The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks Read Online Free PDF Page B

here to Katonga. For hundreds of thousands of years, these people, our Katongan employees, had been equatorial rain-forest hunters and subsistence farmers, and I probably should not have expected them to adapt as quickly as nineteenth-century New Englanders to working with industrial machinery, day in and day out, year in and year out, on assembly lines manufacturing products that they themselves would never use or even see used by others. Ordinarily, I understood the obstacles they faced and, without prejudice, scaled my expectations accordingly. But today, for some reason, I was baffled by their ineptitude and inattention and consequently found myself screaming at them for the slightest offense or oversight. By midafternoon, whenever I approached the line, the workers looked down or away, and when I retreated to the office, the clerks and managers started shuffling through their files as if searching for a lost letter. Finally, I gave it up and called for my driver and returned to town.
    I asked to be let off at Binga Park, and walked straightaway to the café at the end of the cul-de-sac near my hotel. When I reached the corner of the narrow street, and from the square peered down its length to the deserted café and bar at the end, where Andrew calmly washed yesterday’s mud and Djinn’s blood off the cobblestones of the courtyard that surrounded his tables, something turned me away—a felt , rather than heard or seen, warning was issued to me. This place is terribly cold, I thought. Quickly, I walked on and went directly to my hotel room, where I poured myself a tumbler of whiskey and sat by the window, looked out on the park, and waited for dark.
    Several drinks later, night had arrived. From my window, I saw the lights of the town come up—strings and chains of lights brightening rooms and lobbies and public spaces and along streets and alleys, illuminating in strips and spots the lives of the people who lived with one another in the cramped tenements and worker-hotels, the boardinghouses and restaurants and outdoor cafés of Gbandeh. My gloom lifted somewhat then, and, for the first time since the previous night, solitude and difference eased their grip on my sense of myself. I left my hotel for the street, and made for the café.
    At the crowded bar, I signaled to Andrew, who broke off his conversation with an attractive young woman, Japanese or Korean, in jeans and T-shirt and, without being asked, he brought me an opened Rhino and glass. “Welcome back, sir,” he said.
    “Andrew, I have to ask you something. About Djinn.”
    “No problem, sir. What about him?”
    I said that I had been shocked by what had happened to him. And shocked even more that no one had objected or even seemed to care when he was shot and killed. “Killed for what? For climbing the wall of a building? For refusing to come down when the policeman ordered him to? Andrew, that hardly deserves shooting,” I said.
    “He broke the rules, sir. He never should have climbed the wall.”
    “But he’s a madman! That could have been you!” I said. “Or me! Any one of us could be mad. Maybe we are mad, and he’s the sane one. Who can say for sure?”
    “Doesn’t matter, sir. It’s the rules that matter, and he broke them.”
    “But they were small rules that he broke. He was killed for it!”
    Andrew shrugged, then abruptly asked me how I had enjoyed my meat and vegetable pie.
    “What? Well, fine,” I said. “I mean, it was actually delicious.”
    Did I wonder about the meat? he wanted to know. He no longer looked at me, but seemed to be trying to catch the eye of the Asian woman at the far side of the bar.
    “What has this to do with Djinn, may I ask? And by the way, Andrew, I don’t want this beer, I want a whiskey. Neat.”
    He smiled graciously and poured from the best bottle in the place, and when he set the glass before me, he said, “I hope you’re not upset there was no bush meat for it, sir. No chimp.”
    “Upset?” I