“Why 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.
I wanted to deny it. I wanted to holler him into dust. I was so angry that I didn’t trust my actions, so I left the room. I never spoke to Brent again. I didn’t touch him again. I couldn’t. The nurse was always telling me that a kind word or a gentle touch would be the best medicine. But I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t think of one kind thing to say. His smell made my stomach turn. I would have liked to jab knives into his eyes.
I didn’t touch or talk to him; I didn’t go into his room at night. Every day he got weaker and I thought to myself, Good, I hope he dies soon. I hope he dies tonight while I’m in my bed thinking about the Playboy magazines that I stole from under his bed.
One morning the nurse found him on the floor next to the door. He must have been trying to get out. Maybe he was trying to get to me. I heard something in the night, but I really thought that it was squirrels in the gutters, not my uncle scrabbling on the oak floor trying to escape from death.
The police asked me if I had heard anything. Everyone knew how much I hated Brent. But nothing came of it. He died of cancer. They couldn’t arrest me for not being friendly, for rubbing my urgent erection on the mattress while thinking about impossibly endowed Tammy Lee Naidor, the Playmate of the month.
“No,” I said to Bennet. “No, I’ve never killed anyone. And now I have to go. I’ll come down tomorrow and ask you some more.”
“Whatever you say, Warden.” Bennet smiled.
“You want a book?”
“If I may,” he said.
I passed him a paperback that I brought in my pocket. Hothouse by Brian Aldiss. It was a book set millions of years in the future, where plants had ascended to be the dominant species on Earth. Maybe I gave it to him because it was one of my favorites. I don’t know.
I sat up at the head of my bed and communed with my ancestors. I didn’t know a damn thing about them except that my family had kept and then forgotten them in the basement for hundreds of years. They were the only thing in my life of value right then—a hope that I came from somewhere important.
I was looking at the ivory faces and thinking about myself as an embezzler and a murderer. Brent had always called me a malingerer. Maybe I was that too.
Early in the morning, about 3:00 or so, I pulled out an old spring binder that I had used in college. I started writing ideas for questions. By the time the sun came up, my tin trash can was filled with the failures I had penned.