The Man in My Basement (14 page)

U
p in my room, I studied the passport masks on the windowsill. I had them standing on their chins with their heads propped up against the glass. One’s mouth formed an O, making him seem like he was singing. The two others were tight-lipped, maybe humming the music for their brother’s song.

Maybe they were black slavers,
I thought,
and maybe Anniston Bennet’s ancestor owned the ship that they navigated.

I realized that I wasn’t afraid or upset for the first time in many years. And even though I had had a lot to drink, I wasn’t tired or even tipsy anymore. The talk with Bennet exhilarated me. I didn’t even remember at that time what he’d said. I just knew that it was important, that I was privy to a way of thinking that wasn’t taught in schools or at the dinner table. In some crazy way it was what I liked about the wild. There were no moral laws or rules governing the lives of wolves and bears. Those creatures lived only by the instinct of survival. What Bennet said about the world was the same thing, only with the added ingredient of sly thought. Looking out of my window, I wanted to howl at the moon.

The night moved along, but I did not tire. Snatches of phrases kept returning from my discussion with Bennet. Knowledge and ownership, a hundred times the return on an investment. But most of all I was taken by his confidence and certainty. He
knew
how the world worked. Not like Clarance or the construction boss Wilson Ryder. They just repeated what they read in books or what they wanted to believe. I believed that Bennet knew the truth that lay under the newspaper stories and the hypocrisy of politics. He made me question what was, when for a whole lifetime up till that moment, I accepted the world’s excuses.

Wandering the house and thinking about my prisoner, I was still awake at 2:00 in the morning. Not only awake but excited. All of my fears about being tricked and sent to prison—all of my worry about how odd Bennet was—dissipated with the thrill of a new way of seeing the world.

I tried to lie down, but sleep wouldn’t come. Finally I decided to call Narciss. Not her, actually, but the answering machine at her store. I wanted to go out with her, to discuss passport masks and notions of power.

She answered on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Narciss?”

“Mr. Blakey? Is something wrong?”

“I’m sorry, Narciss. I thought that you wouldn’t hear the shop phone. I was going to leave a message on your machine.”

“It’s okay,” she said in a voice more sultry than usual. “I don’t sleep very much. The doctor says it’s my metabolism. I take naps during the day and work most nights.”

“On your book?”

“On anything. I read and quilt and watch bad TV.”

“Huh. I sleep most nights through. But tonight I was just up.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why did you call?”

I wasn’t prepared to set up a date with a real person. Not with Narciss at any rate.

“Did you ever study evil at college?” I asked instead. The question surprised me. “I mean, what people in the past thought made a man evil, bad?”

“No,” she said with a note of wonder in her voice. “No, we never studied that. And now that you mention it, it seems that it should have been at least a seminar if not a whole branch of study.”

“That’s the thing, right?” I said. “I mean, here we got evil all over the place: in our history books and fiction and on movies and TV. We just fought a war against a supposedly evil man, but then if you ask what
evil
is, every-body has a different answer.”

“I suppose they cover it in divinity school,” Narciss said, “but that would be religious, and you’re really asking about something else. The idea of evil. Why do you ask?”

Because I have the devil living in my basement—
that’s what came to my mind.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was just sitting up thinking about it and I thought about you and archaeology and thought maybe you would know. I went to college for three years and I never heard anything about it.”

“What college did you go to?”

“Long Island City College. I studied political science mainly.”

“Why’d you stop going?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. My grades weren’t so good and I couldn’t remember anything. Nothing. The last semester of my sophomore year I was going to fail a course in ancient political thought. Some of those guys talked about evil. But that was a long time ago. You’d think that there’d be a modern study of it.”

“Are you ever planning to go back?”

“To school? No.”

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t mean anything to me. I mean, let’s say I went back. I’d go for a year and a half and then I’d have a bachelor’s degree. What then? They don’t have political scientists in the want ads —”

“But they have jobs for college graduates.”

I stopped myself before I could say any more. I realized that I was about to start talking like I always did. I was going to make fun of school and jobs and careers. That’s what I always did when somebody tried to give me advice.

“I got other plans,” I said. “School didn’t do it for me and so now I have to find another way.”

“What way?”

“Reclamations,” I said. And then before she could ask another question—“It’s a form of international finance. I’ve been studying with a guy named Dent. He’s been, ah, tutoring me, kind of. That’s one of the reasons I go down to New York. I meet with Mr. Dent every week or so.”

“Is he a teacher?” she asked.

I could tell by the tone in her voice that she believed me. But that’s not what shocked me. I was stunned that the lie, as it came out of my mouth, became truth. The most important part of what I said was true. I
was
Bennet’s student. That’s why I was wandering the house, because I was learning.

“Yes,” I said to Narciss’s question. It seemed like hours since she asked it. “And no. I mean, it’s not like school. We just happened into each other at Curry’s bar a while back. He explained to me that he worked for multinational corporations, helping them to acquire wealth all over the world. I was interested and he said that not that many people showed real interest in what he did. He agreed to teach me, to tell me what he knows.”

“It doesn’t sound good,” she said. “It sounds like what all those American businesses do when they go to other countries and exploit labor or just steal. They say that Nigeria is one of the richest African countries, but most of the people there live in poverty. They say that’s because of the oil companies.”

“That might be, Narciss,” I said in earnest. “But standing on the outside quoting Engels and Marx isn’t going to help. Sayin’
that’s not fair
won’t do anything either. What I want is to find out, to get in there and see for myself. Because you know they aren’t going to stop doing what they’re doing just because we whisper something against them at night on the phone. I mean, I put gas in my tank, don’t I? That’s what voting is to big business, you know. It’s not a secret ballot; it’s a purchase. If you buy from him, that’s your vote of confidence.”

I was making it up as I went, but it sounded right. It sounded true. Snatches of classroom dialogues and dime novels, even some things my uncle Brent had said, came together in a lie that was fast becoming my life.

“Being true doesn’t make something right, you know,” Narciss argued. “Some things are wrong. Just because you know how to get some slave labor doesn’t make it okay.”

“I know that,” I said, more as a musical beat than any conviction. “I know. But if your hands are clean and people are still dying, then how can you say that you did better than me?”

“I don’t know,” she said after a short pause. “But I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I… I have to go.”

“Okay. I’m sorry if I bothered you.”

“No, you didn’t. Good-bye.”

“Bye.”

At one time I would have been near despair at that kind of ending to a phone call. So few women ever seemed to show an interest in me that if I had one on the line I never wanted to let go. But that morning I wasn’t worried about anything. I had discovered my calling. Or at least I had found a door.

It was like a fairy tale my mother used to read to me—
The Brownie’s Gift.
A child was walking in the woods looking for his cat, Bootsie, who had run away. The boy searched and called and was very very sad when he came upon an iron door in a tree. There was a tiny slit in the door through which the boy could see a small elfin creature—called a brownie—who was locked up and every bit as sad as the child. They made an alliance, boy and elf, that one would help the other and they would both be happy ever after.

I don’t remember the particulars, but the brownie was freed and Bootsie was found. I spent years after that searching my ancestral woods for a door in a tree or the ground. I believed that somewhere there was a beneficent genie who I could free in exchange for happiness for all times.

I had found that door after thirty years of searching. It was the hatch to my own basement, and the brownie was a white man who wanted to be caged. No matter the differences the main story was the same. I went to bed thinking that I’d never fall asleep. But after only a moment I was unconscious beneath the heads of my ancestors.

“G
ood morning,” the naked man said to me. The prisoner was standing in the middle of his cell, his pajamas hung neatly from the back of the cage. The concrete surrounding his cell was dark from the water he must have thrown there. “I washed both pair last night. I wasn’t at all tired.”

Anniston Bennet had a huge uncircumcised penis. It was the biggest one I had ever seen on a human male. It just hung down flaccid and heavy between his thighs.

“I was thinking about our talk,” he said, seemingly unconscious of his nakedness or endowment. “I don’t usually think about things much. Usually there’s too much to get done. I’ve lived a pretty active life, you know. But you had me thinking last night. And to answer your question —”

“What question?”

“About killing —”

“I have to go, Mr. Bennet,” I said. I put down the fried eggs and heated potato patties and pushed them under the door to his cage. I was rattled by his ease at being naked. He wasn’t a powerfully built man, small except for that big dick. And there was a cascading series of crosshatched scars down his right shoulder that was painful to see. His feet were tiny. Something about standing there conversing with the naked man was too much for me.

“I’ll be back this afternoon,” I said. “We could talk then.”

“Where you going?”

“To see my friend. We said we’d get together today.”

He wanted to keep on talking, but I had to get out of there. I rushed up the stairs and slammed the hatch shut. I threw the newly attached bolts and secured them with the padlocks and went straight to my car.

I never did figure out what it was exactly that drove me from the cellar that morning. I have what I always thought was a normal-size penis. I’ve never measured or anything, but it has the feel of average. The women I’ve known were never surprised, one way or the other, when my erection was finally exposed to them. And even when they whispered sweet compliments, it had to do with how hard it got rather than how deep it went. Some men, I knew, were better endowed. Bethany had told me that it was just this fact that kept her attached to Clarance for so long. There were stories about Clarance’s sexual prowess, but I had seen him in the boys’ gym and he didn’t hold a candle to Anniston Bennet.

I’d never felt embarrassed or inferior before that morning. And it wasn’t just Bennet’s anatomy but also his ease at being naked. As a child I learned to be ashamed of exposing my genitals or buttocks. Some dresses that women wear today make me avert my eyes.

I was halfway to Clarance’s house before I realized that I had not lied to Bennet. It was Tuesday. Clarance always took Tuesdays off and worked the lighter Sunday shift. I got there a little after 10:00. His oldest daughter, Athalia, was sitting on the front porch. She was a big girl, sixteen I believe, and a magnet for boys.

“Hi, Mr. Blakey!” she shouted. “Daddy’s havin’ breakfast.”

Even that small piece of information was delivered across the lawn in an engaging manner. Athalia was what is known as a daddy’s girl. She loved to see men happy. I’ve often thought that Clarance must have sold his soul at some East Hampton crossroads to be blessed in so many ways.

“How’s summer school, Thalia?”

“They suspended me ’cause I had a dirty magazine,” she said, her smile dimming for a moment.

“You in trouble?”

“Naw. Momma’s mad but Daddy just laughed.”

She was wearing loose shorts and a pink blouse that didn’t make it down to her navel. She caught my eye and I thought about Anniston Bennet—about how he was as unashamed as a child.

“When can you go back?” I asked.

“I gotta go Friday. I don’t see why I can’t just have the whole week off.” She was bothered, but nothing kept Athalia down for long. She gave me a big grin and opened the door for me. I went through the small ranch-style house toward the back. There was no one in the dining room. Through the window I could see big Clarance sitting down to a meal at his cast-iron patio table. He was wearing shorts like his daughter, with a strap undershirt and red thongs. The iron table and chair were painted lime green. Behind him was a child’s rubber pool in the middle of the back lawn. Clarance’s house was a small affair, built in the midfifties. His family had lived in the Harbor for at least a hundred years, but they came from slaves down in Georgia. He still had cousins in Atlanta.

He saw me through the window and waved a turkey drumstick at me.

Once outside I hailed him. “Hey, Clarance.”

“Charles.” He used his drumstick to point out an iron chair, which I dragged to the table.

“You want some food?” he asked me.

“No, thanks.”

“You look like you could use somethin’, man,” he said. “You losin’ weight?”