Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Yeah, he’s sick—he ain’t givin’ me no argument about the doctor.

  *

  Eric’s plan was to take the mono the quarter of a mile to the market, do some shopping for fish and vegetables (some squash, potatoes, kale), then walk up the commons and stop into Dr. Zaya’s glass and wood office to ask Dona, her niece and receptionist, when would be a good time to have Shit come in.

  When, with his tote bag, Eric left the mono and came down the brick ramp—their yellow gone gray over a decade-and-a-half—between the hedges and the few pines, from all the people walking about, he realized it was Saturday, not Friday.

  At the far end, the Dump Produce sign’s black and orange awning hung above the heads of milling people. On the other side rose the patinaed wings and—below them—the horned head of the common’s bronze guardian.

  Among black eggplants, green and yellow peppers, red and yellow tomatoes, green, yellow, and red apples, beige and pink peaches, Eric walked to the fish benches.

  In her striped apron, with a single breast and tattooed flowers following her faint mastectomy scar, Laurel nodded to him when he strolled up. (You didn’t see too many of those today.) Arna was talking with somebody down a couple of yards. While Eric looked at the fillets spread across chipped ice, at knee level the greenish pipe from the wooden wall dripped into the plastic pail. Beside him, he heard a familiar voice. “Those are nice looking bluefish.”

  “Dr. Zaya?” Surprised, Eric looked over. “I was about to go to your office and make an appointment. Then I realized you ain’t open today.”

  “Mr. Jeffers.” Dr. Zaya stood up, smiling. “It’s good to see you. You’ve been under the weather?” She looked around.

  Seeing the wrinkles at her eyes, Eric thought: she’s older than the woman in her thirties they’d started going to twenty-five years ago. “But I must say, this is some beautiful weather to be under.” In her yellow lace shawl, Dr. Zaya laughed. Through its tracery, in the sunlight, her brown shoulders looked, well, glorious. After years of shaving her head, she had started growing her hair back, rough, white, and grizzled.

  “It ain’t for me. It’s for Shit. He’s doin’ poorly.”

  “Is he, now?”

  “He’s coughin’ all the time—and he hardly gets out of bed or eats nothin’.”

  “Well, then—why don’t you finish up your shopping. I did mine earlier, but I was looking around to see if I’d missed anything. I’ll go back to the office, get a few things. Meet me there in twenty minutes, and I’ll come on out to your cabin and take a look.”

  Eric raised his eyebrows. “On the weekend—and you’re comin’ out to make a house call?”

  “Why not?” She chuckled. “I got my training during the thirties. As long as you don’t tell too many people, I don’t mind droppin’ in.”

  He came down to the office, with broccoli, cod, fruit, collards (no kale), eggs and coffee in his bag. (Eric remembered when they used to ask him if he wanted it delivered; but he rarely said yes.) She was coming out, carrying a narrow case. They walked under the trees to the maglev station.

  It came in three minutes.

  Sitting beside her on the car’s purple bench, Eric said, “I don’t know what to say. I mean, thank you—so much.”

  “I’ve been treatin’ you boys awhile,” she said. “I imagine Mr. Haskell needs lookin’ after or you wouldn’t be asking.” As it sped, the car made a musical keening.

  *

  Walking in off the porch, Dr. Zaya opened her case over the placemats still on the table and took out a pair of around-the-head goggles. Then she lifted out a rolled up pad.

  In the bedroom, Shit was dozing.

  Holding the jamb with one hand, Eric said, “You got company.”

  “Huh?” Blinking, stretching, Shit pushed himself up on the pillow, which was gray. “I was just thinkin’ about gettin’ up, there. But I been so tired…” He coughed.

  “If you would just let me get this reflector pad under you, Mr. Haskell, I’ll take a look.”

  Shit said, “You don’t mind that I ain’t got no clothes on—”

  Dr. Zaya said, “Just means you don’t have to take them off. That’s all.”

  Shit grinned at Eric. “Gimme a hand gettin’ on top of this thing.”

  Eric gripped his arm, then sat down and helped Shit slide over, while Dr. Zaya adjusted the goggles over her head. “Mmmmm.” She turned a knob on the side of the contraption near her temple. “You, my friend, have a slightly foggy spot on your lung, there—” She pointed down at his chest—“no, it’s not cancer. But it looks as if you have picked up a touch of pneumonia.”

  Dr. Zaya suggested he take the air shuttle leaving in fifty minutes from the other end of the island, which would let him off at Runcible Memorial. “Mr. Jeffers can go with you. They’re still honoring the Kyle Foundation Plan—”

  “Nope,” Shit said, from the dingy sheets and drab blankets around him.

  “Pardon me…?”

  “I ain’t takin’ no air shuttle.” Shit breathed with his mouth open.

  Dr. Zaya suppressed a smile. “Well, how do you intend to get to the hospital?”

  “I’ll take the boat, thank you for askin’—and maybe one of the Miller kids can drive me down there, Hannibal or Ed.” Again, coughing brought his head forward, his hand up. He dragged in a breath. “…or maybe Holly’s cousin, Lucille—what helps out Ed.”

  “With the shuttle—” Dr. Zaya frowned—“you can get there, go through admissions, and be in your room fifty minutes after take off. You’re not going to tell me, now, you’d really rather spend four-and-a-half, five hours by boat and car—”

  “I sure am—” Again, Shit began to cough.

  Eric thought: Four hours was an exaggeration—once they got the ferry it would be more like two. “He can’t take heights,” Eric said. “And he ain’t never flown.”

  Without sympathy, Dr. Zaya frowned. “Well, that’s a little crazy. I’m not going to argue with you, but go there—and go there today. I’ll call them for you and tell them you’re…coming later on.” She turned to Eric, pulling up her shawl. “Are you sure you can’t talk some sense into him? If he’s just nervous about flying, I’ll give him a shot that—”

  “I ain’t nervous about it,” Shit interrupted. “I ain’t doin’ it, so there ain’t nothin’ to be nervous about.”

  Dr. Zaya laughed. Her bronze ear hoops shook. “You are really my most eccentric patients.” Lifting the reflector pad, that, under Shit’s back, had let her see the shadow of Shit’s lungs, she began to re-roll it. “But I do want you there—in the hospital—this evening. There’s no sense in him spending another night here hacking his innards out.”

  In the kitchen, she closed up her case and, after refusing some warmed up coffee (in the brown mug, while Eric was rinsing it out), left.

  Eric went back to the bedroom, sat on the broad bed’s edge, picked up the phone from the night table, and with his thumb, pushed it into his ear.

  Shit took Eric’s other wrist and dragged it over his stomach to his groin.

  Eric looked back. “What’s the matter…?”

  “Grab a-hold of my dick,” Shit said. “It’s cold.”

  Eric closed his fingers around the loose inches, while he said, “Ed Miller…?” His knuckles moved in the scrotal flesh, warm, familiar, while he waited for a connecting beep.

  Neither Ed nor Hannibal was answering. But Holly turned out to be on the island—and getting ready to take the boat back to the mainland, where she was going to pick up their truck in the lot and drive down to Hemmings. If they could be ready in an hour, she’d be happy to go with them and give them a lift to Memorial. “’Cause I know he’s not going to take no air shuttle.” She laughed. “I like looking at the water, too. That’s why I was taking the ferry.”

  “Yeah…” Eric said, trying to suppress his own frustration.

  Forty minutes later, Holly came by for them.

  He wore a thermal-lined
sweatshirt, which had spent fifteen years in a bottom drawer before—last year—it had turned up and Shit had started wearing the thirty-year-old hoody. Certainly, it looked odd. For one thing, it was gray: today people simply didn’t wear that color in an outer garment.

  Shit hunched between them on the maglev seat, Holly at one side (she wore a large coral necklace and a large coral comb in her graying hair), Eric at the other. He held a bag of Shit’s things—dental brush, cleaning tablets, witch hazel pads and some underwear in a sealed plastic bag.

  At the top of the steps down to the boat dock, Shit’s grip tightened on Eric’s arm. Bushes rustled beside the railing. “You’re gonna have to go slow,” Shit said, softly. “I feel like I’m gonna pass out.”

  Landing after landing, they got him down. A couple of times, Eric thought, this was the kind of thing it had been nice having Caleb around for. But Caleb was something time had excised from their lives. Once Holly said, “Mr. Haskell, you really don’t look well. You sure you won’t break down and take the next air shuttle? It would be so much easier—”

  Shit didn’t say anything, but, down the concrete steps, he kept going—step by unsteady step.

  On the boat, he sat in the passenger shelter, leaning against Eric, who held his hand—sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely. (He knew the captain, but was damned if he remembered her name.) Holly said, “He really doesn’t look good…”

  Neither man said anything back.

  *

  The gurney rolled through the green tiled halls. Shit asked hoarsely, “There ain’t nobody pushin’ this thing?” He held the sheet up at his neck. “Can you keep up?”

  “Yeah.” Eric hurried up two steps, still carrying the plastic bag. “I’m right here,” though he had to walk faster than was comfortable.

  Two floors up, and at the other end of the building, three orderlies waited. As they moved Shit into his room and onto his bed—and Eric hovered, trying to see but not get in the way—once and a while Shit would blow out, “Whew…!” and again fell to coughing. Soon, though, they had him comfortable. (The room was the same pale orange as the one his mother had died in, over at the Hostel—though the blinds were vertical, not horizontal. Eric wondered if Shit remembered.) The vital signs meter beeped and clicked on its stand.

  A nurse said Eric should phone Dr. Zaya, just to make sure, but Shit would likely be home in three or four days.

  Three small plastic cups stood on the table by the bed, and Shit was connected up to a drip bag that hung from a metal hook. “Go on home, now,” Shit said. “I wanna go to sleep. You hang around here, the way everybody keeps runnin’ all over this place, you gonna catch somethin’ and be sick as a dog, too. Go on home, now; get some rest.”

  Eric said, “You’re probably right. But I’m gonna sit here another five or ten minutes before I get up. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “Sure. Far as I’m concerned, you could climb in here and put your arms around me—I swear, that’s gotta be the best medicine. I betcha a couple of more nights of that, and I’d be fit as a fiddle again…Not that nobody wants to hear what I gotta say about it—”

  *

  When Eric walked from under the hospital’s awning, it was after three-thirty. Clouds fluffed the autumn sky. Way beyond the hedges was an orange and black sign—“Freshest Food on the Georgia Coast: DUMP PRODUCE”: it was the back of the bus stop shelter out by the service road. Eric frowned. Was the Hemmings Mall shuttle still running? The main building at the Mall, he knew, had been shut down years before. Perhaps it had even been razed. There’d always been a hospital stop, though, since so many orderlies and nurses lived in the Dump—had once lived in the Dump. Himself, Eric hadn’t been on it in more than fifteen…more than twenty years!

  But if it was still running back through Runcible, through the Dump, to Diamond Harbor…

  Getting around the hedges meant a difficult fifty yards of out-of-the-way walking. He had to cross a parking lot—but, as he neared it, he saw a bench under the shelter’s plastic roof.

  When he got there, Eric was surprised how tired he was.

  He sat—slowly—on the metal slats…if they were metal. (How did just worryin’ about someone take so much energy?) He ran a finger between. What was that stuff they’d used for his mother’s ash canister…?

  Eric saw the vehicle pulling up—which was not a flat-nosed bus but a rounded car with a more or less pointed cab. Across the top, a sign said “Diamond Harbor,” which, as Eric rose again, prompted him to think a sign must hang somewhere around the stop, surely, giving the route. He should have been looking for that to check, instead of just sitting there.

  Eric got on, wondering if there would be a driver or not—someone who could tell him where they were stopping on the way to the Harbor. These days, when he came to the mainland—and so infrequently—he felt practically lost. The green observation roof curved over the aisle, above gray and maroon seats. It was rather scratched—which meant the bus was older than he’d thought from its blue and silver exterior.

  There was a driver: a heavy brown fellow in a jacket and pants with patches of clear plastic in them. (It surprised Eric; on Gilead, service workers—drivers, caretakers, guards—were usually women.)

  “Excuse me,” Eric said—and surprised himself by asking, “Does this still stop at the Dump?” The notion of going to see the old place had risen, luminous, in his mind.

  The man said, “It’ll stop anywhere you want, as long as it’s on the route.”

  “Oh…and the Dump is still one of the stops—on the route?”

  The man nodded. The bus moved through the lot, toward the highway, more and more quickly. I sound like a tourist.

  *

  They stopped along the top of the bluff. “I’ll have to walk down…?” Eric asked, tentatively.

  “If that’s where you wanna go.” The driver didn’t smile. (So they didn’t go through the Dump anymore, but around it. That was a change.) “There’s hardly nobody down there, now…”

  Below, the hangar-like structure of Fred Hurter’s was gone. So was the Gay Friendly John—the whole building was no longer there. Where both had been was a single lot—pretty uncared for, too, Eric saw, as he came closer. The Social Service building was closed up, but then, it was Saturday.

  It looked liked the closing was permanent: no blinds hung in the windows. He saw no furniture inside.

  The rubble to the right was where the Housing Office had been.

  Many of the houses—he turned onto the gravel road—just weren’t there.

  I remember…some of ’em. How many years did I live here? (Eric walked above the Dump’s remnants.) Now up the slope was a neat line of five cabins, wall to wall—none of the houses that Kyle had had Big Man Markum’s dad build looked like that!

  The Dump’s cabins had each been different—Kyle had had a different architect (well, architectural student) design each one. But there were no repeated little post box houses, all nanobolted together. That must have been someone’s attempt at a row of tourist cabins—and from their look, they hadn’t been successful.

  (Did people live there or were they only storage…?)

  Eric walked down the path, under familiar gulls. The Potts house was gone. The path smelled dusty but not the sunny dust he remembered. If anything, it smelled like…dust from some Atlanta backstreet. Out towards the Dump’s edge, where Dynamite had once lived, among the trees that seemed to have grown up, was a light…

  It was bright enough—white enough—to guild the yellow grass and show up the green in the pine branches.

  From up the slope, he could look down and see it was halfway between Bull’s and Dynamite’s, though he couldn’t see its source. (It was a long walk. But there was nowhere to sit.) Around it, pine shadows fell on grass and gravel. When had all these trees gotten a chance to grow, anyway…?

  Halfway down the slope, Eric thought: Damn, I could fall and twist an ankle and lie around here a week ’fore anybody found me…
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  Looking down the bluff, Eric frowned—and stopped.

  That should be where Mama Grace’s used to stand.

  But, no—that cabin was gone, too. What was the name of that nice pair of guys who had taken it over…? Eric walked, again, through afternoon shadow, by weed and rock and tree.

  There—that was Chef Ron’s old place, though it no longer had a porch. Stands of trees, many of them, from their size, fifteen years old—or older—threw off his estimation of distances and directions.

  Had it been that long since he’d visited…?

  I used to lope down this thing in five or six minutes—

  It took him more like twenty. As he came nearer, Eric saw people wandering around in…the yard of the house over there—which, yes, was Bull’s! Though Bull and Whiteboy had quit the area long, long back.

  Eric turned to look up at the old cabin…where Dynamite, Shit and Eric himself had lived…That was still there, though one corner sagged calamitously. Eric looked for the steps where, on his free day when they’d worked at the Opera, he’d come to sit, read, and re-read his Ethica. But Dynamite’s old cabin no longer had steps going up. Had they broken away…?

  As Eric approached, a lanky black woman came from the door, without a shirt, to walk to the edge and watch him.

  From Gilead gossip, Eric remembered that, time and again, squatters were living in some of the Dump’s collapsing cabins—though that had been news from a year, three years, four years back.

  When he was ten, eight, six yards away, Eric called, “Hello, there. Afternoon, ma’am…You livin’ here now?” He continued forward.

  She said, “No.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “I’m just visiting. I used to live here, a million years ago. It’s been a while since I seen it. It’s pretty different.”

  The woman nodded. “Kind of a ghost town now.”

  “Where you from?” Eric asked.

  “Chicago,” she answered. (He thought: She sounded neither particularly black nor particularly local. More like someone you’d meet out on the island.) “But my mama grew up in Split Pine. Then she went up to Philadelphia. My father had family there, so that’s where I ended up in school.”