The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  I was sorry now that I’d told Knox the truth back in Virginia, when he’d asked me where I was going. I’d said Cuba, and he’d laughed and asked why, and I had tried to tell him, but all I could say was that I wanted to help the Cuban people liberate themselves from a cruel and corrupt dictator. We both knew how that sounded, and neither of us had spoken of Cuba again, until now.

  I stepped away from the car to the curb. “Well, thanks. Thanks for the advice. And the ride. Good meeting you,” I said.

  He called me by my name. I hadn’t thought he’d caught it. “Look, if you need some help, just give me a call,” he said and stuck a small white card out the window on the passenger’s side.

  I took the card and read his first name, Dewey, his address back in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and a post office box here in St. Petersburg. “Thanks,” I said.

  “I stay at the hotel,” Knox said, nodding toward the high, pink, stuccoed building. “With my fiancée. Her name’s Sturgis, Bea Sturgis. Bea’s here all the time, year round. Nice woman. Give a call anytime.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I know what I’m doing.”

  He smiled. “No,” he said. “You don’t.” Then he waved good-bye, dropped the Buick into gear, and moved off slowly toward the hotel garage.

  It was not quite nine in the morning, and it was already hot. I peeled off my jacket, tied it to the duffle, and strolled across the street to the park by the marina and sat down on a bench facing the street. Behind me, charter fishing boats and yachts rocked tenderly against the narrow dock, where pelicans perched somberly on the bollards. Across the street, men and women in short-sleeved, pastel-colored blouses and shirts and plaid Bermuda shorts drifted in and out of the hotel. New cars and taxis and limousines drove people by and let people off and picked people up. A light breeze riffled quietly through the royal palm trees that lined the street. Everyone and everything belonged exactly where it was.

  I was suddenly hungry and realized that I hadn’t eaten since the night before at a Stuckeys in North Carolina. A few minutes passed, and then I saw Knox emerge from the parking garage at the left of the hotel and walk briskly along the sidewalk toward the hotel, his gaze straight ahead of him, businesslike. He reached the canopy, turned under it, and entered the building, nodding agreeably to the doorman as he passed through the glass doors to the dark, cool interior.

  I stood up slowly, grabbed my duffle, crossed the street, and followed him.

  I never saw Knox again. I called him from the house phone in the lobby, and he laughed and called the manager, who met me at the front desk and gave me a note to take to the concierge, who put me to work that very day as a furniture mover.

  I was the youngest and the healthiest of a gang of seven or eight men who set up tables and chairs for meeting rooms and convention halls, decorated ballrooms for wedding receptions, moved pianos from one dining room to another, dragged king-sized mattresses from suite to suite, unloaded supplies from trucks, delivered carts of dirty linen to the basement laundry, lugged sofas, lamps, cribs, and carpets from one end of the hotel to the other. Paid less than thirty dollars a week for six ten-hour days a week, we worked staggered shifts and were on call seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. We were given room and board and ate in a bare room off the hotel kitchen with the dishwashers and slept two to a tiny, cell-like room in a cinder-block dormitory behind the hotel.

  Most of the kitchen help was black and went home, or somewhere, at night. We furniture movers were to a man white and, except for me, over forty, terminally alcoholic, physically fragile, and itinerant. It took me a few days to realize that we were all a type of migrant worker, vagrants, wanderers down from the cold cities and railroad yards of the North, and that the day after payday most of this week’s crew would be gone, replaced the next day by a new group of men, who, a week later, would leave, too, for Miami, New Orleans, or Los Angeles. No one else wanted our jobs, and we couldn’t get any other. We were underpaid, overworked, and looked down upon by chambermaids, elevator operators, and doormen. Like certain plumbing tools, we were not thought to exist until we were needed.

  Even so, less than two weeks into this line of work, I decided to succeed at it. Which was like deciding to succeed at being a prisoner of war, deciding to become a good prisoner of war. I believed that I could become so good at moving furniture that I’d be irreplaceable and shortly thereafter would be made boss of the furniture movers, and then my talent for organization, my affection for the hotel, and the warmth of my personality would be recognized by the concierge, who would promote me, would make me his assistant, and from there I’d go on to concierge itself, then assistant manager, until, before long, why not manager? In the distant future, I saw a chain of hotels linking every major city on the Gulf of Mexico (a body of water I had not actually seen yet) that I would control from a bank of telephones here on my desk in St. Petersburg at the Coquina Key, which, since it was where I got my start, would become the central jewel in my necklace of hotels and resorts, my diadem, a modest man’s point of understandable pride. I would entertain world leaders here—Dr. Fidel Castro, President Dwight Eisenhower, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. People would congratulate me for having dropped out of an Ivy League college after less than one term, and my mother and brother and sister would now realize the wisdom of my decision, and friends from high school would call me up, begging for jobs in one of my many hotels. Late at night, lying in my narrow bunk, my temporary roommate snoring in the bunk below, I imagined testimonial dinners at which I would single out my old friend Dewey Knox from Chevy Chase. He’d be seated alongside his lady, Bea Sturgis, at the head table, just beyond the mayor of St. Petersburg and the governor of Florida. “It all started with Knox,” I’d say. “He told me this place was made for a guy like me, and he was right!”

  Furniture movers came and went, but I stayed. The fourth person in five weeks with whom I shared my grim cell was named Bob O’Neil, from Chicago, and when he found out that I’d been a furniture mover at the Coquina Key for longer than a month, he told me I was crazy. I’d come back from setting up a VFW luncheon in the Oleander Room, hoping to sneak a few hours’ sleep, as I’d been up most of the night before, taking down the tables and chairs and cleaning up the hall after an all-state sports award banquet. My previous roommate, Fred from Columbus, a fat, morosely silent man whose hands trembled while he read religious tracts, which he wordlessly passed on to me, had got his first week’s pay two days before and had taken off for Phoenix, he said, where his sister lived.

  My new roommate, when I arrived, had already claimed the bottom bunk and removed my magazines and was now lying stretched out on it. I closed the door, and he sat up, stuck out his hand, and introduced himself. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Bob, and I’m an alcoholic.” He was in his early or late forties; it was hard to tell which. His face was broad and blotched, with broken veins crisscrossing his cheeks and large red nose. He was bright-eyed and had a cheerful, loose mouth and a wash of thin, sandy-gray hair.

  I removed his open, nearly empty, cardboard suitcase from the only chair in the room and sat down. I said, “How come you tell people you’re an alcoholic, Bob?” and he explained that he was required to by Alcoholics Anonymous, which he said he had joined just yesterday, after years of considering it.

  “That’s what you got to say,” he said. “You got to admit to the world that you’re an alcoholic. Put it right out there. First step to recovery, kid.”

  “How long before you’re cured?” I asked. “And don’t have to go around introducing yourself like that?”

  “Never,” he said. “Never. It’s like … a condition. Like diabetes or your height. I’m allergic to booze, to alcohol. Simple as that.”

  “So you can’t touch the stuff?”

  “Right. Not unless I want to die.” He swung his feet around to the floor and lit a cigarette. “Smoke?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “The bottom bunk’s mine.”

  “You’re kidding me
,” he said, smiling broadly. “Look at you—what’re you, eighteen? Twenty?”

  “Eighteen. Almost nineteen.”

  “Eighteen. Right. And here I am, an old, sick man, an alcoholic, and you can jump up there like a pole vaulter. And you’re saying that bottom bunk’s yours.” He sighed, coughed, lay back down, and closed his eyes. “You’re right. It’s yours.”

  “No, go ahead. I’ll sleep on top.”

  “No, no, no! You’re right, you got here before me. First come, first served. That’s the law of the land. I understand, kid.”

  I climbed up the rickety ladder at the end of the bunk and flung myself face-forward onto the bed.

  “You sure you don’t mind?” he asked, sticking his head out and peering up at me.

  “No.”

  “How long you been here, anyhow?”

  “Little over five weeks,” I said. More than half as long as I went to college, I noticed.

  “Five weeks!” He laughed and told me I was crazy, said it in a high, amused voice. “Well,” he said, yawning, “you must be getting real good at it.”

  “Yeah.”

  Nobody worked these jobs more than a week or at the most two, he explained. “You’re like a prisoner, never see the light of day, never make enough money to make a difference in your life, so what you gotta do, you just gotta get your pay and leave. Get the hell out. Find a place or a job that does make a difference. Smart, good-looking kid like you,” he said, “you can do better than this. This is America, for Christ’s sake. You can do real good for yourself. How much money you got saved up?”

  “Not much. Little over sixty bucks.”

  “Well, there you go,” he said, as if presenting a self-evident truth.

  I thanked him for the advice, explained that I was tired and needed sleep. I was on the night shift that week and had been told to fill in for a guy who’d left the morning crew, something that was happening with increasing frequency, which I had taken as a sure sign of imminent success.

  Over the next few days, whenever we talked, which was often, as he was garrulous and I was lonely, we talked about Bob’s alcoholism and my refusal to take his advice, which was to leave the hotel immediately, rent a room in town, get a job in a restaurant or a store, where people could see me, as Bob explained, because, according to him, I had the kind of face people trusted. “An honest face,” he said, as if it communicated more than merely a commitment to telling the truth, as if intelligence, reliability, sensitivity, personal cleanliness, and high ambition all went with it. “You got an honest face, kid. You should get the hell out there in the real world, where you can use it.”

  For my part, I advised him to keep going to his AA meetings, which he said he did. He was tempted daily to drink, I knew, by the flask toters in our crew, and often he’d come into the room trembling, on the verge of tears, and he’d grab me by the shoulders and beg me not to let him do it. “Don’t let me give in, kid! Don’t let the bastards get to me. Talk to me, kid,” he’d beg, and I’d talk to him, remind him of all he’d told me—his broken marriages, his lost jobs, his penniless wanderings between Florida and Chicago, his waking up sick in filthy flophouses and pan-handling on street corners—until at last he’d calm down and feel a new determination to resist temptation. I could see that it was hard on him physically. He seemed to be losing weight, and his skin, despite the red blotches and broken veins, had taken on a dull gray pallor, and he never seemed to sleep. We were both on the night shift that week, and all day long, except when he went out for what he said were his AA meetings, I’d hear him in the bunk below, tossing his body from side to side in the dim afternoon light as he struggled to fall asleep, eventually giving up, lighting a cigarette, going out for a walk, returning to try and fail again.

  One afternoon, a few days before his first payday, he reached up to my bunk and woke me. “Listen, kid, I can’t sleep. Loan me a couple bucks, willya? I got to go get a bottle.” His voice was unusually firm, clear. He’d made a decision.

  “Bob, don’t! You don’t want that. Stick it out.”

  “Don’t lecture me, kid, just loan me a coupla bucks.” This time he was giving me an order, not making a request.

  I looked into his eyes for a few seconds and saw my own stare back. “No,” I said and turned over and went defiantly to sleep.

  When I woke, it was growing dark, and I knew I’d almost missed supper, so I rushed from the room and down the long tunnel that connected the dormitory to the hotel kitchen, where the night dishwashers and furniture movers were already eating. Bob wasn’t there, and no one had seen him.

  “He’s working tonight!” I said. “He’s got to work tonight!”

  They shrugged and went on eating. No one cared.

  A half dozen rooms on the fourteenth floor were being painted, and we spent the night moving furniture out and storing it in the basement, and there was a chamber of commerce breakfast that we had to set up in the Crepe Myrtle Room. By the time I got back to my room, it was daylight. Bob was there, sound asleep in the bottom bunk.

  I looked around the room, checked the tin trash can, even peered into the dresser drawers, but found no bottle. He heard me and rolled over and watched.

  “Lookin’ for something?”

  “You know what.”

  “A bottle?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Sorry, kid.”

  “You didn’t drink?”

  “Nope.” He sat up and smiled. He looked rested for the first time, and his color had returned. He lit a cigarette. “Nope, I didn’t break. Close, though,” he said, his blue eyes twinkling, and he held his thumb and index finger a pencil width apart. “Close.”

  I grinned, as if his triumph were mine. “You really got through it, huh? What’d you do? Where were you all night?”

  “Right here. While you were working, I was sleeping like a baby. I got back here late from the AA meeting. It was a long one, and I was burnt, man. So I just told ’em I was sick, they could dock my pay, and then I came back here and slept the night away.”

  “Wow! That’s great!” I shook his hand. “See, man, that’s what I’ve been telling you! You got to keep going to those AA meetings!”

  He smiled tolerantly, rubbed out his cigarette, and lay back down. I pulled off my shirt and trousers, climbed up to my bed, and when I heard Bob snoring, I fell asleep.

  That afternoon, when I woke, Bob was gone again. I got down from my bed and noticed that his cardboard suitcase was gone, too. His drawer in the dresser was empty, and when I looked into the medicine cabinet above the tiny sink in the corner, I saw that he’d taken his shaving kit. He’d moved out.

  I was confused and suddenly, unexpectedly, sad. I stood in front of the mirror and shaved, the first time in three days, and tried to figure it all out—Bob’s alcoholism, which did indeed seem as much a part of him as his height or the color of his eyes, and my caring about it; his persistent advice to me, and mine to him; his vain dream of not drinking, my dream of … what? Success? Forgiveness? Revenge? Somehow, Bob and I were alike, I thought, especially now that he had fled from the hotel. The thought scared me. It was the first time since that snowy night I left the college on the hill that I’d been scared.

  I wiped off the scraps of shaving cream, washed my razor, and opened the cabinet for my bottle of Aqua Velva. Gone. A wave of anger swirled around me and passed quickly on. I sighed. Oh, what the hell, let him have it. The man left without even one week’s pay; a morning splash of aftershave would make him feel successful for at least a minute or two. The rest of the day he’ll feel like what he is, I thought, a failure.

  I picked up my shirt and pants and slowly got dressed, when, leaning down to tie my shoe, I saw the pale blue bottle in the tin trash can between the dresser and the bed. I reached in, drew it out, and saw that it was empty.

  Chucking it back, as if it were a dead animal, I looked around the gray room, and I saw its pathetic poverty for the first time—the spindly furniture, the bare c
inder-block walls and linoleum floor, the small window that faced the yellow-brick side of the parking garage next door. Knox’s blue Buick was probably still parked there. I looked at my half dozen paperback books on the dresser—mysteries, a Stendhal novel, an anthology of Great American Short Stories—and my papers, a short stack of letters from home, a sketchbook, a journal I was planning to write in soon. I’d brought it for Cuba. Then I pulled my old canvas duffle out from under the bed and began shoving clothes inside.

  I rented a room from an old lady who owned a small house off Central Avenue in downtown St. Petersburg, a quiet neighborhood of bungalows and tree-lined streets that was beginning to be devoured at the edges by glass-and-concrete buildings housing condominiums, insurance companies, and banks. The room was small, but bright and clean, in the back off the kitchen, with its own bathroom and separate entrance. With the room went kitchen privileges, but I would have to eat in my bedroom. There were strict house rules that I eagerly agreed to: no visitors, by which I knew she meant women; no smoking; no drinking. I’d been meaning to give up smoking anyhow, and since the only way I could drink was more or less illegally, it seemed more or less a luxury to me. Especially after Bob O’Neil. As for women in my room, based on my experience so far, the old lady might as well have said no Martians.

  “I’m a Christian,” she said, “and this is a Christian home.” Her name was Mrs. Treworgy. She was tiny, half my size, and pink—pink hair, pink skin, pink rims around her watery eyes.

  “I’m a Christian too,” I assured her.

  “What church?”

  I hesitated. “Methodist?”

  She smiled, relieved, and told me where the nearest Methodist church was located; not far, as it turned out. She herself was a Baptist, which meant that she had to walk ten blocks each way on Sundays. “But the preaching’s worth it,” she said. “And our choir is much better than the Methodist choir.”