The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  Nancy braked her car to a quick stop next to Merle, lowered the window and asked if he wanted a lift into town. She liked the old man, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the old man intrigued her, as if she believed he knew something about the world they lived in together that she did not know and that would profit her greatly if she did know. So she courted him, fussed over him, seemed to be looking after his comfort and welfare, behaving the way, as she once said to Noni, his daughters ought to behave.

  Merle apparently knew all this, and more, though you could never be sure with him. He got inside the low, sleek car, slammed the door shut, and surrounded himself with the smell of leather and the pressure of fan-driven heat. “Morning, Mrs. Hubner. A fine, crispy morning, isn’t it?”

  She agreed and asked him where she could drop him. A fast, urgent driver, she was already flying past the intersection of Old Road and Main Street and was approaching the center of town. She drove so as to endanger, but didn’t seem to know it. It was as if her relation to the physical act of driving was the same as her relation to poverty—abstract, wholly theoretical, and sentimental—which, from Merle’s perspective, made her as dangerous a driver as she was a citizen.

  Merle and Nancy exchanged brief remarks, mostly solicitous on her part as to the present condition of Merle’s arthritis and mostly whining on his part as to the same thing. Merle knew that by whining he could put Nancy at her ease, and in encounters as brief as this he, like most people, enjoyed being able to put people at their ease. It made things more interesting for him later on. Stopping in front of Hayward’s Hardware and Sporting Goods Store, where Merle was headed for traps, she suddenly asked him a direct question (since she was now sufficiently at her ease to trust that he would answer directly and honestly and in that way might be brought to reveal more than he wished to): “Tell me, Mr. Ring, is it true that that woman, Flora in number eleven, you know the one, is raising hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer?”

  “Yes,” he said, lying, for he had heard nothing of it. “Though I’m not sure of the numbers. It’s hard to count ’em after a certain point, sixty, say.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little … disgusting? I mean, the filth! I think the woman ought to be put away, don’t you?” she asked, still trying to get information.

  “What would you do with all those guinea pigs then?”

  “Let the SPCA take them, I suppose. They know how to handle these things, when things like this get out of hand. Imagine, all those tiny animals crowded into a trailer, and remember, number eleven is not one of the larger trailers in the park, you know.”

  “I guess you’re right, the SPCA could kill ’em for us, once we’d got Flora locked up someplace. The whole thing would probably drive her right over the edge, anyhow, taking away her animals and killing ’em like that, tossing ’em into that incinerator they got. That’d push ol’ Flora right over the edge. She’d be booby-hatch material for sure then, whether she is now or not.”

  “You’re making fun of me, Mr. Ring. Aren’t you?”

  “No, no, no, I’m not making fun of you, Mrs. Hubner,” he said, opening the door and stepping out, not without difficulty, because of the shape of the car and his stiff back. “I’ll check into it for you, ma’am. Get the facts of the situation, so to speak. Because you’re probably right. I mean, something will have to be done, eventually, by someone. Because those kinds of animals, rodents and such, they breed fast, and before you know it, one hundred is two hundred, two hundred is four, four is eight, and so on.”

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Ring,” she said with clear relief. He was such a nice man. She wondered if there was some way she could make his life a little easier. At his age, to be alone like that, it was simply awful.

  Merle closed the door, waved, and walked into Hayward’s and Nancy drove on to Ginnie’s Beauty Nook on Green Street across from Knight’s Paint Store, where Ginnie and her husband, Claudel, had rented the upstairs apartment after their trailer burned down. That was over three years ago, or maybe four. Nancy couldn’t remember, until it came back to her that it had happened the summer Noni turned fifteen and started having migraines and saying she hated her, and then Nancy remembered that was the summer her husband died. So it must be over four years now since Ginnie and Claudel moved into town and rented that apartment over Knight’s Paint Store. Isn’t it amazing how time flies when you’re not paying attention, she reflected.

  A week later, Merle woke late, after having spent most of the night out on the lake in his ice house, and because the sun was shining, casting a raw light that somehow pleased him, he decided to visit Flora Pease and determine if all this fuss over her guinea pigs was justified. Since talking with Nancy Hubner, he had spoken only to Marcelle Chagnon about the guinea pigs, and her response had been to look heavenward, as if for help or possibly mere solace, and to say, “Just don’t talk to me about that crazy woman, Merle, don’t start in about her. As long as she doesn’t cause any troubles for me, I won’t cause any troubles for her. But if you start in on this, there’ll be troubles. For me. And that means for her, too, remember that.”

  “Makes sense,” Merle said, and for several days he went strictly about his business—ice fishing, eating, cleaning, reading the Manchester Union Leader, puttering with his tools and equipment—slow, solitary activities that he seemed to savor. He was the kind of person who, by the slowness of his pace and the hard quality of his attention, appeared to take sensual pleasure from the most ordinary activity. He was a small, lightly framed man and wore a short, white beard, which he kept neatly trimmed. His clothing was simple and functional, flannel shirts, khaki pants, steel-toed work shoes—the same style of clothing he had worn since his youth, when he first became a carpenter’s apprentice and determined what sort of clothing was appropriate for that kind of life. His teeth were brown, stained from a lifetime of smoking a cob pipe, and his weathered skin was still taut, indicating that he had always been a small, trim man. There was something effeminate about him that, at least in old age, made him physically attractive, especially to women, but to men as well. Generally, his manner with people was odd and somewhat disconcerting, for he was both involved with their lives and not involved, both serious and not serious, both present and absent. For example, a compliment from Merle somehow had the effect of reminding the recipient of his or her vanity, while an uninvited criticism came out sounding like praise for having possessed qualities that got you singled out in the first place.

  Though seasonably cold (fifteen degrees below freezing), the day was pleasant and dry, the light falling on the rock ground directly, so that the edges of objects took on an unusual sharpness and clarity. Merle knocked briskly on Flora’s door, and after a moment, she swung it open. She was wrapped in a wool bathrobe that must have been several decades old and belonged originally to a very large man, for it flowed around her blocky body like a carpet. Her short hair stuck out in a corolla of dark red spikes, and her eyes were red-rimmed and watery-looking, as, grumpily, she asked Merle what he wanted from her.

  “A look,” he chirped, smiling.

  “A look. At what?”

  “At your animals. The guinea pigs I been hearing about.”

  “You heard about them? What did you hear?” She stood before the door, obstructing his view into the darkened room beyond. An odor of fur and straw, however, seeped past and merged warmly with the cold, almost sterile air outdoors.

  Merle sniffed with interest at the odor, apparently relishing it. “Heard you got a passel of ’em. I never seen one of these guinea pigs before and was wondering what in hell they look like. Pigs?”

  “No. More like fat, furry chipmunks,” Flora said, easing away from the door. She still had not smiled, however, and was not ready to invite Merle inside. “Mrs. Chagnon send you over here?” she demanded. “That woman is putting me on the spot. I can’t have any friends anymore to visit or to talk to me here, or else I’ll get into trouble with that woman.”

 
; “No, Marcelle didn’t send me, she didn’t even want to talk about your guinea pigs with me. She just said as long as they don’t cause her any trouble, she won’t cause you any trouble.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Flora said, defiantly crossing her short, thick arms over her chest. “People come around here and see my guinea pigs, and then I get into trouble. If they don’t come around here and don’t see nothing, then it’s like the guinea pigs, for them, don’t exist. That kid, Terry, the black one, he started it, when all I was doing was trying to be friendly, and then he went and dragged the other kid, the white one, in here, and they got to smoking my hemp, and then pretty soon here comes Mrs. Chagnon, and I get in trouble. All I want is to be left alone,” she said with great clarity, as if she said it to herself many times a day.

  Merle nodded sympathetically. “I understand how you feel. It’s like when I won the lottery, that was back a ways before you come here, and everybody thought I had a whole heap more money than I had, so everyone was after me for some.”

  That interested Flora. She had never met anyone who had won the lottery. In fact, she was starting to believe that it was all faked, that no one ever won, that those people jumping up and down hysterically in the TV ads were just actors. Now, because of Merle’s having won, her faith in the basic goodness of the world was magically restored. “This means they probably went to the moon, too!” she said with clear relief.

  “Who?”

  “The astronauts.”

  “You didn’t believe that, the rocket to the moon? I thought you used to be in the Air Force.”

  “That’s why I had so much trouble believing it,” she said and stood aside and waved him in.

  Inside, when his eyes had grown accustomed to the dim light of the room, this is what Merle saw: large, waist-high, wood-framed, chicken-wire pens that were divided into cubicles about two feet square. The pens were placed throughout the room in no apparent order or pattern, which gave the room, despite the absence of furniture, the effect of being incredibly cluttered, as if someone were either just moving in or all packed to move out. As far as Merle could see, the rooms adjacent to this one were similarly jammed with pens, and he surmised that the rooms he couldn’t see, the bedroom at the back and the bathroom, were also filled with pens like these. In each cubicle there was a pair of grown or nearly grown guinea pigs or else one grown (presumably female) pig and a litter of two or three piglets. Merle could see and hear the animals in the nearby cubicles scurrying nervously in their cages, but the animals closest to him were crouched and still, their large round eyes rolling frantically and their noses twitching as, somehow, Merle’s own odor penetrated the heavy odor of the room.

  Flora reached down and plucked a black and white spotted pig from the cage it shared with a tan, long-haired mate. Cradling it in her arm and stroking its nose with her free hand, she walked cooing and clucking over to Merle and showed him the animal. “This here’s Ferdinand,” she said. “After the bull.”

  “Ah. May I?” he said, reaching out to take Ferdinand.

  Merle held the animal as Flora had and studied its trembling, limp body. It seemed to offer no defense and showed no response except stark terror. When Merle placed it back into its cubicle, it remained exactly where he had placed it, as if waiting for a sudden, wholly deserved execution.

  “How come you like these animals, Flora?”

  “Don’t you like them?” she bristled.

  “I don’t feel one way or the other about them. I was wondering about you.”

  She was silent for a moment and moved nervously around the cages, checking into the cubicles as she moved. “Well, somebody’s got to take care of them. Especially in this climate. They’re really not built for the ice and snow.”

  “So you don’t do it because you like them?”

  “No. I mean, I like looking at them and all, the colors are pretty, and their little faces are cute and all. But I’m just taking care of them so they won’t die, that’s all.”

  There was a silence, and Merle said, “I hate to ask it, but how come you let them breed together? You know where that’ll lead?”

  “Do you know where it’ll lead if I don’t let them breed together?” she asked, facing him with her hands fisted on her hips.

  “Yup.”

  “Where?”

  “They’ll die out.”

  “Right. That answer your question?”

  “Yup.”

  Merle stayed with her for the next half hour, as she showed him her elaborate watering system—a series of interconnected hoses that ran from the cold water spigot in the kitchen sink around and through all the cages, ending back in the bathroom sink—and her cleverly designed system of trays beneath the cages for removing from the cages the feces and spilled food, and her gravity-fed system of grain troughs, so that all she had to do was dump a quart a day into each cage and the small trough in each individual cubicle would be automatically filled. She designed and built the cages herself, she explained, and, because she was no carpenter, they weren’t very fancy or pretty to look at. But the basic idea was a good one, she insisted, so that, despite her lack of skill, the system worked, and consequently every one of her animals was clean, well-fed, and watered at all times. “You can’t ask for much more in this life, can you?” she said proudly as she led Merle to the door.

  He guessed no, you couldn’t. “But I still think you’re headed for troubles,” he told her, and he opened the door to leave.

  “What do you mean? What’s going on?” Suddenly she was suspicious of him and frightened of Marcelle Chagnon again, with her suspicion of the one and fear of the other swiftly merging and becoming anger at everyone.

  “No, no, no. Not troubles with Marcelle or any of the rest of the folks in the park. Just with the breeding and all. In time, there will be too many of them. They breed new ones faster than the old ones die off. It’s simple. There will come a day when you won’t have any more room left in there. What will you do then?”

  “Move out.”

  “What about the animals?”

  “I’ll take care of them. They can have the whole trailer. They’ll have lots of room if I move out.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Merle said calmly. “It goes on forever. It’s numbers, and it doesn’t change or level off or get better. It gets worse and worse, faster and faster.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said to him. “Everything depends on how you look at it. And what looks worse and worse to you might look better and better to me.”

  Merle smiled, and his blue eyes gleamed. He stepped down to the ground and waved pleasantly at the grim woman. “You are right, Flora Pease. Absolutely right. And I thank you for straightening me out this fine morning!” he exclaimed, and, whistling softly, he walked off for Marcelle’s trailer, where he would sit down at her table and drink a cup of coffee with her and recommend to her that, in the matter of Flora and her guinea pigs, the best policy was no policy, because Flora was more than capable of handling any problem that the proliferation of the guinea pigs might create.

  Marcelle was not happy with Merle’s advice. She was a woman of action and it pained her to sit still and let things happen. But, she told Merle, she had no choice in this matter of the guinea pigs. If she tried to evict Flora and the animals, there would be a ruckus and possibly a scandal; if she brought in the health department, there was bound to be a scandal; if she evicted Flora and not the guinea pigs, then she’d have the problem of disposing of the damn things herself. “It’s just gone too far,” she said, scowling.

  “But everything’s fine right now, at this very moment, isn’t it?” Merle asked, stirring his coffee.

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  “Then it hasn’t gone too far. It’s gone just far enough.”

  At this stage, just before Christmas, everyone had an opinion as to what ought to be done with regard to the question of the guinea pigs.

  FLORA PEASE: Keep the animals warm, w
ell-fed, clean, and breeding. Naturally, as their numbers increase, their universe will expand. (Flora didn’t express herself that way, for she would have been speaking to people who would have been confused by language like that coming from her. She said it this way: “When you take care of things, they thrive. Animals, vegetables, minerals, same with all of them. And that makes you a better person, since it’s the taking care that makes people thrive. Feeling good is good, and feeling better is better. No two ways about it. All people ever argue about anyhow is how to go about feeling good and then better.”)