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.
There were five empties in the can under a holey T-shirt and a few wads of paper. I found four more under the bed. On the outside of the windowsill, there was one dead soldier, as Clarance called them. That started my journey back through the house. There were bottles everywhere. Some were only half empty. One or two almost full. There were bottles on the front porch, in the backyard, on the patio chairs. On the roof there were a few left over from friendly spring nights when Laura and I made love in my sleeping bag up under the stars.
They were behind the couch and on the inside ledge of the fireplace. By the time I finished, there were fifty-one bottles on the old dining-room table. Those empties would make me two paper dollars. And with them I could keep my pride.
I remembered what I was doing and who I was with for almost every bottle found. The ones in the backyard were from a party the summer before last. It was Ricky and Clarance with some other guys and girls. The police had to come over to tell us to turn the music down.
It was the only time in my life that I had sex with two women in one night. The first was my girlfriend at that time, China Browne. We’d been dancing and got to get kind of amorous. I took her up to my mother’s old room. It was over pretty quickly because I was so excited. China fell asleep and I went back downstairs. There were lots of people there dancing and talking loud. I felt a sweet sense of calm and started putting beer bottles back in a wooden crate. China’s friend Jane Sadler started picking up with me.
We were just talking and laughing about what a good time everybody was having. We filled two crates and were carrying them out to the backyard. Then we heard this noise, a moaning out behind the garage. I winked at Jane and we snuck around the corner.
It was Clarance and this white girl who had come with somebody, I didn’t know who. But she was with Clarance right then. They were kissing furiously in the faint light that shone over the back of the garage. He was moaning in a deep bass and she squealed between their soul kisses.
Jane put her hand on my forearm. At first I thought that she wanted to give the newfound lovers some privacy, but when I looked I could see that she was just steadying herself. Jane had skin my color and bright eyes and long curly hair.
Suddenly Clarance spun the white girl around. She lifted her miniskirt while he pulled down her panties. Jane’s grip on my forearm tightened. Clarance started fumbling with his zipper then. The white girl was waving her butt around and moaning. Clarance kept fumbling.
“Hurry up!” The white girl’s hushed cry was exactly what I wanted to shout.
“I got it now,” Clarance said, throwing down something. The next morning I realized that it was the wrapper from a condom.
He bent his knees and took a long slow slide into his new friend. Her welcoming moan made my heart skip so hard that I thought I might be having a seizure.
Clarance started slamming hard against her backside. The smacking flesh and high-pitched barks from the girl made me sweat.
“I cain’t hold it, baby,” Clarance barked. “I cain’t hold it.”
“Come come come come come,” she answered.
And then they were both silent and rigid. After a moment Clarance made a grunting sound that was no more than the crack of a dry leaf and the girl exhaled through her open mouth.
Jane pulled me by the arm. When we got around to the other side, she kissed me. I led her straight to the basement.
There was no inside connection from the house. You had to go outside and through a heavy trapdoor to get down there. I suppose that it was called a basement because it was under the house, but it was more like a crypt.
I snapped on the light and Jane kissed me again.
“Don’t say a word,” she told me as she lifted her skirt and I dropped my pants. She sat back on my great-grandfather’s oversize traveling trunk.
It should have been safe sex but it wasn’t. I was happy that I just made love to China because I didn’t want those moments with Jane to ever end. I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet while she stroked my other balls and scratched both of my nipples with the long, press-on fingernails of one hand. We were looking into each other’s eyes. Every once in a while she’d lean forward to kiss me, but when I returned the gesture she moved her head back and sneered.
The trunk rocked precariously, but we had the balance of cats in heat. She undulated on her hips and quivered while I pushed and pulled, feeling the veins standing out all over my body. I started to move faster but Jane said, “Slow it down, baby. Slow it down.”
When I finally came I moved back in one small show of responsibility. The emotion on her face while she watched my ejaculation was the deep satisfaction that comes from victory.
China stopped seeing me after that night, and Jane never returned one phone call. Maybe they compared notes; I didn’t care. That night was a highlight for me. Two women and a chance to see the Master—that’s what we called Clarance when it came to women—in action. I was at peace for a whole week. I didn’t do anything except pack the trash into bags and put the crates of empty beers in the basement.
That’s why I thought about the basement. It was Jane and China Browne that jarred my memory.
It was a large, dark room crowded with stuff from the Dodd and Blakey families. A little something was there from every generation. I had one great-auntie, Blythe, who considered herself a painter. There were fifty or more of her awful canvases leaned up against the walls and behind a useless coal-burning stove. Her trees and houses and people looked like a child’s pitiful attempts. There was my great-grandfather’s traveling trunk and stacks of old newspapers that were yellow and brittle from fifty years or more before. We had old furniture and rugs and straw baskets filled with two hundred Christmases of toys. The cobwebs looked like they belonged on a movie set, and it was cold down there too.
Eighteen wooden crates of empty beer bottles were stacked in the middle of the cobblestone floor. They were all I was interested in. It meant twenty-four dollars at the beer-and-soda store at the Corners. I dragged the boxes out into the light, rubbing my face now and then to get off the tickle of cobwebs. When I got all the crates, I looked around some more to see if there might have been something else of value there.
It was a big basement. Thirty feet in either direction. The ceiling must have been ten feet from the floor. Anniston Bennet was right: it would have made a nice apartment without all that junk. It was a well-built hole. Dry as a bone and cool year round because it was deep in the rocky earth. I used to think that ghosts lived in that cellar, that the spirits of my dead ancestors came from out of the graveyard behind my house and played cards or talked all night long in the solitude of that room. I left them Kool-Aid and lemon cookies in the summer. When the food was still there the next day, my father would tell me that the spirits had eaten the ghost food that lives inside the food for the living. He told me that it was like a blessing and now the food left over had to be buried in the trash like the dead.