Chapter 5. The Basement
Relieved that the child did not discover him when she came down to get rice, Demetrius sits in an out-of-sight corner of the basement to think.
The sound of laughter startles Demetrius out of his reverie, but his mind doesn’t clear. Instead, a sudden longing propels him to his feet. Taking a couple of steps toward the stairs, he thinks, I’ll go up to them. I’m just a fellow human who needs a little help.
He takes another step and stops, head pounding with reverberations. He grabs his own wrists and presses them against his stomach as if they belong to a second person he’s trying to hold back.
Exhaling, he returns to his seat. “It was the strangest thing, Granny,” he imagines himself saying to his grandmother, sitting on her porch, listening to the breeze off the Chesapeake Bay. “It was like I was two people, the fugitive intruder me, and another me, who knew he belonged in that house. I got confused.”
“Careful, dearie,” her serene voice would reply. “Keep your mind tight inside the real you.”
“Yes, Granny,” Demetrius whispers aloud.
The phone rings upstairs. He hears the woman utter a sharp syllable, followed by a string of unintelligible Spanish.
He gets to his feet, tiptoes over to the sink once again, and crouches beside it. It’s a risky spot, visible from the stairs, but he needs information about the people unknowingly sheltering him.
“I’m not backing down!” This declaration surges out of the hole in the ceiling, in clear English. Then the words, “… start a collective household.” Silence follows, then an unintelligible rush, out of which he distinguishes, “… invite other people to live here with us. Paying people.” He can’t make out the woman’s next words, but they sound argumentative. Then he hears her say firmly, “…the sooner the better.”
She switches back to Spanish. Concentrating, he distinguishes the word “colectivo,” mentioned several times.
He stops listening to focus on what he has just heard. She plans to rent out rooms! “‘The sooner the better,’” he repeats to himself. Could he ask to rent a room here? This place would be ideal—completely random, with no connection to him.
He hurries back to his bag and rummages through it, lamenting that he hadn’t planned a week’s visit to Granny Gus, so he’d have more clothes.
After walking across the Maryland border the night before, Demetrius had spotted several cop cars stopped at a light up ahead. Forcing himself to keep to his measured pace, he had veered left onto a narrower road. In a block he encountered a bridge over a small stream. Scrambling down the steep embankment, he had ducked under the low bridge. Breathing deeply to calm himself alerted him that despite changing clothes in his car before abandoning it, his body still smelled of the garbage heap where he had hidden.
He dug around in his bag for soap from his toilet kit and gave himself an awkward wash. Ignoring his chattering teeth and thoughts of polluted water, he rubbed himself dry with a spare shirt.
Hearing no vehicles or other noises, he crept up the embankment and resumed walking down the curving road. Soon he crossed a wide avenue into a residential area not unlike the small town where his grandmother lived.
He had begun wondering how long it would be before dawn, or before he collapsed from exhaustion, when that roaring helicopter had suddenly materialized, sending him on his panicked sprint through the wide alley, his dash across the overgrown backyard, and his headlong fall into this basement refuge.
Demetrius glances around the basement to center himself once again in the present, then returns to the sink to coax another trickle out of the faucet without activating its voice. He cups water in his palms and gives himself a supplementary washing, disappointed not to find laundry soap. He rifles through his bag once again and liberally applies deodorant and cologne.
The bump on his head is tender, but he’s fairly sure the dizziness he feels is from lack of food and rest, not anything more serious. Upstairs, everything seems quiet. Could they have gone out? Don’t relax, he warns himself.
Over his clean button-down shirt, he dons a crew-neck maroon sweater his mother gave him. He’d always thought it dorky, and packed it more as a talisman than a garment, but now he’s glad to have it. Dorky will seem unthreatening.
He doesn’t dare shave without a mirror—a pretty impression he’ll make if he shows up with blood on his face—but hopes the little proto-goatee sprouting on his chin will further his aim to look like a harmless honest citizen. Of course, he genuinely is one; it’s just this insane situation forcing him to impersonate an invented honest citizen.
A name pops into his head. “Cole Robert Benson.” Softly, he repeats it aloud. ‘Cole’ might be for Nat King Cole, a favorite of his grandmother’s. ‘Robert’ could be for Robert Kennedy, a White liberal whom Demetrius kind of likes. Plus, it’s a satisfyingly mainstream name. ‘Benson’ could be for George Benson. Benson Dubois? Maybe Benson and Hedges cigarettes, which he’d briefly smoked in his twenties.
“Thanks,” he tells his unconscious mind. He waits for additional inspiration regarding this new identity, but nothing more surfaces. “I’ll make it up as I go along,” he resolves. “Go with the flow.”
He closes his eyes to get into the flow. Then, sensing the pull toward the comfortable limbo he’d drifted into before, his head jerks and his eyes fly open. He realizes, with shock, that he’s close to falling asleep, or something like it, on his feet. He grabs his locs in both fists and tugs hard, bullying himself into alertness.
He returns to his duffel bag and pulls out a coffee can wrapped in red paper. With a silent apology to his grandmother, he eases off the paper, opens the lid, and pokes a finger into the fragrant grounds of Granny Gus’s favorite brew, which she considers too extravagant to buy for herself. He carefully draws out a little green bag with “Nader-LaDuke” printed on it (his thank you gift for donating to their presidential campaign) and gives it a squeeze. The roll of cash is still there—twelve hundred dollars. He has been slipping in a crisp new hundred each month for the past year, picturing his grandmother’s surprise when she digs in her coffee scoop tomorrow, no, today, on her 81st birthday.
“Granny,” he tells her silently, “you keep saving my life, even when you don’t know it.” Now this money will need to last him for who knows how long, and who knows what expenses.
He ponders his savings account–seven thousand dollars squirreled away over the five years since he started working at the Arboretum, mostly thanks to his rent-controlled apartment. Which will be history if the developers get their way in the neighborhood, as they’ve already done in the adjacent H Street Corridor. He’ll lose it anyway if he’s gone longer than a few weeks, but he can’t do anything about that now.
He’d have even more money, but he’s spent a couple thousand creating the Liberated Zone garden and buying other supplies for the LZ Center, plus occasionally helping out when one of the Lilydale Street Krew kids or their families has an urgent need. Jane and Michael have done the same, as has Susan, owner of the corner diner, the epitome of kindness, though she insists it’s self-interest—“If y’all keep the developer sharks at bay and the kids out of mischief, my diner survives. For that, I can spare you some cash and a few breakfasts.” Demetrius sighs, longing for his ordinary life, and for Susan’s pancakes and pies.
He shoos his mind back to now. The proverbial rainy day has arrived; more like a hailstorm, but he can’t touch his savings. When he spotted an ATM on last night’s trek up Bladensburg Road, he’d immediately crossed the street to avoid its security camera.
Demetrius swings the little money pouch from side to side, and finds himself shaking his head along with it even though the movement increases his dizziness. He should give up this crazy notion of living on the lam and go back to face the police.
But Jane’s black-eyed gaze bores into his mind. “Did the conditions causing you to run change?” she would ask. Again, he shakes his head no. “Then keep on with this for now. You got away. Now get a room.” Wearily, he nods at Jane, and basks in her approving smile.
He considers his–hopefully–future landlady. The woman’s singing encourages him. And he likes her phrase, “collective household.” That sounds progressive, although likely a hippy, new-agey kind of progressive. But that’s better than a fascist or a racist.
What if she is a racist? Latinos often are, he thinks. That is, they aren’t hypocrites about it like many White people, who hide behind politeness. She might say, “The room’s been taken,” like in those studies where a Black and then a White person pretend to inquire about the same job or housing, and the Black person is told it’s been filled, but when the White person shows up, it’s suddenly available again.
If that happens, he will just… well, he’ll have to think of something else.
As he soundlessly zips his bag, Demetrius wonders how he’ll explain his inquiry about the room if there is no sign in front of the house. Panic jangles in his mind. Maybe he should do this tomorrow.
A loud gurgle jolts him. He looks down at his stomach, reminded of a scene in a Charlie Chaplin movie—Modern Times?—where Charlie and a woman sit in a room glaring at one another, both their stomachs noisily growling.
He feels his anxiety grow. Earlier, the basement seemed a place of safety; now its mood has shifted, as if pushing him out, warning him no woman will let a hollow-eyed, desperate-looking stranger into her home. As evening approaches, his chances will plummet. By tomorrow, he’ll be a wreck.
He takes a deep breath. It has to be now.
There’s one last task which, fortunately, Demetrius has remembered in time. Near the door are some gardening tools. He creeps over, snags a pair of short pruning shears, returns to his cement bag, and kneels on it. One by one, he snips off his locs as close as possible to his head, wincing under the pull of the dull blade, banishing from his mind the time he has devoted to cultivating them. When it’s done, he rubs his scalp to blend the nubs together. Fearing his hair will look choppy, he reopens his bag and pokes around for his black beret, another gift from his mother in her campaign to nudge him away from dressing like the kids, something he enjoys because he feels super-comfortable—not to pretend he is ten years younger, as Jane always teases him. He plants the beret on his head, trying for a suave yet conservative angle.
That thought makes him smile. His face feels stiff, as though the muscles have forgotten how it’s done. He tries again, practicing a few expressions he hopes look pleasant and reassuring.
He scoops up his shorn locks, holds them like a bouquet of flowers, then wedges them as far as they will go under the cement bag. He gives his clothes, hair, and face one last smoothing, praying he hasn’t forgotten some telling detail.
He eases open the basement door and creeps up a few stairs until he gains a view of his surroundings. After hours in the near-dark, he’s dazzled by the late afternoon sun on the brilliant canopy of yellow, red and orange leaves dancing in the breeze. The overgrown bushes and vines along the alley fence harbor an active crew of sparrows and squirrels, but a long moment of observation reveals nothing more threatening.
Demetrius ducks back down the stairs to grab his duffel bag. He gently pulls the door shut, leaving it unlocked as he found it. Then he steals up the stairs, across the backyard, down the alley, and around the block, to approach the house as if for the first time.