After 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.
“Okay.” He paused. “Mr. Dodd-Blakey. Good morning to you. Did you sleep well?”
“I’ll connect a hose from the sink that you can use to wash your dishes,” I replied. “It’s just cold water but that’ll have to do. You want me to leave the light on?”
“I didn’t get my books last night,” he said. “Would you get them for me?”
“Which one did you want?”
This curt question caught Bennet up short. He put out a hand and touched the metal slats of his cage. For a moment hardness shone in his eyes, but then he said, “The first volume in the Story of Civilization.”
I complied without comment. The book was a tight fit under the cage door and the cover ripped.
“Maybe you could open the door for the other ones,” Bennet suggested.
“The only reason that lock comes off,” I said, “is when you get your ass out of here.”
“You sound angry, Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”
I regretted having asked him to refer to me in that way. It was a show of respect, but not to me. I was Charles, son of Mr. Blakey.
“Not angry,” I said. “It’s just . . . just this whole thing is weird.”
“What?” Anniston Bennet asked, sitting back in his chair behind metal bars as if he were in his den in Greenwich.
“You,” I said, “in this cell under lock and key, with me like some kinda warden and butler all rolled up into one.”
Bennet smiled.
“Have you ever read the Story of Civilization?” he asked.
“A long time ago,” I lied. “I’m not so good on a lotta details though.”
“All throughout history there have been men who have isolated themselves from the world,” he said. “They go to mountaintops or sit in meditation for months at a time. They flagellate themselves and refrain from having sex or masturbation. That’s mostly what I’m doing here.”
“But you said that you’re a criminal paying for his crimes,” I pointed out.
Anniston Bennet smiled and hunched his shoulders as if to say, You got me there.
“Many ancient belief systems are based on the concept of sin, my friend,” he said. “The Hindus accept as truth that they are answering for crimes committed in previous lives. The Hebrews and Christians are answering for the sins of their long-ago ancestors.”
“But that’s not you, is it?”
“No. I don’t have the luxury of a god. But what I do have is not contagious.”
“Come again?”
“In the eyes of the world, Mr. Dodd-Blakey, I am an upright and innocent man. My time here with you would be seen merely as an eccentricity. You can collect my money and serve me dry sandwiches and Kool-Aid. No one will blame you or indict you for the crimes that I recognize as my own.”
“That’s just a lot of talk, Mr. Bennet. I think that it’s crazy what you’re doing, but I took your money, so I’ll hold up my side of the bargain. But don’t you think that I’m gonna be a part of all this crazy talk. I’ll bring you your meals and whatever else I have to do. But I don’t like it and I’ll put you out of here in a minute if anything gets to be too much for me.”
I don’t know how he felt about that because I left before he could engage me anymore. Outside the cellar I began to sweat. My heart was pounding and my ears rang. Inside my chest there was laughter, but the mirth could not make its way to my lips. It came as a throbbing rumble that might have been pleasant if it had an outlet.
I stumbled to the house, up to my room. There I sat on the old maple bed, thinking about Brent and all the mean things he had said to me. I imagined him walking down the halls in his slow shuffling pace. I thought about him cursing the summer for its heat and the winter for cold. I hated his smell and scratchy voice.
I could almost hear him, his wheezing through those last dying days.
Ears ringing, heart pumping, chest throbbing, and sweat dripping, I tried to rise above my body, hoped for my spirit to transcend grief.
It was grief I felt. Deep sadness that no mother or god could calm. I hated Anniston Bennet, hated him. I blamed him for everything that was wrong with me. His damned money and smirks.
I was wondering how long a boiled egg and cornflakes could keep someone alive. Everything was orange colored through closed lids, and my skin was dry and cool.
I opened my eyes. The air and the light in the room told me that it was afternoon. I had been dreaming of the prisoner’s luncheon. His life was like an invisible pulsing beacon, a second heart, a child who needed attention. He was living in my dreams as well as my cellar. I despised him already and he hadn’t even been there a whole day.
I prepared baked beans from the can, boiled potatoes, and cranberry juice for his late lunch. He was already halfway through the thousand-page volume of history, wearing red-rimmed glasses and sitting in the red plastic chair. The breakfast tray was already pushed out. I shoved the lunch tray into his cell.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Four,” I said, turning to leave.
“It’s not so bad, is it?” he asked.
I turned back and said with false bravado, “Not bad for me at all. I’m not the one locked up in a cold basement on a summer day. I’m not the one kept away from my family and friends.”
“That’s true,” he said. “But you know there’s a belief that any society that is forced to punish its citizens is, to one degree or another, an unhealthy state.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “What country do you know of doesn’t have laws?”
“It’s a question of degree, Mr. Dodd-Blakey,” Bennet replied, “not one of law. A man who recognizes his crime and accepts his punishment is a member of good standing in his country. But the criminal who runs and hides, who is unrepentant even though he knows what he’s done, is a symptom of a much greater disease.”
“None of that has anything to do with you being here,” I said. “You’re renting a room and locking the door—that’s all.”
“No,” the enigmatic white man said to a space somewhere over my head. “I am here answering for crimes against humanity. I am doing so because I am guilty, not because I was caught. And in doing so I am making the world a better place. I’m setting an example down here.”
“How can you be doing that when no one even knows where you are?”
“There’s more to the world than one plus one, Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”
I barely heard him over the pounding of my heart. I worried that maybe he wasn’t crazy, that he wasn’t even a common crook. Even though I didn’t understand what he was saying, I feared that maybe he was right, that he was living out some moral dilemma and that I was caught up in the center of it all without knowing it.
Once outside I was sweating again. I didn’t want to go in my house, so I got in the car and drove into town. I went to Harbor Savings with the money Narciss had sent. The teller went over the check for a full minute before cashing it. Everyone in the Harbor must have known about my thefts.
From the bank I went to Nelson’s Hardware, where I bought three combination padlocks and heavy hinges to hold them. Ricky was sitting on a public bench on Main Street, drinking orange juice from a carton. I pretended not to notice him from across the street.
“Hey, Charles,” he called.
I looked up, feigning surprise, and then crossed over to him.
“Hey, Cat,” I said. “I thought you were working for Wilson Ryder?”
“Took the day off,” he said. “Clarance said he saw you at the train station in the middle of the night.”
“Yeah. I met some girl and she said she wanted to come back out to see me, said she’d be on that train but damned if she was.” I lied smoothly and without a skip.
“Who is she?”
“Abby Peters,” I said, pulling the name out of thin air.
“White girl?”
I said nothing then. If he wanted to wonder about something, I thought it would be best to have him thinking about a girl who didn’t exist.
“Clarance said that you looked upset,” Ricky said.
“Upset?”
“Well actually he said crazy. He said that you had a crazy look in your eye.” Ricky cocked his head to the side in order to see up into my eyes. He was searching for insanity.
“How are you, Cat?”
He made a painful face. “Bethany dropped me.”
“When?”
“Almost two months but I still miss her.” The honest hurt in his voice and eyes told me that he had no suspicions about who Bethany was with now. “It hurts way down. You know, that girl could get somethin’ cookin’ in me. I was thinkin’ about startin’ some kinda serious business, about makin’ a life for myself, for us. You know?”
“You always got life, Cat. Or else you don’t have it. There is nothing else.” It sounded right when I said it. Now it’s just a meaningless line of words.
“Are you crazy, Charles?”
I laughed and said, “Just tired, Ricky. Tired of every day.”
“What you mean?”
“I want something else, I guess. Something different.”
“Like what? A vacation?”
“Maybe a journey,” I said. The words were coming from my lips, but I wasn’t thinking about them.
“What’s the difference?” Ricky asked.
“A vacation’s over after two weeks. You go out on a journey and you might not ever come back.”