchhiked the final twenty-five miles home to Catamount. No, for Maggie it was the love and the trust and the protection that made the burden. For Tom, the burden was in withholding that love, trust, and protection. That’s what he believed.