Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  —when three young men came up, two of them holding hands. “Hey, you came out here, too?”

  The girl with the dreads said, “You can take some fruit or some cookies, if you want. It’s free.” She looked back at Eric to explain soberly, “They came out here on the boat with us, too.”

  “Wow,” one of the boys said. And did. (Eric heard the cookie breaking in his mouth.) “You know, they were right. Out here, this is like something you read about happening in the thirties.” Then they walked away.

  From her seat, Deena said, “All of the island here—at least this part—is like a left-over piece of the thirties. Of the good times before today. But it’s nice.” She went on sketching.

  The girl with the dreads said, “We were talking to them last night. His brother was on the moon—but he’d never met anyone who’d been to Mars. Like Deena. We almost convinced them to get married. You know, you and your partner should think about it.”

  “Come on,” Deena said. “Everything doesn’t have to be politics. Besides, if you’re living in the thirties, it isn’t quite as important as it is today—I mean, in the rest of the country.”

  Two minutes later, Shit was back with a bag of peaches. “They only gimme a dozen. But that’s somethin’.”

  Eric pushed up from the table. “Will you please stay still long enough for me to hug you and ask you what the fuck you’re doin’ back here and how you’re feelin’?”

  “Okay,” Shit said, still grinning.

  Suddenly, Eric stood up and hugged him—and Shit hugged Eric back. By his ear, Eric heard Shit say, “Excuse me, yall, but I am a tongue fucker from way back, and I ain’t sucked on no part of this old bastard in three days now.” And Eric had a mouth full of everything in Shit’s.

  The two girls laughed.

  I could break down and just ask, but why can’t I remember it…?

  When Shit pulled his face away, Eric said, “You ain’t had no coffee yet.”

  “Don’t worry,” Shit said, “I’ll make some when we get home.”

  Finally, Eric asked, “Why are you here? Ain’t you supposed to be in the hospital for another day? You got pneumonia!”

  “Not no more, I don’t. Last night,” Shit said, “they told I could leave this mornin’, if I wanted to. Whatever they gimme knocked that stuff out right away. They got medicines now they didn’t even have when Shad come down with it—you remember Shad?”

  On the ground, Deena did a last few lines on her drawing, then said, “You want to see what I’m doing?” She turned the pad around.

  Shit and Eric both looked down.

  So did the girl with the dreads.

  It was a sketch of Shit, with his grin and his tufty beard and his caved-in cheeks and his bald spot and his incongruous hoody—seeing it drawn, and drawn so well, with folds and the ragged elbow, made it look particularly odd—bent over the table, holding his bag and setting out apples. “You can have this,” she said. “This—” she gestured with the pad—“keeps a copy on store for me, if I need it later…for reference.”

  * * *

  [105] IT WASN’T A full year later that Eric made the transition into relative sexual inactivity. He was eighty-five when he’d noticed that, along with his erections, his orgasms of every three weeks, or month or so had…well, stopped.

  There’d been two and three month interruptions in them before, and for a while he’d even taken testosterone.

  (Remember you had that testosterone pump fixed in the side of your belly? You had to get it filled every month for…hell, it had to be more’n ten years. I just made mine naturally, with my balls I guess.

  (Yeah, Eric said. That would be you.)

  But this seemed permanent.

  Over the same time, two years older, Shit would still declare, now on one morning, now on another, “Get over here, y’ol’ white bastard; this nigger’s gonna fuck your cracker asshole.” Fifty years before, Eric had heard Shit approach Dynamite, pretty much every second or third morning, with the same words: it made the arc of coastal life coherent, and though Eric’s response to Shit’s weight and rhythm was sexual in only the most general way, it rarely hurt. (Didn’t I used to wonder if I would ever be able to do this? Now I can—at least if I grease myself up the night before—which probably means I could’a done it back then. Damn…) It was more pleasant than he’d remembered it when the same acts had made him come. A couple of times, looking at the pale blue KY pump on the night table (though you could get it in various sized plastic envelopes with self-sealing spouts, you couldn’t find that stuff in real collapsible tubes no more), he told Shit, “You know, I understand a lot about your daddy I didn’t when he was alive,” not that Shit was curious about what that was.

  Sometimes, panting, grinning, Shit would say, “Hey…I finished up…that time…” which made Eric realize the two out of three he didn’t say it, he hadn’t. Well, since Eric hadn’t, either, he didn’t mind. He loved his position as the object of Shit’s enthusiasm. How odd that, as an eighty-five- year-old man, he could lie next to Shit, with copper sunrise coming under the window shade, and feel, now on one morning, now on another, these were the most satisfying moments in a life that, sexually speaking, had been pretty satisfying throughout.

  A few times, there, Eric had said to Shit, who was still breathing hard on top of him, “Hey—don’t work yourself into a heart attack. I ain’t ready for your nigger ass to drop dead on me…” Then he reached up to pat the puffy hair of Shit’s beard; and Shit reached down to run his fingers through Eric’s.

  One day, instead of making a joke about it and calling Eric a dumb nigger back, panting, Shit had said, “Don’t worry. I ain’t plannin’ to kill myself fuckin’ some damn white man to death! Even you!” For the first time, the racial slur sounded as though it had been intended to wound. Eric reached up and put his hand over Shit’s, still holding his shoulder. He felt the scarred and broken pits where nails should be. (How did one learn to find such violations beautiful…?) Eric listened to the labored breath above. Shit didn’t take his hand away. Well, maybe Shit was joking. Or grumpy…because he hadn’t come.

  But, later in the morning, Shit said, “I wanna take a nap. Come on in with me,” which, as late as fifteen years before, would have been an invitation to make love.

  Inside, on the unmade bed, Shit—as usual, he hadn’t gotten dressed all morning—said, “Lay up here where I can feel you against me. I’m gonna pull my damn pecker for a while. I swear, if I don’t get off, it’s gonna fuckin’ kill me!”

  It began a strange and, finally, frightening spring, at the end of which, three months later (with or without Eric), rarely more than half dressed and often naked or just in an undershirt, Shit was beating off all the time…in bed, sitting at the kitchen table, out behind the house, in the bathroom, down beside the ocean, or out on the cabin’s deck at night.

  At first Eric would say, “You gotta stop this, Shit. You gonna get sores on yourself, now.”

  Shit would say, “I don’t give a fuck,” and keep on.

  Later, Eric would say, “If somebody comes by, Ed or someone, and they see you, they gonna make me put you away. Don’t you understand?”

  Not stopping, Shit would grump, “I don’t care. Besides, you’re the one who’s crazy—out there on the commons at two-thirty in the mornin’, with all your clothes off, talking to a damned statue.”

  “Oh, come on,” Eric said. “I explained that to you. Since I was naked the first time I happened to see it, at Jay’s, I wanted to look at it that way again. That’s all. I thought it might…”

  “And you never have been able to tell me what you thought it might do. And Dr. Zaya had to bring you home with a blanket round your damned shoulders. I told you, this ain’t like the damned Dump, where we could do stuff like that.” Having slowed for the length of half a sentence, Shit went back to pumping.

  “Shit, that was three years ago—and…well, okay. So maybe I was a little crazy that night. I told you, I thought it
was late, and no one would be out. Or—okay, maybe I forgot the Settlement ain’t the Dump. But that don’t got nothin’ to do with this. You gotta stop!”

  “You’re crazy already! So I’m just gonna go crazy along with you.”

  “Oh, don’t be like that.” It made him want to cry. Something was wrong with him, he knew. A couple of times Shit had tried to tell him, as had that new doctor, but it would never stick. “Stop, will you…?”

  “Fuck you!”

  Eating could halt it for maybe five or ten minutes, no longer.

  Really, it was like a parody of that Costas fellow, back in Hugantown (odd: it was the only name he remembered from anyone in the place not in his family), who’d lived in the cabin in the lot around from Eric’s grandmother—only this was without climaxes. Eric wondered if the same fate had fallen to the plumber, who’d been more than a decade his senior, anyway. Twenty-two times in a…Was Costas alive?

  In June, sitting in the kitchen, naked, in one blue sock, an old man with dangling dugs and bony hips, ankles, and shoulders, fist moving in the tight white hair at his groin, Shit said, “Come here. You gotta do somethin’ for me.” His hand pulsed about his soft, sizable penis. Blown up to twice their former diameter with age, from what they’d been thirty years back, Shit’s brown testicles moved with his fist on the chair’s stained caning.

  Eric put the kitchen knife on the counter, left the carrots he was cutting for the last beef stew of the year, turned, and walked across the floor. In his own jeans and bare feet, the only other thing he wore was a green T-shirt.

  Shit looked up at him. “Can you get down on the floor, between my knees, here?”

  “Yeah…but I may never get up.” Eric began to lower himself, managing finally to sit on the rag rug that went under the kitchen table. “Now, if I asked you to sit down here, you’d call me a murderer—”

  “’Cause with my arthritis, you would be. Hey—I’m gonna ask you to do somethin’. It’s gonna be hard for you, too. I don’t think you’re gonna wanna do it…”

  Looking up at Shit’s face, Eric saw the tears in the old man’s yellowing eyes, their green now mostly gray. Old man? No…as with so many older people, when he went down to the Settlement for the open air market or the groceries or sometimes went to ask Ed how the new ferry was working out and took a ride back to the Harbor, Eric saw a girl or a boy who had been oddly afflicted with one or another ailment, so that she walked slow and stiff or that he had lost most of his hair or the face was overlaid with odd folds of flesh—wrinkles. Bellies and hips were weighted with alien fat or had grown unaccountably thin. “Age” was a variety of bodily disfigurements that simply and eventually infolded the young. That’s all.

  Eric put his hand on Shit’s thigh and looked up at the boy’s eyes to which something had…happened, that had discolored them and made them tear—made them…old. The flesh underneath Shit’s leg was wrinkled; what lay across the top was smooth.

  Shit took a breath, and for a moment Eric was convinced Shit was going to ask Eric to castrate him. Eric’s heart was not pounding…But yeah, he thought, the nigger’s gone crazy. “Okay. What…?”

  Shit said, “You gonna drink the piss out my dick, lick out my asshole, and eat my damned snot?”

  Now Eric took a surprised breath. “Goddam it, nigger, of course I am!” The relief was disorienting. He lay his cheek against Shit’s soft thigh. With his other hand, he reached forward and cradled Shit’s testicles in his own old man’s labor-roughened palm. Under himself, Eric moved his legs to get them more comfortable, though it was futile. Shit’s goddam nuts were almost twice the size he once remembered them—not as big as Jay’s had eventually gotten. (Like a goddam grapefruits!) Still, they’d been out of his damned pants for…well, weeks! “I thought you were gonna ask me to do something hard.” Eric snorted. Could their bloating have had anything to do with Shit’s obsessive masturbation? (He remembered how Jay’s used to itch, if that wasn’t just a damned excuse…) Really, as much as Shit hated it, Eric had to get them both to a doctor, for a checkup. “That’s just…fun.” It had been at least twelve years now that both were taking pills for blood pressure, too. Maybe that needed to be adjusted.

  After a long while, Shit said, “Well, you ain’t done none of it for a while…”

  Was something like that really making him cry? “Well—you been so busy pounding your damned dick, how was I supposed to get your attention? What’d you want me to do? Bring you down, hog-tie you, drain your damned radiator and rape your nose?”

  “Maybe you could do…a little of that.” Behind the tears, Shit began to smile. “I wouldn’t mind. Would you at least call me a goddam motherfuckin’ piece of mule shit, so I’ll know you care?” He sighed and turned to the window, as though he wondered if anyone were looking in—and his hand…stopped moving. Eric was about to do it, when Shit interrupted him:

  “I remember the first time we was ridin’ together in the truck with my dad, you was pickin’ at yours and eatin’ it, but you was too scared to give me none. So finally, about after ten minutes, when I got tired of laughin’ at you to myself, I dug out a finger-full and gave it to you. Later, Dynamite told me he thought we was cute.”

  “Yeah, well I guess I was. Scared, I mean. Sure. I remember bein’ scared to give you any with your dad there, even though I knew he wouldn’t mind. But I don’t remember you givin’ me none.”

  “Well, I did. And when you took it, you looked so…grateful, there. I already knew I wanted you around. But that’s when I knew I wanted you around for a long time—forever. ’Cause it was so easy to make you happy.”

  Eric snorted. “And I can’t even remember it.”

  After another pause, Shit said, “’Cause I don’t get hard now, I thought you didn’t want to no more. Or you didn’t like it now or somethin’.”

  “Well, I don’t get hard, either—” Eric lifted his head from against Shit’s leg and wondered how he was going to stand up—“no more. What you mean, I didn’t want to? Nigger, you are as crazy as a damned white man—course I want to. I’d do it even if you didn’t want me to. And if you do want it, that’s better.”

  Shit looked down again. With the back of his wide, bony fingers he rubbed Eric’s beard. “Your beard looks nice.”

  “Well, yours looks like an old worn out door mat…but it’s still sexy as all hell…You gonna help me up from here?” Shit’s hand went under Eric’s arm. He tugged. “And, please,” Eric said, “let’s go and lie down on the bed for a while. Together. And hold each other. Please…?”

  Then began three weeks where, first for an hour, then three, then five, Shit stopped—“Goddam, I’m glad I still got your dick to hold onto!”—till he was only doing it forty minutes or an hour each day, usually in the morning before they got out of bed, one hand pushed under Eric’s shoulder.

  Sometimes, with Eric, he’d even joke about that, saying he had to keep it up, in case something happened that surprised him. “We might as well, since we don’t got nothin’ else to do.”

  * * *

  [106] NOT ONLY DO Wonder Decades take their place in the past; so do perfectly ordinary years with little of interest about them save that ordinary folk like you and me and Shit and Eric survived them.

  * * *

  [107] THE CYCLES OF Eric’s life took in stony beaches and pine forests where you could walk in a daylight all but night dark and fields where there was no grass, only stones and moss, alongside tar and macadam measured at its edge with poles and wires and solar panels, and water, broken, flickering, so much water, as much water—salt and silver—as there was sky, enough to make you scream or laugh at such absurd vastness, swelling within until Eric became his self exploding through today toward tomorrow, water green as glass falling between rocks and wet grass, the smell of dust and docks and distances, and sometimes Shit stepped up and took Eric’s rough hand in his rough hand.

  Under scruffy brows, Shit’s eyes watered a lot these days, so that frequently he thum
bed them dry, then rubbed it away on hip or T-shirt hem.

  Sometimes Shit would say, “It’s nice today.” And sometimes, “It’s gonna rain.”

  Most of the time, when he said that, it did.

  * * *

  [108] THAT WINTER THEY hadn’t gone to Anne’s but rather to Hanna’s. Two weeks before the solstice, while he was helping Anne pack her latest set of large pots to earn a couple of thousand, Anne herself told Eric, “Hanna wants us all—you know, the people who come to my place—to come to her studio this year, instead.”

  Eric pulled the tape gun over the crevice and tore off the brown strip.

  Anne grasped the carton’s corners and, left and right, walked it over the cement floor toward the ones by the door. “For eggnog and dinner. Yall don’t mind—?”

  Through the screening, the wind lifted Eric’s hood from his shoulders, then dropped it, so that the fur tickled his ear. “Well, I’ll tell you—since you ain’t doin’ it, we’ll probably stay home and just—”

  “No!” Anne insisted.

  Eric pulled the sealing wand down along the next carton’s overlapping flaps, covering part of a large “F.” Within, foam packing held another of Anne’s big pots.

  “She already told me. She’s gonnna come and get yall. You just gotta walk from your door to the car. She’s really eager for you to meet this young woman—from the university over in Mobile.”

  The screen door did not quite fill the top of the kiln room’s side doorframe. When the kiln was on, it could get hot in here—even in January. Anne only fired one pot at a time.

  “Well—” Eric lifted the wand and turned to the last box—“I don’t really got an objection. But, you know Shit—if he ain’t doin’ what he’s always done, he gets grumpy.”

  “Well, you ask him,” Anne said. “Tell him it would be a favor to both me and Hanna. Because of the Atlanta show, I just can’t do it this year. And, besides—hell—I’m gettin’ on. You know, Hanna’s got heat in her big studio.”