Free The Man in My Basement by Walter Mosley

head.
    Bethany loved eating and sex, as I have said before, but she also loved to talk about herself. We heard all about her plans of moving down to Atlanta and starting a braid-and-nail parlor. She loved children and had gone to some wild parties at crazy artists’ homes in Southampton. One well-known painter had asked her to model three times, but every time he was so moved by her ample beauty that he had to make love to her instead.
    I could see that most of her stories were designed to excite her male audience. It worked. Ricky was almost swooning over her words. He had run into her at a shopping mall near Riverhead a week or so earlier, and she gave him hopes. Now he was only a sausage away.
    “Hey, Bethy,” he said.
    “Yeah?”
    “I wanna show you somethin’ upstairs.”
    “What?” she asked.
    “Somethin’.”
    “You comin’, Charles?” Bethany pursed her lips and lowered her eyelids. If we were out in nature, I would have killed Ricky right then.
    “In a few minutes,” I said.
    Ricky sighed in relief.
    “Okay,” she said, smiling. “But you come on up now.”
    “I’ll be there.”
    “Come on,” Ricky said, grabbing her by the arm.
    “Ow! Don’t be so rough, Ricky. I’m comin’.”
    I washed the dishes and looked out the window. I was thinking about Anniston Bennet and the bag of money that I had hidden in the foldout sofa bed in my father’s old library. A bagful of money was not a normal thing—that’s what I was thinking. No matter how much the little white man had acted like it was a simple business transaction, it was obvious that he wanted to hide what he was doing. It made me nervous, but I couldn’t see any way out of it. Twenty-five hundred dollars of the money was already gone.
    But how bad could it be? He couldn’t hurt anybody in my basement. He was just little so I knew he couldn’t hurt me. Unless he had a gun. But I could lock the doors while he was down there. Of course a man with a gun could get through a door, or a window.
    But why would he need to pay me money? Why not just shoot me in the breakfast nook?
    “Ohhhh.”
    I couldn’t believe that Bennet had any designs on my welfare. I decided to get drunk and stop worrying about things I couldn’t change.
    “Ohhhhh.”
It was only a whisper. But, I thought, it had to be a roar to make it all the way down into the kitchen from my parents’ room on the third floor. That was the deal I usually made with Clarance. He could come to my house with one of his girlfriends. They’d stay on the third floor and I’d sleep downstairs in my father’s den. But it was the first time that Ricky had asked for the deal.
    I never imagined that Bethany, who spoke in a small high voice, could get the volume to disturb me downstairs.
    That’s when I remembered being a child. Now and then my parents wanted to be alone,
to talk,
they said. They’d go into their room and tell me to go play. But all I wanted was to play with them and talk to them. After they sent me away from the door a few times, I’d wander down to the pantry with my toy soldiers and guns. I was happy then because there was a vent that let me hear my parents’ soft murmuring voices while I played soldier.
    “That’s it, baby,” Bethany said. She might have been talking to me, her voice was so clear. “Right there. Right there. Right there.”
    Ricky was saying something, and she replied with a whole drawerful of yeses.
    I hadn’t masturbated in three days because of the alcohol. By the time I got around to that, I was too dizzy to do anything. Bethany was telling Ricky where to move and when he got it right she let go with a strained roar.
    That was my first orgasm too.
    I could hear the furniture rocking and Bethany’s squeals. She knew what she wanted and was very specific in her requests. To hear a woman ask for pleasure like that had me on my knees among the boxes of cereal and plastic containers of grape juice. After my third orgasm I had to leave the pantry