Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “I remember Big Man. But that was usually at his place. I don’t remember ever havin’ anybody else up there in bed with us—” Shit frowned. “A girl?”

  “You don’t remember how, after two weeks, you made me take her off and tell her she had to move on—’cause she didn’t like you talkin’ about fuckin’ all the guys downstairs in the theater? She said you could do it, but she didn’t want you to talk about it—at least so much. You don’t remember…?”

  “I remember Mex sleepin’ on the floor, the night he stayed after one of your free food cookouts. And I remember gettin’ up early so I could get a blowjob from him, before you got up. But that’s all.”

  “Now I remember that—you just wanted to take your mornin’ piss in his mouth and didn’t want me to wake up and feel bad about it. So you got up instead of callin’ him into bed with us—I thought you were bein’ kinda silly.”

  “Oh…you did? Well, you always used to think I was being silly when I was tryin’ to be considerate.”

  “No, I didn’t.” Eric took Shit’s hand and squeezed it. “I thought it was sweet. It’s one of the reasons I love you.” Eric sucked his teeth. “Shit, you really don’t remember how you told me I had to tell her to leave ’cause you was too chickenshit to talk to her yourself? You said you didn’t know how to talk to no woman you was fuckin’—and I was surprised, ’cause I always thought you were the big stud who knew everything about sex. When I told her, she was pretty upset about it. We’d only met her about a day before the Bombs went off—and by the time you was ready to kick her out, everybody was all twisted out of shape, pretty much everywhere. She’d lost a lot of family—”

  “A woman, huh? Probably the only one I ever fucked, anyway.”

  “What about the girl who you told me about—one of the summer people, a couple of years before I come down here?”

  “I don’t even remember her that well. Probably ’cause I had to think about my daddy fuckin’ her, in order to get off. And if there was another one later, I probably had to think about you.”

  Eric frowned. “You never told me that before. Anyway, like I said—” with his other hand, Eric fingered behind his ear—“Gus and Caleb weren’t very much alike…”

  “Funny I don’t remember it. In thirty-three, huh? Well, with them Bombs there, that was a funny year.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “That you don’t remember Gus, though—that is odd. She ended up workin’ on the Produce Farm. I think she was the first woman they had out there.”

  “Now that’s actually beginning to sound familiar. But I sure don’t remember fuckin’ her.”

  “Well, you know, you got a tendency not to remember things you don’t particularly like. It’s probably how you live with ’em so easily.”

  “Hey, don’t say that about me.” Shit frowned. “I can remember stuff you don’t.”

  “Well, maybe I remember that ’cause I was kinda mad at you, too, over that one. Them Bombs had gone off. Everything was crazy, and I didn’t think you was bein’ very nice to her.”

  “Well, now, see,” Shit said. “If I was mad at you, I would work on forgettin’ it. Maybe I was—and that’s why I can’t remember it. Sometimes, you know, you wanna be too nice to people. And bein’ nice to the point where you make yourself miserable ain’t that good, either.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I know…”

  Now and again, they received postcards from Caleb, from Denver and Missoula and Kansas City, and in the first three months after he left, text messages arrived regularly that Eric read out to Shit from the e-reader Caleb had left with them.

  “You sure you don’t want to get one of them General Screens like he had—I mean, just so you could do your marketing a little more easily?”

  Eric raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind as long as you don’t try to teach me how to use it. You start tryin’, though, and I’ll probably kill ya’. Course me and him used to watch dirty pictures on that thing—and he’d play with my dick while we watched ’em. That was fun. But you and me got along without it—how long there…?”

  In another year, however, the postcards—then the text messages—stopped. Apparently, Caleb never did get his degree. And, no, they never got a General Screen.

  Nor did Caleb visit.

  * * *

  [103] MOVING OUT OF the sun, gold clouds turned under themselves to become soiled bronze. West, a storm’s rags slanted toward the sea, the gray of a heavily chalked blackboard, carelessly erased.

  Years ago, Eric had nailed together two wooden crates to make a bench. Out on the porch, Shit had built a back to the thing, with boards. Then across the back and the seat, he’d tacked some old carpet.

  One hand on his own thigh and one on the bench’s arm, Eric lowered himself—really, we need to get a comfortable porch seat. But the fact that they’d made it themselves had extended its life fifteen years now, if not twenty.

  A leaf blew along the porch edge, ticking one after another of the newels supporting the rail, till, at the opening for the steps, it swirled out over the grass with hundreds of others, blowing.

  Along the road, half a dozen young people came, some laughing and skipping backwards, others running, all of them talking heatedly, their shorts and shirts glittering gold and green, metallic blue and red.

  At the same time, Shit came around the bench end and sat next to Eric. He put one broad hand on Eric’s thigh—and his foot over Eric’s work shoe.

  Eric said, “They gotta get a gate in front of the graveyard. It’s one thing to walk around in it and enjoy it, but you can’t have kids running and screaming and raisin’ hell all over.” He frowned at encroaching overcast. “They gonna get wet ’fore they get back to the Settlement. That rain can’t be more than twenty minutes off.”

  “More like two or three,” Shit said. “A graveyard is always a good place to get off to and fuck. Probably that’s what they was doin’.”

  “All of ’em together? I don’t think so.”

  Shit began to rub Eric’s washed out denim. “That’s what I would have been doin’, when I was their age.”

  One of the girls put her fists out from her sides. In her sandals, she rose about six, eight, twelve inches off the road, and, like a levitating saint, leaning forward, began to glide along, faster and faster. A couple of boys did the same.

  The first boy increased his speed—and suddenly all his clothing whipped free. He turned his invisible scooter field and started back, balancing, concentrating, grinning.

  The other kids whooped.

  Shit’s fingers tightened on Eric’s leg. “Hey, look, they’ve got them scooter fields!”

  Another of the boys sailed over the grass toward them, then turned, and sailed away.

  “You think they’d let me try that out?”

  “Come on,” Eric said. “Last year, Molly’s nephew let you use his glide field and you fell and almost busted your hip. I am not lettin’ you on one of those things again!”

  “Aw, come on. I bet if I asked, they’d think it was funny, watchin’ a seventy-five-year-old man messin’ around on one of those—”

  “You are not seventy-five! ’Cause I am seventy-nine and you are eighty-one! How you gonna ride it when you can’t even see the goddam things—”

  The gaggle of youngsters was moving forward, back toward the Settlement, circling on and off the road, some running, some soaring, half of them naked. By now, the clothing on all three with the inductance scooter fields had come to pieces, flickering in bright clouds, in glittering streamers twelve and fourteen feet off the ground, blindly trying to find their owners. Shit said, “Hey, that’s…pretty!”

  One of the girls halted and a cloud of bright fragments settled around her, reforming over her hips and belly, her shoulders and breasts

  Eric said, “That’s stupid! At least you gettin’ on one of them field things is stupid. You say stuff like that just ’cause you wanna worry me!” He put his han
d on top of Shit’s. “They are pretty, though—the way their clothes come off ’em and get back on ’em, when they stop runnin’ around. I’ll give you that.”

  Shit responded by pressing harder with his foot; he chuckled. “That’s right—I do, you know. I like to see you all worried about me. It’s about the only excitement we got.” Around them, the island rumbled, and—with the thunder—rain began to drip from the porch roof’s forward edge. The youngsters released a rising wail at the rain. Then, on the invisible inductance scooters or on foot, they were gone around the bend.

  Eric looked up. Here and there in the roof, drops and runnels ran down clear Plexiglas rectangles. The temperature had dropped a few breezy degrees. Eric asked, “What you think I’d look like, walkin’ around in one of them things, that come all to pieces like that, then join up later on?”

  Shit humphed. “Yeah, sure. You won’t even take the sleeves off your shirt and let people see your pictures no more. You gonna put somethin’ on that’s gonna let people look at your butt and wave your goddam dick at ’em? Yeah, sure you are!” He pulled his hand loose from under Eric’s, meshed it with his other, and dropped them between his knees. Then he looked where Eric was looking. “You know, you’re right.” He was taking up a colloquy they’d started and abandoned fifty times in the last decade. “I gotta get me up there and reconnect those solar panels we put up. It’s a shame, just ’cause we disconnected them for that storm back when—was it fifty-eight? Fifty-nine?—not to have ’em workin’. With these power ups and downs, we could really use ’em today”

  “Well, you ain’t climbin’ up there on no ladder. Neither one of us is.”

  Shit chuckled again. “Hey—that first kid, when his shorts come whippin’ off him, he had a nice pair a’ low hangers on ’im. Nice and heavy. Fun to hold—if I’d gone and asked him could I heft ’em, he might’ve said ‘Yes.’ And the worst he coulda said was ‘No.’ I bet you noticed ’em, too.”

  “Sure—some crazy old man comin’ up to ’im and sayin’, ‘Hey, sonny, could I hold your balls there for a bit?’ Yeah, they’d have you put away in about two minutes.” Then, after a moment, Eric said: “But, yes, I did. And I figured that was why you was interested in goin’ out and messin’ with them.”

  “Oh, yeah. Nothin’ gets by you.” Again Shit laughed. “You know, if he’d let me feel ’em, I’da asked ’im to come back and let you have heft—”

  “Shit…?”

  “I would. I always liked to watch out for you—’cause you was always a little shy—”

  “Shit…?”

  “What?”

  “Seriously. When’s the last time you had sex with somebody who wasn’t me? Was that back with Caleb?”

  Shit looked out at the rain. After a while, he said, “You’re serious, now?”

  “Yeah. I was curious—and serious.”

  “Actually, it was about six weeks ago.”

  Eric was surprised.

  Shit breathed in and sat up on the bench. “I was down town, walkin’ around the Settlement. Remember that first day of Indian summer? I mean, it was one of them days when every male dog in the Settlement was runnin’ around with two inches of dick stickin’ out, all red and pointy, and tryin’ to hump anything that would hold still, and every male from eight years old on up had a boner in his skivvies that he was pushin’ around and couldn’t make it go down to save hisself. I mean, you could feel it with the women, but you could see it on the men. Anyway, I was goin’ by Lacy’s and her girlfriend Orchid’s house, and I was remembering how Anne had been tellin’ us that they wanted to have a baby together, but they didn’t want to do it with a sperm bank—she had a friend from school up in Michigan, who they’d invited out, to get Orchid pregnant—?”

  “Yeah, I remember Anne tellin’ us all that—”

  “—and how Anne was sayin’ she didn’t think that was a good idea. But while I’m walkin’ down there, I see this guy comin’ out of Lacy’s front door—nice lookin’ feller, no shirt on him, and just this pair of loose pants, all this black curly hair on his chest, and sandals—he’s a kid, thirty, thirty-five-years old maybe. And I’m thinkin’, well, you know, maybe that’s the new daddy. And he’s pushin’ at himself and pullin’ and adjustin’ just like me and every other guy I’d seen that day. And he comes runnin’ down the steps, then looks around—he don’t see me, or at least he don’t look like he do—and he turns around and starts back up, then turns around again and comes down again, and there ain’t nobody else out on the sidewalk, and like I say, he’s feelin’ and rubbin’, and I tell you, nigger, if you said I could smell what he was gonna do, I wouldn’t argue with you two minutes. He goes off and turns at the corner of the house to go around into the back. And so—” Shit shrugged—“I kind of followed him. Like I said, I could smell somethin’ was goin’ on! I got to the back corner and looked around where Lacy’s got their hollyhocks and their irises all growin’ up, and damned if that guy wasn’t standing, lookin’ in the corner of one of the back windows. He’d pushed his pants down and was stooped there with his ass in the sunlight, apumpin’ his pecker with his fist, while he’s peekin’ in—so I figured, what the hell, and took my limp old dick and began pullin’ on it there with ’im. I never did figure out when he actually saw me, or if he knowed I’d followed from the beginnin’ and just didn’t care. But once he looks over at me—and grins. I mean, just like that. I don’t think he was anymore surprised than I was.

  “I whispered, ‘What you peekin’ at…?’

  “He put his finger up against his mouth in the sunlight and shushes me. Then he goes back to peekin’ and pumpin’.

  “So I moved about three steps closer. And he looks over again, still grinnin’, and says, kinda soft, ‘I just love watchin’ lesbians. I swear, I could do that all day long, all fuckin’ year. I just can’t get enough of ’em. They’re so fuckin’ beautiful with each other.’ I mean, he was really sweet.

  “‘Then you come to the right island, fella,’ I told him, ‘You the guy who Lacy and Orchid called in to get Orchid pregnant?’

  “‘You know about that?’ he asked—ain’t neither one of us missed a stroke, while he were going on. But that’s the kind of day it was.

  “‘I thought we were all gonna do it together—this afternoon,’ he explained. ‘I mean, I gotta do Orchid a couple or five times. But then they got into each other, see, and asked me to go out and hang around a while and come back later.’

  “So that’s when I asked him, ‘You want me to give you a hand, son? Or maybe a little mouth action while you watchin’?”

  “’Jesus, old man,’ he said, “I was hopin’ you was gonna say that.’” Shit looked at Eric and shrugged. “So I went over and squatted down—he had to help me—and I leaned back against the house. He plugged right in to my face and goes on lookin’ though that crack under the window. He wasn’t even that big—but, boy, was he enthusiastic! Well, damned if he didn’t shoot three fuckin’ loads down my throat—five and ten minutes apart! Then he apologizes for bein’ so horny. When he was finally helpin’ me get upright, he said, ‘Hey, don’t tell nobody about this. They’re worried I’m not gonna have enough to do the deed. But, damn—I can come over that stuff all day long. And a lot.’

  “Tryin’ to make sure my hip was still workin’, I told him, ‘Well, I sure ain’t gonna argue with you, son.’ And when I walked away, I looked back to see he’s squattin’ at the window again, pullin’ on himself once more. I mean, the truth is, I was tired out! But, yes, I did think about tryin’ to hunt you up so I could watch you get another one of his loads. But when I got home, you was out. Really. You was.”

  “Shit…” Eric said.

  “What?”

  “I am jealous of you.”

  Shit said, “The only reason I didn’t tell you when I saw you a couple of hours later was ’cause I didn’t want you to think you’d missed out on somethin’.”

  “And I believe you, too.” Eric sighed. “I’m still jeal
ous.” He chuckled.

  Before the porch, dimming the intensity of air and sea and trees, fell a glittering gray rain.

  * * *

  [104] “YOU BEEN COUGHIN’ three days now.” Beside the stained sink, Eric turned off the water. “It don’t sound good.”

  Sitting in the chair by the table, with his knees wide, Shit leaned forward and coughed again. When he did it, he flattened his hand over the lower half of his bearded face, rather than hacking into his fist.

  “And you ain’t eatin’ right.”

  “What you want me to do?” Shit asked. “See Dr. Zaya?”

  “Yeah,” Eric turned from the counter. “That’s just what I want—”

  Shit coughed again. “Pour me some coffee, will you?” He picked up his brown mug and held it out.

  Eric stepped over and took it. Shit’s knee knob pushed through torn pants; his size fifteen sneakers sat askew on the rag rug. (Really, the man ain’t nothin’ but feet and hands. And how many times have I thought that in sixty, sixty-five years?) Eric went back to the counter, to pull the carafe from under the black and chrome drip pot. Behind him, coughs came in a rasping cascade. After he poured lots of milk, he turned back, stepped over again, and handed Shit the mug.

  Shit’s fingers lapping over Eric’s, Shit took the brown mug, brought it down, sipped, coughed once more, then sat it on the quilted green placemat. “I’m gonna lie down. I’m still pretty tired. You go call her. Ask her when she wants me to come in.”

  Eric put his hand on Shit’s skull and rubbed, his palm going from rough hair to bald scalp. He rubbed twice, three times more.

  Still holding his cup, Shit leaned his head against Eric’s hip—

  —then he pulled away, to stand, slowly.

  Taking up his mug, with his scrawny man’s lumber Shit moved toward the bedroom.