The Man in My Basement (12 page)

“Okay.” He paused. “Mr. Dodd-Blakey. Good morning to you. Did you sleep well?”

“I’ll connect a hose from the sink that you can use to wash your dishes,” I replied. “It’s just cold water but that’ll have to do. You want me to leave the light on?”

“I didn’t get my books last night,” he said. “Would you get them for me?”

“Which one did you want?”

This curt question caught Bennet up short. He put out a hand and touched the metal slats of his cage. For a moment hardness shone in his eyes, but then he said, “The first volume in the
Story of Civilization.
”

I complied without comment. The book was a tight fit under the cage door and the cover ripped.

“Maybe you could open the door for the other ones,” Bennet suggested.

“The only reason that lock comes off,” I said, “is when you get your ass out of here.”

“You sound angry, Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”

I regretted having asked him to refer to me in that way. It was a show of respect, but not to me. I was Charles, son of Mr. Blakey.

“Not angry,” I said. “It’s just… just this whole thing is weird.”

“What?” Anniston Bennet asked, sitting back in his chair behind metal bars as if he were in his den in Greenwich.

“You,” I said, “in this cell under lock and key, with me like some kinda warden and butler all rolled up into one.”

Bennet smiled.

“Have you ever read the
Story of Civilization?
” he asked.

“A long time ago,” I lied. “I’m not so good on a lotta details though.”

“All throughout history there have been men who have isolated themselves from the world,” he said. “They go to mountaintops or sit in meditation for months at a time. They flagellate themselves and refrain from having sex or masturbation. That’s mostly what I’m doing here.”

“But you said that you’re a criminal paying for his crimes,” I pointed out.

Anniston Bennet smiled and hunched his shoulders as if to say,
You got me there.

“Many ancient belief systems are based on the concept of sin, my friend,” he said. “The Hindus accept as truth that they are answering for crimes committed in previous lives. The Hebrews and Christians are answering for the sins of their long-ago ancestors.”

“But that’s not you, is it?”

“No. I don’t have the luxury of a god. But what I do have is not contagious.”

“Come again?”

“In the eyes of the world, Mr. Dodd-Blakey, I am an upright and innocent man. My time here with you would be seen merely as an eccentricity. You can collect my money and serve me dry sandwiches and Kool-Aid. No one will blame you or indict you for the crimes that I recognize as my own.”

“That’s just a lot of talk, Mr. Bennet. I think that it’s crazy what you’re doing, but I took your money, so I’ll hold up my side of the bargain. But don’t you think that I’m gonna be a part of all this crazy talk. I’ll bring you your meals and whatever else I have to do. But I don’t like it and I’ll put you out of here in a minute if anything gets to be too much for me.”

I don’t know how he felt about that because I left before he could engage me anymore. Outside the cellar I began to sweat. My heart was pounding and my ears rang. Inside my chest there was laughter, but the mirth could not make its way to my lips. It came as a throbbing rumble that might have been pleasant if it had an outlet.

I stumbled to the house, up to my room. There I sat on the old maple bed, thinking about Brent and all the mean things he had said to me. I imagined him walking down the halls in his slow shuffling pace. I thought about him cursing the summer for its heat and the winter for cold. I hated his smell and scratchy voice.

I could almost hear him, his wheezing through those last dying days.

Ears ringing, heart pumping, chest throbbing, and sweat dripping, I tried to rise above my body, hoped for my spirit to transcend grief.

It was grief I felt. Deep sadness that no mother or god could calm. I hated Anniston Bennet, hated him. I blamed him for everything that was wrong with me. His damned money and smirks.

I was wondering how long a boiled egg and cornflakes could keep someone alive. Everything was orange colored through closed lids, and my skin was dry and cool.

I opened my eyes. The air and the light in the room told me that it was afternoon. I had been dreaming of the prisoner’s luncheon. His life was like an invisible pulsing beacon, a second heart, a child who needed attention. He was living in my dreams as well as my cellar. I despised him already and he hadn’t even been there a whole day.

I prepared baked beans from the can, boiled potatoes, and cranberry juice for his late lunch. He was already halfway through the thousand-page volume of history, wearing red-rimmed glasses and sitting in the red plastic chair. The breakfast tray was already pushed out. I shoved the lunch tray into his cell.

“What time is it?” he asked.

“Four,” I said, turning to leave.

“It’s not so bad, is it?” he asked.

I turned back and said with false bravado, “Not bad for me at all. I’m not the one locked up in a cold basement on a summer day. I’m not the one kept away from my family and friends.”

“That’s true,” he said. “But you know there’s a belief that any society that is forced to punish its citizens is, to one degree or another, an unhealthy state.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “What country do you know of doesn’t have laws?”

“It’s a question of degree, Mr. Dodd-Blakey,” Bennet replied, “not one of law. A man who recognizes his crime and accepts his punishment is a member of good standing in his country. But the criminal who runs and hides, who is unrepentant even though he knows what he’s done, is a symptom of a much greater disease.”

“None of that has anything to do with you being here,” I said. “You’re renting a room and locking the door—that’s all.”

“No,” the enigmatic white man said to a space somewhere over my head. “I am here answering for crimes against humanity. I am doing so because I am guilty, not because I was caught. And in doing so I am making the world a better place. I’m setting an example down here.”

“How can you be doing that when no one even knows where you are?”

“There’s more to the world than one plus one, Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”

I barely heard him over the pounding of my heart. I worried that maybe he wasn’t crazy, that he wasn’t even a common crook. Even though I didn’t understand what he was saying, I feared that maybe he was right, that he was living out some moral dilemma and that I was caught up in the center of it all without knowing it.

Once outside I was sweating again. I didn’t want to go in my house, so I got in the car and drove into town. I went to Harbor Savings with the money Narciss had sent. The teller went over the check for a full minute before cashing it. Everyone in the Harbor must have known about my thefts.

From the bank I went to Nelson’s Hardware, where I bought three combination padlocks and heavy hinges to hold them. Ricky was sitting on a public bench on Main Street, drinking orange juice from a carton. I pretended not to notice him from across the street.

“Hey, Charles,” he called.

I looked up, feigning surprise, and then crossed over to him.

“Hey, Cat,” I said. “I thought you were working for Wilson Ryder?”

“Took the day off,” he said. “Clarance said he saw you at the train station in the middle of the night.”

“Yeah. I met some girl and she said she wanted to come back out to see me, said she’d be on that train but damned if she was.” I lied smoothly and without a skip.

“Who is she?”

“Abby Peters,” I said, pulling the name out of thin air.

“White girl?”

I said nothing then. If he wanted to wonder about something, I thought it would be best to have him thinking about a girl who didn’t exist.

“Clarance said that you looked upset,” Ricky said.

“Upset?”

“Well actually he said crazy. He said that you had a crazy look in your eye.” Ricky cocked his head to the side in order to see up into my eyes. He was searching for insanity.

“How are you, Cat?”

He made a painful face. “Bethany dropped me.”

“When?”

“Almost two months but I still miss her.” The honest hurt in his voice and eyes told me that he had no suspicions about who Bethany was with now. “It hurts way down. You know, that girl could get somethin’ cookin’ in me. I was thinkin’ about startin’ some kinda serious business, about makin’ a life for myself, for us. You know?”

“You always got life, Cat. Or else you don’t have it. There is nothing else.” It sounded right when I said it. Now it’s just a meaningless line of words.

“
Are
you crazy, Charles?”

I laughed and said, “Just tired, Ricky. Tired of every day.”

“What you mean?”

“I want something else, I guess. Something different.”

“Like what? A vacation?”

“Maybe a journey,” I said. The words were coming from my lips, but I wasn’t thinking about them.

“What’s the difference?” Ricky asked.

“A vacation’s over after two weeks. You go out on a journey and you might not ever come back.”

T
hat evening I took three suits from the hall closet. I hadn’t worn a suit since I worked for the bank. There was a brown one, a deep green, and a blue so dark that I bought it thinking it was black. They were all cleaned and pressed. Before he got sick my father had repaneled all the closets with cedar, so no moths had gotten to them. I rummaged around for some dress shirts and ties. They were my father’s, but we were the same size. His suits fit me too. They seemed to have more character than my straight-cuffed wear. His pants were roomier in the thighs. His socks were argyle. He had bigger shoulders than me, so the jackets were loose but stylish. There were a dozen of his suits in my mother’s closet. And they covered the rainbow.

I’d always wondered why he had so many suits. He was a butcher in Southampton his whole life until he died. I guess he just liked them.

I brought Bennet a Big Mac and fries at about 9:00. He wanted to talk to me, but I didn’t bite. I just shoved his food in and carried the dirty dishes back to the house.

The next day, after feeding the prisoner, I put on a white gabardine that my father wore and a dark-blue dress shirt and cream-colored tie. Tennis shoes were all I had to go with the ensemble, but they looked good in the full-length mirror. I noticed something different about me, but I wasn’t sure what it was. It might have been the hipster clothes, but maybe it was something else.

Giving up that mystery, I drove off to see Narciss Gully.

She wasn’t expecting me. The door to her shop was locked. But after a long while, she came from somewhere and peered through the linen curtains.

Seeing me, she was startled. I don’t know if it was the suit or the surprise appearance, but she opened the door and said, “Mr. Blakey? What are you doing here?”

“Thought I’d check up on my business.” The words didn’t sound like me and the voice was queer. I didn’t know why I had come out to Bridgehampton, to the little converted cottage that Narciss used as her shop and home.

You had to step down to enter the house. The front room was large and there were quilts everywhere—hanging from the walls, spread out on chairs, folded in stacks in the corner. The designs were rude on the whole and the cloth was old, stained, and often yellowing. The dominant color was white, and that made the room nearly glisten. Narciss wore a black skirt that came down to midcalf. It clung to her slender figure and stood out against the whiteness of the room. Her skin, with its subtle variations, seemed like a black-and-brown flame that had been stylized in a painting.

“I was working out back,” she said as an excuse or maybe as a reason to be left alone.

“I thought this shop was your work?”

“It is—in a way. I’m writing a book too, about the Negro quilts of the northeastern states. I hope that it will be a historical document as well as a craft and collecting resource. Harvard University Press wants to publish it.” She rubbed her long fingers against the side of her face and looked down at the floor.

“That sounds nice,” I said. “How long you been working on it?”

“Years,” she said, smiling an apology.

“Good work needs time,” my mother said often and I repeated then.

She smiled again and I blessed my mom.

“How’s it going with my stuff?” I asked.

“Great. I’ve sent out all of my inquiries and people are starting to respond. A few serious collectors of African American art were interested in the masks, but I told them that they were in your permanent collection.” She looked at me, and there was something like pride in her eyes.

“How much do you think we’ll get in the end?”

“I don’t know, maybe eighty thousand dollars.”

If I was in my own clothes, speaking my own words, I would have probably yipped and shouted. Instead I stuck my lips out and nodded.

“That sounds good,” I said. “Sounds like what I expected.”

Narciss was happy to be appreciated. I was happy that she was happy.

“I’ve been reading about your masks,” she said. “They’re really interesting. They were used for tribal identification, but they also were to remind their owner of their home and family—their people.”

I was listening close enough to have repeated her words but I wasn’t concerned. Her skin and fingers and figure so slight that it seemed like they could be easily broken—that’s what I was thinking about.

“You know I’m busy for the next couple of weeks,” I said. “But maybe after that we could have that dinner we keep missing.”

Miss Gully’s mind was in Africa and history and identity, but I don’t think she was upset to switch over to dating.

“That would be nice,” she said. “You know, I’ve tried to call you a few times, but there’s never been any answer.”

“I’ve been away some lately.”

“Oh? Where have you been?”

“Down to the city. I’ve been considering working in Manhattan for some time now. You know, I’ve been here my whole life. I think it’s time for a change.”