The Man in My Basement Read Online Free PDF

and I dropped my pants. She sat back on my great-grandfather’s oversize traveling trunk.
    It should have been safe sex but it wasn’t. I was happy that I just made love to China because I didn’t want those moments with Jane to ever end. I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet while she stroked my other balls and scratched both of my nipples with the long, press-on fingernails of one hand. We were looking into each other’s eyes. Every once in a while she’d lean forward to kiss me, but when I returned the gesture she moved her head back and sneered.
    The trunk rocked precariously, but we had the balance of cats in heat. She undulated on her hips and quivered while I pushed and pulled, feeling the veins standing out all over my body. I started to move faster but Jane said, “Slow it down, baby. Slow it down.”
    When I finally came I moved back in one small show of responsibility. The emotion on her face while she watched my ejaculation was the deep satisfaction that comes from victory.
    China stopped seeing me after that night, and Jane never returned one phone call. Maybe they compared notes; I didn’t care. That night was a highlight for me. Two women and a chance to see the Master—that’s what we called Clarance when it came to women—in action. I was at peace for a whole week. I didn’t do anything except pack the trash into bags and put the crates of empty beers in the basement.
    That’s why I thought about the basement. It was Jane and China Browne that jarred my memory.
     
     
    It was a large, dark room crowded with stuff from the Dodd and Blakey families. A little something was there from every generation. I had one great-auntie, Blythe, who considered herself a painter. There were fifty or more of her awful canvases leaned up against the walls and behind a useless coal-burning stove. Her trees and houses and people looked like a child’s pitiful attempts. There was my great-grandfather’s traveling trunk and stacks of old newspapers that were yellow and brittle from fifty years or more before. We had old furniture and rugs and straw baskets filled with two hundred Christmases of toys. The cobwebs looked like they belonged on a movie set, and it was cold down there too.
    Eighteen wooden crates of empty beer bottles were stacked in the middle of the cobblestone floor. They were all I was interested in. It meant twenty-four dollars at the beer-and-soda store at the Corners. I dragged the boxes out into the light, rubbing my face now and then to get off the tickle of cobwebs. When I got all the crates, I looked around some more to see if there might have been something else of value there.
    It
was
a big basement. Thirty feet in either direction. The ceiling must have been ten feet from the floor. Anniston Bennet was right: it would have made a nice apartment without all that junk. It was a well-built hole. Dry as a bone and cool year round because it was deep in the rocky earth. I used to think that ghosts lived in that cellar, that the spirits of my dead ancestors came from out of the graveyard behind my house and played cards or talked all night long in the solitude of that room. I left them Kool-Aid and lemon cookies in the summer. When the food was still there the next day, my father would tell me that the spirits had eaten the ghost food that lives inside the food for the living. He told me that it was like a blessing and now the food left over had to be buried in the trash like the dead.
     
     
     

• 6 •
     
     
    L ate the next day I was in my newly cleaned kitchen, ready to cook.
    Twenty-four dollars can buy a lot of canned spinach and baked beans. I also got rice and polenta and a big bag of potatoes. One whole chicken with celery and carrots could make a soup to last me a week if I stretched it.
    I’m not a good cook, but I can make simple dishes. That’s because I used to love spending time with my mother in the kitchen. She never made me work. All I had to do was sit around and