Around that time I started putting money in banks in Southampton, East Hampton, out down in Long Island City. Five hundred dollars at a time in interest-bearing savings accounts. I dated Bethany, Extine, and Narciss three of the four nights that I avoided the hatch behind my house. Extine spent the night wanting to kiss me, but I refrained because I knew that would take her power away. Narciss and I went to see the remastered version of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil. Afterward we talked about it and then I drove her home. She asked me to come in, but I said no.
“Don’t you like me?” she asked with excruciating honesty.
“I do, honey. But I’m like an athlete in training. I need all my power to concentrate.”
“Training for what?”
“An examination. A test that Mr. Dent is giving me.”
“What kind of test?”
“Just to see what I know, what I can do.”
“Like an aptitude test?”
“Uh-huh. Just like that.”
Bethany was the biggest problem and the most fun. I took her to the fanciest restaurant we knew, the Captain’s Table in Amagansett. I told her up front that I was going home alone, and she proceeded to spend the rest of the night being all sexy and seductive. Every move of her shoulders set my heart to thrumming.
I kissed her for a long while at her door. But then I told her that I had to get home, that I had an important meeting the next day. And that was no lie.
Every night I sat up late with my ancestors. Leonard, the geeky-looking one, JoJo, the warrior, and Singer, the mask with his lips set into an O. I named them and thought about them. I had made up their characters and histories, but they were real to me.
Singer was a priest. He knew songs all the way back to the first songs. He was from the Congo, I believed, and not related to Leonard, who dealt in slaves, or JoJo, who protected Leonard even though he knew what his brother did was wrong.
I talked with them in earnest for hours. JoJo’s voice told me that death was nothing to fear. Leonard suggested that I get the money while I still had the man locked away and powerless.
Singer I did not understand. His placid face always chanting. I learned the most from him.
I wasn’t crazy. It’s just that my world had disintegrated. Or maybe it was that I never really had a life but hadn’t known it, so I was blissful in my ignorance. Everything began to fall apart when I started talking to Anniston Bennet . . . No. Before Bennet and I started our talks on evil, when I started cleaning out my cellar . . . Or maybe it went all the way back to Uncle Brent or before him to when my father died.
I put on a dark suit with a yellow shirt and a splashy red-and-blue tie to go see Bennet. His beard was filling in and his dark eyes were intense. It took him a full five minutes to get used to the light. He had lost weight, and from the smell of the room, I thought he might have had an intestinal disorder.
I didn’t care about any of that. It wasn’t my choice, I felt, but his. He could walk free at any time or answer my questions and eat steak.
“Mr. Bennet,” I said.
“Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”
“Are you ready to answer my questions?”
“Don’t you mean am I ready to go home?”
“Not before you answer my questions.”
I thought that there were tears in his eyes, but I wasn’t certain.
“Why do you want to be down here in this cage?” I asked.
“Don’t you see? Haven’t you been listening to me?” he said. “With a word from me, your life could end. Maybe just with a gesture. A sentence could level a city block or blow a jetliner out of the sky. A dream could destroy Philadelphia. A disagreement could throw western Africa into famine for five years. You see it every day on TV, but no one listens. People like me move around, but no one knows our names.”
“Maybe you’re hiding down here,” I suggested.
“I’m not afraid to die, Charles. I’ve truly walked through the valley of death.”
“If you aren’t hiding, then are you afraid of what you might do?”
“There’s nothing I can do. Nothing.”
“I don’t understand. If you feel like you don’t make a difference, then why torture yourself?”
Bennet looked at me with wide frightened eyes. “Don’t leave me in the dark again, Charles. Give me a couple of days with some food and light.”
“All you have to do is answer my question, Mr. Bennet.”
“Give me a couple of days.”
“Could that baby ask you that?”
Maybe I was crazy. I didn’t hate Bennet. I was his employee. Somehow I felt that he was still calling the shots, that he was making up his own mind to starve in darkness four days more. He was tortured behind those black eyes, under that scorched head. I was the tool of his penance.
He was a slaver of souls in the twentieth century. He was a killer and a liar and a thief, but that didn’t matter to me. From what he had said I understood that he was a torturer of black people, but I believed him when he said that it wasn’t out of malice or even intent.
My domination of him came from a personal conflict we were having. I didn’t want to be another one of his slaves. I was foolish enough to believe that I could take his money and keep my freedom.
The next four days were spent pretty much as the last. I saw a lady three out of four nights. The first day I went fishing and didn’t catch a thing. The next day I saw Clarance and Ricky together for the first time in months. I picked them up in my car and treated them to drinks at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. We sat in the front room talking about old times and drinking port. Clarance smoked a cigar.
“What’s goin’ on with you?” Clarance asked me in the middle of our talk.
“What you mean?”
“I mean you never answer your phone and we don’t see you. You don’t have a job, but you’re still in your house and goin’ out buyin’ port. Somebody said that they saw you at Curry’s in East Hampton. One guy saw you hitchhiking down the road to Southampton.”
“I don’t know, Clarance,” I said. “Things are changing. You know I haven’t done much with my life and I’d like to change that if I could.”
“What you gonna do?”
I knew the answer to his question right then, when he asked, but I didn’t answer because secrets had become dearer to me than their own content or designs.
The pecan pie was the most unexpected thing that happened while I waited for my prisoner to soften up in the dark. I bought the pie, which was edged in chocolate, at a roadside bakery stand that my mother used to frequent. It was a beautiful pie. The pecans crowded the surface and the crust rose like a collar, leaving ample room for the chocolate edge.
I bought the pie in memory of my mother, but when I got home I carried it across the street to Miss Littleneck. She was delighted and insisted that I come in to share the gift of giving with her sister, Chastity.
The entranceway to the Littleneck home was close and unlivable, I thought. Irene led me up a flight of narrow stairs to a room where the scent of death hovered like incense. In the small bed lay a woman, once black and now gray, the size of a child and wearing a curly brown wig. Her eyes might have been open. Her chest didn’t seem to move. But I knew from the jittering finger of her left hand on top of the blanket that she was still among the living, at least for a little bit and a while.
“Chastity, look what little Charles Blakey brought us,” Irene Littleneck said. “He brought us your favorite pie. And he didn’t even know that you liked it. Did you, Charles?”
I shook my head.
“Speak up, Charles,” Irene ordered. “Chassy doesn’t hear so well.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know you liked the pie, but I hope you like it.”
“Isn’t that nice?” Irene asked her sister.
The dying woman’s fingers got a little more agitated. Irene held her sister’s wrist and peered down into the half-closed eyes. “He’s a godsend, don’t you think?”
The one-sided talk went on for a while. Then Irene turned to me and said, “We better let her get some rest. You know, she hasn’t had a guest in more than three years.”
“Mr. Bennet.”
“Mr. Dodd-Blakey.”
Anniston Bennet was sick by this time. His eyes had trouble keeping their focus even after they had become accustomed to the light. Only half a loaf of bread had been eaten and he was unwashed. If I had not just seen Chastity Littleneck, I might have broken down right then.
“Why do you torture me?” he asked.
“Why don’t you just leave?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell. I’m supposed to be down here. Trapped by a Negro, a black man, until the bubble in my brain passes. Until the itch in my heart goes away.”
He said all of that staring down at my feet. Again I didn’t believe him. Anytime he showed weakness I thought it was a trap.
“That’s no answer,” I said. It was a phrase my father used when I avoided his questions.
“I swear it is,” Bennet said. “There’s a bubble in my brain, not a tumor but I can feel it. And I want to tear my chest open. Did you know how far a woman would go to save her babies from starvation?”
The last question took me by surprise.
“Say what?” I asked.
“That’s what you want to know,” Bennet said. “There was a rich man somewhere on the Mediterranean who wanted to experiment on a child. A thousand miles south of him, there was a political campaign of famine being waged. And among the population there were many mothers who would have jumped at the offer of feeding the rest of her family at the cost of one son. I was just a conduit, a wire making the circuit. If one child had not died, the whole family would have perished.”
“You could have saved them all,” I said.
“That time maybe. And maybe I did once in a while. But the power is drained away if you never meet your obligations. The rich man I aided gave me power that some presidents wouldn’t have understood.”
“Is it the guilt over that child that brings you here?”
“No. I don’t think so. Can I have some oatmeal?”
I made his afternoon meal of porridge and returned to watch him eat.
“Can I have light tonight?” he asked me.
“You could go home and sit next to a fire.”
“I don’t want to go. I have to wait out the time.”
“Then you can stay, but I want to hear everything. No more games.”