Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  At the clear-walled boathouse, on the metal dock, it’s what Eddie said. Eric smiled, shrugged, and thought I don’t know. To me it sounds nuts, and turned back to the elevator…“No—that’s what they tell me.” Eddie’s brown sleeves were pushed up his heavy forearms. Today, he had a belly. “The old Tax and Record Office up there really is the oldest building on the island.”

  “But it don’t make sense,” Eric said. “I used to come out here—I mean, when you was runnin’ around in diapers, Ed. There wasn’t no buildin’ there at all. I remember when they first started clearin’ this end of the island. It was just trees. They had their first meetin’ out here in a damned tent—”

  “You wanna work tomorrow,” Ed said, “you guys can come down to the Boathouse and fix the wires to them three switches in the back.”

  “Sure,” Eric said.

  “And if you get a chance, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to fix the light in Hugh’s kitchen. I was there last week, and it wasn’t workin’. He probably don’t care about it enough to mention, but I bet it would make things easier on him if you fixed it for him.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  The grass around Hugh’s cabin was overlong, and you’d think it looked like something back on the mainland in the Dump. Eric walked up the steps. Hugh’s cabin smelled really musty, and Hugh—who was ninety-seven and occasionally said he was a hundred—was sitting in a chair around on the side deck, in his sweater. After hellos and well, now, it’s nice of you come and see me here, it really is, Eric said, “Come on, Hugh. You and me are old timers—since before Three-B. How can the tax office down there be the oldest building in the Settlement? That’s just some nonsense for the tourists, ain’t it?”

  “Old-timer?” Hugh said. “You aren’t no old-timer—you didn’t come down to this place till you were sixteen, seventeen years old. I remember when Jay first brought you out to the Kyle place.”

  “So do I—”

  “But I was born here. I spent my third birthday in the Kyle mansion, when they used to have the big Christmas party, and they invited everybody from allllll over the state to come out.” Vines twisted around the newels. Birds chirped. “People would come from Tennessee and Alabama and…they had Chinese people comin’ and people from Europe comin’…”

  “Yeah, I know. And they had black and white people, too, and they were proud of it.”

  “They sure were. And they’d bring out them little cracker boys like Jay and Wendell and Tennyson and the Johnston kids, too, from the mainland and local black fellas like me—even though Kyle was my name, too—to play and be together and see how everybody got along with each other. That was Robert Kyle’s grandmother’s idea, you know. She started that when she was a little girl, years before I was born—”

  “Yeah, Hugh. I know about that. But I’m talking about the Tax Office—down town in the Settlement. You seen it. How can they say that’s the oldest buildin’ on the island? I remember when they started clearing back the forest—me and Shit came out here for that meeting. There wasn’t no building there at all.” Eric leaned back on the rail, looking around for another chair. “They were building Ms. Reba’s place—and they had a tent up, where Kyle spoke that afternoon. Hell, I built half the buildings in this Settlement—me and Shit. The Holota cabin where we live now is older than that thing. Anybody can look at it and tell you, that’s a new…you know…structure…new house, there.”

  Hugh sat and went on chuckling. “You know I don’t put another chair out here, so that visitors won’t stay too long. I like to sit here by myself and just look at things—”

  “Don’t worry, Hugh. I ain’t gonna take up your morning. But I was trying to understand—”

  “When they cleared it back—” Hugh seemed satisfied that Eric would go soon—“they did find that one house. But it wasn’t exactly a house. It was a foundation. That’s all that was left. And Ms. Reba said they might as well use it for her place. Only when they started, they realized it was an old, old building from years before—when there used to be an actual little township at that end of Gilead, from before the Kyle mansion even got built. So they asked Ms. Reba if she would take another plot, closer to the water, with a better view, and then they kept that old foundation and built it up. And since it used to be an official building for the Indian Records, they decided to use it for a record storin’ place and tax place in the Settlement. You see how it don’t sit even with the rest of the street? But they used the old foundation, just like it was. It’s not the oldest building. But it’s the oldest foundation. Now, they don’t make a big thing about how it’s all new, floor to ceilin’. They make like it’s a real old place—and they done a good job of makin’ it look kinda old—and just the clear wall, there, so you can look out and see the sky and water and the people passin’ by, that they say is the new part.” Hugh leaned forward and chuckled. “And half these fool women around here believe ’em.”

  “But I been livin’ in these parts fifty years—and been out here on Gilead, comin’ to pay my damned taxes there every year for fifteen years—or more—and I didn’t know any of this stuff about it till now.”

  “The only ones who did were Jay and Mex and some of the old Holotas—and they wasn’t really interested in it from a historical perspective. They had to hunt it up in old newspapers from the eighteen-nineties—the nineteen twenties. And, of course, they got some of it wrong, like that picture I give ’em, what Mr. Jenkins give to me. He didn’t know when it come from—that date was just a guess—till his niece found the rest of the actual paper in the basement. That’s all from these new ladies, who’re always trying to hunt things up in the old papers they got in some of the offices on the mainland—and in the basement of the Herald.”

  “Hugh—what’s history supposed to mean if you don’t know it while you’re livin’ right when it’s rubbin’ up against you?”

  “Not much of anythin’, probably. You goin’ home, soon?”

  Eric sucked his teeth. “All these women around here goin’ on about the place like it was the most important thing out here. Yeah, I’m leavin’, Hugh. Oh—” He reached down into his orange shopping bag. “I brought some oatmeal raisin cookies for you. I know you like them.”

  “Oh!” Hugh sat back, smiling, surprised. “Now that’s nice of you. You put ’em right over there, before you leave—”

  On his way home, Eric thought, Damn, I forgot to ask him about the light. Well, maybe tomorrow when we get finished at the Boathouse. Yes, the Tax Office was an odd looking little building, out of alignment with the houses left and right of it. But he’d seen it all these years and thought it was either somebody’s surveying mistake or just an anomaly—certainly little places like this could have them. As a breeze fingered under his shirt shoulders, it actually looked as if it might be part of a past township pattern somehow breaking out into the present.

  These days the Kyle mansion was hidden under webs of scaffolding—had been for more than a year. (More renovations—renovations on the renovations, Eric guessed.) Trees flung shadows over it. Forty yards beyond it, Eric turned off and started through the woods. He walked till the ground began to slope and you could see out toward the water. Once he’d come there during a storm—and sworn he’d never do that again. It had been loud and he’d seen a tree blown up and watched it sweep around toward him and barely miss knocking him down—

  Eric reached the stone bench—something that had been brought there, by the Kyles, for some sort of garden. Seventy-five years ago? Eighty-five years? More than a hundred?

  Askew on the dirt, the stanchion and one end were half-buried, but you could sit on it. So he sat. He put down his orange bag between his old, scuffed work shoes. Going down into it with his right hand, he came out with his book. Eventually, he’d taped the whole cover over—back and front. The sea stretched toward a horizon that was identical to the one they saw out their own kitchen door, though the rocks and the whispering growth were completely different.

  It smell
ed like dust and the sea.

  Eric opened the book and started with the Preface to Part III, “Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects.”

  …they seem to conceive man in Nature as a dominion within a dominion. For they believe that man disturbs, rather than follows the order of Nature, that he has absolute power over his actions, and that he is determined only by himself. And if they attribute the cause of human impotence and inconstancy, not to the common power of Nature, but to I know not what vice of human nature, which they therefore bewail, or disdain, or (as usually happens) cure. And he who knows how to censure more eloquently and cunningly the weakness of the human mind is held to be godly…

  He thought, I can remember when that made no more sense to me than if I was reading it ass backwards. And now it seems lucid.

  He read to the preface’s end and decided: I think I’ll skim the body of the argument this time; I remember pretty clearly what it is. I’d rather read the last two parts, “Of Human Bondage” and “Of Human Freedom.” Long ago, he had realized the two were a single singing paean.

  He turned over “Definitions” and “Postulates” and “Demonstrations” and “Propositions” and “Scholia.” (“…No one knows how the mind moves the body…”) He remembered the years when he used to read these pages, simply replacing the word “God” with the word “Nature,” since, over and over, Spinoza had hammered in how they meant the same thing—were, indeed, two words for the same thing, but both had to be expanded and recomplicated just a bit from the way most people thought of them in order to reach that self-evident identity. But now he simply read what was there, and it seemed to offer no barrier, as he had by the same process—equally long ago—grown comfortable with a godless world, or rather with a world in which the gods had grown comfortable with his metaphorizing of them.

  (It was wonderfully pleasurable to find a man who wrote four hundred years ago writing of “building and painting” in a landscape in which, only a few hundred yards away, Eric had built and had painted…)

  Things strived to remain themselves—that striving was their canatus—and yet so many of them, it would seem if you looked at the histories people kept building around themselves, did nothing but fail in that endeavor.

  Bondage, when all was said, seemed to be how we were subservient to a Nature that had been detailed in the book’s first three parts—sometimes in sadness, sometimes in joy, and fell out from the perfect world of nature: That perfection existed in its variety because it could, not because of any human lack—a wanting—in Nature or God. Eric read on, happily bound by habit and familiarity…

  “Hey—”

  Eric looked up, “Oh, hi—!”

  “No, don’t stop,” Shit said. “Go on readin’. I’m just gonna lie down on the bench here and put my head in your lap. You can rest your book on my forehead and use it for a readin’ stand.”

  Shit lowered himself to the stone, his right leg out—the one where the arthritis was worse than in the other—and swung his big feet up to balance callused heels on the concrete.

  Eric raised his elbow. Shit put his head down and turned on his side, nuzzling the bony back of his head against Eric’s belly. Eric’s elbows fell on Shit’s shoulder. Shit brought up his upper hand between Eric’s legs. “I ain’t gonna give you no hard-on or nothin’ if I play with your pecker through your pants, while I’m lyin’ here, am I…?”

  “Probably—” Eric said, turning a page—“not.” Then he looked down. “But don’t tickle.”

  “All right.”

  After another minute, Eric turned his open book down and put it over Shit’s ear, so that it covered his face. “Oh, that’s nice,” Shit said. “The light off the water was kinda gettin’ to my eyes. Now that’s usin’ that thing for somethin’ useful—like a sunshade. Now you can’t really do that with one of them readers—”

  “Shit…?”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinkin’.”

  “Thinkin’ what?”

  “We was at the Opera for eleven years—almost twelve. And this mornin’. I just went in and paid our taxes out here for what? The twenty-third or the twenty-fourth time out here? But I swear it feels like we was at the Opera a lot longer than we been out here.”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “You know, it really do.” He moved his head. “That’s probably cause out here I don’t fuck even half the number of people I did when I was at the Opera, when I could could rip me off some nookie a couple of times a day, if I wanted—though, even by the end there, it was more like once every couple of weeks. If I could get up for it.”

  “But you’d think,” Eric said, “with all the sex we had back then, the time at the Opera woulda gone faster, now. You know, times flies when you’re havin’ fun—and we had a lotta fun at that old place!”

  “We sure as fuck did. But you’re right—it does seem like we was there pretty much forever. ’Course we was on the garbage run even longer.”

  “Not much,” Eric said, “when you actually count the years. I think it’s just time goin’ faster, when you get older.”

  “Well, like you say, God—or Nature—knows it does. Why you been thinkin’ about that?”

  “I stopped by to see Hugh—at his cabin.”

  Chucking, Shit turned his face up. “Did he tell you to get outta his face?”

  “In a polite enough way.” Eric took a deep breath, and starched. “Hey, you got to remember two things for me.”

  “What?” Shit asked.

  “We got a job at the Boathouse tomorrow—and then we gotta fix the kitchen light at Hugh’s. Ed told me about it—and when I was over there, I completely forgot to tell him we’d be comin’ by.”

  Shit sat up. “I’ll tell you to write ’em down as soon as we get home.”

  “That’s all I want you to do. If I jot ’em down, I won’t forget.”

  “Hey, they brought your boxes of food by today. Come on home and cook dinner for me.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “I am. Don’t I always? What time is it?”

  The sun was a white-hot spark in the trees, somewhere behind. Gold and mustard clouds under the faintest salmon and violet drifted over the sea. Eric looked around, and Shit said, “It’s somewhere after four. Maybe even five…”

  “Aww,” Eric said. “It can’t be that late. I just sat down here. It wasn’t even noon…”

  Shit said, “When you’re out here readin’ your book, nigger, you don’t know how fast time passes…”

  But Eric had already closed it and dropped it into the orange canvas sack. “Come on—come on, now. Get up, Shit. Let’s get on home. So I can feed you.”

  * * *

  [99] IN THE THREE years Caleb was there, odd things began coming into the house: an ancient DVD player, a wall computer monitor, and then Caleb asked them if he could put a General Screen on the back edge of the table. “I’ll just install the pro-unit here, under the edge. I won’t even pull it up unless you want to watch some news or—”

  “You can do what you want,” Shit said, “just as long as you don’t expect me to do nothin’ with it.”

  “Hey—” Caleb raised his palm, and the glimmering light screen lifted from the edge of the table’s planks—“I could teach you how to use this thing in ten, fifteen minutes, Mr. Haskell—half an hour!”

  “No, you can’t. ’Cause I can’t read no writin’. I told you that before!”

  “You don’t have to read anything,” Caleb explained. “They got tutorials on this thing that are all pictures, like them cartoons you were laughin’ over so much last Saturday.

  “What’s that?” Shit pointed to the screen.

  “Where—what do you mean?”

  “What’s that? Right here.”

  “Huh?” Caleb said. “That’s just the name of the Line Server.”

  “And that’s writin’, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And I told you, I can’t read it. So I can’t learn that stuff.”


  Caleb looked at Eric, who shook his head with half a smile. “Try him again in a week, when it’s been here a while and he ain’t feelin’ so ornery. Show him some good porn—he’ll like that.”

  Shit said, “If you wanna go on suckin’ my damned dick and lickin’ out my damned asshole, you’ll keep that writin’ stuff out my face, is what you’ll do! I can get behind yours, yeah, from time to time—your shit, I mean. But I ain’t interested in that!”

  Clearly chagrined, Caleb dropped his hand, and the plane of light collapsed into the table under his fingers.

  Over the next days, Eric found himself using it, however. A number of the market vendors were connected online, and he could get them to deliver most of his purchases—or put them aside for him, so they’d be waiting for him. Then, through some list Caleb had put his name on, someone started sending them flyers for a films series at the old Opera House—it hadn’t been an adult film palace since Eric and Shit had given it up, all those years ago in Runcible.

  In nothing but a baggy T-shirt, pouring coffee from the glass carafe at the counter, Shit explained, “Yeah, believe it or not, we used to take care of that place—for more’n ten years.” With a cup in each hand, he turned and set them on the table in front of Caleb and Eric. “After we gave up the garbage route. It was a fuck film palace then—where niggers like you would suck each other off in the top balcony or jerk off down in the orchestra. You could always find some white guys in there, too.”

  “I used to have a good time in that place.” Eric moved his hands around the warm mug. (While Caleb was here, Eric wondered if they should pick up some chocolate…) “Yeah, we each had a few regulars. Pretty much one or two of ’em, every day. Want a Danish?”

  Caleb, who was kind of stocky, took one from the chipped plate. “Wished I’d been here for that. Sounds like fun.” Then, holding up the pastry, he said, “Why am I the only one here who ever eats a whole one of these things?”

  Still later, looking at the paper on the kitchen table, Eric saw there was a week-long retrospective of the films of Peter Jackson: Lost Silver, Heavenly Creatures, The Hobbit, Part One and Part Two, Lord of the Rings (all three films playing three times over two days), The Frighteners and King Kong (“With Deleted Scenes Completed and Restored”), The Lovely Bones. Hadn’t he’d gotten into some argument about King Kong once—with his dad? But exactly over what, he wasn’t sure. With a tattooed forearm, Eric pushed the flyer to the table back: the colors within his skin had migrated, blurred, faded. The yellow and white highlights that had made Cassandra’s pictures special were gone. (Why hadn’t they gone to her funeral…? Oh, yeah: because at the last minute her family had her shipped to Oklahoma. That’s when Tank had sold both places, here and in Runcible.) The blue lines had thickened around her delicate vegetation, losing the precision that, once, decades back, so many had praised.