“Good morning,” the naked man said to me. The prisoner was standing in the middle of his cell, his pajamas hung neatly from the back of the cage. The concrete surrounding his cell was dark from the water he must have thrown there. “I washed both pair last night. I wasn’t at all tired.”
Anniston Bennet had a huge uncircumcised penis. It was the biggest one I had ever seen on a human male. It just hung down flaccid and heavy between his thighs.
“I was thinking about our talk,” he said, seemingly unconscious of his nakedness or endowment. “I don’t usually think about things much. Usually there’s too much to get done. I’ve lived a pretty active life, you know. But you had me thinking last night. And to answer your question —”
“What question?”
“About killing —”
“I have to go, Mr. Bennet,” I said. I put down the fried eggs and heated potato patties and pushed them under the door to his cage. I was rattled by his ease at being naked. He wasn’t a powerfully built man, small except for that big dick. And there was a cascading series of crosshatched scars down his right shoulder that was painful to see. His feet were tiny. Something about standing there conversing with the naked man was too much for me.
“I’ll be back this afternoon,” I said. “We could talk then.”
“Where you going?”
“To see my friend. We said we’d get together today.”
He wanted to keep on talking, but I had to get out of there. I rushed up the stairs and slammed the hatch shut. I threw the newly attached bolts and secured them with the padlocks and went straight to my car.
I never did figure out what it was exactly that drove me from the cellar that morning. I have what I always thought was a normal-size penis. I’ve never measured or anything, but it has the feel of average. The women I’ve known were never surprised, one way or the other, when my erection was finally exposed to them. And even when they whispered sweet compliments, it had to do with how hard it got rather than how deep it went. Some men, I knew, were better endowed. Bethany had told me that it was just this fact that kept her attached to Clarance for so long. There were stories about Clarance’s sexual prowess, but I had seen him in the boys’ gym and he didn’t hold a candle to Anniston Bennet.
I’d never felt embarrassed or inferior before that morning. And it wasn’t just Bennet’s anatomy but also his ease at being naked. As a child I learned to be ashamed of exposing my genitals or buttocks. Some dresses that women wear today make me avert my eyes.
I was halfway to Clarance’s house before I realized that I had not lied to Bennet. It was Tuesday. Clarance always took Tuesdays off and worked the lighter Sunday shift. I got there a little after 10:00. His oldest daughter, Athalia, was sitting on the front porch. She was a big girl, sixteen I believe, and a magnet for boys.
“Hi, Mr. Blakey!” she shouted. “Daddy’s havin’ breakfast.”
Even that small piece of information was delivered across the lawn in an engaging manner. Athalia was what is known as a daddy’s girl. She loved to see men happy. I’ve often thought that Clarance must have sold his soul at some East Hampton crossroads to be blessed in so many ways.
“How’s summer school, Thalia?”
“They suspended me ’cause I had a dirty magazine,” she said, her smile dimming for a moment.
“You in trouble?”
“Naw. Momma’s mad but Daddy just laughed.”
She was wearing loose shorts and a pink blouse that didn’t make it down to her navel. She caught my eye and I thought about Anniston Bennet—about how he was as unashamed as a child.
“When can you go back?” I asked.
“I gotta go Friday. I don’t see why I can’t just have the whole week off.” She was bothered, but nothing kept Athalia down for long. She gave me a big grin and opened the door for me. I went through the small ranch-style house toward the back. There was no one in the dining room. Through the window I could see big Clarance sitting down to a meal at his cast-iron patio table. He was wearing shorts like his daughter, with a strap undershirt and red thongs. The iron table and chair were painted lime green. Behind him was a child’s rubber pool in the middle of the back lawn. Clarance’s house was a small affair, built in the midfifties. His family had lived in the Harbor for at least a hundred years, but they came from slaves down in Georgia. He still had cousins in Atlanta.
He saw me through the window and waved a turkey drumstick at me.
Once outside I hailed him. “Hey, Clarance.”
“Charles.” He used his drumstick to point out an iron chair, which I dragged to the table.
“You want some food?” he asked me.
“No, thanks.”
“You look like you could use somethin’, man,” he said. “You losin’ weight?”
That was what was different about my image in the mirror.
“How are you, Clarance?”
“Can’t complain. Athalia had a Playgirl magazine at school and they kicked her out. Can you imagine that? Here they had lawyers holding up the president’s dick on TV every night and they wanna suspend a girl for buyin’ a magazine off the rack.”
“Sorry if I was rude when I saw you at the train station,” I said.
That raised Clarance’s eyebrows a notch. It might have been the first apology that I ever gave without being forced into it.
“That’s okay,” he said. “You okay?”
“Been thinkin’. Been thinkin’.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know, Clarance. I guess I’m wondering why I’m out here doin’ what I do. You know, there’s nothing to it.”
“What you mean?”
“It’s like I’ve been asleep my whole life,” I said. “And even now it feels like I’m still asleep, or almost out. I wake up for a minute and then three days go by and I wake up again.”
“You mean you been up in your bed all this time?”
“Naw, man. Not sleeping—sleepwalking. I wake up and I’m in a store buying pot roast. Or somebody’s talking to me, I mean I’m in the middle of a conversation, and I don’t even know what the person just said. I don’t even know what we’re talking about or how I even got there. You know?”
I could tell that Clarance was concerned because he stopped eating.
“Like you black out?” he asked.
“No. If I think about it, I remember, but it’s hard to concentrate. It’s like nothing is important enough to think about.”
What I was saying to Clarance had always been true for me—my whole life. Not a single day went by that I wasn’t lost in daydreams. Teachers talking at you, my mother or father telling me what was right or wrong. The reason I didn’t watch TV was because I couldn’t sit still for a movie or sitcom. Halfway through a war film I still wasn’t sure which side was which. I could read books, fun books, and I could follow an animal through the woods for hours. A blaze in the fireplace could keep my attention for a whole night. But anybody telling me anything was just a waste of good breath, as my uncle Brent used to say.
“Maybe you drinkin’ too much,” Clarance said.
“Maybe.”
“You want a job, Charles?”
“What kind of job?”
“Driving a taxi. I could hook you up there.”
I looked at Clarance, feeling like I had just come awake again. His act of kindness felt like the gentle nudge my mother used to give me when I was too tired to get up the first time she called.
“I got money,” I said.
“How’d you get that?”
“Cat introduced me to Narciss Gully. She has an antique business. She specializes in quilts, but she’s helping me sell the stuff that was in my cellar. It’s a lotta money.”
“How much?”
“Enough for the mortgage and a couple’a years or so.”
Clarance didn’t have much money. He worked hard at the taxi business, and his wife, Mona, was a nurse at the hospital in Southampton. Their families had nothing to give them. They spent everything on their kids. And so when Clarance still had concern on his face for my dilemma, I understood that he was a real friend. We’d known each other for thirty-three years, my whole life, and that was the first moment that I knew he really cared for me.
“I got to go, Mr. Mayhew,” I said.
“You just got here. Stay for a while. Maybe we could go pick up Cat after work and go to some bars.”
“No,” I said. “But thank you. Thank you. And I’m sorry if I ever made you mad, man. You know I was just jealous. See ya.”
I stood up from the iron chair and walked out past the teenager on the front porch. I glanced at her and realized that she was thumbing through the naked photographs in the Playgirl magazine that got her suspended.
“Bye, Thalia.”
“Bye, Mr. Blakey. You come on back, okay?”