Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Well, I—”

  “Please.” She let go of the carton corner to smile at him, under wisps of scarlet. (This month Anne’s hair was scarlet.) “Tell Shit it’s for me.”

  “Sure. I’ll tell him,” Eric said. “But I ain’t promisin’ nothin’.” He smiled back. The fact was Eric was pretty sure Shit would have no objections. To his own surprise, though, Eric had become the one not too eager to try new things, new places, though he didn’t like to admit it. Blaming it on Shit was one of those convenient things to say.

  But then, by now all their friends knew that, too.

  Finished helping Anne pack up the biggest works, he stepped outside as the truck down from the Atlanta Gallery pulled up, and, in a thermal web suit, Geraldine climbed out. “Hi, there, pretty lady. Hey, there, young man.”

  Eric smiled and thought: People used to say that to old fellows when I was kid. He still wondered why…?

  Eric was rolling the last of them out on the red power dolly when he noticed the address on the truck bed’s blue side was 4667 Montoya. “Hey, you know? Hey—Geraldine?” He worked the carton onto the tailgate, which had begun to whine and lift. “Up there in Atlanta—you fellows can’t be more than half a block from where me and my daddy used to live. A big ol’ private house, divided up into apartments. Guy named Condotti owned it—but I know he’s long gone.”

  “On Montoya?” Geraldine frowned down from where she stood on the hydraulically rising platform with the carton. She had heavy, muscular arms, both of them sleeved with tattoos. It was hard to believe only that flimsy netting along with some black engineer style boots could keep you warm. For all her shoulder muscles, her tits were long and flat. (How far back had he gotten used to seeing women and men walking around in clothing that revealed pubic hair, breasts, genitals…? Drive by a road crew in winter or summer, and as the job had become safer and safer—no more hot tar, no more bits of gravel and flying lumps of macadam—it was pretty usual to see six or ten men, buck naked, at least that’s what they looked like from more than fifteen feet off, in nothin’ but boots and hardhats, puttin’ down a road. As a young man, he remembered actually thinking it had to stop with breasts.) On her rather prominent cunt she’d attached a couple of small carved charms—two red, one gold—to the graying hair behind its length of wire with the tiny silver beads that kept in the heat.

  Geraldine got the next box up. “Ain’t no private houses there today. It’s all business towers. Most of them went up back in the thirties.” A strong woman, she had a belly and made Eric think of an only slightly less hairy Jay MacAmon—with, yeah, breasts.

  “Oh…Towers?” Eric was surprised, he had the feeling he should have known that. Though he’d been to Savannah a few times, he hadn’t been in Atlanta since he was a kid. Hadn’t someone already told him about the changes? But when…?

  Behind him Anne was saying, “Now, please, honey, when you take these off the truck, take ’em off just like you put ’em on—one at a time. If something does go wrong, there’s no need to smash up two or three.”

  “Sweetheart,” Geraldine said, “have I ever broken one of your little pottie pieces in six years of gettin’ ’em back and forth?”

  “No, you haven’t. And this is not the time to start. Now”—Anne’s hand fell on Eric’s shoulder as, above them, Geraldine leaned the carton back, first to walk it into the truck bed, then to lower it on its side—“don’t forget to ask Shit about coming to Hanna’s. You gonna remember?”

  “Oh…!” Eric said, and nodded, still trying to fix his mind to the fact that his adolescent neighborhood was really gone, the same way the untamed and uninhabited Gilead—the Holotas’ Gilead, Jay and Mex’s Gilead, Shit’s old Gilead—from his own first years at Diamond Harbor were…gone.

  As Eric walked back along the Island’s winter bluff, hands swinging through dry, thigh-high grass, it occurred to him: yes, Anne knew his increasing tendency to sedentariness. But she’s too nice to call me on it. Then he thought (it made him smile in the evening, as gulls swooped about): And she knows if Shit says he don’t mind goin’ to Hanna’s, I ain’t gonna put up no fuss. Well, if they’re gonna bring us out there and take us back, and it’s the same people, just in a different place—he sighed with the fancied difficulty of it—it should be okay.

  More and more old things were going. And the new things were just uncomfortable, not because they were embarrassing or sexual or inconvenient—just new.

  The great ceramic shapes Anne made, with their metallic glaze like liquid sunlight poured around them—he looked out at the copper sea—he’d always thought were beautiful when, years back, he used to see them in the pottery shop windows in Runcible or Hemmings.

  But a notion that had come to him only that afternoon—that those objects, however beautiful, had displaced his Atlanta—made them seem cold, if not somehow minatory.

  * * *

  [109] THAT EVENING, WHEN the kitchen in their cabin was half dark and, sighing some, as Anne had requested him Eric asked, and Shit answered, “Sure. Hanna’s got a nice place. I don’t understand them big paintin’s she does. But that ain’t nothin’ new. Let’s go.” So there was no excuse not to have their Solstice holiday at Hanna’s rather than Anne’s.

  The young woman—who came to pick them up—was an Asian social science student named Ann Lee, doing a group dissertation on “community” at the University over in Mobile. (Group dissertations—that was something new since Caleb had told them about his first stay in graduate school…Or was it?) She wanted to interview both Shit and Eric about their lives in the Settlement and before.

  It was one reason Hanna had been so eager that they come.

  *

  At the party in the back studio, dozens of people moved around them.

  Floating beneath the beamed ceiling, glowing and glittering letters and numbers declared, “2077! HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2077!” though that was eight days off.

  “Now, see,” Shit said, sitting down across from him on the edge of an outdoor wooden settee, a piece of summer garden furniture brought inside Hanna’s barn-like studio for the winter. Shit held a red plastic plate heaped with chicken and chopped kale cooked up with ham hocks and a helping of sliced beets and vinegar that, on one side, had already left red spots splattering his white canvas jacket. “We got us this pretty young lady who wants to take me back in the office, there, and ask me all sorts of questions about stuff—she gonna ask you, too, don’t worry.”

  “I know that,” Eric said. “This eggnog is good.” In both hands, Eric held the cut glass cup. Nutmeg’s scent rose from brown speckled peaks of meringue folded into whipped cream and whisky.

  “You keep on puttin’ it down, and you gonna be drunk as a skunk—and gassy, too. You ain’t a drinker.” Shit looked around. “Ask one of these kids here to bring you somethin’ to eat. They’ll do it. Hey—” He called one youngster who couldn’t have been sixteen.

  The boy turned and raised an inquiring eyebrow—iridescent blue.

  “You wanna get this feller a nice plate of that ham? And some of them shrimps in gravy?”

  The youngster, who was not local, frowned. He was wearing a thermal web-shirt—woven of coppery threads spaced as wide as fishnet. (Like Geraldine’s…) You could turn it on or off, and it would create a blanket of warmth around you, even on really cold days. Sometimes workmen wore whole suits of the stuff, bottom and top. (Someone had even given Shit a heat-net shirt a few years back, which he’d worn exactly once, shrugging it away, finally, with, Yeah, it’s warm, but I keep thinkin’ the damned thing’s gonna ’lectrocute me.) The kid’s pants also had a large transparent plastic crotch panel—when had those come in? At least two decades before, Eric had been sure Shit would have both of them wearing them in a month. That would have been just like him. (But he’d surprised Eric by shrugging them off with, There ain’t no mystery left. You know exactly what you gonna get. So why bother?) At local bars, it had taken maybe three years for men to stop joshing, “If mine w
as that puny, I’d be embarrassed to wear one.” It didn’t stop anyone from walking around in them, though. As several fashion commentators remarked, until it became a cliché, their popularity was mostly with rather small-hung straight guys—though there were occasional exceptions in the entertainment world—which, blue hair not withstanding, was what this very pleasant young fellow looked to be.

  “And maybe some of that hop’n’john? You know.” Shit ducked his head. “Hop’n’john? Them beans and rice? And a spoonful of them chopped-up greens. You can skip the beets. I like those, but he don’t.”

  “Sure.” The kid smiled at Eric, turned, and, between the guests, hurried toward the buffet table across the room, calling over his shoulder, “Hey, it’s nice to see you guys again this year.”

  Eric wondered who he was, down to visit what cousin or aunt. But when your hair color (and cut) changed so radically season to season, it was hard to recognize children, given how fast they grew, anyway.

  Beside Eric, solstice lights flickered in a web of red, green, and blue over a lumpy, leaning cactus. With its terracotta pot, it must have weighed almost as much as the kid.

  At which point, the Asian Ann woman came up. “Mr. Haskell, if you—oh, you’re still eating. Well, we can certainly wait till you’re finished.”

  “Honey, these are my thirds. I’m just playin’ with this stuff. If I eat all this mess down, good as it is, I’m gonna be fat as Ol’ Daddy Christmas.” Shit put the plate on the table between him and Eric. “Besides, I’m all interested in your questions there.” Slowly he stood.

  Eric knew it hurt his left hip and winced for him. “I wanna find out what you’re gonna ask me.”

  “Well, if you’re ready, Hanna says we can use her back office. That’s where my recorder is…” and they were walking off.

  Then the kid in the net shirt returned with Eric’s plate. Eric took it and said, “Thank you.”

  The kid didn’t say anything but looked very serious. Eric was about to start eating, when he realized the youngster was still staring at him.

  Eric paused with his fork up and frowned inquiringly.

  The kid blurted. “My name is Cum Stain. But I don’t think you would call me that, would you? You’re probably too old, huh?”

  Eric shrugged. “Why not? My partner’s name is Shit—” he nodded off in the direction Shit had vanished—“and people been callin’ him that since he was younger than you.”

  “They have? Oh, wow!”

  “Sure have, Cum Stain.” Eric grinned.

  The kid grinned back, then turned, and dashed away.

  Even with the black plastic fork, the ham cut just as tender. It was good, too. So were the greens. He ate some more, but gas in his belly suddenly wanted to get out but wouldn’t. It made him sit the plate down beside Shit’s, wondering if there was any club soda.

  Molly walked up, in her open orange jacket and orange slacks, gold flocking on both. “Hey, I came over to make sure somebody had taken care of you. But I see you got a plate—oh, you didn’t get no sweet potatoes.” (But he shook his head, and she went on.) “It’s so nice of you fellows to agree to talk to Ann.” She had rings in her dark, dark nipples. Her orange lipstick practically leapt from her dark, dark face. It was interesting that both men and women again were turning to make up, a resurgence from the thirties.

  “Oh,” Eric said, “this ain’t nothin’. We’re at that age where we’ll talk any of you young folks ear off, if you wanna waste time listenin’. The only thing I’m worried about is Shit’s stories is gonna scandalize her. Shit never did learn how to tone a tale down a little so he could tell it in a way that wouldn’t make a civilized person arch an eyebrow.”

  Hanna laughed. Gold and orange fabric shook as did her tit rings. “Well, I don’t think Ann—”

  —Eric felt a mental hitch, realizing for the tenth time in three days that Ann was the university woman Ann Lee, not the potter Anne Frazier—

  “—really wants her stories all that civilized. This is for her American Anthropology class, and she told me she needs ’em as raw as she can get ’em. Her topic, you see, is the role of sexuality in gay community development.”

  “Well, yeah,” Eric said. “I un’erstand that. But there’s raw and there’s plain crude. Shit starts talkin’ about sex, and he may just ‘role’ her out your front door on the run. We’re both more than a little crude. Only sometimes I can control it. Most of the time, though, Shit don’t even make the effort.”

  “Mr. Jeffers, I’ve known both you and Mr. Haskell for a long time—thirteen years, fifteen even.” Molly laughed again. “You’re my oldest friends in the Settlement. The fact is you are true social treasures, the both of you.”

  It surprised him when she said it: Eric thought of Molly as among his newest. But then, fifteen years was probably a third of the young painter’s life.

  “Nobody minds a little crudity, Mr. Jeffers—at least not here in the Settlement. Most of the women around this place consider themselves pretty worldly and sophisticated, but if we didn’t have the two of you and the outrageous things that come out of both your mouths, we wouldn’t have anything to lift our eyebrows about or to whisper with each other over or just to make us…laugh ourselves silly! I mean, that story Mr. Haskell told at Anne’s, two summers ago, about the two of you in a three way with that midget, when his catheter worked loose, and started spurtin’ all over everyone, has still got be one of the funniest things I ever heard!”

  “Oh, yeah.” Eric raised his chin. Shit had told that one back at Anne’s summer solstice dinner and kept half her back yard in stitches twenty whole minutes. “I remember that one. That was pretty funny—and messy. But you know, we’re all still friends.” Though, as he said it, he realized they weren’t: Big Man had died, at his dad’s house on the mainland, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago—or more like thirty. (What he’d meant was that they’d stayed friends, despite the incident. But that’s not what he’d said.) Mr. Markum was dead. For half a dozen years there, they’d gone to Christmas dinner at Big Man’s in Pinewood (despite the tree and the cards, Big Man always managed to call it something else), arriving early in the day to help out, then clean up afterward, but that was…twenty-five, thirty-five years ago!

  Molly was saying, “Ann said she wanted to spend about an hour and a half with Shit, then she’d be ready for you. If you don’t mind sittin’ here, she’ll get to you. You want me to bring you some key lime pie?”

  “I ain’t even ate this ham and greens yet. And I ain’t much for desserts. Naw, you don’t have to worry about me.” Eric shifted around in the chair’s cushions, thought about taking up the plate of food again, but let it stay. “What I’m gonna do is sit here and take a little nap. While I’m waitin’, I mean—’cause it’s after eight o’clock. And after eight o’clock, that’s what I usually to do.”

  “Well, you go ahead. I’ll come get you as soon as she’s finished with Mr. Haskell.” Straightening up, Hanna chuckled again. “I swear—I was walking back from the commons the other evening, and I was thinkin’ about that story, the way Mr. Haskell told it that night at Anne’s. I started laughing out loud, right there on the path, under the trees. I couldn’t stop myself. Two years after hearin’ it—and I’m still laughing myself silly over the image of you lookin’ all surprised and him rollin’ onto his bag with that stuff just…” In the course of searching for a word, not finding it, and shaking her head, she laughed again, turned, and started away between guests.

  Draperies behind the Christmas lights—whatever they called them, Christmas lights was what they were—were flowered and printed with leaves. Among their pattern, he could make out something like a face, which looked like…yes, that was his beard, and that was where his upper teeth should have been. Jay stood there, behind the colored stars, grinning. Behind him was Mike, with his denim shirt open wide over his dark, gleaming chest, because it was summer—Jay’s shirt was open too, because it was winter and along the coast winter was so mil
d.

  Like summers, sometimes…

  It was funny, too—both had tails, winding, coiling, looping and unrolling, writhing behind them on the sand, pushing aside leaves, splashing down in the water, whipping up dry dirt, as they walked ahead of him over the beach. Mike’s serpentine appendage was covered with what looked like coal chips—black scales, Eric realized—glistening under an aluminum sky. The scales on Jay’s were hemp hued. Eric could see the bases pushing aside the frayed rip in the seat of both their work pants, allowing him to glimpse where the plated flesh joined Jay’s blond-haired buttocks or his dad’s, dark as gunmetal.

  As the two men walked ahead, the tails overlapped and wrapped one another, so that along the writhing lengths he couldn’t keep them distinct. It was like one great tail between them that, with its loopings and unloopings, as gulls flew above, ran from one of them and coiled around and around to join the other.

  “Now, how’re we gonna do it,” Mike explained, stopping and turning and taking Eric’s book from under his arm, “is that I’m gonna weld this one cover over here…weld it to the people.” The volume was four-feet high—as tall, Eric thought, as one of Anne’s pots. “And your friend over there—” he nodded toward Jay, who, in his big old work shoes, stood in the scurf of foam—“is gonna weld the other cover there to the sea, you see?”

  Like summer, like winter…

  Where he stood, Jay laughed. Out among small waves, a twenty-foot ceramic “C,” chipped and ancient, stood in the slosh and slough, as though it had escaped from between the book covers.

  Between, their shared tail writhed.

  “Come on,” Jay said. “Help us open it, now.” All three took hold of the cover and pulled it up—it was heavy as a picnic table top—their hands above their heads, they worked their way under, to push it higher. Eric was shoeless and the paper slid under foot, wrinkling. The book was a lot bigger than he’d thought: more like twenty feet than four. When they got the cover vertical, it tottered a little—Mike raised both hands to catch it if it fell back, and Jay only stepped aside, staring upward.