12
When the final white tail bobbed off into the wood, I was 13
thoroughly satisfied.
14
My uncle Brent had been a hunter before he got sick.
15
He killed hundreds of deer down in South Carolina, 16
where he’d lived with his third wife.
17
“Hunt for the weekend hunters,” he’d tell me in one of his 18
few friendly moods. “Kill six bucks and make two forty.”
19
When I was a child I imagined that the deer used to sur-20
round our house in the evening, hoping that Brent would 21
come outside for a walk. Then they could stomp him to 22
death for the crimes he’d committed against their race.
23
24
25
“Chuck,” Wilson Ryder said. The tone of his voice mim-26
icked surprise, but it was also leveled at me offensively.
27 S
“Mr. Ryder,” I said in greeting. I hated the name Chuck.
28 R
And he knew it because I had asked him not to call me by
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The Man in My Basement
that name eighteen years before when I had my first sum-1
mer job working for his family’s construction company.
2
Wilson Ryder was an older white man with yellowish 3
white hair and a big gut. His family had been in con-4
struction for three generations. Young men in my family 5
had worked for his family almost the whole time. He had 6
gray eyes, and fingers covered with yellow-and-black cal-7
luses from hard work and cigarettes.
8
We were standing in a wide circle of yellow soil that had 9
been cleared out of a scrub-pine stand. The trees stood in 10
an angry arc three hundred yards from the center of the 11
circle. There were the beginnings of excavation here and 12
there. Enough to give you the idea of the cul-de-sac of 13
mansions that the Ryder family intended to build. They 14
would level the whole island and sell it off stone by stone 15
if they could.
16
“What can I do for you?” Ryder asked me.
17
“I’d like a job, Mr. Ryder.”
