The Man in My Basement (16 page)

“I came over to see if she did something, but it was just a letter so I was going back. Then you come blunderin’ down.”

“It was a woman?”

“The one that came and moved all that stuff outta your house with that Puerto Rican boy.”

“You were sitting outside?” I asked. It felt nice to have words with a neighbor even if it was 3:00 in the morning and I was running a private prison in my home.

“Havin’ a cigarette,” she said. “You know Chastity’s too sick for me to smoke in the house. Doctor said that her lungs are too weak.”

Irene had always been old. When I was five, she was in her fifties. She and her sister, Chastity, used to come over and visit with my mother and Brent. I think Irene was sweet on my sour uncle.

“Oh,” I said. “How is your sister, Miss Littleneck?”

“Not so good, Charles. She’s been in that bed for almost a year now. I make her walk around the room twice a day, but it’s getting harder and harder to get her up.”

The sadness in Irene’s voice was pitiful. She and Chastity had lived together their entire lives. But the only time I ever saw Chastity in the previous five years was when the ambulance came now and then to take her off to the hospital for some kind of treatment.

“I’m sorry to hear it, Miss Littleneck. If you need anything, just come over and ask, okay? If I’m not here just leave me a note.”

“Oh, thank you, Charles. Thank you. Thank you.” She was too far away to touch me, but she held out a thin hand anyway. Her gratitude was beyond anything I had said or done.

“Well,” I said. “I better be getting back to bed. Good night.”

“Good night,” she said, but she didn’t move until I went back inside my door.

Dear Mr. Blakey,
I apologize for getting off the phone so abruptly the other night. I called back the next day, but there was no answer. Tonight I was up late working on my book and I decided to write you.
I’m sorry for not giving you a chance to express your feelings about your business. I suppose that we’re just of different temperaments and shouldn’t try to force communication. But I want you to know that I do respect your wishes and I will execute the sale of your property with the utmost professionalism.
Sincerely,
Narciss Gully

The only reason I mention the letter here is to document how much my life had changed. Not my life exactly but the circumstances of my world. Narciss wanted me to call her, that is what I believed. She was up in the middle of the night thinking about me, trying to get me out of her head and then trying to write me out of, or into, her life.

All that and I was no closer to love.

I made coffee and plans instead of going to bed. I wanted something. I didn’t know exactly what that something was, but I was pretty sure that Anniston Bennet was the key. I had to come to a deal with him, an understanding. But up until then I felt that he was in control of every interaction even though he was the one locked up.

I read Narciss’s letter a dozen times while thinking in the back of my mind about Bennet.

She answered on the first ring. “Hello.” It was 5:00 in the morning by then.

“Hey, Narciss,” I said. “I just found your note.”

“You’re up early,” she said.

“Let’s have lunch tomorrow. You know, not later today but the next day.”

“I don’t know.”

“The Japanese place in Sag Harbor is open for lunch, I think. Let’s go there,” I said.

“What time?”

“One-thirty. We can go at one-thirty and avoid a lunch crowd.”

“I don’t know if I should, Mr. Blakey.”

“The name is Charles and don’t think about it, just meet me. I won’t bite and I won’t make you see me again if you don’t want.”

“Are we going to talk business?”

“No. No business. I just want to clear up a couple of things.”

She hesitated. I heard a tapping on her end of the line.

“I don’t do much dating…”

“I just want to get together. It’s not a date. It’s lunch.”

“Okay. One-thirty tomorrow.”

“See ya then.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Good morning, Mr. Bennet,” I said at 6:45.

I snapped on the light and he jerked up from his mattress on the floor.

“Good morning.”

I shoved the cold cereal and fruit under the door and sat on the trunk.

“Here’s the deal,” I said.

Bennet sat in his red chair and ran his hand down across his face until he was clasping his throat.

“Go on,” he said.

“Everything is a privilege. Food is a privilege and so is water and light and the books to read. If you want me to be the warden of your life, then that’s just what I’ll be.”

“How do I earn these privileges?” Bennet asked. He was very serious.

“I will ask you questions. And you will answer them. If you refuse or I don’t like your answers, then a privilege will be taken away. If I don’t like your attitude, I will suspend privileges. If you lie, the same thing.”

“But how will you know if I’m lying?”

“You will have to prove it to me.”

For some reason that answer made Bennet flinch.

“And what are my rights?” he asked.

“You have only one right in here,” I said. “At any time you can ask to be released. And then, ninety-six hours after that request, I will open the door and you can go.”

“Don’t forget your money.”

“I don’t care about the money. All I care about is my rules in my jail.”

“And why the ninety-six-hour delay?”

“Because you’re not going to be the boss here. This is my house. If you want to play some stupid game, you have to play by my rules. And believe me, if you say tomorrow that you want out, I will turn out the light and leave you down here with nothing but a mug of water for four days.”

I believe that that was the first time I saw the true Anniston Bennet. All artifice was gone from his face. His brow knitted and his fingers did a jittery little dance.

“And if I don’t answer your questions to your satisfaction?” he asked.

“Same thing,” I said. “Solitary confinement. No light. Bread and water. For four days.”

“What is this, Charles? Do you think you can break me?”

“This is my home,” I said. “My home, my rules.”

“How long do I have to think about this?”

“Right now. Right now. Either you say that you agree or I pull your ass outta there and drive you to the train station in those pajamas.”

Underneath the glowering eyes a smile came to Anniston Bennet’s lips.

“I will agree on one condition,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Even though I might not exercise the option, I reserve the right to ask you one question for every three you ask of me. And you give me your word that you will answer as honestly as you can.”

“Deal,” I said.

“And if I answer the question you ask of me, that is, if you believe my answer, then I won’t be punished because your question was inadequate. Also you have to ask specific questions and not something like
Tell me everything about this or that.
”

“Okay,” I said. I had already thought about the types of questions that would be fair. I agreed with his reservations. I believed that if I couldn’t ask the question, then I didn’t deserve an answer. “Okay. I’ll be specific and I will say why I don’t believe something.”

Anniston Bennet nodded his agreement. He was deadly serious. I can’t even begin to explain how I felt.

“W
hy are you here?” I had brought him panfried scrod and boiled potatoes for dinner—that and a small pitcher of chilled Irish Breakfast tea.

“I don’t understand.”

It was the first jab and counter in our contest.

“Why do you want to be here in this cell in my basement? Why do you feel you should be in jail?”

Bennet had been sitting in his red plastic chair. He stood, held his hands out, and splayed his fingers. One hand was held high; the other was at waist level. They were like an ancient image of twin suns.

“Because, Charles. I am criminal.” The suns turned to fists. “I have broken every commandment and dozens of laws and ordinances.”

“What laws have —”

“It’s my turn,” he said.

“I only asked you one question.”

“Why am I here?” he said, holding up a solitary thumb. “Why do I want to be here?” The forefinger. “And why do I feel I should be in jail?”

His count was correct, and I wanted to play by the rules.

“Did you embezzle money from Harbor Savings?” he asked.

My first impulse was to say no. I almost did. Then I wanted to say yes, but I couldn’t get the word out of my mouth. I sat there, gritting my teeth. Bennet’s only emotion was bland patience.

It dawned on me that I had gotten into a game that I could lose. If I played by the rules we’d set out that morning, I was open to questions that made me just as vulnerable as Bennet. If I answered truthfully, he would have something on me.

And I couldn’t be sure if what he told me was the truth.

“Yes,” I said anyway. “Yes, I took money from the drawer. I guess you could call it embezzlement.”

Anniston Bennet smiled.

“Have you ever murdered anybody?” I asked, expecting to wipe the smirk off his face.

“No,” he replied, still showing his small teeth.

I stood up, knocking the standing book trunk flat on the floor behind me. “That’s it!” I shouted. “Four days’ solitary!”

He leaped to his feet also.

“That’s not fair!” he cried, a bit playfully.

“Yes it is. You lied. I already know that you murdered that soldier in North Vietnam. Either you lied then or you are now.”

“I did not lie on either count,” Bennet complained. “I never said that I murdered that soldier. I said that I killed him, shot him actually. But I was ordered to do so by a legal representative of the government. I no more murdered that soldier than an executioner murders a condemned man.”

“You said that you broke every commandment,” I argued. But I realized before I finished that the commandment says
Thou shalt not kill;
it does not say
murder.

“Are you a lawyer, Mr. Bennet?” I asked.

“No. I have no formal training as a lawyer and neither have I taken or passed the bar in any state or nation.”

“What did you steal?”

“Only one thing,” he said. “It was years ago, in the seventies in a villa outside of Rio de Janeiro. A painting that was just there leaning up against the wall in a poorly lit hallway that no one went into much. It was in a rich man’s house. I was newly out of Asia and looking for a shipping connection outside the U.S. that would be willing to move what some saw as contraband. The man who owned the house also owned a dozen ships. Not big ships but big enough for my purposes. But it wasn’t working out. The man either wanted too much or was scared and asked for too much, so I would have to abandon my efforts. I stayed a day or two too long. His daughter hated him. She would come up to my room every night and make love to me and tell me how much she hated him. She was the one who showed me the painting.

“It was a nude, a foot high and nine inches wide. She was peach colored and leaning over a blue chair. Picasso. Just threw it in my suitcase while Embado’s daughter was sleeping in my bed. She slept late that day, and I managed to leave without waking her.”

I allowed the idea to seep in. It wasn’t the painting or Brazil or a beautiful young woman coming to him for sex in her own father’s home. It wasn’t any one of those things but all of them together. Thinking about his access to power and wealth, about his almost innocent lack of morals, set off an empty feeling in my chest.

I looked into his blue eyes while I thought of how to phrase my next question.

He saw what was going on in my eyes and said, “My turn.”

I counted to myself and then nodded.

“Have you ever killed anybody?”

I wanted to get up and leave right then, to run away from Bennet—and everything else. I thought that I could free him and then I’d drive to New York. From there I could make it down to Atlanta, change my name, get a job unloading boxes.

But there was something about the peach-colored nude and the naked woman in the bed—something about me spending an entire lifetime up in my room reading comic books and masturbating while there was a real world outside that I was too scared to acknowledge. These things held me. Bennet’s question was the deepest contact that I had ever had with another human being.

Brent was dying. He was almost dead already. The hospice nurse came in every morning to see about him. She changed his diapers and washed him. She fed him breakfast and then a volunteer would come later in the day to feed him dinner. The meals were the same, just a can of vitamin-enriched milk-shake-like stuff. Chocolate for dinner and banana in the morning. The nurse said that I should look in on him at night, but I never did—letting him sleep, I said to myself.

By then he couldn’t even talk. He’d open his eyes when I’d come into the room though. He looked at me with longing eyes. Sometimes he’d hold out a feeble hand.

Before he was that far gone, Brent asked me to sit down next to his bed one morning. I had just brought in his breakfast and was getting ready to leave.

“Charles.”

His voice was weak. I pretended not to hear him.

“Charles, please sit down for a minute.”

I did as he asked. He took my hand.

“What?”

“I just wanted to say that I was sorry, boy. I just wanted to say that I know I treated you bad all these years. Called you names. Told you you were no good. I can see now that all that time what you needed was a father. That’s why you were so bad. You were just mad and I never saw why. Can you forgive me?”

Tears came into my eyes. Tears of rage. The idea that Brent would mention my father, that he would dare to even suggest that he could have taken my father’s place, made me hate him more than I ever had. I let go of his hand so as not to crack his fingers. He saw the tears and smiled. I believe that he thought I was forgiving him, that those tears were his absolution.