The Angel on the Roof

by Russell Banks

  DOREEN TIEDE: Evict Flora (she could always rent a room at the Hawthorne House, Claudel Bing had and, God knows, he was barely able to tie his own shoes for a while, he was so drunk, though of course he’s much better now and may actually move out of the Hawthorne House one of these days, and in fact the man was starting to look like his old self again, which was not half bad), and then call in the SPCA to find homes for the animals (the ones that couldn’t be placed in foster homes would have to be destroyed— but, really, all they are is animals, rodents, rats, almost).

  TERRY CONSTANT: Sneak into her trailer one day when she’s in town buying grain, and, one by one, liberate the animals. Maybe you ought to wait till spring and then just set them free to live in the swamp and the piney woods and fields between Old Road and the trailerpark. By the time winter came rolling around again, they’d have figured out how to tunnel into the ground and hibernate like the rest of the warm-blooded animals. The ones that didn’t learn how to survive, well, too bad for them. Survival of the fittest.

  BRUCE SEVERANCE: The profit motive, man. That’s what needs to be invoked here. Explain to Flora that laboratories pay well for clean, well-fed guinea pigs, especially those bred and housed under such controlled conditions as Flora has established. Explain this, pointing out how it’ll enable her to breed guinea pigs for both fun and profit for an indefinite period of time, for as long as she wants, when you get right down to it. Show her that this is not only socially useful but it’ll provide her with enough money to take even better care of her animals than now.

  NONI HUBNER: Bruce’s idea is a good one, and so is Leon LaRoche’s, and Captain Knox has a good idea too. Maybe we ought to try one first, Captain Knox’s, say, since he’s the oldest and has the most experience of the world, and if that doesn’t work, we could try Leon LaRoche’s, and then if that fails, we can try Bruce’s. That would be the democratic way.

  LEON LAROCHE: Captain Knox’s idea, of course, is the logical one, but it runs certain risks and depends on his being able to keep Flora, by the sheer force of his will, from reacting hysterically or somehow “causing a scene” that would embarrass the trailerpark and we who live in it. If the Suncook Valley Sun learned that we had this sort of thing going on here, that we had a village eccentric living here among us at the trailerpark, we would all suffer deep embarrassment. I agree, therefore, with Doreen Tiede’s plan. But my admiration, of course, is for Captain Knox’s plan.

  CAROL CONSTANT: I don’t care what you do with the damned things, just do something. The world’s got enough problems, real problems, without people going out and inventing new ones. The main thing is to keep the poor woman happy, and if having a lot of little rodents around is what makes her happy, and they aren’t bothering anyone else yet, then, for God’s sake, leave her alone. She’ll end up taking care of them herself, getting rid of them or whatever, if and when they start to bother her—and they’ll bother her a lot sooner than they bother us, once we stop thinking about them all the time. Her ideas will change as soon as the guinea pigs get to the point where they’re causing more trouble than they’re giving pleasure. Everybody’s that way, and Flora Pease is no different. You have to trust the fact that we’re all human beings.

  NANCY HUBNER: Obviously, the guinea pigs are Flora’s substitutes for a family and friends. She’s trying to tell us something, and we’re not listening. If we, and I mean all of us, associated more with Flora on a social level, if we befriended her, then her need for these filthy animals would diminish and probably disappear. It would be something that in the future we could all laugh about, Flora laughing right along with us. We should drop by for coffee, invite her over for drinks, offer to help redecorate her trailer, and so on. We should be more charitable. It’s as simple as that. Christian charity. I know it won’t be easy—Flora’s not exactly socially “flexible,” if you know what I mean, but we are, at least most of us are, and therefore it’s our responsibility to initiate contact, not hers, poor thing.

  CAPTAIN DEWEY KNOX: It’s her choice, no one else’s. Either she goes, or the animals go. She decides which it’s to be, we don’t. If she decides to go, fine, she can take the animals with her or leave them behind, in which case I’m sure some more or less humane way can be found to dispose of them. If she stays, also fine, but she stays without the animals. Those are the rules—no pets. They’re the same rules for all of us, no exceptions. All one has to do is apply the rules, and that forces onto the woman a decision that, however painful it may be for her, she must make. No one can make that decision for her.

  MARCELLE CHAGNON: If she’d stop the damned things from breeding, the whole problem would be solved. At least it would not bother me anymore, which is important. The only way to get her to stop breeding them, without bringing the Corporation or the health board or the SPCA or any other outsiders into it, is to go in there and separate the males from the females ourselves, and when she comes back from town, say to her, Okay, Flora, this is a compromise. Sometimes people don’t understand what a compromise is until you force it on them. It’s either that or we sit around waiting for this thing to explode, and then it’ll be too late to compromise, because the outsiders will be in charge.

  MERLE RING: Let Flora continue to keep the animals warm, well-fed, clean, and breeding. Naturally, as their numbers increase, their universe will expand. And as a result, all the people in the trailerpark, insofar as they observe this phenomenon, will find their universe expanding also. (It’s understood that Merle did not express himself this way, for he would have been expressing himself to people who would have been offended by language like that. Here’s how he put it: “It’ll be interesting to see what the woman does with her problem—if it ever actually becomes a problem. And if it never becomes a problem, that should be interesting, too.”)

  Flora’s life up to now ought to have prepared her for what eventually happened with the guinea pigs. It had been a hard life, beginning with the death of her mother when Flora was barely a year old. Flora’s father was what in these parts is often called a rough carpenter, meaning that he could use a hammer and saw well enough to work as a helper to a bona fide carpenter. Usually he was the one who nailed together the plywood forms for making cellar walls and then, when the cement had set, tore the forms apart. During the fall and winter months, when it was too cold for cement to pour, the bona fide carpenters moved to interior work, which required a certain skill and a basic fluency with numbers, and Flora’s father was always among the first in the fall unemployment line.

  There were three older children, older by one, two, and three years, and after the mother died, the children more or less took care of themselves. They lived out beyond Shackford Corners in a dilapidated house that appeared to be falling into its own cellar hole, an unpainted, leaky, abandoned house heated in winter by a kerosene stove, with no running water and only rudimentary wiring. The father’s way of raising his children was to stay drunk when he was not working, to beat them if they cried or intruded on his particular misery, and, when he was working, to leave them to their own devices, which were not especially healthful devices. When Flora’s older brother was six, he set off one of the blasting caps that he found near the lumber camp a half mile behind the house in the woods and blew one of his arms off and almost died. When Flora’s only sister was eleven, she was raped by an uncle visiting from Saskatchewan and after that could only gaze blankly past your head when you tried to talk to her or get her to talk to you. Flora’s older brother, when he was fourteen and she thirteen, sickened and died of what was determined by the local health authorities to have been malnutrition, at which point the remaining three children were taken away from the father and placed into the care of the state, which meant, at that time, the New Hampshire State Hospital over in Concord, where they had a wing for juveniles who could not be placed in foster homes or who were drug addicts or had committed crimes of violence but were too young to be tried as adults. Four years later, Flora was allowed to leave the mental hospita
l (for that is what it was) on the condition that she join the United States Air Force, where she spent the next twenty years working in the main as a maid, or steward, in officers’ clubs and quarters at various bases around the country. She was not badly treated by the Air Force itself, but numerous individual servicemen, enlisted men as well as officers, treated her unspeakably.

  Despite her life, Flora remained good-naturedly ambitious for her spirit. She believed in self-improvement, believed that it was possible, and that not to seek it was reprehensible, was, in fact, a sin. And sinners she viewed the way most people view the stupid or the poor—as if their stupidity or poverty were their own fault, the direct result of sheer laziness and a calculated desire to exploit the rest of humankind, who, of course, are intelligent or well-off as a direct result of their willingness to work and not ask for help from others. This might not seem a particularly enlightened way to view sinners, and it certainly was not a Christian way to view sinners, but it did preserve a kind of chastity for Flora. It also, of course, made it difficult for her to learn much, in moral terms, from the behavior of others. There was probably a wisdom in that, however, a trade-off that made it possible for her to survive into something like middle age without falling into madness and despair.

  Within a week of having moved into the trailerpark, Flora had purchased her first pair of guinea pigs. She went into the Catamount five-and-dime looking for goldfish, but when she saw the pair of scrawny, matted animals in their tiny, filthy cages at the back of the store, she forgot the goldfish, which by comparison looked relatively healthy, despite the cloudiness of the water in their tank. She built her cages herself, mostly from cast-off boards and chicken wire she found at the town dump and carried home. The skills required were not great, were, in fact, about the same as had been required of her father in the construction of cement forms. At the dump she also found pieces of garden hose she needed to make her watering system and the old gutters she hooked up as grain troughs.

  Day and night, she worked for her guinea pigs, walking to town and hauling back fifty-pound bags of grain, dragging back from the dump more old boards, sheets of tin, gutters, and so on. As the guinea pigs multiplied and more cages became necessary, Flora soon found herself working long hours into the night alone in her trailer, feeding, watering, and cleaning the animals, while out behind the trailer the pyramid of mixed straw, feces, urine, and grain gradually rose to waist height, then to shoulder height, finally reaching to head height, when she had to start a second pyramid, and then, a few months later, a third. And as the space requirements of the guinea pigs increased, her own living space decreased, until finally she was sleeping on a cot in a corner of the back bedroom, eating standing up at the kitchen sink, stashing her clothing and personal belongings under her cot, so that all the remaining space could be devoted to the care, housing, and feeding of the guinea pigs.

  By the start of her third summer at the trailerpark, she had begun to lose weight noticeably, and her usually pinkish skin had taken on a gray pallor. Never particularly fastidious anyhow, her personal hygiene now could be said not to exist at all, and the odor she bore with her was the same odor given off by the guinea pigs, so that, in time, to call Flora Pease the Guinea Pig Lady was not to misrepresent her. Her eyes grew dull, as if the light behind them were slowly going out, and her hair was tangled and stiff with dirt, and her clothing seemed increasingly to be hidden behind stains, smears, spills, drips, and dust.

  “Here comes the Guinea Pig Lady!” You’d hear the call from the loafers outside McCallister’s News & Variety leaning against the glass front, and a tall, angular teenager with shoulder-length hair and acne, wearing torn jeans and a Mothers of Invention T-shirt, would stick his long head inside and call your name, “C’mere, take a look at this, man!”

  You’d be picking up your paper, maybe, or because McCallister’s was the only place that sold it, the racing form with yesterday’s Rockingham results and today’s odds. The kid might irritate you slightly—his gawky, witless pleasure, his slightly pornographic acne, the affectation of his T-shirt and long hair—but still, your curiosity up, you’d pay for your paper and stroll to the door to see what had got the kid so excited.

  In a low, conspiratorial voice, the kid would say, “The Guinea Pig Lady.”

  She’d be on the other side of the street, shuffling rapidly along the sidewalk in the direction of Merrimack Farmers’ Exchange, wearing her blue, U.S. Air Force, wool, ankle-length coat, even though this was May and an unusually warm day even for May, and her boot lacings were undone and trailing behind her, her arms chopping away at the air as if she were a boxer working out with the heavy bag, and she was singing in a voice moderately loud, loud enough to be heard easily across the street, “My Boy Bill” from Carousel.

  “Hey, honey!” the kid wailed, and the Guinea Pig Lady, though she ignored his call, stopped singing at once. “Hey, honey, how about a little nookie, sweets!” The Guinea Pig Lady sped up a bit, her arms churning faster against the air. “Got something for ya, honey! Got me a licking stick, sweet lips!”

  If you already knew who the woman was, Flora Pease, of the Granite State Trailerpark out at Skitter Lake, and knew about the guinea pigs and, thereby, could guess why she was headed for the grain store, you’d ease past the kid and away. But if you didn’t know who she was, you might ask the kid, and he’d say, “The Guinea Pig Lady, man. She lives with these hundreds of guinea pigs in the trailerpark out at Skitter Lake. Just her and all these animals. Everybody in town knows about it, but she won’t let anyone inside her trailer to see ’em, man. She’s got these huge piles of shit out behind her trailer, and she comes into town all the time to buy feed for ’em. She’s a fuckin’ freak, man! A freak! And nobody in town can do anything about ’em, the guinea pigs, I mean, because so far nobody out at the trailerpark will make a formal complaint about ’em. You can bet your ass if I lived out there I’d sure as shit make a complaint. I’d burn the fucking trailer to the ground, man. I mean, that’s disgusting, all them animals. Somebody ought to go out there some night and pull her outa there and burn the place down. It’s a health hazard, man! You can get a disease from them things!”

  One September morning, after about a week of not having seen Flora leave her trailer once, even to empty the trays of feces out back, Marcelle decided to make sure the woman was all right, so she stepped across the roadway and knocked on Flora’s door. The lake, below a cloudless sky, was deep blue, and the leaves of the birches along the shore were yellowing. There had already been a hard frost, and the grass and weeds and low scrub shone dully gold in the sunlight.

  There was no answer. Marcelle knocked again, firmly this time, and called Flora’s name.

  A moment later she heard a low, muffled voice from inside. “Go away.” Then silence, except for the breeze off the lake.

  “Are you all right? It’s me, Marcelle!”

  Silence.

  Marcelle tried the door. Locked. She called again, “Flora, let me in!” and stood with her fists jammed against her hips. She breathed in and out rapidly, her large brow pulled down in alarm. A few seconds passed, and she called out, “Flora, I’m coming inside!”

  Moving quickly to the top step, she pitched her shoulder against the door just above the latch, which immediately gave way and let the door blow open, causing Marcelle to stagger inside, off-balance, blinking in the darkness and floundering in the odor of the animals as if she’d fallen in a huge tub of warm water. “Flora!” she yelled. “Flora, where are you?” Bumping against the cages, she made her way around them and into the kitchen area, shouting Flora’s name and peering in vain into the darkness. In several minutes, she had made her way to the bedroom in back, and there in a corner she found Flora on her cot, wrapped in a blanket, looking almost unconscious, limp, bulky, gray. Her hands were near her throat, clutching the top of the blanket like the hands of a frightened, beaten child, and she had her head turned toward the wall, with her eyes closed. She looked like a sic
k child to Marcelle, like her own child, Joel, who had died when he was twelve— the fever had risen, and the hallucinations had come until he was out of his head with them, and then, suddenly, while she was mopping his body with damp washcloths, the wildness had gone out of him, and he had turned on his side, drawn his skinny legs up to his belly, and died.

  Flora was feverish, though not with as high a fever as the boy, Joel, had endured, and she had drawn her legs up to her, bulking her body into a lumpy heap beneath the filthy blanket. “You’re sick,” Marcelle announced to the woman, who seemed not to hear her. Marcelle straightened the blanket, brushed the woman’s matted hair away from her face, and looked around the room to see if there wasn’t some way she could make her more comfortable. The room was jammed with the large, odd-shaped cages, and Marcelle could hear the animals rustling back and forth on the wire flooring, now and then chittering in what she supposed was protest against hunger and thirst.

  Taking a backward step, Marcelle yanked the cord and opened the venetian blind, and sunlight tumbled into the room. Suddenly Flora was shouting, “Shut it! Shut it! Don’t let them see! No one can see me!”

  Marcelle closed the blind, and the room once again filled with the gloom and shadow that Flora believed hid the shape of the life being lived here. “I got to get you to a doctor,” Marcelle said quietly. “Doctor Wickshaw’s got office hours today. You know Carol Constant, his nurse, that nice colored lady who lives next door? You got to see a doctor, missy.”

  “No. I’ll be all right soon,” she said in a weak voice. “Just the flu, that’s all.” She pulled the blanket up higher, covering most of her face, but exposing her dirty bare feet.