The Man in My Basement (11 page)

“Help me with these,” he said, dragging the table and chair toward the small door of the cage.

He crawled into the cage, and with a little effort, I passed the furniture in to him.

He arranged the pieces like a small bedroom. I handed him the clothes and stationery and a few other small items.

“Pass the crapper,” he then said. I dragged the oval-shaped cylinder to the door, and he strained over it until it was against the back wall of the cage.

“Now all we need is to put the pump back here and we’re in business,” he said.

He stood up then and approached me. Looking at him through the diamonds of the cage, I thought not for the first time that the structure might bear more than a resemblance to a prison cell.

“Have you figured it out yet?” he asked me as if reading my mind.

“What?”

Again the silent laugh.

“What?” I asked again.

“This is my prison,” he said. “And you are my warden and my guard.”

“Are you crazy?” The sentence just came out of my mouth. It wasn’t really a question.

“You like to drink, don’t you, Charles?” he asked. “Why don’t you go up to the house and get us some liquor? I’ll explain to you why I’m not crazy and why this is important for both of us.”

It was a request bordering on a gentle command. There was no polite answer except to go get a bottle and two glasses. I wanted to be out of his presence for a minute. Anniston Bennet was a man who made you do what he wanted. He seemed reasonable and generous and knowledgeable—not mad. But what he was saying made me want to run.

I walked away instead. Up toward the house and the cheap bottles of whiskey in the pantry, where I first heard Bethany’s cries of passion and where my parents murmured deep secrets that made me feel at ease.

“L
et’s just say…” Anniston Bennet was saying. I had brought my cheap whiskey and two squat glasses that had been on the shelf since before my mother could remember. I was sitting on the stairs and he had pulled out his red chair to join me. “…that I’m a criminal wishing to pay for my crimes.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why don’t you just turn yourself in to the police if you want to go to jail?”

“I don’t recognize any organized form of law enforcement, or government for that matter, as valid,” he stated simply. He might have been a prime minister or anarchist. He could have even been some advanced form of alien life, looking down on humanity as we might look on a mob of ants. “But even if I did, there is no crime that I could be tried for in this country. Well, maybe some laws having to do with money. But I would never allow the hypocrites on our benches to stand judgment over me.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said, downing my glass in frustration and refilling it with the gratitude of a full bottle. “What does my basement have to do with all that? What do I have to do with it?”

“Everything about us is random,” Bennet said. “Maybe the universe has laws, but they aren’t concerned about you or me or the people we touch. We’re just mistakes who got up and walked off. The only things that are certain are death and the will to survive…”

He was a tiny man talking as if he were a giant. But he was convincing too.

“…We make our own victories and our own mistakes,” he said, and for a moment there was a sad little chink in his armor of certainty. “There is no justice unless the judged agree. Without understanding and repentance there can only be revenge.” He reached over to the stair next to me and refilled both our glasses.

“What are you talking about, Mr. Bennet? What kind of crime and justice and revenge do you mean?”

“The worst,” he said. “You think of the worst crime you can imagine and then make it worse. And then you will have a glimmer of what I have done.”

The whiskey was having an effect on both of us. My vision was skewed and the tone in his voice tended toward humanity.

“I don’t need to know this,” I said. “I don’t need to be a part of it.”

“But I paid you.”

“To rent my basement, not to start a private prison. Damn, man. I don’t know you. The police could come down here and find you all locked up. They could get me on kidnapping and who knows what else? No. No.”

“Have you spent my money?” Bennet asked.

“I’ll give you back what I have and then repay the rest.”

“You need money, Charles. Why not take it when you can?”

“What do you know about me? What do you know about what I need?”

“Everything.” He smiled and nodded.

“Like what?”

“I know where you went to high school and who your friends were. Clarance and Ricky, who you also call Cat. I know that you worked at Harbor Savings and that you embezzled four hundred and thirty dollars from your drawer…”

Whiskey softened the blow. I wondered if it was part of Bennet’s plan to get me drunk.

“…The bank president, who liked you at first, felt betrayed, and blacklisted you among the town business community. Your mother and father are dead and no one else in your family is much interested in your well-being. You drink too much and you cried for five days after your mother’s death. You had three years at Long Island City College. But you dropped out, didn’t you? I don’t know why you left. You had passing grades.” Bennet peered at me with a Milquetoast expression on his face. “You’re broke, you don’t have a job, and there’s a thirty-thousand-dollar mortgage hanging over your head that might lose your line their home.”

“Where the hell did you get all that?”

“There’s a man who used to work for me, a Filo Nunn. He now has a job for the investigation division of Morganthau and Haup.”

“Who’s that?”

“You wouldn’t know, Charlie, but the bank president did. He started stuttering when Nunn got on the line. He understood that even the smallest toehold with that firm would completely transform his career in finance.”

Bennet refilled my glass. I didn’t even know that it was empty.

“So this guy, Nunn, found all that out? But you said that he doesn’t even work for you anymore.”

“Filo Nunn owes me his life.” Anniston Bennet smiled again. If he had been a child, I would have said that he thought he was cute.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bennet, but I can’t go along with this. No. I will not be a part of this.”

“That’s final?” Bennet asked.

I nodded.

“But what if I made you a deal? What if I gave you the twenty-five thousand dollars now and we went ahead as we’d planned? Then in two weeks you tell me what you think. If the answer is still no, then I’ll leave. If it’s not I stay the rest of the time and double the final payment. All in cash. Always in cash.”

I don’t think the money interested me even that far back. And I was worried that once Bennet dug in, he’d be hard to dislodge. I was drunk but not that drunk. I remember the night and every word that was spoken. Maybe the whiskey made me less fearful. The consequences that bothered me earlier (and the next morning, for that matter) seemed manageable.

But that’s not why I agreed to Bennet’s request.

I agreed because of knowledge and intimacy. Anniston Bennet knew more about me than any other person—and he was still willing to enter this business deal. Those shocking blue eyes looked right into mine and knew what they were seeing. Not like Bethany and not like Clarance. Unlike Uncle Brent, Bennet made no judgments. If he felt he was better than me, it was only because he felt better than everyone, and that, in some strange whiskey-soaked way, made me an equal in the world—at least in the world as seen through his eyes.

“Yeah, all right,” I said. “Let’s do this thing.”

Bennet smiled and retrieved the satchel from the floor next to his cell. He took five bound stacks of twenty-dollar bills.

“Twenty-five thousand, as we agreed,” he said.

Then he came out with an ugly chunk of black metal that had some mechanical purpose that was not immediately obvious.

“It’s an original lock used to hold down a line of slaves in the old slaving ships,” Bennet told me. Along with the lock there was a brass key with a cylindrical tip that had teeth and slats made to fit the archaic mechanism. “It’s over a hundred and fifty years old. I got it in Mali.”

As far as I knew there was no one in the Blakey family who had ever been a slave. We came over as indentured servants and sailors on Spanish and Portuguese ships. It was even intimated that one distant cousin was himself a slaver, selling black bodies on the wharves of New York City from a ship called the
Dahomey.

Many of my relatives didn’t like to think that they were a part of the mass of blacks in this country. They would say, secretly, that they were no different from the English or Irish immigrants. But most Negroes, even the old families that dotted our neighborhood, understood that racism doesn’t ask for a pedigree. I knew that many white people didn’t like me because of my dark skin. I wasn’t stupid. At the same time I didn’t feel the pang or tug of identity when slavery was mentioned.

But that lock was a vicious thing. It must have weighed four pounds. The loop of metal used to secure the bolt was half an inch thick. I could imagine that ugly device holding down twenty men in the cold fastness of the Atlantic.

Bennet worked the key, which was new, in the lock and the long loop came away from the barrel-like body.

“It fits the center hinge on the door,” he said.

He crawled into the cage, dragging his red chair, and I fit the lock through and slammed it shut. Then I pulled hard to make sure that the lock held.

The loud crack of the lock snapping shut had a pronounced effect on my self-proclaimed prisoner. His face visibly paled and he grabbed onto the bars of the door with both hands.

“I thought you wanted this,” I said.

“I do.”

“Then why do you look so scared?”

“I had certain experiences thirty years ago that made me nervous about close spaces and locked doors,” he said.

“So then why you want to lock yourself in a basement?”

“This is a punishment, Mr. Blakey, not a vacation.”

A
fter I’d locked him in, I brought my prisoner some water and a dry ham-salad sandwich that I made from white bread and a can off the shelf. There was a small space between the bottom of the cell door and the floor. This space was large enough to pass the tin plate and squat glass through.

“Lights out,” I said at the hatch.

The look in his eyes was both frightened and resolved.

I pulled the string on the lightbulb. I decided to put a lock on the hatch door in the morning. For one night in the hole, he could go without security.

I didn’t sleep much that night. Fidgety and nervous, I broke out into sweats every now and then. Sounds that could have been the hatch to the basement drove me from the bed a half-dozen times. I looked out the window and once even ventured into the yard. I didn’t lift the cellar door though. I didn’t want to show Bennet how scared I was.

He was locked up in a nine-foot cell and I was still afraid of him. Actually the fear started when the lock engaged. He was empowered by the fact of his helplessness. And I was at risk. I lay in bed worrying about kids sneaking into the cellar and finding Bennet. Then they’d tell their parents and then the police would come…

One of the few times I fell off to sleep, I dreamed that I was in a courtroom. Lainie and Mr. Gurgel and Ira Minder testified that I was a bank robber. They said that it was armed robbery because I had carried my pocketknife to work and, somehow, the pocketknife turned into the .22 rifle that was in a box on the shelf in my father’s library. The judge found me guilty. I was convicted, sentenced, and put into Bennet’s cell. But it was much smaller than nine by nine, more like three by three. I couldn’t stand up and there was barely any light. A wave of despair so profound went through me that I was standing next to the bed before I came awake. I wanted to run. I wanted to cry. I definitely wanted Anniston Bennet out of my life.

I roamed the rooms of the house after that, going from floor to floor trying to figure out how I could beat this thing. I wanted a drink but my stomach and intestines were roiling. I couldn’t even make out words in the books I paged through.

I was up in the old fortress, my mother’s sewing room, when the sun hit my great-grandfather’s old oaks. Amber, orange, a hint of yellow, and deep-blue strips made the horizon line. They were the colors of majesty’s approach. I was arrested by the promise of morning light. I imagined those deer I had seen all dewy and shivering in the morning chill. The night was behind them, and if the air smelled clean and clear of danger, they marked another night gone with hunger and thirst for the next.

I awoke with my head on a bag of pieces my mother kept for quilting. The sun was hot on my ear and my own loud breath was like a wind tunnel.

Outside the granite headstones stood in the high weeds like soldiers hunkering down in the grass before a morning assault. My mother spoke to me then. “You should cut those weeds,” she said as clearly as if she were still alive. It was the first time I had ever imagined hearing her voice.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

I showered and shaved, brushed and ironed. Anniston Bennet’s breakfast—a boiled egg, cornflakes, and apple juice—was ready at 9:23.

When I opened the hatch, a scent assailed me. It wasn’t strong but it was living—the man in my basement taking ownership with his spoor.

“Good morning, Charlie,” Bennet said as I stooped over to slide the tray and glass under the cage door.

“The name is Charles Dodd-Blakey. You can call me Mr. Dodd-Blakey, Mr. Bennet. That will keep us civil over the next two weeks.” It was a voice I hadn’t heard in many years—fourteen years. The tone I used on Uncle Brent when he was lying in his bed dying, smelling up my home with death.

Bennet’s thin eyebrows raised. He took up the tray and stood, using his toe to push the previous night’s tray out. I realized that I was expected to take his dirty dishes and wash them—like a manservant, a butler doing his master’s dirty work for him.