After that night with Bethany, the days passed quickly. I spent most of the time reading sci-fi novels, but I unpacked the rest of Bennet’s boxes too. There I found three tin plates, each broken into different-size segments like a TV-dinner tray, and a portable toilet unit that was to be connected by rubber tubing to a canister designed to empty the contents of the toilet. There was a box of books and various elastic exercising devices. A cigar box held three pens and two pencils with a dozen cream-colored envelopes along with a small ream of blank sheets of notepaper.
It seemed as if Anniston Bennet had everything he needed to live in that hole for a very long time.
The books were all hardback. The Wealth of Nations, The Prince, the complete collection of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. Maybe ninety books in all. About fifteen of these were nonfiction (not including the Durants’ eleven volumes), and most of these were economic texts and not titles that I knew. The fiction and poetry was of a high quality, for the most part. I recognized The Alexandria Quartet by Durrell and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He had the collected works of the poet Philip Larkin and Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Moby Dick was there and a book called Vineland. He also had the Bible and Koran. He had one very large atlas that didn’t have any publication information in it. I got the feeling that it was privately published and contained specialized geographic information. Many of the maps were color coded with initials that made no sense to me and were not explained in any table.
They were all books that I would’ve liked to have read at some time in the past. I mean that I would’ve liked to know what was in the Bible and the history of the world so when I had arguments with Clarance I could sound smart. But I can’t concentrate on that kind of reading. My mind just drifts when there are too many facts or tough sentences on the page. That’s one of the reasons why I finally left college. As long as classes were lectures, I picked up most of what I needed by ear. But as soon as I had to read some heavy text, I was in deep water.
There were two sets of powder-blue pajamas decorated by red dashes at all angles to one another. All in all it was like a summer camp for a cracked adult.
All except for that cage.
Three days before Anniston Bennet was due to arrive, I received a telegram. It had been slipped under my front door sometime the day before.
Mr. Blakey,
After numerous attempts to reach you by telephone, we are contacting you by this method to confirm the appointment and to ask you to meet the client’s train at 12:04 A.M. Please confirm your agreement by calling the number on the card that the client gave you at your first meeting.
There was no signature, but of course none was necessary. I thought the secrecy was strange, but then again Bethany had told me about rich people and how odd they were.
It took me the entire day to find that card. I turned the house inside out. Finally I found it in the upstairs hamper, in the pocket I had put it in after calling Bennet the first time.
“Hello,” said a familiar voice. “You have reached the Tanenbaum and Ross Investment Strategies Group”—the click—“Mr. Bennet”—the next click—“is not in at the moment but will return your message at the earliest possible time. Please leave your name and number after the signal.”
“I’ll be there at midnight,” I said and hung up.
And I was there, in the lamp-lit parking lot, at midnight. An obese family—the Benoits, mother and children—was also there, waiting. The Benoit family had come down to the Harbor from Montreal at the turn of the century. I don’t remember ever having spoken to Raoul, the father, or any of his clan, but I knew them because they were part of my community. Trudy, the mother, looked at me nervously, a black man at midnight and the train not in yet.
“Hello, Mrs. Benoit,” I hailed. “You meeting Raoul?”
I said it to put her at ease. It worked too. She smiled and nodded. She didn’t remember my name. Maybe she couldn’t distinguish between black men. But it didn’t matter what white people saw when they looked at me. Why would I care?
The train came in and a few people got off. Most of them got into cars. Three taxis rolled up from the colored company that Clarance dispatched for. The few travelers who did not have cars climbed into the cabs. Raoul Benoit, a thin and dapper man wearing a silver-gray suit, tried to get his arms around his wife and failed. He kissed his children and herded them, like so many beach balls, toward a blue station wagon.
“Hey, Charles,” a man said. Behind me Clarance had driven up in a cab. In the back there were three passengers, and another, a woman, sat beside my childhood friend. All of the passengers were white. The riders looked uncomfortable. One man in the backseat checked his watch.
“You drivin’ now?” I asked.
“Athalia needs braces, so I’m drivin’ three nights a week. How you doin’?”
“Fine,” I said, looking over my shoulder.
“You need a ride?”
“No.”
“What you doin’ out here?” he asked. “Meetin’ somebody?”
“Can we get going, driver?” the woman next to Clarance asked, barely restraining her impatience.
“Must be the next train,” I said vaguely.
“Next train’s tomorrow,” Clarance informed me.
“Oh.”
“Driver,” a man in the backseat said.
“What?” Clarance’s tone was sharp.
In the darkness, on the platform next to the station sign, I saw the silhouette of a small man.
“We need to get home,” the passenger was saying.
“Well if you can’t wait a minute while I find out how my friend is, then you could walk.” That brought silence.
“You go on, Clarance,” I said. “I got my car. I can drive home.”
“I tried to call you,” Clarance said.
“I been thinkin’,” I replied.
“You wanna get together?”
“I’ll call you next week,” I said.
Clarance looked at me a moment. There was concern in his face. He was a good man, and we had been friends as long as either one of us could remember. But there was no way to talk to me. He shrugged.
“See ya,” he said and then drove off.
As he left, Anniston Bennet approached from the platform. I stood my ground, waiting.
“Good evening,” he said.
The air was cool but my windbreaker was enough to keep the chill off. There were moths floating around the floodlights, and I detected the barely distinguishable motion of bats feasting on the fluttering bugs in the hovering darkness.
I took a deep breath and prepared myself. I wanted to start this thing with Bennet on the right foot. I never had a tenant before and didn’t want to be taken advantage of. Everything mattered. The fact that I waited for him to walk to me, that I didn’t offer to take his satchel. All he carried was that small leather bag. I wondered what he was planning to wear for two months.
“Mr. Blakey,” he said.
“Mr. Bennet.”
“I tried to call,” he said. “But there was no answer.”
“I know. I got the telegram. Did you get my message?”
He shrugged his shoulders, indicating that he was there because he received my message. That would have been a good moment for me to take his bag, but I did not.
“My car is over there.” I indicated the brown Dodge.
We made our way. Bennet threw his bag in the backseat and we were off.
“Why did you need me to pick you up?” I asked, turning onto the highway. “You know we didn’t say anything about you paying for a limo service.”
“I want to be circumspect about this retreat, Mr. Blakey. No one knows where I’m going. Part of the idea is that I am to be kept from everything in my world—completely. I don’t want my car in your driveway or some driver who remembers where he dropped me off.”
“That sounds illegal, Mr. Bennet. I don’t want to be involved in anything that’s against the law.”
He looked at me and laughed silently. Then he said, “Not illegal. No. You see, in my world I’m pretty well known, and some people think that I’m important—for their money. I don’t want anybody finding me. This time is my own.”
Off the side of the highway, I spotted three deer, their luminescent eyes transfixed by my high beams. We sped past them. I thought that at least they were witnesses to our passage.
“What were you laughing about?” I asked.
“Ask me later.” Bennet sat back in the passenger’s seat, letting out a deep sigh. It could have been pleasure or the last breath of a dying man.
“Can you pull into your garage?” Bennet asked me as we drove up my gravel driveway. “I mean, if we’re going to see this secrecy thing through, we might as well do it right.”
I almost sneered, but then I remembered Miss Littleneck. She was probably sitting on her front porch, smoking a cigarette and spying on the night. I wasn’t sure if I wanted the neighborhood to know about my tenant, so I opened the garage door and drove in. Bennet and I exited out the back door of the garage and down through the hatch to the cellar. I snapped on the light and immediately Bennet began to inspect my work. I had unpacked and constructed a small red plastic table and chair. These seemed to satisfy him. There was also a futon that I had unfurled.
“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.