The Man in My Basement (22 page)

I covered the hole with two doors that I took off the hinges of the two toilets in my house. The next night I dug some more. The hole was as deep as I am tall before I dragged the board-stiff corpse from my basement. I rolled him in and covered him over. There was no ceremony.

The following day I dismantled the cell. Over the next few weeks I used a blowtorch and an electric saw to cut the metal into pieces, which I deposited, along with the dismantled toilet, in dump sites around the island. I burned his trunk and books and clothes.

All that was left of him were those letters and about forty tapes of his confessions.

He was right; I never sent his letters. I buried them with his tapes in the basement where he died.

I started my museum. Now, with Narciss, I collect pieces of black history from the area where I live. Narciss and I don’t go out anymore. I told her that I’m not monogamous but I’d still like to be friends. After a while she came around.

I make my money from admission fees and from the historically black colleges that send up graduate students and professors now and then to study my collection. Narciss is good at applying for grants, so we usually have enough to pay our salaries.

Chastity Littleneck died and I was the only one other than Irene and the minister at the funeral. The whole time I kept thinking that it was Anniston Bennet’s funeral I was attending. It was sad, but I didn’t cry.

Irene died four weeks later. She left me her house in a new will. It was that one pecan pie and a walk in the graveyard. Bennet was wrong but he would never know it. Some people live according to love and being loved—if only a little.

I rent the Littleneck house to rich people in the summer. And I still live up in my childhood room, playing cards on Thursdays (closing the museum early) and doing very little to make life grand.

Extine went away at the end of the season. If she ever came back she didn’t call me. Bethany married Ricky. Clarance was his best man.

I don’t think I’ll ever get married. I still haven’t found love, and whenever I think about children, I remember that there once was a boy who was sold to a dog.

WALTER MOSLEY
is the author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins series of mysteries; the novels
Blue Light, RL’s Dream,
and
Fearless Jones;
and two collections of stories featuring Socrates Fortlow,
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,
for which he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and
Walkin’ the Dog.
He was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York.