Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  It fell out, open, its far edge, with its leather binding down, splatting foam and seawater.

  Eric took a great breath. His birthday was in less than a week…

  Reaching up to tug around the orange visor (one of those old Turpens caps, like they used to sell at the truck stop four, five years ago…), Jay strode out beside it on the book’s cream-colored end paper, with its intricate watermarks. In his other hand, Jay already held his welding arc in his gloved hand. Dragging behind, the red rubber hose wound back across the inside cover to become intertwined with the men’s immense shared tail. “Weld it to the stars,” Jay said. “And the sun—the moon. And the clouds.”

  “You see,” Mike said, from the book’s landward edge, “he got the easy job.”

  Jay squatted down, one knee in the water. From the arc tip, a white spark bit into the binding. Steam billowed up, hiding him.

  Back where Mike stood, just on the endpaper, his boots had left footprints. Eric wondered if he should suggest his father take his shoes off.

  “Yeah.” Mike scratched his head. “The white man always got the easy job—You gonna help me weld this book to some of these people around here?”

  The only person Eric could see was scrawny Frankie in her ragged sweater, lurking half behind a tree, one hand up on the bark. And, unlike Jay, Mike didn’t even have welding tools. But, then, Mike was a senior welder. He could do the job with the black, crackling power from his bare fingers. Because he was black like Bull. “Come on, little girl—don’t be scared. Nobody’s gonna hurt you. We just wanna bind you here with this book—it’s only philosophy…” Eric and Mike had started forward. There was Miss Louise, sitting at her table, in the dark, under the leaves. And Mr. Johnston. And, clowning around behind the fence, the guys from Dump Produce. Horm. And even Lurrie, though Eric didn’t recognize him at first because he didn’t have his hat.

  Imploringly, Eric said to Mike, “How about Shit and Dynamite? I wanna bond with them…!”

  “Well, I don’t know about that.” Mike sounded uncertain. “I ain’t so sure if I really hold with the kind of stuff you guys been doin’ out here…”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be like that, Dad. Come on—”

  “—Come on,” Shit pushed at Eric’s shoulder.

  “What,” Eric said. “Wha…?”

  “Come on. It’s your turn now.”

  “If he’s sleeping,” the Asian woman was saying, “we can do it later. You gave me a lot to think about, Mr. Haskell—”

  “No,” Shit said. “He’ll chew my damned head off, if I don’t wake him up to talk to you. He actually got some stuff to say. Me, I was just blabberin’.”

  “Oh…” Eric said. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He moved forward in the seat. His head felt immense and hollow. Unsteadily, he pushed up, for a moment sure the floor was crooked beneath him.

  “I got ya!” Shit grasped him by the shoulders. “Get your balance, now. Come on—” the floor righted—“take your time. I’m gonna get you a glass of water—or do you want some more eggnog?”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “Naw—just some water. With ice, if they got it. You know I ain’t a drinker.”

  “I ain’t a drinker.” Shit grinned—he’d taken out his teeth again. “But sometimes I wonder about you. You put away two whole cups. That stuff’s almost pure whiskey. You take ’im on back to the office. I’ll bring you both a glass. Hey—make ’im show ya his tattoos. He’ll do it in private, but he don’t like to show ’em off in public.”

  “Come on, be quiet, Shit—!”

  “I’m serious. I’m gettin’ yall some water.”

  The woman said, “Water would be nice.” She took Eric’s arm. “You’re sure you’re ready for this…?”

  “Oh, yes.” Eric tried to exaggerate his readiness and wondered if he sounded silly. He started walking. “Of course I am. Now, which way is this office…?”

  The Asian woman thought that was funny. At least she laughed. “Right back here.”

  But he knew this place as well as he knew Anne’s. He’d helped Hanna pack her paintings the same way he helped Anne box her pots. Only he’d just woken…

  As they walked through the guests, Eric took a big breath. “You know, my book—I’m sure they all told you how I’m always readin’ this one book.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Anne said something about a philosopher you were interested in.”

  Carefully, Eric said, “Benedict de Spinoza. Ethics. I was just thinkin’, you know, I read that book so many times. I shoulda done somethin’ with it. I always tried to do good, to help people, to feed ’em when they was hungry. But I coulda done some more—a lot more. I could have told some of the young people about him—helped them to understand what he was sayin’, too. I probably coulda done it through the Library. Had a class or something, for youngsters who wanted to read it—it didn’t have to be just youngsters. It could have been anyone. ’Cause it’s so hard to read—especially at the start. I could have helped them all that way. But now, I think I’ve forgotten too much—maybe that just means it’s time for me to read it once more. But I think I’m…too old.”

  Young Ann had walked through the door, where a desk had chairs on either side. “Hanna says you’re…eighty-six?” She looked at him questioningly. “I don’t see why you’re too old. You could still do it.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. You see, I’m not a teacher or a writer or anything. I never was. I’m just a handyman—”

  “But you’re a handyman who reads Spinoza.”

  He thought she sounded proud of him, the way the young could sound proud of any dip-shit thing the elderly managed to do.

  (You know, I got up this morning and put my shoes on.

  (You did? Well, I’ll be!

  (I mean, it’s not that they understand you almost pass out when you do it. Because you had to hold your breath when you bent over…)

  “Well—” Eric smiled—“who used to read Spinoza. Handyman work—me and Shit—that’s all we can do. And at this point, we can’t do much of that. We have a perversion,” he said, glancing down at the seat and readying himself to sit. “We like to eat up dried mucus. Our own, each other’s. A doc told us once that it was even good for you—because it helped your immune system. Makin’ it sexual—that was Nature’s or God’s way of keepin’ you at it. It could even have been a survival trait. Lots of kids do it, but most of ’em get it shamed out of them unless they sexualize it. If we’d been into havin’ babies and stuff, maybe we coulda passed it on. Maybe you don’t even have to pass it on genetically, though. It could just happen socially, if we’d had ’em around us more. But we didn’t do that, neither. It’s too bad we wasted all that—”

  He noticed now a strange look—almost distasteful—had taken over her face.

  “Yes,” she said, “immune system…your partner was talking about the same thing. But that sounds like science. I mean…‘genetics.’ I’m an academic, so I don’t know much about that. We don’t have time to go outside our disciplines. So I don’t like to discuss it.”

  “Well,” Eric said, “there was one time when almost all gay fellers knew somethin’ about the immune system, because there were these diseases like AIDS and things that affected it so much. When I first got to the Dump, you had to have an AIDS test every few months and be ready to show it, too. But not no more.”

  “Please,” she said. “Sit down—”

  And he saw she was not looking at him.

  Eric sat and frowned. “Don’t you really think all this ‘embarrassment of science’ stuff is just more ‘I don’t wanna be related to no apes or no chimpanzees’? I mean—”

  She looked up. “Mr. Jeffers—come on, now. No one is related to an ape. No one is related to a…chimpanzee! That’s absurd. We’re human beings, who can think and feel.”

  “But all life is related to each other…” He saw she was smiling.

  So he smiled back.

  And she said, “I’d like to ask you some of m
y own questions now. Reading Spinoza, though—now, how could something like that be wasted?”

  Leaning back, Eric chuckled. “That’s what Spinoza would have said—that it wouldn’t have been wasted. Or even knowin’ some little stuff about science. He had a great trust in knowledge for its own sake.”

  Again, she smiled—and sat behind the desk, under the shelf of books. “Let’s not talk about things like science, all right? That’s…just a little crude, even for an enlightened group of artists, out here. Like talking about your income. I want to discuss some…well, things I think are actually important. Would you mind that?”

  “Thanks to the Kyle Foundation, I don’t have to worry about—or talk too much—about my income. But a lotta people do—and did.”

  “Your partner—Mr. Haskell—was telling me that both of you, separately and together, used to spend time at the Kyle Mansion, even before it became the Settlement Library. They told me it was abandoned back then—back before the thirties.”

  “Naw, we used to go there when Hugh Kyle lived there—sometimes Mr. Kyle himself would come.”

  “Really…?” She looked seriously surprised. “Do you think you could tell me a little about that—?”

  “Oh, yes. We—”

  From the door, Shit leaned in. “I gotcha two nice glasses of water here—okay? With ice.”

  When Eric sipped his, he realized his had bubbles—soda water, like he’d have had at home. He gave Shit a quick smile. Shit smiled back toothlessly—Eric saw the shape of his teeth under the cloth of Shit’s plaid shirt pocket beneath his loose white jacket—with the beet spots—and walked with his listing swagger that, Eric knew, was actually a kind of limp, back out among winter guests.

  “One of the things I wanted to talk about—” Ann turned over a piece of paper, took up a pen (though it didn’t seem to have an ordinary point. Some sort of stylus…?) and made a note—“is some stories that have come to us from the mainland, about how some folks used to practice Satanic magic around this area.”

  Eric raised an eyebrow.

  “Did you know anything about that?”

  “Satanic magic? Naw, I never heard nothin’ about that.”

  She wrote something down, moved the stylus to an upper corner—and the writing disappeared, probably to be stored in some chip or bubble whose location he did not know.

  She saw him peering and smiled. “I like these old fashioned devices,” she explained. “In the thirties, they made these things to last. And I really don’t like being bothered with new technologies, even when they’re supposed to be simple. What do they say? ‘If it was good enough for my dad…’” She leaned forward and wrote some more. Below where she was writing, a whole paragraph suddenly appeared on the page, which, somehow, she’d recalled—or what she had written had called up. “One of our informants tell me that when he was a child, his father took him and a bunch of other people to the island here, and they did some bizarre Satanic rites, probably sexual, which he wasn’t allowed to see, of course, somewhere in the Kyle mansion and outside it. That was before any of the current residents of the Settlement had come out to—”

  Eric began to laugh. “What—you been talkin’ to Ed Miller? That’s crazy. There wasn’t no Satanic rites goin’ on at the Kyle place when Mex and Jay lived there.”

  Ann sat back. “Now, I’m not supposed to reveal my informants names to each other, but out here, sometimes it’s hard to keep them private. Still, yes, Captain Ed Miller said he knew MacAmon and his mute partner very well—and for a number of years. He said in many ways, after his own father died, Mr. MacAmon and Mr. Jalisco practically raised him. He said he always had the feeling that they were keeping something from him.”

  “Ed knew they was gay—life partners—like me and Shit…”

  “Yes, of course. That’s why we’re interested in what he had to say. But he said, very explicitly, he meant something else.”

  “Well…” Eric had begun to frown again. “Well, I suppose they was keepin’ some things to themselves. Ed was a straight little puppy. They wasn’t out to convert him or make ’im do stuff that would turn his mind all around—though they probably wanted him to grow up comfortable with all kinds of people. And he did. But they wasn’t out to rub his nose in the sex they was havin’ with their friends and—hell—each other. That’s all.” Eric’s frowned reached its strongest. “What’d you say Mex’s last name was?”

  “Jalisco. At least that’s the name he paid his taxes under and that was on his credit union account.”

  “Mex Jalisco—I guess Mex had to be a nickname, too. You know, I never really thought too much about that before?” Eric eyebrows, somewhat bushy and overlong, bunched. “You know his first name?”

  “Carlos.” Looking down, Ann wrote some more. “A lot of people who had connections with the Dump have gone on at some length about how much respect Mr. MacAmon had for his partner. But not a one of them knew Mr. Jalisco’s name, first or last. I confess, that seems a little odd for a respected man—”

  “I think I know why that was,” Eric said.

  Questioningly, Ann looked up.

  “Mex was here quite a while. But when he first come there was people lookin’ for him from Mexico. At least, he’d run away from them, when he ended up here, with MacAmon. I think Jay was protectin’ him—from the people back in Mexico what tried to cut his tongue out and made it so he couldn’t talk. ‘Mex’ is a pretty convenient nickname for a Mexican man who don’t wanna be found in a whole country full of legal and illegal immigrants. And that’s what we had back then.”

  “Well, he was legalized, eventually—as far as we can tell, in ’96 of the last century, through the efforts of Robert Kyle, the same man who started the Dump.”

  “So there you go.” Eric sat back. “’96 was ten, eleven years before I come down here. But I bet that has somethin’ to do with why they didn’t throw around his real name. At least, whenever I thought on it, that’s what I always come up with—though I confess, I did a lot of that thinkin’ after they was both dead.”

  “There’s also the fact that MacAmon kept his partner, who was deaf and dumb, I gather, pretty isolated from others like himself. I know he spoke the hand sign language fairly common back then, before they developed really efficient brain prostheses for deafness and blindness. That doesn’t sound like respect to me.”

  “ASL,” Eric said. “Naw, Jay respected him. First of all, Mex wasn’t deaf. He could hear as good as we can—probably better than me today. Jay spoke that sign language, too, and they taught it to a lot of their close friends. Me and Shit both could talk that stuff back when we was young—I forgot more than half of it by now, I know. But I used to be able to say pretty much anything to Mex or Jay or anybody who knew it.” Were these how stories came together or fell apart? Or is this how they did both? “And Mex went to a group of people who signed, down in Pinewood—same place as our friend Big Man lived—and Jay would drive him there pretty regular. He wasn’t that isolated—Jay saw to it.”

  “Actually that does make me feel better about it. I surprise myself sometimes with how involved I find myself with all these dead people and how they lived their lives. My supervisor says I should just try to accept everything and not judge anything. Maybe after I’ve been doing this a little longer, I’ll be able to.” She smiled. “But it’s hard not to have your own opinions.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “Lord knows I got enough of my own. But I can pretty well tell you, there wasn’t no Satanic rites goin’ on out here on Gilead, or anywhere else I know about down here. Ed Miller was just a nervous little kid—he weren’t but seven or eight—maybe nine—goin’ out to a funeral at the Indian Graveyard we got back there, what he didn’t understand.”

  “Perhaps it was an Indian ceremony—which he took for something more sinister.”

  “No,” Eric said, impatient. “It was just Jay buryin’ his Uncle Shad. I was there. That’s the whole point—it wasn’t no kind of religion!” Eric sud
denly found himself with a mind full of Spinoza’s intentionless God, who was everything and desired nothing—neither from man nor from anything else…

  “Mr. Jeffers?”

  “I’m sorry there. But it…just wasn’t. Some friends had come out to see him through it—that’s all. And Ed was just little kid with a big imagination.”

  “We’re also trying to run down some stories about man, a friend of Mr. MacAmon’s, who lived in the Dump and who ran some kind of torture dungeon, with his partner—”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “Black Bull and Whiteboy.”

  Ann nodded.

  “They did a lot of work—mostly I think for people outside, from all over the state—and the surrounding states, I guess: they had cars comin’ up to their cabin with license plates from all over. They did their work in the place, too, when somebody felt they needed it. But they must’ve charged pretty reasonable rates, as I understand it, ’cause it was pretty cheap livin’ in the Dump with everything subsidized like it was. Yeah, they were a little strange—”

  “—and the kinds of things they did don’t strike you as Satanic? I’ve seen photographs taken in their basement, sixty and seventy years ago, that go pretty much beyond anything I could certainly imagine. We found more than seventy pictures in Kyle’s personal papers on store in the library.”

  “Hey, I bet that was just some ordinary S&M—sadomasochism. You always gonna have some people into that wherever you got gay people. It’s just one of things that goes into…what you call it? The community. Men what like to dress us like women or wear make up or just be real soft and gentle—wear their inner consciousness out where everybody can see it, even if it’s a gentle one. And men who like to wear chains and leather and act like Nazis or—I don’t know—they’re doin’ some kind of Satanic rituals. You know, I had to come all the way down here from Atlanta, before I learned that that was okay—the S&M and all the soft femininity. But that’s what community is—a lot of different kinds of people. Together. It ain’t the difference between. It’s the difference among—the difference within, see?”