The Angel on the Roof by Russell Banks
Except when dealing with Doreen Tiede, that is. Which is why Doreen was able to put Marcelle on the spot and say to her late one afternoon in Marcelle’s trailer at number 1, “What’s with that woman, Flora Pease? Is she a fruitcake, or what? And if she is, how come you let her move in? And if she isn’t a fruitcake, how come she looks the way she does and acts the way she does?” There were in the park, besides Doreen, Marcelle, and Flora, three additional women, but none of them could make Marcelle look at herself and give a straight answer to a direct question. None of them could make her forget her work and stop, even for a second. Only Doreen could get away with embarrassing Marcelle, or at least with demanding a straight answer from her, and getting it, too, probably because both Doreen and Marcelle looked tired in the same way, and each woman understood the nature of the fatigue and respected it in the other. They didn’t feel sorry for it in each other; they respected it. There were twenty or more years between them, and Marcelle’s children had long ago gone off and left her—one was a computer programmer in Billerica, Massachusetts, another was in the Navy and making a career of it, a third was running a McDonald’s in Seattle, Washington, and a fourth had died. Because she had raised them herself, while at the same time fending off the attacks of the man who had fathered them on her, she thought of her life as work and her work as feeding, housing, and clothing her three surviving children and teaching them to be kindly, strong people, despite the fact that their father happened to have been a cruel, weak person. A life like that, or rather, twenty-five years of it, can permanently mark your face and make it instantly recognizable to anyone who happens to be engaged in similar work. Magicians, wise men, and fools are supposed to be able to recognize each other instantly, but so, too, are poor women who raise children alone.
They were sitting in Marcelle’s trailer, having a beer. It was five-thirty, Doreen was on her way home from her job at the tannery, where she was a bookkeeper in the office. Her daughter, Maureen, was with her, having spent the afternoon with a baby-sitter in town next door to the kindergarten she attended in the mornings, and was whining for supper. Doreen had stopped in to pay her June rent, a week late, and Marcelle had accepted her apology for the lateness and had offered her a beer. Because of the lateness of the payment and Marcelle’s graciousness, Doreen felt obliged to accept it, even though she preferred to get home and start supper so Maureen would stop whining.
Flora’s name had come up when Maureen had stopped whining and had suddenly said, “Look, Momma, at the funny lady!” and had pointed out the window at Flora, wearing a heavy, ankle-length coat in the heat, sweeping her yard with a broom. She was working her way across the packed dirt yard toward the road that ran through the center of the park, raising a cloud of dust as she swept, singing in a loud voice something from Fiddler on the Roof—“If I were a rich man…”—and the two women and the child watched her, amazed. That’s when Doreen had demanded to know what Marcelle had been thinking when she agreed to rent a trailer to Flora Pease.
Marcelle sighed, sat heavily back down at the kitchen table, and said, “Naw, I knew she was a little crazy. But not like this.” She lit a cigarette and took a quick drag. “I guess I felt sorry for her. And I needed the money. We got two vacancies now out of twelve trailers, and I get paid by how many trailers have tenants, you know. When Flora came by that day, we got three vacancies, and I’m broke and need the money, so I look the other way a little and I say, sure, you can have number eleven, which is always the hardest to rent anyhow, because it’s on the backside away from the lake, and it’s got number twelve and number ten right next to it and the swamp behind. Number five I’ll rent easy, it’s on the lake, and nine should be easy too, soon’s people forget about Tom Smith’s suicide. It’s the end of the row and has a nice yard on one side, plus the toolshed in back. But eleven has always been a bitch to rent. So here’s this lady, if you want to call her that, and she’s got a regular income from the Air Force, and she seems friendly enough, lives alone, she says, has relations around here, she says, so what the hell, even though I can already see she’s a little off. I figure it was because of her being maybe not interested in men, one of those women. And I figure, what the hell, that’s her business, not mine, I don’t give a damn what she does or who she does it with, so long as she keeps to herself. So I say, sure, take number eleven, thinking maybe she won’t. But she did.”
Marcelle sipped at her can of beer, and Doreen went for hers. The radio was tuned quietly in the background to the country-and-western station from Dover. Doreen reached across the counter to the radio and turned up the volume, saying to no one in particular, “I like this song.”
“That’s ’cause you’re not thirty yet, honey. You’ll get to be thirty, and then you’ll like a different kind of song. Wait.”
Doreen smiled from somewhere behind the fatigue that covered her face. It was a veil she had taken several years ago, and she’d probably wear it until she died or lost her memory, whichever came first. She looked at her red-painted fingernails. “What happens when you’re forty, and then fifty? You like a different kind of song then too?”
“Can’t say for fifty yet, but, yes, for forty. Thirty, then forty, and probably fifty, too. Sixty, now, that’s the question. That’s when you decide you don’t like any of the songs they play, and so you go and sit in front of the TV and watch game shows,” she laughed.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Doreen said, finishing her beer off and standing to leave, “that Flora Pease over there, she’s going to be trouble, Marcelle. You made a big mistake letting her in the park. Mark my words.”
“Naw. She’s harmless. A little fruity, that’s all. We’re all a little fruity, if you want to think about it,” she said. “Some are just more able to cover it up than others, that’s all.”
Doreen shook her head and hurried her daughter out the screened door and along the road to number 4. When she had left, Marcelle stood up and from the window over the sink watched Flora, who swept and sang her way back from the road across her dirt yard to the door, then stepped daintily up the cinder blocks and entered her home.
Then, in August that summer, a quarrel between Terry Constant and his older sister, Carol, who lived in number 10 next door to Flora, caused young Terry to fly out the door one night around midnight and bang fiercely against the metal wall of their trailer. It was the outer wall of the bedroom where his sister slept, and he was doubtless pounding that particular wall to impress his sister with his anger. No one in the park knew what the quarrel was about, and at that hour no one much cared, but when Terry commenced his banging on the wall of the trailer, several people were obliged to involve themselves with the fight. Lights went on across the road at number 6, where Captain Knox lived alone, and 7, where Noni Hubner and her mother, Nancy, lived. It wasn’t unusual for Terry to be making a lot of noise at night, but it was unusual for him to be making it this late and outside the privacy of his own home.
It was easy to be frightened of Terry if you didn’t know him—he was about twenty-five, tall and muscular and very dark, and he had an expressive face and a loud voice—but if you knew him, he was, at worst, irritating. To his sister Carol, though, he must often have been a pure burden, and that was why they quarreled. She had come up from Boston a few years ago to work as a nurse for a dying real estate man who had died shortly after, leaving her sort of stuck in this white world, insofar as she was immediately offered a good job in town as Doctor Wickshaw’s nurse and had no other job to go to anywhere else and no money to live on while she looked. So she took it. Then her mother down in Boston died, and Terry moved in with his sister for a spell and stayed on, working here and there and now and then for what he called monkey money as a carpenter’s helper or stacking hides in the tannery. Sometimes he and Carol would have an argument, caused, everyone was sure, by Terry, since he was so loud and insecure and she was so quiet and sure of herself, and then Terry would be gone for a month or so, only to return one night all smiles and compli
Captain Knox was the first to leave his trailer and try to quiet Terry. In his fatherly way, embellished somewhat by his white hair and plaid bathrobe and bedroom slippers, he informed Terry that he was waking up working people. He stood across the road in the light from his window, tall and straight, arms crossed over his chest, one bushy black eyebrow raised in disapproval, and said, “Not everybody in this place can sleep till noon, young man.”
Terry stopped banging for a second, peered over his shoulder at the man, and said, “Fuck you, Knox!” and went back to banging on the tin wall, as if he were hammering nails with his bare fists. Captain Knox turned and marched back inside his trailer, and, after a few seconds, his lights went out.
Then the girl, Noni Hubner, in her nightgown, appeared at the open door of number 7. Her long, silky blond hair hung loosely over her shoulders, circling her like a halo lit from behind. A woman’s voice, her mother’s, called from inside the trailer, “Noni, don’t! Don’t go out there!”
The girl waved the voice away and stepped out to the landing, barefoot, delicately exposing the silhouette of her body against the light of the living room behind her.
Now the mother shrieked, “Noni! Come back! He may be on drugs!”
Terry ceased hammering and turned to stare at the girl across the road. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki work pants and blue tennis shoes, and his arms hung loosely at his sides, his chest heaving from the exertion of his noisemaking and his anger, and he smiled over at the girl and said, “Hey, honey, you want to come beat on my drum?”
“You’re waking everyone up,” she said politely.
“Please come back inside, Noni! Please!”
The black man took a step toward the girl, and she whirled and disappeared inside, slamming the door and locking it, switching off the lights and dumping the trailer back into darkness.
Terry stood by the side of the road looking after her. “Fuck,” he said. Then he noticed Flora Pease standing next to him, a blocky figure in a long overcoat, barefoot, and carrying in her arms, as if it were a baby, a small, furry animal.
“What you got there?” Terry demanded.
“Elbourne.” Flora smiled down at the chocolate-colored animal and made a quiet, clucking noise with her mouth.
“What the hell’s an Elbourne?”
“Guinea pig. Elbourne’s his name.”
“Why’d you name him Elbourne?”
“After my grandfather. How come you’re making such a racket out here?”
Terry took a step closer, trying to see the guinea pig more clearly, and Flora wrapped the animal in her coat sleeve, as if to protect it from his gaze.
“I won’t hurt ol’ Elbourne. I just want to see him. I never seen a guinea pig before.”
“He’s a lot quieter than you are, mister, I’ll tell you that much. Now, how come you’re making such a racket out here banging on the side of your house?”
“That ain’t my house. That’s my sister’s house!”
“Oh,” Flora said, as if she now understood everything, and she extended the animal toward Terry so he could see it entirely. It was long-haired, shaped like a football, with circular, dark eyes on the sides of its head and small ears and tiny legs tucked beneath its body. It seemed terrified and trembled in Flora’s outstretched hands.
Terry took the animal and held it up to examine its paws and involuted tail, then brought it close to his chest and, holding it in one large hand, tickled it under the chin with his forefinger. The animal made a tiny cluttering noise that gradually subsided to a light drr-r-r, and Terry chuckled. “Nice little thing,” he said. “How many you got, or is this the only one?”
“Lots.”
“Lots? You got a bunch of these guinea pigs in there?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“I suppose you did.”
“Give him back,” she said and brusquely reached out for the animal.
Terry placed Elbourne into Flora’s hands, and she turned and walked swiftly on her short legs around the front of her trailer. After a few seconds, her door slammed shut, and the lights went out, and Terry was once again standing alone in darkness in the middle of the trailerpark. Tiptoeing across the narrow belt of knee-high weeds and grass that ran between the trailers, he came up close to Flora’s bedroom window. “No pets allowed in the trailerpark, honey!” he called out, and he turned and strolled off to get some sleep, so he could leave this place behind him early in the morning.
Either Terry didn’t find the opportunity to tell anyone about Flora Pease having “lots” of guinea pigs in her trailer or he simply chose not to mention it, because it wasn’t until after he returned to the trailerpark, two months later, in early October, that anyone other than he had a clue to the fact that, indeed, there were living in number 11, besides Flora, a total of seventeen guinea pigs, five of which were male. Of the twelve females, eight were pregnant, and since guinea pigs produce an average of 2.5 piglets per litter, in a matter of days there would be an additional twenty guinea pigs in Flora’s trailer, making a total of thirty-seven. About two months after birth, these newcomers would be sexually mature, with a two-month gestation period, so that if half the newborns were females, and if the other mothers continued to be fertile, along with the four original females, then sometime late in December there would be approximately one hundred fifteen guinea pigs residing in Flora’s trailer, of which fifty-four would be male and sixty-one female. These calculations were made by Leon LaRoche, who lived at number 2, the second trailer on your right as you entered the park. Leon worked as a teller for the Catamount Savings and Loan, so calculations of this sort came more or less naturally to him.
“That’s a minimum!” he told Marcelle. “One hundred fifteen guinea pigs, fifty-four males and sixty-one females. Minimum. And you don’t have to be a genius to calculate how many of those filthy little animals will be living in her trailer with her by March. Want me to compute it for you?” he asked, drawing his calculator from his jacket pocket again.
“No, I get the picture.” Marcelle scowled. It was a bright, sunny Sunday morning in early October, and the two were standing in Marcelle’s kitchen, Marcelle, in flannel shirt and jeans, taller by half a hand than Leon, who, in sport coat, slacks, shirt and tie, was dressed for mass, which he regularly attended at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Catamount. It was a conversation last night with Captain Knox that had led young Leon to bring his figures to the attention of the manager, for it was he, the Captain, who had made the discovery that there were precisely seventeen guinea pigs in Flora’s trailer, rather than merely “lots,” as Terry had discovered, and the Captain was alarmed.
It hadn’t taken much imagination for the Captain to conclude that something funny was going on in number 11. When you are one of the three or four people who happen to be around the park all day because you are either retired or unemployed, and when you live across the road from a woman who announces her comings and goings with loud singing, which in turn draws your attention to her numerous expeditions to town for more food than one person can possibly consume, and when you notice her carting into her trailer an entire bale of hay and daily emptying buckets of what appears to be animal feces, tiny pellets rapidly becoming a conical heap behind the trailer, then before long you can conclude that the woman is doing something that requires an explanation. And when you are a retired captain of the United States Army, you feel entitled to require that explanation, which is precisely what Captain Dewey Knox did.
He waited by his window until he saw Flora one morning carryi
Switching the bucket from her right hand to her left, she saluted smartly. “Captain,” she said. “Good morning, sir.”
The Captain casually returned the salute, as befitted his rank. “What was your rank at retirement, Pease?”
“Airman Third Class, sir.” She stood not exactly at attention, but not exactly at ease, either. It’s difficult when retired military personnel meet each other as civilians: their bodies have enormous resistance to accepting the new modes of acknowledging each other, with the result that they don’t quite operate as either military or civilian bodies, but as something uncomfortably neither.
“Airman Third, eh?” The Captain scratched his cleanly shaved chin. “I would have thought after twenty years you’d have risen a little higher.”