The Man in My Basement (3 page)

“I’m sure he’ll be back by then,” Mathias said. “And if he comes back earlier, I’ll have him call you.”

“That would be nice. Yes. You know I have to take my money out of the stock market before the world goes to hell in a handbasket. He talked me into it before, but now I just want a passbook. I want regular interest with no nonsense. The stock market is no better than roulette, and gambling is a sin.”

“I’m sure Mr. Hickey will do what you want…”

The conversation went on for another few minutes. Mr. Mathias listened to Mildred’s woes. Everyone knew that old Mrs. Cosgrove had barely a hundred-dollar balance in her account. She lived off social-security checks. But her family had been some of the bank’s first depositors. Treating her nicely was the best advertisement they could have.

“Yes, Charles?” the guard asked after Millie left. “Can I help you?”

“No.”

“Did you want something?”

“Can’t anyone walk into this bank, Arnold?”

“Of course. But I didn’t think that you had an account here anymore.”

“I came to see Lainie,” I said.

“Oh, I see. Lainie.”

The greeter had reverted into guard and had no intention of standing aside. So I went around him and across the wide tiled floor of the bank.

It was a domed building with a round floor. At the opposite side from the entrance was a group of seven desks, separated from the main room by a waist-high mahogany wall. The center desk belonged to Lainie Brown.

Lainie was the only black bank officer. She’d started as secretary the year I was born. Her boss was a liberal thinker, and she trained Lainie and then forced the bank president, Ira Minder, to promote her.

Lainie had been my friend at the bank. We ate lunch together, and she told me that she hoped to make me into a loan officer one day. But then I was fired, and that was the end to my banking future and our friendship.

“Charles.” Lainie was surprised but not necessarily happy to see me. She was a heavyset woman with auburn skin. Her eyes were large and spaced wider than most. Every tooth had a space between it, and her smile, when she smiled, seemed to wrap around her whole head.

But Lainie wasn’t smiling right then. Her look was somewhere between surprise and caution. I might have been a snake on her front porch or a strange purple sky.

“ ’Bout time for lunch, isn’t it?” I said.

“Uh, why I suppose it is.”

“I already ate, but I’ll sit with you if you don’t mind.”

“No,” her lips said. Her eyes held the same answer with another meaning. I suppose somebody else might have taken the hint and offered to wait until a better time.

“Well let’s go,” I said.

Lainie rose up out of her generous walnut seat, releasing a sweet odor. Her perfume was one of the best benefits at Harbor Savings. It was one of the few things I remembered about work.

L
ainie ate a bagged lunch every day at 12:30. Ham or turkey or chicken on white bread, with a fruit and a novelty cake. She sat on the picnic bench half a block up from the Winter Hotel on a slip of property that was too small to sell. She was wearing a white silk dress that was decorated with prints of giant purple orchids. A single pearl hung from a pendant around her neck. There was a dark freckle on her throat, next to the pearl. I was thinking that that small spot of dark flesh was far more precious than some stone from an oyster’s belly.

“How’s Peaches?” Lainie had regained her composure. She’d opened her bag and was peeling back the wax paper on the sandwich to check out the meat.

“Fine, the last time I talked to her. Her husband’s mother passed.”

“I know. I was at the funeral. I was surprised not to see you there.”

“Busy,” I said, not remembering the excuse I gave at the time.

Lainie took a bite out of her sandwich and smiled. She always smiled after the first bite of her sandwich. She told me once that her mother, Arvette, made her lunch every morning. I think the bread reminded Lainie of her mother the way that Catholics are supposed to be reminded of their Lord when they eat that biscuit.

Lainie and Arvette lived together just outside of town in a small house where both of them had been born. Most Negroes around the midisland lived in modest homes. Our ancestors had been farmworkers mainly. Many had come from the South over the decades, looking for a place they could work in peace.

“I was out at Wilson Ryder’s new site this morning,” I said.

“Really? Mr. Gurgel is the officer in charge of that loan. He says that the Ryders have always been good business.” She took another bite. But that was just eating—no smile involved.

“Yeah. Well, anyway, I went over there to ask about a job today. I mean, he had jobs. I know that because Ricky Winkler works out there. But Mr. Ryder lied and said that he didn’t have any jobs. And when I told him that he was a liar, he started talkin’ about the bank and why didn’t I work there anymore?”

Lainie took a big bite out of her sandwich. I think she did that because she wanted time to think. After chewing on her white bread and processed meat like it was a mouthful of jerky, she stopped and took a deep breath. I pushed down the urge to stand up and walk away.

“Did you ever take money from your drawer?” she asked.

And suddenly it all came back to me like the plot of a novel that I had read so long ago I didn’t even remember the name of the book. But it wasn’t that long ago and it was my own life that I was remembering.

It wasn’t really very much at all. I was a bank teller. I counted money, gave change, made debits and credits. I did passbooks, Christmas clubs, checking accounts, and sometimes payroll. Anything else went to another window. I wore a jacket and slacks every day with a tie. You didn’t have to wear the tie on Fridays, but I did anyway. I was good at my job. Always on time, friendly with even the rude customers, I was good at math too.

But one day I was going to meet my then-girlfriend China Browne for dinner. It was a Tuesday and I wasn’t due for my paycheck until the end of the week. My account was empty because I had just paid for an electric food processor and China wanted to be taken out.

So I borrowed twenty dollars from the bank. I made up my mind to pay a dollar interest when I got my paycheck. And it really wasn’t any big sum. If they asked me about it, I could just say that I must have made a mistake. People make mistakes in banks all the time. Mr. Gurgel, the senior loan officer, once missed a zero and the bank was out ninety thousand dollars for a week.

Of course Friday came and went. China and I went down to New York that weekend, so I put off returning the twenty until I got paid again. But by that time two more weeks had passed, and I figured if nobody noticed, then why should I worry? Probably if I had left it at that, everything would have been okay. But there were five or six other times when I needed money. It was never more than fifty dollars.

“No,” I said.

“Well that’s what they thought,” she said. “The president said that they had proof.”

“How could that be?” I felt indignant even though I knew that I was guilty. “If they had proof, then why didn’t they have me arrested?”

“Mr. Mathias told me that they had discussed it and the bank felt it wouldn’t serve their interests to prosecute.” I knew that she was reporting what she heard because the words she was using were not hers.

“Why not?”

“Because it wasn’t a lot of money and almost every colored person in the Harbor has money in the bank. If the bank prosecuted you over a couple’a hundred dollars, the customers might get upset and take their money to East Hampton.” Lainie peered into my eyes as she spoke. I don’t know if she saw my guilt there or not.

I was guilty. Every time I pocketed a few dollars, I expected to return it. But it wasn’t like the money I used to steal out of my uncle Brent’s wallet. I took that money because I hated him. I hated the way he smelled and the way he talked about my father. I took it because my father’s family had come directly from Africa, but Brent said that my father really didn’t know our roots. He said that we were like all other American blacks, that we came from “slave-caliber Negroes who were defeated in war and sold into slavery because they didn’t have the guts to die in battle.” He said that there was no such thing as free Africans who had “chosen to come over and sell their labor in indentured servitude” and that American Negro citizens never existed before 1865, as my father claimed.

I kept Brent’s money. He used to complain to my mother, but I’d just tell her that it must be his illness affecting his brain. I don’t know what she thought about it all. She didn’t like Brent’s mouth either, but he was family and my mother was the sweetest woman in the world.

“Well,” I said to Lainie. “I didn’t steal anything and now people at the bank are telling everybody that I’m a thief and I can’t get a job. And you didn’t even tell me. Didn’t warn me or anything.”

“I’m sorry, Charles,” she said. “I just didn’t know what to think. Mr. Mathias told me about what had happened. And I was afraid that you’d lose your temper and that if they did have some kind of evidence that they’d take you to jail. I was worried about you.”

She was getting weepy. Lainie had a kind heart. But I wasn’t in any mood to worry about her crocodile tears. What about me? Here I had waited until I was down to my last dollar, thinking that I could always pick up a job somewhere. But nobody in the Harbor would hire a thief. And even if I went out of town, people would still ask for references.

What I wanted to do was yell at Lainie until she felt the pain that I was feeling on the inside. I would have yelled if I were innocent.

“I’m sorry, Lainie. It’s not your fault. It’s just that bank. I probably made some mistake and they decided that I was a thief. That’s all.”

“What are you going to do?”

I considered her question for a moment, and then I thought a little more. I opened my mouth, but there was no answer forthcoming.

“I got to go,” I said. “Thanks for tellin’ me.”

I
did go fishing—in a small river not two miles from my house. I caught three good-size trout, not for pleasure but to eat that night. I wanted to cook dinner but couldn’t bear the idea of counting out pennies to some high school cashier at the IGA.

It was after 6:00 when I got home. There was a little daylight left in the distance, but it was dusk. My plans were all set by the time I got in, so I went right to the phone.

A woman answered after seven rings. “Hello?”

“Mona?”

“Hey, Charles. Hold on.” She put the phone down with a loud knock and yelled, “It’s Charles!”

A few moments passed and then the phone hissed as it was being picked up.

“What?” a man’s angry voice said.

“Hey, Clarance. Listen, man, I got to borrow a hundred bucks fast.”

“So?”

“This is no joke, Clarance —”

“Naw. That’s right. This ain’t no joke at all. This is dead serious. I been thinkin’ about you and how you act since last night. And it burns me up. Here I am tryin’ to be your friend and all you wanna do is dis me. Well that’s it. I’m through with you, man. I called Ricky and told him. I said no more Thursday-night blackjack, no more Saturday-night bar hoppin’, no more nuthin’. We’re through.” Clarance was sputtering. I almost made a joke but then thought better of it.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean nuthin’. You know it was the whiskey —”

“You sorry all right. Unemployed, drunk loudmouth is what you is.” Clarance usually tried to articulate in the ways of school learning. That kind of language was promoted among the older colored families of the Harbor. But when he got angry, he talked
street.

“I said I was sorry, man. What more do you want?”

“I don’t want nuthin’ from you. I don’t want you to call or ask me for money or nuthin’ else. Just stay away from me, you hear?” And with that he hung up the phone in my ear.

I realized then that I didn’t have any kind of plan. All I was going to do was borrow a hundred dollars from Clarance to put some cheap food in my refrigerator.

I washed out a griddle and a saucepan, a glass and a plate and utensils to cook and eat with. Then I cleaned my fish and dredged the fillets in cornmeal. Fried fish with hot sauce and a side of turnips was my dinner. I laughed because it was better food than I would have had if I had the money to go to the diner.

There were two shots’ worth left in the whiskey bottle, just enough to keep me between self-pity and drunken tears.

The house was a mess. There were piles of clothes and dirty dishes in every room. Junk mail and bills were thrown into corners, and every chair had something piled on the seat.

I went upstairs to my bedroom and threw the blankets—along with a notebook, two dirty dinner plates, and a dozen loose stones that I had picked up—from the bed. I lay with arms and legs dangling over the sides of the small mattress. On the windowsill next to my head was a book I had been reading.
Neglect’s Glasses.
It was a science-fiction novel about a kid in the ghetto who had found a pair of sunglasses somehow imbued with the intelligence of an alien race. The ghetto child, just days away from his initiation into a youth gang, is drawn into a swirl of knowledge that takes him places that he never knew were possible.

I laid there on my bed, reading, for well over an hour. The boy, whose name was Tyler, was transformed into the unknown hope of humanity. He did good things because the glasses always made him feel the emotions of those lives he touched. And so when he hurt people, he experienced their pain. Helping others made Tyler feel good about himself.

I would have read the whole book that night if it wasn’t for chapter twelve. That’s where Tyler looked closely at his parents and in a flash of divination realized that his father would soon be dead. I couldn’t take the revelation and threw the slender hardback into the tin trash can, decorated with astronauts, that had sat in the same corner for more than thirty years. The book hitting the can set off a burble of beer bottles jostling together.