The Angel on the Roof by Russell Banks

Author:Russell Banks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780099286332
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2000-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

Comfort

Leon LaRoche, the bank teller, tried to tell this story once to his friend and neighbor, Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.). Leon was in his late twenties when he made the attempt, and he had been drinking beer with the Captain in the Captain’s trailer for several hours, so he was slightly drunk, or he probably would not have tried to tell it at all. When drunk, it’s your judgment about the sayable that goes, not your inhibitions.

The two men had been talking about a kid who used to live at the trailerpark, Buddy Smith, who had been a thief and a liar and whose father, Tom Smith, had finally thrown him out of the trailer he’d shared with his son for most of the kid’s life. Six months after the son departed, the father shot himself, and nobody understood any of it. Buddy Smith never showed up in Catamount again, not even for the funeral, and that had been the end of the matter, except when folks now and then wondered whatever happened to him and wondered why his father, a sociable, though utterly private man, had killed himself. Most people believed that by now the kid was locked up in jail somewhere out West, where his mother was supposed to live, and that Tom Smith had shot himself in the mouth with his shotgun because, since he had been living alone, his drinking had got out of hand, and too much drinking alone can make you depressed. Nobody thought the two events, the son’s departure and the father’s suicide, were connected. At least not in such a way as to think the suicide could have been avoided, which is to say, at least not in such a way as you could blame the son for the death of the father.

“I liked Buddy,” Leon said, gazing into his glass. “I really did.” The two men were seated at the Captain’s kitchen table, the television set still rumbling behind them in the living room, for when Leon knocked on the door and offered to share a six-pack of beer with him, the Captain had been watching the evening news and in his pleasure had neglected to shut the machine off. The older man was grateful for the interruption—it was a frosty November night, and people generally don’t go calling on people uninvited on nights like this—and when the first six-pack was drunk, the Captain started offering beer from his refrigerator, until they found themselves working their way through a third six-pack. The Captain said he didn’t mind, it was a Friday night anyhow, and he was restless and felt like having company, so what the hell, crack open another, Leon, and relax, for Chrissakes, you’re too uptight, boy. “You remind me of myself when I was your age,” he told Leon. “Some people have to learn to relax, have to force themselves to do it, and then after a while it comes naturally,” he said laughing, as if to prove how finally it had come naturally to him.

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