Free The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks by Russell Banks

covered by a hinged, wooden panel, keeping the bob-house in total darkness. When no light enters the bob-house, you can sit inside and peer through the holes in the ice and see clearly the world below. You see what the fish see, and you see them, too. But they cannot see you. You see the muddy lake bottom, undulating weeds, and decaying leaves, and, in a cold, green light, you see small schools of bluegills drift over the weed beds in search of food and oxygen, and coming along behind them three or four pickerel glide into view, looking for stragglers. Here and there a batch of yellow perch cruise past, and slowly, sleepily, a black bass. The light filtered through the ice is still, hard, and cold, like an algebraic equation, and you can watch the world pass through it with a clarity, objectivity, and love that is usually thought to be the exclusive prerogative of gods.
    Until one winter a few years ago, Merle Ring was not taken very seriously by the other residents of the trailerpark. He was viewed as peculiar and slightly troublesome, mainly because, while he had opinions on everything and about everyone, when he expressed those opinions, which he did frequently, he didn’t make much sense to people and seemed almost to be making fun of them. For instance, he told Doreen Tiede, who was having difficulties with her ex-husband, Buck, that the only way to make him cease behaving the way he had behaved back when he was her husband, that is, as a drunken, brutal crybaby, was to get herself a new husband. “Who?” she asked him. They were in the car, and she was giving Merle a lift into town on her way to work at the tannery. Her daughter, Maureen, headed to the baby-sitter for the day, was in the back, where she was unaccustomed to sitting. Doreen laughed lightly and said it again, “Really, Merle, who should I marry?”
    “It don’t matter. Just get yourself a new husband. That way you’ll get rid of Buck. Because he won’t believe you’re not his wife until you’re someone else’s.” He looked out the window at the birches alongside the road, leafless and gold-tinted in the morning sun. “That’s how I always did it,” he said.
    “What?” She was clasping and unclasping the steering wheel as if her fingers were stiff and cold. This business with her ex-husband really bothered her, and it was hurting Maureen.
    “Whenever I wanted to get rid of a wife, I married another. Once you’re over a certain age and have got yourself married, you stay married the rest of your life, unless the one you happened to be married to ups and dies. Then you can be single again.”
    “Maybe Buck’ll up and die on me, then,” she said with a quick grimace.
    “Mommy!” the child said and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
    “I was only joking, sweets.” Doreen looked into the rearview mirror. “And stop sucking your thumb. You’re too old for that.” Then, to Merle: “Is that how you got to be single, after all those wives? How many, six, seven?”
    “Numerous. Yup, the last one died. Just in time, too, because I was all set to get married again.”
    “To who?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t have anybody in particular in mind at the time. But I sure was eager to get that last one off my back.”
    “Jesus, Merle, isn’t anything sacred to you?”
    “Sure.”
    “For instance.”
    “Marriage, for instance. But not husbands or wives,” he quickly added.
    “I can’t take you seriously, Merle,” she said, and they drove on in silence.
    That was the form most of his conversations took. It didn’t matter whom he was talking to, Merle’s observations and opinions left you feeling puzzled, a little hurt and irritated. To avoid those feelings most people told themselves and each other that Merle “wasn’t all there,” that he didn’t really understand how complicated life was, and that he really didn’t like anyone, anyhow. But because he was orderly and quiet and, like most small, neat, symmetrical men,