The Man in My Basement (5 page)

That was a gas.

Christ’s Hope Church was just three blocks up from my house and many a churchgoer had to drive past my place. Almost everyone slowed to see me stripped to the waist, cutting down the dead weeds and grasses that had grown wild for years.

Peaches and Floyd drove by. They came to a virtual stop in order to gawk. I smiled at them and waved. Peaches said something to her husband and they sped off to God.

T
hat was one of the hardest days I ever put in. Twelve thirty-nine-gallon plastic bags of trash and dead weeds. I only had two empty bags left. In the afternoon I broke my fast with instant coffee, baked beans, and quick-cooking polenta. I carried the meal on a tray up to the third floor, to my mother’s sewing room, which was a small chamber off her bedroom. There she had a treadle-powered sewing machine and a small table meant for piecework.

I put my tray on the table and stared out the window like I used to do as a child when my parents were out. Her window was the observation deck for my fortress. I could see our family graveyard and my great-grandfather’s stand of oaks and then up the side of the piney hills behind our community. As a child I sat there for hours shooting BBs at Confederate soldiers or the English. I was a patriotic Yankee fighting to protect my home.

My mother was still alive in that room. The basket with her threads and yarns sat next to her spindly maple chair. Her worn sewing slippers lay underneath the table, making it seem as if she would soon be coming up to use them. I could see her in my mind, long face and coffee-and-cream-colored skin. Her nose was broad but not so flat and her eyes were as round as some forest creature’s orbs. She always smiled just to see me. That smile was always waiting for me upstairs in her room.

My father was dimmer in my memory. Much darker than Mom, he was thick. Not fat but strong like a tree trunk. He had big hands and a giant’s laugh. Nobody expected him to drop dead, certainly not me. Maybe if I had warning I would have looked closer, listened more attentively while he was still alive. As it is he’s just a big hole in my memory, a hole where there was a yearning. I looked away over the hills because if I paid too much attention to my father’s absence, the yearning would turn into a yowl.

A dead leaf from the previous fall was tumbling on a sudden wind. Its progress was almost musical; it seemed to be tinkling in the breeze. I looked and listened and then realized that the phone was ringing downstairs.

My foot hit the last step to the first floor when the ringing stopped. The leaf was still blowing in my mind’s eye and I was laughing. I sat down next to the phone, wondering whether or not to go up for my beans and cornmeal. My hesitation was rewarded with another ring.

There was a great deal of static over the line.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Blakey. Anniston Bennet.”

“Oh, Mr. Bennet. I didn’t expect to hear from you until at least tomorrow.”

“I call into my messages every six hours unless I’m somewhere where I can’t get to a phone. You’re interested in renting me your basement?”

“We can talk about it.”

I thought I heard the hiss of a sharp intake of breath. Maybe it was the bad connection, but I got the feeling that Mr. Bennet was not a patient man.

“I don’t have time to come out there again, Mr. Blakey.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you then.”

We were silent for a few beats while the chatter of the static went merrily along. At one point I thought the connection might have broken off.

“I can come out there on Friday,” Bennet said in a restrained tone. Another conversation interfered with us over the lines. It was some foreign tongue, sounded Arabic but I’m not too good with languages.

“What time?” I asked over the new conversation.

“Four. Four in the afternoon.”

“I’ll see you at four then.”

“Four,” Anniston Bennet said one more time, and the connection was broken.

There I sat, listening to phone static from some foreign land, happy even though I had just made the first step toward giving up my solitude. I tried to imagine the little white man coming into my kitchen while I was standing there in my drawers with a hangover.

From there I wondered about the word
hangover
for a while. Was it an old seafaring term? Was the image of a sailor throwing up over the side of the ship, hanging on for his life? That brought me around to thinking about liquor, Southern Comfort to be exact. Ricky loved Southern Comfort and I did too.

“Hey, Cat,” I said into the receiver.

“Charles, hey.”

“You doin’ anything?”

“Uh-uh, man. Not me. Clarance out with his wife an’ kids. He sure don’t wanna see you after Thursday night.”

“Yeah.” I paused, anticipating the drink. “Hey, Ricky?”

“Hey what?”

“You wanna pick up a pint of SC and come on over?”

“Shit.”

“I’ll pay you for the whole thing when you get here, man.” That was a good offer and Ricky knew it. “I need some help with my basement.”

“Okay,” he said. “I gotta give my sister a ride, but then I’ll be over.”

“Is it dry?” Ricky asked, holding his tumbler of iced Southern Comfort and peering down into the darkness of the cellar.

“Yeah. These doors are triple ply and high. No rain can get in.” I took a few steps down and pulled the chain on the light.

Ricky followed.

“Big down here,” he said.

“All this junk, man. I gotta get rid of it.”

“Why? You gonna rent to that white man?”

“No,” I lied.

I’ve lied all my life. To my parents and teachers and friends at school. I lied about being sick and not coming in to work, about romantic conquests, my salary, my father’s job. I’ve lied about where I was last night and where I was right then if I was on the phone and no one could see me. I have lied and been called a liar and then lied again to cover other falsehoods. Sometimes I pretend to know things that I don’t know. Sometimes I lie to tell people what I think they want to hear.

It’s not such a bad thing—lying. Sometimes it protects people’s feelings or gives them confidence or just makes them laugh.

But I never told a lie like that one-word fib to Ricky about Anniston Bennet. Somehow I knew that I shouldn’t talk about the little man who calls from Arabia about a basement sublet. I wanted to keep those cards close to my vest.

“Damn, you got some old stuff down here,” Ricky was saying.

“Junk.”

“Uh-uh, man. This is antique-quality shit.”

“Shit is right.”

“No, Charles. These old dolls and wood toys are valuable. So’s the furniture, the trunk, probably the clothes in the trunk, and maybe even these old paintings. You can’t tell, man. These people out here spend five hundred dollars on an old broked-down chair in a minute.” Ricky had lived his teenage years in Brooklyn with his father. The way he talked was different than the way most of my friends did. But he had an eye for profit. One summer he and Clarance ran a nighttime hot-dog stand in East Hampton. Charged three and four dollars for hot dogs, and got it.

“How do I sell this stuff? Yard sale?”

“That’s sucker shit right there, man. Uh-uh. There’s some dealers in East Hampton and Southampton. I know who they are, but you know they wanna rob you. But there’s this sister out around Bridgehampton run a little store that specializes in old quilts. Narciss Gully. If we could get Narciss out here to look at your stuff and then broker it with the other dealers, then you might make out.”

“You know her?”

“Ten percent.”

“Say what?” My tumbler was empty and I just felt the Southern Comfort in my blood.

“Ten percent,” Ricky said again. “I don’t do any manual labor and I’m not responsible if at the end you don’t think you got enough money.”

“What does she get out of it?”

“I’ll suggest ten percent for her too, but she might ask for as much as twenty.”

“Thirty percent gone and you two don’t do nothing but introduce?” I was arguing, but I knew it was a lost cause. I had the woman’s name; I could have called her on my own. But that would have cut Ricky out—I would never have treated a friend like that.

I spent the next day pulling junk out of my basement. It was a day full of the dry husks of spiders and centipedes, and dust on top of oily grime that had been laid down before the Civil War. I washed and swept and scrubbed with every brush I had—even my uncle Brent’s old toothbrush. My work yielded six boxes of old books (including three diaries from three generations of Blakeys and Dodds), wooden toys, tools that I couldn’t even figure out how to hold, and so many piles of old clothes that I could only make a stab at separating them. Tuxedos and jeans, fancy dresses and all kinds of undergarment straps, dried-up elastics, and buckles. Most of the clothes looked like they could have been for children, but it was just that I had a long line of short people in my family. My parents were only the second generation of big Blakeys. I’m six foot two. My father was six one.

I moved all the furniture out of the living room and brought in the loot, piling it in each of the corners according to type. When the job was done, I sat in the wide seat of the bay window to appreciate my labor.

I liked hard work. A big pile of stones that need to be moved, a field to plow. What I love is a big job that takes muscle and stick-to-itiveness. I’m not into a lot of details or measuring or comparing. I don’t want to build a steam engine; just give me a sledgehammer or a shovel and I can work all day long, all month if I have to.

“Hello?” The voice came from the front door, which was open. “Mr. Blakey?”

I had been asleep. The room around me was dim because there was no light on and the sun was setting outside.

“Mr. Blakey?” She was tall and thin, brittle looking on first glance. That was probably because she was so tentative coming into a stranger’s home.

“Over here,” I said. My voice was heavy from sleep, but there was a quality to it that was different. I don’t know if you want to call it musical or assured or maybe mature, like a man.

“Charles Blakey?” the tall woman asked.

“Yeah. And I guess you’re Narciss Gully.”

Hearing her name calmed the skittish woman a bit.

“Oh,” she said. “It was dark and I didn’t know…”

I went to the wall near where she’d entered the room and turned on the light.

“…didn’t know if something was wrong.” She was brown, mostly dark brown, but here and there it lightened a little, lending a subtle texture to her skin. I imagined the broad sweep of clouds across the earth from an astronaut’s view. Or maybe it was a parchment, incredibly old and almost erased by age and rain, the slight gradation of color coming from sepia glyphs whose secrets were now gone.

“…I mean it was so dark,” she continued, obviously still nervous about coming into a strange man’s house without the proper reception.

I didn’t help to relieve her fears, looking her over, thinking strange thoughts about her skin.

“…and you were just sitting there…”

“I’ve been working all day pulling stuff out of the cellar because Ricky said you’d come by at eight. I guess I worked so hard that I fell asleep here in the window.” And there it was—the truth. There was no lie in my words, body language, or voice. And again I wondered what had happened. It was almost as if I were in one of my beloved Philip José Farmer fantasies. Like I had gone to sleep in a mundane world and awakened in a fantastical place where the colors were brighter and youth was eternal. It was partially like that, like some fantasy, but this new world of mine was only subtly different; only my point of view and clarity of vision had altered.

“Oh,” Narciss said, looking around the large living room. “There’s a lot, isn’t there?”

She wasn’t a beautiful woman, except for that skin. Probably my age, give or take. Her face was squarish and the white-rimmed glasses were too big for her features. Her eyes were a muddy color and her fingers were too long it seemed. But when she splayed out those digits to indicate the immensity of the trove I had uncovered, I appreciated their reach.

“You think it’s worth anything?”

“I can’t tell until I’ve studied it, but it certainly looks interesting.”

“Hey, Charles?” came another voice.

“In here, Ricky,” I said.

When he came in I was disappointed because he wasn’t carrying a bottle in a bag. Whenever I heard Ricky’s voice, I got the urge to drink. I wondered then how often since we were children that we had been sober together.

“Hey, Narciss. How are you?”

“Fine, Richard,” she said.

“You guys met, huh?”

“Yeah, Cat.” Ricky winced when I called him by his nickname. I didn’t use it again that night.

Narciss was already down on her knees, looking through the toys. She had on close-fitting khaki trousers with a matching woman’s jacket. She took off the jacket, revealing a loose black T-shirt. She was dressed for hard work.

While she worked Ricky and I sat side by side in the window seat, watching her plow through my family’s accumulation of junk.

“You wanna go get a shot at Bernie’s?” Ricky asked me. That meant the drinks were on him. That was our code—the man who suggested drinks paid for them.

I wanted to go. But I was also interested in everything about Narciss. By then she was sitting in a half-lotus position, going over old photographs and letters that my mother kept in a miniature steamer trunk she’d inherited from some aunt or another. With every new letter she clucked her tongue or hummed. I felt like she was a teacher impressed by my homework assignment.

Narciss was marking out a history that would probably have captured the interest of historians and anthropologists around the nation. But for me there was only her, scrutinizing a pile of refuse that, if it weren’t for her concern, I would have used to make a bonfire in the backyard.

R
icky was fidgety. He wasn’t used to sitting around while others worked.