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

physically attractive, and because his financial life was under control, he was accepted into the community. Also, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other if you took him seriously or if you followed his advice, and, as a result, Merle was never an agitated man, which, naturally, made him an attractive neighbor. No one thought him a particularly useful neighbor, however.
    Until he won the state lottery, that is. That same October morning, the morning he saw the first ice on the lake and a little later had the brief conversation with Doreen Tiede concerning her ex-husband, Buck, he purchased, as he did every month, a one-dollar lottery ticket. It was a habit for Merle, ever since the state first introduced the lottery back in the 1960s, to go into town the day after his social security check arrived in the mail, cash his check at the bank, and on the way home stop at the state liquor store and buy a fifth of Canadian Club and a single lottery ticket. There were several types available, but Merle preferred the Daily Numbers Game, in which you play a four-digit number for the day. The winning number would be printed the next morning in the Manchester Union Leader . For your one-dollar bet, the payoff on four digits in the exact order was $4,500. At that point, your number went into another lottery, the Grand Prize Drawing, made later in the year, for $50,000. Merle won $4,500, and here’s how he did it. He bet his exact age, 7789—on October 30, 1978, he was seventy-seven years, eight months, nine days old. He had always bet his age, which of course meant that the number he played varied slightly, but systematically, from one month to the next. He claimed it was on principle, for he did not believe, on the one hand, in wholly giving over to chance or impulse or, on the other, in relying absolutely on a fixed number. It was a compromise, a realistic compromise, in Merle’s mind, between randomness and control, two extremes that, he felt, led to the same place— superstition. There were, of course, three months a year when, because he was limited to selecting four single-digit numbers, he could not play his exact age, and in those months, December, January, and February, he did not buy a ticket. But those were the months he spent ice-fishing, and it seemed somehow wrong to him, to gamble on numbers when you were ice-fishing. At least, that’s how he explained it.
    Merle took his $4,500, paid the tax on it, and spent about $250 refurbishing his bob-house. It needed a new floor and roof and a paint job, and many interior fixtures had fallen into disrepair. The rest of the money he gave away, as loans, of course, but Merle once said that he never loaned money he couldn’t afford to give away, and as a result of this attitude, no one felt especially obliged to pay him back. Throughout November, Merle hammered and sawed away at his bob-house, while people from the trailerpark came and went, congratulating him on his good luck, explaining their great, sudden need for $300 or $400 or $500, then, while he counted out the bills, thanking him profusely for the loan. He kept his prize money inside a cigar box in his toolbox, a huge, locked wooden crate far too heavy for fewer than four men to carry and located just inside the door to his trailer.
    Meanwhile, the ice on the lake gradually thickened and spread out from the coves and shallows, creeping over the dark water like a pale shadow. Merle’s bob-house was a handsome, carefully fitted structure. The bottom sills had been cut to serve as runners, so that Merle could push the building out onto the ice alone. The interior was like a ship’s cabin, with hinged shelves and lockers, hooks and drawers, a small woodstove made from a twenty-five-gallon metal drum, a padded bunk that folded against the wall when not in use, and so on. The interior wood, white pine, had been left raw and over the years had darkened from woodsmoke and moisture to the color of old briar. The exterior,