The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  For it wasn’t simply Buddy’s stealing his father’s belongings that had turned the man against him, though that helped. And it wasn’t that the boy seemed incapable of telling the truth about anything—he would lie when there was nothing to be gained by it, he lied for the sheer pleasure of lying, or so it seemed, and if you asked him was it raining outside, he’d look out the window, see that it was raining, and say no, not yet, and when you stepped out the door into the rain, you’d turn around and look at Buddy, and he’d say with great delight that it must have started raining that very second. And it wasn’t that the boy was reckless and troublesome, that he seemed incapable of avoiding the kind of person who happened at that moment to want to hurt someone, especially someone young and pretty and mouthy. Buddy would find himself in a bar, the Hawthorne House, say, next to a crossed-up truck driver or some hide-stacker from the tannery, and he would do everything he could think of to make himself look even younger, prettier, and mouthier than he was, and he’d end up getting himself thrashed for it. And then somehow he’d find his way back to the trailerpark, and he’d drag himself to the door, swing open the door, and fall into the living room, where his father would be sitting in front of the TV with a can of beer in his hand and the open newspaper on his lap.

  “Buddy! What the hell’s happened?”

  “Oh, Daddy, did I ever get myself into one this time! They got some mean and dirty-fighting, rattle-snaking, bad-ass cowboys hanging out nowadays at the Hawthorne House. It’s just not your family restaurant anymore.”

  It wasn’t any of those actions and attitudes and incapacities that turned Tom against his son and made him lock his door against his boy. In fact, if anyone had asked him why, after all those years of standing by him, had he suddenly gone and turned against his boy, Tom would not have been able to answer. All he knew was that it began for him about a week after Buddy left this last time, back in April. Right off, Tom noticed that his son had taken with him his tape deck, tapes, a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey, his cuff links, two shirts, and probably a dozen more possessions that he wouldn’t find out about until he needed them and went looking for them. He merely observed that, once again, his son had made off with everything of his that he could lay his hands on, and he was, once again, glad that none of it was irreplaceable. Nothing Tom owned was irreplaceable, even though that was not by intention. In recent years he had worked off and on as an escort driver for a mobile home manufacturer in Suncook, hiring out with his own pickup truck and CB radio, usually as the lead man, the one with the sign, WIDE LOAD FOLLOWING, on the front of his truck, and before that he had driven an oil delivery truck, so while he had always made enough to house and feed and clothe himself and his one child, he hadn’t made much more than that. Certainly, he had never made enough to buy anything that was irreplaceable.

  But about a week after Buddy left this time, Tom began to feel something he had never felt before—at least with regard to Buddy he had never felt it before. He felt relieved. Relieved that the boy was gone from him, was not at home in front of the TV set or coming in late all drunk and bashed up or slamming cupboard doors in the morning in search of food. He was glad, for the first time he could remember, that he did not have to see the boy’s face across the table from him; he discovered that he enjoyed eating alone. And then, once he admitted to himself that he was relieved to have the boy gone from him, it was as if he had released a flood of bad feelings about the boy, so that his face darkened every time Buddy’s name was mentioned or every time he walked into some evidence of the boy’s ever having lived with him, his dirty clothes in that final week’s laundry, for example, or a letter that came to him three days after he left, a letter in a woman’s handwriting, Tom could tell, because of the careful, large, rounded letters. And then even his memories of the boy’s childhood began to turn sour and ugly, and he couldn’t remember something he’d once enjoyed with the boy without feeling his stomach tighten and grow heavy, so that he would turn away from the memory and think about something more immediate. For instance, he taught Buddy to ice-skate when he was only four or five and taught him to shoot a hockey puck into a makeshift goal he set up on the lake behind the trailerpark not far from shore and within sight of his own trailer. Buddy developed the basic skills quickly and soon was obsessed with practicing the sport, especially the part that had him skating full speed to a spot twelve or fifteen feet in front of the goal and firing the puck a few inches off the ice into the goal, then coasting forward, stick raised to celebrate the score, retrieving the puck, and looping back out to make the run over again. For hours in the late afternoons that winter, the boy skated alone and shot goals, and his father looked out the window of the trailer as it grew swiftly dark outside and watched the tiny figure of his son move back and forth across the gray surface of the ice, until after a while it seemed the boy was floating in a dark haze, and then Tom stepped outside to the frozen ground and hollered for him to come in for supper. And the image of his son that he held in his mind as he called his name into the darkness was of his small, struggling figure afloat in a haze between the ice below and the sky above, as if sky and ice had merged and had become an ether, as if the firmament had been erased. Remembering this now, as he often did when, by accident, he happened to look out the window in the kitchen that showed him a wide expanse of the open lake, he winced and held on to the edge of the counter as if to regain lost balance, and he thought about getting some new tiles to replace the half dozen that were lifting from the floor in front of the sink.

  Tom didn’t understand this shift in his feelings, this great relief, as if a huge burden had been lifted from his back. He was ashamed of it, which only replaced one burden with another. For it seemed wrong to him, wrong to feel glad that his son was gone away, wrong to hope that he would never come back, and it seemed shameful to him that memories of his son made him wince, that signs of his son’s life made him look away with irritation, that questions from friends about his son’s whereabouts and welfare made him grit his teeth and answer abruptly and vaguely. But he couldn’t help himself. It was out of his control. Buddy had even started entering his dreams in the same irritating way, turning a pleasant dream sour, a peaceful dream turbulent, a funny dream grim.

  He knew Buddy eventually would come back, would show up in town again, probably down at the trailer, and if not there, then up here at the Hawthorne House, where Buddy knew his father could be found almost every afternoon drinking three or four beers and listening to Gary and the locals who stopped in after work. That’s when Tom had taken to locking his door whenever he left the trailer, something he had never done before, not in all the years he had lived at the trailerpark. In recent years most people in the park had taken to locking their doors, mainly because of rumors of theft (though no one actually knew firsthand of any thievery), and until now Tom had refused to go along with the trends, saying that he had nothing worth stealing anyhow, so why try to protect it? Then one morning he had walked out the door to his truck, about to leave for a two-day job escorting a sixty-seven-foot Marlette from Suncook to just outside Syracuse, New York. He got into the truck, started the engine, peered back at the powder blue trailer, and thought, The door. He got out, walked quickly across to the cinder-block steps, reached up, and locked the door. That was that. And he had locked it, whenever he left the trailer, ever since.

  The girl Donna was gone. She had got up as if going to the ladies’ room, and she hadn’t come back.

  “Where’s Donna, Dad?” Buddy asked, looking hurt and slightly bewildered. He sat down in the booth where she had been sitting earlier.

  “Gone, maybe.” Tom turned away from his son and faced the bar, standing between two barstools as if he were in too much of a hurry to sit down and relax.

  Buddy sat in the booth looking half dazed, but it was the wrong way to look, or so it seemed to Tom, so Tom said nothing, even though he thought about it, about how the boy should be acting at a time like this. After all, a new girlfriend got spoo
ked and slipped out the door and drove off in her car, and she might have taken all Buddy’s belongings with her, even including his father’s tape deck and tapes and cuff links. Why, then, wasn’t the boy racing outside to see if the girl at least had tossed his bags out of her car before driving off? And why wasn’t he cursing her? Or maybe even laughing, at himself, at the girl, at his fate? Instead, he sat in the booth, languid, head lolling back, eyes half closed. Tom glanced down at the boy, then turned swiftly away again. The sight of his son sitting like that made him tighten inside and caused his shoulders and the small of his back to stiffen.

  “You think she tossed your bags out before she took off?” he asked the boy in a low voice.

  Gary looked across at Buddy and chuckled. He apparently didn’t see anything wrong with the way the boy was acting. He craned his neck so he could see out the window to where the girl’s car had been parked. “Buddy, you’re in luck this time. She left your gear. It’s sitting out there in the lot.” He looked at Tom and grinned and winked.

  Tom didn’t respond. Instead, he sighed and turned away from the bar and came and sat opposite his son in the booth, saying as he slid into the seat, “Well, Buddy, what are your plans now? Where you headed for now?”

  Buddy smiled warmly, as if noticing his father’s presence for the first time. “I was thinking about staying here for the summer, you know, maybe get some work locally, drilling wells or as a carpenter’s helper. Then in the fall see if I can’t work something out down at the university, maybe get the government to help me pay for a couple of engineering drawing courses or something. You know, with the GI Bill, so I could get a better job next year and gradually work my way to the top, become a captain of industry, maybe even run for governor or open up a car dealership or start a tree farm…”

  “Buddy, I’m serious.”

  “So’m I, Dad. I’m serious.” And suddenly he looked it, his mouth drawn tightly forward, his blue eyes cold and grim, his hands clenched in fists in front of him on the table.

  In a soft voice, Tom reminded the boy that the government wouldn’t help him pay for anything, not with his kind of discharge from the Army—he’d spent more than half his one year in the Army locked up in the stockade, usually for trivial offenses, but offenses committed so compulsively and frequently that finally they gave up on him and sent him home to his father. Tom told the boy, again, that he couldn’t take courses down at the university until he first finished high school, and he told him, again, that with his reputation for trouble it was almost impossible for him to get work around here anymore, unless he was willing to work the night shift down at the tannery stacking hides. And he told his son that he didn’t want him to live with him in his trailer. Not anymore. Not ever.

  Quickly, as if startled, Buddy looked at his father, and his blue eyes filmed over with tears. “You’re kicking me out?” His lip trembled. Tom saw that the boy was terrified and was about to cry, and he was shocked to see it.

  He got up from the booth quickly. “C’mon, we’ll talk about this outside,” he said gruffly, and he hurried away from the booth, tossing Gary a pair of dollar bills as he passed the bar. Buddy followed silently.

  Outside, in the brightness of the parking lot, they stood facing each other at the tailgate of Tom’s pickup truck. Nearby, Buddy’s duffel and battered brown canvas suitcase lay in a heap on the pavement.

  “Dad, maybe I could just stay till I got on my feet. You know, just till I saved a little money, enough to rent my own place…”

  Tom looked at the boy steadily. They were the same height and build, though Tom, twenty years older, was slightly heavier and thicker through the shoulders and arms. Behind them a lumber truck changed gears, braked, and slowed, passed through the town on its way south. Tom cleared his throat. “You got to take care of yourself now,” he said slowly.

  The boy walked to his bags and dragged them toward Tom’s truck, lifted them and tossed them into the back. He was smiling again. “C’mon, Dad, just a few days. I’ll get hold of Donna, I got her number down in Boston, she gave it to me, and I’ll call her and set something up with her. She just took off because she had to be in Boston by tonight, and she could see I wanted to stay here awhile and visit alone with you, sort of to reestablish contact.”

  Tom reached over the tailgate into the truck and pulled out the bags and dropped them onto the pavement behind Buddy. His face grew long and heavy, and the boy stared down at the bags as if not understanding what they were doing there, and, when his gaze came back, Tom saw that the boy was about to weep again.

  Another lumber truck approached the Hawthorne House, changed gears as it neared the curve and slope from the bar to the tannery below. “You could pick up a ride on one of those trucks this afternoon and be in Boston tonight, if you wanted to,” Tom said.

  “Daddy…”

  It had turned into a low, gray day, dark and heavy and cool, not sunny and warm as it had been an hour earlier. The streets of the town were nearly empty. No cars passed. Generally, in a mill town people don’t move about much except early in the day and late.

  “Daddy … c’mon, I’m broke,” Buddy said quietly, and his voice cracked and tears rolled down his cheeks, and he looked like a small boy standing before his father, open-faced, weeping, his shoulders slanting toward the ground, his hands hanging uselessly down. “I need some money … before I can take off on my own. Please help me, Daddy. I need some money. I won’t cause you any more trouble, I promise.”

  Tom looked away from the sight of his son and up at the gray sky, and he could see that it would rain soon. Then he looked away from the sky and down the hill toward the dam and the red-brick tannery and then finally at the boy’s duffel and suitcase. “I’ve heard promises,” he said. “And I’ve had to make up my mind, regardless.”

  “I can’t go off alone…”

  “You just did, from last April.”

  “Yes!” the boy cried. “But I thought I could come back! I didn’t know you’d lock your door against me!”

  Tom studied the boy’s face carefully, as if seeing something there he had never seen before. When you love someone for years, you lose sight of how that person looks to the rest of the world. Then one day, even though it’s painful, you push the person away, and suddenly you can see him the way a stranger sees him. But because you know so much more about him than a stranger can, you are frightened for him, as frightened as you would be for yourself, if you could see in yourself, as you see in him, that you’re not quite right, that you don’t quite fit into the place the world has tried to make for you.

  Tom stopped looking at his son and instead looked at the ground. He took a deliberate step past his son and picked up the two bags, turned, and pitched them into the back of the truck. Slowly, as if exhausted, he walked around to the driver’s side and got in. “C’mon,” he said in a low voice and started the engine.

  The boy brightened and, instantly transformed, ran around to the other side and slid in next to his father. “Oh, hey, listen, Dad,” he said, “I promise I won’t cause you any more trouble! I’ll even pay you room and board, I’ll get a job tomorrow down at the tannery, stacking hides! Just like you said!” He stuck his right arm out the open window and slapped the side of the truck with the flat of his hand, making a loud noise, and repeated it with sudden, erratic exuberance. “I’ll get a car, a good used car, and then I’ll be able to rent my own place, Dad. Hey, maybe rent a trailer at the park near you, there’s always a couple of vacancies…” He went on banging the side of the truck.

  Tom didn’t answer. He dropped the truck into reverse, waited as another lumber truck passed, backed into the street, and turned left and headed downhill toward the tannery, following the lumber truck.

  Buddy ceased banging the door and peered out the open window at the stores and houses and then the dam and old mill, with the tannery buildings on the left. “Where we going, Dad? The trailerpark’s the other way.”

  Tom said nothing. He shifted down
a gear as they came up close behind the lumber truck, which was laboriously making its way up the hill on the far side of the dam. At the top of the hill, the road straightened and widened, and Tom pulled out and passed the truck, giving a toot and a wave to the driver as he passed. Driving fast, he soon was ahead of the truck by a quarter mile or more, and two miles down the road from the dam, with rolling green fields of new corn spreading away from the road, he came to the entrance ramp to the Turnpike, where he pulled over and stopped the pickup. The lumber truck was drawing slowly behind him.

  Buddy said, “You sonofabitch.”

  “You get out and stick your thumb out, and that driver’ll pick you up.”

  Buddy wrenched open the door and stepped out of the pickup and slammed the door shut behind him. Slinging his bags quickly to the ground, he waved at the driver of the truck hissing to a stop by the ramp and showed him his thumb. The driver waved him up, and Buddy climbed aboard. Tom let the truck pass, turned slowly around in the road, and headed back to town.

  Mistake

  In the spring of 1960, I turned twenty. By June, I’d be married, so I was working at a second job, selling women’s shoes at a Thom McAn’s in a shopping center out in West St. Petersburg. Driving home late six nights a week in my shaky ’48 Studebaker, I cast wary glances out the open window at the causeway that looped across the bay north to Tampa, a string of lights over dark water that somehow made me think of New York City, and for a few terrifying seconds each night I wondered if I was making the biggest mistake of my life.