The next few days went by quickly. I spent them scrubbing and cleaning the basement. I also straightened up the house as well as I could. The walls and floors of the basement needed paint, but all I had was forty dollars, so elbow grease was the only oil-based liquid I used.
My uncle Brent used to say that I was lazy and worthless. He said it whenever my mother was out.
“I’m surprised that a boy like you don’t starve ’cause he too lazy to lift the fork to his lips,” he said often. And then he’d laugh in a wheezing manner and I’d wish that he’d fall down the steps and die.
I hated everything about Brent. The fact that he talked in a southern Negro dialect made me hate his kind of blackness. I didn’t want to be associated with street. You had to prove yourself to me if you didn’t speak like an educated person, a white person. When Ricky came back from Brooklyn, I didn’t like him because I heard the whispering, muttering southern talk of Brent in his words. Even then, in that room, fourteen years after Brent had died, I was still angry at him.
“You stupid fuck,” I said to a memory. “Dumb shit motherfucker. I’ll kill you.”
Sometimes I’d spend the whole day walking around the house cursing Brent and all the mean things he said. At odd moments his name would come to my lips with some new curse to level at him. It was like he was still alive and I was in my late teens, forced to care for him after burying my own mother.
He was bedridden by that time. A nurse came in from social services and Medicare, but I was still expected to feed him and give him some of his drugs. I was never late or forgetful because my mother made me promise before she died that I would take care of him.
But that didn’t mean I had to talk. I walked into that room with his tray, sullen and closemouthed. He tried to be friendly, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. I blamed Brent for everything that ever befell me. My father’s death, my mother’s, the feeling I had that I couldn’t tie my shoes right—all of that I blamed Brent for. Even when he looked pitiful and small, I hated him. The skin on his face was brittle and creased. He resembled the center mask in the set—a crack down the forehead to the lips.
At night in those last days, I would dream about Brent. In the dream I cried over his suffering. But the next morning, when I brought in his soft-boiled egg, my heart hardened again.
I spent three days cursing Brent and cleaning up years of squalor. At night I’d buy a cheap pint of Greenly’s Gin and drink it, but only after 10:00—only after I’d read and eaten and done everything that I had to do. I wanted to cut down on the booze because of Clarance and Narciss. Clarance because he thought he was mad at me but really what he was mad at was me from tipsy to drunk. I get mean with alcohol. When I’m high I think I’m being funny, but I knew that Clarance hated being called Clara. I knew it.
And Narciss thought I was sweet. She thought I was something sensitive and discriminating. Maybe if I stayed sober for a while, I’d become a better person; maybe I could make something out of myself.
Anniston Bennet came on Friday at 4:00 exactly. He wore yellow short sleeves over a blue T-shirt, and brown trousers. His tennis shoes were the same blue as his shirt. He had no tie and the yellow shirt was open at the throat, showing a hairy pale neck over the top of the T-shirt collar. His head was oval and his chin came to a tip like the masks that I kept in their box on the windowsill next to my bed. His blue eyes were a perpetual shock, but there was no wonder or magic in the rest of his face.
“Mr. Blakey,” he said, extending a hand over the threshold. His small hand held a surprisingly strong grip.
“Mr. Bennet. Come in.”
“You’re house cleaning?” Bennet asked as we went through the living room that was crowded with the refuse of my ancestors.
“Cleaned out the cellar.” I led my guest into the nook off the kitchen. There was a round maple table there with three chairs. The window looked out into a stone yard, fenced in by vine-covered trellises. The ground was tiled with broad slabs of mossy granite plates. Sunlight dappled in through the slat roof.
I thought such a beautiful sight would jack up any price that the white man was willing to pay. But he barely noticed the view.
“Do you want some cola or lemonade?” I had shopped for this meeting. I also had crackers, French bread, and Parma ham if he was hungry.
“No, thank you,” he said without gratitude. “Can we see the cellar now?”
I led him out the back door and to the entrance in the ground. I threw the trapdoor open and stepped aside, indicating that he should go first. I’d left the light on so he would have no trouble descending the stairs. But he hesitated, even took a step backward. Then, with a visible force of will, he steeled himself and walked down the sixteen stairs.
I followed.
He glanced furtively from one corner to the other, then up to the ceiling and back to the stairs. He squinted but the light wasn’t bright. He clapped his hands together, took a deep breath.
I said, “Cellar’s got running water, but there’s no toilet down there, Mr. —”
“First let me tell you,” he interrupted, “that I have particular requests. I want to rent this cellar for sixty-five days, starting on July one. I will remain here for the whole time, and I expect no one to enter except for you. You will prepare and bring food and you will dispose of any materials that need disposing of. Everything else I need will be delivered two weeks before I am due to arrive. With that will come instructions for any construction necessary.”
“So you want me to be your cook and butler?”
“Not exactly, but that’s close enough to the truth.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bennet, but —”
“I will pay all expenses, plus seven hundred and fifty dollars a day.”
The math stopped me in my tracks. Zero times, five times, seven times. “Forty-eight thousand seven hundred fifty dollars,” I said.
Anniston Bennet smiled. Math done right seemed to please him.
He was uncomfortable in the basement, however.
“Let’s go back up,” he said, leading the way up the stairs.
I didn’t understand how he could be so anxious to rent that room if he couldn’t bear five minutes there.
Back in the breakfast room, he regained his composure.
“I will give you eight thousand five hundred right now as a deposit and then on June fifteen you will receive what paraphernalia I will need for my recluse. You will follow any instructions I have given, and then I will arrive at midnight of June thirty. At that time, after I have inspected the work, I will give you twenty thousand dollars, plus another five for expenses. Sixty-five days later I will give you the balance. All moneys will be in cash.”
Tiny shafts of sunlight shone on Bennet’s head and his small hands, which were folded on the table in front of him. He was unchanged by the light. I realized that the insecurity and friendliness he’d shown on our first meeting were an act.
“Man so cold,” my uncle Brent would say of evil white men, “that he could take a bath in ice water and still take his whiskey on the rocks.”
“Well?” Bennet asked.
“What if . . .” I stalled. “What if I just take your money and then say I didn’t?”
The smile this time was a memory of some previous event. “In my experience, Mr. Blakey, people rarely renege on their promises. It’s always easier to keep your word than to enter into lies or intrigue.”
Looking back on it I should have been scared by his words, but instead I was confused. I wondered what point of view could see honesty as the stronger virtue in a world I knew was full of cheating and lies. Didn’t they lie in commercials on TV and ads in newspapers? Didn’t politicians lie about what they’ve done and what they’re about to do? Clarance lied all the time to his wife, and he had more girlfriends than I did.
But then I thought about Narciss and how the truth had been so easy with her.
“You say you’re going to lie to the government, not tell them about the money,” I said.
“The government isn’t real,” he replied. He might have been talking about Santa Claus or God. “I don’t owe anything to anyone who in themselves are lies and liars.”
Talking to the white man made me very nervous. There were all these thoughts in my head. Thoughts about love and lies and money. Especially money. Money and the mortgage and food and work. I had been calling around about jobs for days, but no one wanted to hire me except for a McDonald’s out on the highway and the plastics factory in Riverhead. But those jobs were part-time and minimum wage. No way I could pay my bills with that.
“Why did you come to me, Mr. Bennet? Of all the places out here, how did you choose my house?”
“I had an associate of mine question Teddy Odett. My friend was looking for a place that I could go. He knew my requirements and asked Odett and also Minder at the bank in town what my best options were. As you know you can’t find a job around here and your mortgage is in arrears. My offer settles your problems and gives me what I need.” Bennet’s words and his bright blue eyes were pure and innocent. But what he was telling me was that a stranger could walk into my life and find out more about me than my closest family and friends ever knew.
“How do you make your money, Mr. Bennet?”
“I’m an agent for a consortium of investment and oil companies. I do research and reclamation work all through the world.”
“Reclaiming what?”
“Wealth.” He said the word and it tickled him.
“No drugs or anything?”
He shook his head. His hands hadn’t moved and the sunlight now shone on his forearms.
“You got the money on you?”
“In a brown paper bag in my trunk,” he said.
“So you hand over the money and I just wait for your furniture and stuff?”
He nodded.
“You really found out about my mortgage and house and everything?”
“I’m a man who gets what he wants, Mr. Blakey. I want your cellar and I’m willing to give you what you need.”
I couldn’t see anything wrong with a man wanting to be a monk. I certainly didn’t have any problems with fifty thousand dollars. But there was something, some formal-ity, an expectation from Bennet that made me feel this recluse, as he called it, was more than just a vacation or retreat. I wanted to find the right question to ask, to pull out the truth that he professed to believe in.
But I felt that it couldn’t go on much longer. If I said no that day, then my chances would be over. The bank wouldn’t give a petty embezzler a break on the mortgage. I couldn’t work.
“What do you plan to be doing down there in my basement?” I asked.
“Reading, thinking. If I get the opportunity maybe I’ll do some writing.”
“Nothing else?”
“Eat and sleep.” Bennet’s face was reposed and patient. He even gave me a wan smile.
“What do you mean, if you get the opportunity?”
“Many things depend on circumstance, Mr. Blakey. Opportunities stem from these circumstances.”
I was beaten by this last interchange. Anniston Bennet wanted to live the hermit’s life in a two-hundred-year-old cellar. I needed the money. I tried to think about what my mother would advise, but all I could come up with was a sad face and a deep sigh, a beseeching look that said I hoped I did right. Uncle Brent would have damned me for either choice.
I wanted to say no, but instead I said, “Okay, Mr. Bennet. Bring me your paper bag and we have a deal.”
The white man handed me the bag and shook my hand in the street in front of my house. Irene Littleneck watched and smoked over our exchange.
“See you on July one,” Bennet said softly.
“You bet.”
Again he got into his turquoise Volkswagen, made a U-turn, and drove off. Irene met my eye from her porch across the street. She probably wanted an explanation. I had known her since I was a child—getting into mischief and having my ears twisted by her and her sister, Chastity.
“How is Chastity, Miss Littleneck?” I hailed.
“Restin’,” the aged woman replied.
“Give her my best,” I said.
“Thank you,” Irene said, and she turned off the heavy stare of accusation. A kind word about her family always softened her punishing ways.