Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  THE KYLE FOUNDATION

  NEWSLETTER FOR

  THE DUMP

  The top one was dated October 2072, which was a year and a half ago. Eric picked up several. They were all old issues of the same periodical. While he sat there, Eric thought, the crazy kid with the baby just propositioned me! Actually, he’s kind of cute—and I am about ninety-eight percent uninterested. Why didn’t this happen to me twenty years ago?

  Probably I would have enjoyed it then.

  He farted—and began to urinate.

  Well, at least Shit isn’t here. He would have felt obligated to take the psychotic bastard up on it—and I would have gone along and been bored out of my skull.

  Who were these kids? Some traveling group marriage that keeps Ole around…kind of like we used to keep Uncle Tom or Dog Dog, I guess. Well, he is cute. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if they get tired of him, now and then. I’m going to assume the baby’s safe and not worry.

  The fact is, Uncle Tom got his share, but we probably kicked him out of bed more times than he wanted. And the old hound did love us.

  These kids are interesting. They’ve been places. They done stuff—yeah, you could write about them. Stories have happened to them. They’ve been to Mars, they have a cause, and they are trying to make art and babies and live good lives. Again, why couldn’t I have met them twenty years ago, when it would have been fun to be friends with them, to watch their progress, rather than now when I’m numb not even with worry but simply the effort of getting Shit to the hospital and back.

  They have stories. (I guess other people mostly do.) I just have a life…

  As he turned over pages, he kept coming on articles about some place in Oklahoma called The Fields…

  I have a life—and it’s mainly over. Yes, it’s been a good one. But what has it allowed me to do that’s worthwhile?

  He looked at the newsletters beside him. With the Kyle Foundation to fight for us, we never had to fight for anything, really. Everything was arranged, from salary to security. It did a good job of taking care of us—and we all thought that was good. Did that allow us to be good or just…superfluous?

  Eric fingered through more old issues to pull one free. Most had only the title on the cover—but this one mentioned a topic.

  ROBERT KYLE THE THIRD DIES

  Eric frowned. Yes, he’d known that—at age 101—Mr. Kyle had passed away. He looked at the date. He was there in the graveyard, though Shit and Eric had missed the service—if that’s what you called it. FEBRUARY 2071—no, certainly that couldn’t have been more than three years ago. Eric paged through the issue. “…with the death of Robert Kyle, the third, at age one hundred and one, in Columbus, Ohio, last week, some long contemplated changes in the working of the Kyle Foundation will finally be set in place…” Life spans of a hundred twenty-five were growing more common among the super rich—though ordinary folks, like Shit and Eric, lived into their eighties, their nineties—though many chose not to, since mental clarity rarely went along with it. The article said that forms would be going out to those covered by the Kyle Plan, and anyone with holdings they no longer wanted to make use of would be asked to fill them out and return the rights to land and goods to the Foundation, so that taxes could be adjusted…

  Had he ever filled those things out? Really, Eric didn’t remember.

  Shaking his head, he put the magazine down, took some toilet tissue and wiped his ass, even though he hadn’t done anything. (You know, if I had some lube, on the off chance that crazy Ole really wanted to fuck, I’d finger it in now…) Eric chuckled. Robert Kyle was another person who’d lived a life you could tell stories about—but Eric—Shit and Eric—the best we’ll ever be is elements in someone else’s.

  Is that what good people—good Americans—were? Even ones like us, who take a hundred years to become anything else than marginal eccentricities?

  Yes, help was what it was all about. But so much of it was needed, whether signaled by atrocities or just unthinking cruelties or simple annoyances, that when the vast hunger for help from Deus sivi Natura struck straight against the bridge of your nose, all you could do—whether you were Robert Kyle with his foundering Foundation or Eric Jeffers with his sandwiches and cookies because he no longer had energy for chili, or Deena Havers holding a wounded soldier on another world or sculpting in light on this one—was to rise and walk through the valley in tears…and think about the valley…

  Eric stood up—the toilet flushed, as if it were some old fashioned public john. Eric buttoned his pants and stepped from the bathroom door.

  The glass wall parted, but even before he stepped through the opening to the yard, he realized something had changed radically.

  First, everyone was standing.

  The fire and the fish—along with the benches—were gone.

  Someone said—to him, Eric realized—“Come on, come on. Get out of there.”

  One of the women—the one with the dreads—said irritably, “Will you let the old guy finish going to the bathroom for God’s sakes?”

  A gaunt Asian, with a potbelly and a red and blue uniform, said, “Come on. Come on, you’re not supposed to be here. Yall get the fuck out of here. Get a move on. I’m not kidding.” With a billy club, he gave the glass wall a tap. Shatter lines zagged through it, though it did not crumble.

  One of the youngest of the women—at least she looked very young to Eric—said, “You know, you’re not doing this alone. About a hundred seventy-five people are watching us right now. Maybe more, because of the Rally. And if you do anything really violent, a minute later three thousand people will see it—and see you doing it.”

  The Asian turned abruptly. “That’s just more of that goddam science crap. Don’t you realize that stuff is weird—and unnatural?”

  Eric was not even aware of recognizing the young patrolman—well, in his late fifties, early sixties. “Aim, what’s a matter?” Actually, it was a second after he said the name that he realized his identification was right. (It was Aim.) Behind the lines and loose ears, enough in the face recalled the teenaged garbage helper, staggering on his injured foot, before the Bottom’s edge, for recognition.

  The Asian frowned at Eric—or, perhaps, Eric found himself thinking, he was frowning at the great wall of time between this and their first meeting.

  Eric said, “That’s you, Aim—ain’t it? It’s Eric Jeffers. What’s the problem?”

  “Mr. Jeffers—that was you in there?”

  “What you givin’ them a hard time for?” Eric nodded toward dark, tall Deena. “That’s Al’s Haver’s granddaughter. Don’t you remember Al, when he worked at the Bottom? He was your boss for a while. Or did he retire, just before you started drivin’ there with Tad?”

  “Well, that ain’t nothin’. The man was the daddy or the grand daddy of three-quarters of the black kids runnin’ around this county—at least for a while.”

  Cuddling the child strapped to his naked belly, Ole said, “I’m just twenty-eight and I got two grandkids already.” He grinned through a beard that looked vaguely like Shit’s at that age; though it was the color he remembered on Jay. “That’s cause I’m nuts.”

  “Come on, Aim. This kid’s just out the Navy—she been to Mars.”

  “Well, then what the fuck is she doin’ with these deadbeats?” Aim turned back to them and roared, “Come on, now! Shut it the fuck down!”

  It looked as though the two others walls of the house suddenly fell in. Where they hit the ground, they vanished. He could see through the glass that the roof and the stone floor were gone. Rock and leaves alone remained—the whole, Eric realized, some virtual construct.

  Through trees at the far side of the clearing, light flickered from The Valley.

  “Hey, cut it out, Aim,” Eric said. “They’re not messing anything up. You’re doin’ more damage—” he looked at the shattered pane—“than they are.”

  “Well, they ain’t supposed to be here. It’s my job to get ’em out.”
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  “Oh, come on,” Eric said. “Let ’em stay for another night. You guys are moving on tomorrow, ain’t you?”

  Sally said, “Yeah. We were planning to.” She said it grumpily.

  “They’re practically locals, Aim. Why you gonna hassle them? They’ll be gone tomorrow. Or, if not, a couple of days after that.”

  “I’m doin’ my damned job. I’m supposed to be runnin’ squatters off this place. They ain’t nothin’ but crazy science kids and…stuff. We don’t like that down here. It ain’t right.” He stood straighter, looked around, and shook his head. “Okay, Mr. Jeffers has saved your asses tonight. But if I come back here in a couple of nights and you’re still around, I’m gonna run you in. And you can say thank you to us both now.”

  Deena said, “Thank you.”

  The others began to move around again. The bear-like young man asked, “Can we put up our shelter again—and eat our dinner?”

  Aim gave another grumpy look and turned away. “Hey, Jeffers.”

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t be wantin’ to make the next ferry to Gilead…?”

  Eric said, “Well, actually…” When he looked back, somehow two of the house walls were again standing. One was the glass wall, no longer broken. While he was looking at it, he heard a snapping of fire. Again the rocks and embers appeared, with their complex racks of roasting fish, their silver skins streaked black and gold.

  He could even smell them.

  “That is just disgusting—the way they play with reality like that.” Aim shook his head. “I know you don’t want to hang around with these people anymore than you have to. They have no respect—no respect at all. For what is. Come on. Lemme give you a lift back to the Harbor. Cookin’ fish like that! That way, you can get away from these ones here—they stink like goddam Californians.”

  *

  Two days later, Eric carried his folding table down the maglev’s station’s brick ramp onto the commons. His tote bag bounced from side to side on his back.

  The sky had not lightened fully.

  Eric turned the corner into the market, looking east where red sun came past the school’s brick face and through the underpass. He squinted at the foreshortened motto—and the world was covered with the particulate rainbow of dragonfly wings, before he looked away, muttering The gift must move…which he had not seen but knew was what the bronze letters read because he had seen them so often before.

  A few of the Tuesday morning vendors were out and already putting things on their own benches. Many more would not be getting there for another hour. The air was cool for September, with now and again a gust of warmer air, a promise of what the later day might hold.

  He’d wanted to be there by seven thirty, but his table was out by six forty, and he came back from Maya with the crate from her imported pasta stand, to sit on, as well as the bag of oatmeal-raisin walnut cookies he’d baked the night before. (He’d left a third with Maya.) Ten minutes later, Dona came by with a tray in her hands—and said, “My aunt did this last night. She asked me to bring this over and give it to you, if you were here.”

  “That nice.” When the cover came off, it was a ginger cake with coffee icing. “You take a couple of cookies.” Eric said.

  “I wish they weren’t so good.” She selected two (clearly looking for smaller ones; Eric smiled), then turned toward Dr. Zaya’s office.

  “You thank the doctor for me—and for comin’ out to get Shit taken care of.”

  “Well, you know—that’s just Zaya. She’s almost as eccentric as you two.”

  All the details that made the market the market—the tools on the benches off to the right, the statue of the winged bronze on its pedestal up at the north end, and the fish stands among the first set up, with Laurel and Arna loading shovelfuls of ice onto their wooden trays (Laurel stopped to wave; Eric grinned and waved back), and, minutes later, the first few women from the big Office, including the one whose name he still hadn’t learned yet, with all the red, matted hair, who held her large cup up in her big, grubby hand, saying, “You know this coffee is so watery, and your cookies is so good—you mind if I take two?”

  “Go ahead,” Eric said. “That’s what they’re here for.”

  She did. “It’s a shame to waste ’em. But thank you, thank you so much.” And chomping, she wandered away across the grass, with three of her friends trailing. Eric chuckled behind her.

  “Mr. Jeffers! Hello…!”

  He looked over.

  Across the grass, two young black women were coming toward him. Both looked faintly familiar and at the same time, no names leaped into his head to go with them.

  Eric called, “Hello…” trying to keep the puzzlement out of his voice.

  The shorter girl had a wealth of dreads, like something out of the turn of the century. What was her name? He’d known it yesterday…

  The taller one wore work pants, work shoes, and a work jacket, open over her breasts: Deena Havers, the sculptor! “Good morning.” Both had knapsacks, which the taller shrugged from one shoulder to let it swing down and sit it on the grass. “Do you mind if I do some sketching? I was thinking about it the last time I saw you, on the mainland. But then you left. So I didn’t get to ask you.” That day, Deena’s head was shaved. It hadn’t been two days ago.

  Eric tried to remember the dark, natural hair that had covered it. “Naw. Naw, go right on ahead.” He felt a surge of pleasure, at seeing Deena and the other girl from the marriage group. “Take a cookie, if you want. Or a piece of cake.” (She was the head of the group marriage. She was writing a book about them. But his mind would not give him back her name…)

  “We took the early morning ferry across—when the sun was just coming up. It was…just beautiful out there on the water,” Deena said. She squatted now and pulling back the canvas cover, then glanced up. “With the fog and everything.”

  “When we came out,” the one with the dreads explained, “the sky was as red as a piece of hickory-smoked ham—and the clouds were like white fat running all through it. It was really interesting—You live out here? What do you do?”

  “Well,” Eric said, moving back on the crate he was using for a chair, “me and my partner, we just do handyman work—sometimes. And sometimes we sit out here and give away cookies and sandwiches to people like you who’re coming through and maybe didn’t have as big a breakfast as they might have liked.”

  The woman with the dreads—oh, come on, what was it?— laughed. “I can just…take one?”

  “Sure can. They’re free.”

  She leaned forward to pick one up, hesitated, and bit. Then she smiled. Deena was already sitting on the grass, cross-legged, and had pulled a sketchpad and a box of pastels free, and was making sweeping gestures across it he couldn’t see. The pad looked twice as big as anything thing that could naturally fit into her sack—which probably meant there was something technological about it, like her sculpture, like the mainland house, which he wouldn’t ever really understand, because he wasn’t an artist or a scientist himself. “Right now,” Eric went on, “I’m just waitin’ for my partner to get back from the hospital. He’s supposed to come in two days, so I’m just killin’ time out here today till he gets home—I mean, it’s comical.” He laughed. “I’m doin’ just the same thing I’d be doin’ if he was here, but I tell you, it feels kind of empty ’cause he ain’t around.” There he was, running off again about what he was feeling, just ’cause it was unusual. “It’s funny—I don’t complain about much, but I sure wish the day after tomorrow would hurry up and get here.” Shut up, he thought to himself. Come on, keep quiet. Listen to them—they’re the interesting ones. (And, of course, they hadn’t said thank you for his intervention with Aim back on the mainland. But that was just kids today…) “But it’s kinda hard waitin’ for him to come—”

  Behind him, somebody said, “Day after tomorrow? That old fool is supposed to come back here from the hospital the day after tomorrow? You mean the one there in R
uncible? Naw—I don’t believe it for a minute! I don’t think he’s comin’ then. You just put that right out of your head, Mr. Eric Jeffers—”

  Frowning, Eric twisted around. Shit was standing there, with a cloth bag and his hand inside, reaching in to pull out three apples—he had the hands for it—which he set down on the table and grinned. “Hey, there, good-lookin’. You think your old fuck is gonna be home from the hospital tomorrow? I know I sure as hell don’t. I think he’s come back already!” Shit pulled out three more, set those down, then dropped his hand on Eric’s shoulder and kneaded. “You talkin’ to my friends here—we was laughin’ and havin’ a good time on the boat across from the Harbor. Wasn’t we? You know who this is? This here is Al Havers granddaughter! Would you believe that? Like I told you, sweetheart, six times, on the boat comin’ across, I used to look up to your granddaddy so much. I used to tease him all the time. But that’s ’cause I wanted so much to be like him, when I was a kid, I didn’t know what to do—only I couldn’t, at least not in the daddy and the granddaddy department, ’cause—” Shit grinned wickedly—“I was a nigger cocksucker. Your granddaddy was quite a guy.”

  From her cross-legged position on the grass in front of the table, Deena went on sketching. “Your partner there, Mr. Haskell, is a cut-up.”

  Dreads shaking around her ears, the other girl laughed.

  And Eric thought, the goddam sun has come up…!

  “Hey,” Shit said, “take an apple, too, with that cookie!” He turned two of the green fruits over and set them on end, so they wouldn’t roll. When he’d put out four more, he started a second layer. Finishing the three-sided pyramid—the two girls (and Eric) had watched, fascinated—he said, “Hey, I’m gonna run over and ask Hap and Bulah if they got any peaches for us.” Holding the empty sack by the neck, he flung it up and over his shoulder and stalked off across the grass, with the side to side sway his arthritis had given him in the last twenty or so years. “They’re always good for that.”

  Eric had a weird expression on his face that was half frown and half grin. He was trying to think how to ask if they knew why Shit was back two days early. It would be just like Shit to get up and leave in the middle of things—though he looked healthy enough—