Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Eric drew in a breath. This was the first he’d heard of the later appointment. He was sure Mike had just invented it.

  Mike flexed his shoulders in a kind of over-relaxed way he sometimes got. “Can’t you tell me where it is? I don’t mind running it up before I go—”

  Eric felt his mother tensing again and dropped his arm from her waist. From the way he had stopped his sentence, probably Mike felt it too.

  “Well, it’s a little complicated. My place is back in the woods and the road doesn’t go there straight—”

  “Mrs. Jeffers?” From his booth, lanky Dynamite looked over. (Yes, they were the guys he’d sucked and tongue-fucked in Turpens. Till now Eric had been assuming—hoping—that a direct look would reveal them as guys who looked—and dressed—like the ones back in the truck stop john. But Dynamite had called his mother “Mrs. Jeffers…”!) Dynamite said: “Me an’ Morgan’s goin’ that way now—we know where you live. We come there every mornin’ for your garbage.” (They were Barbara’s garbage men…!) “It’s on the way to the Dump.” Now Dynamite nodded toward Mike. “Your feller there can follow me on up. We’ll help ’im unload. Then he can drive down over the bridge and get on the highway—you know: at Exit Forty-Six. We’ll bring the boy back here—this is our day off. We ain’t got nothin’ else to do.”

  Shit grinned at Eric—and from somewhere Eric found the presence to smile back. And was hit with a memory: only half the teeth were left in either Shit’s or in Dynamite’s mouth—something Eric’s tongue knew, as it knew their foreskins’ elasticity, the force of their erupting semen. (How did you look that good with half your teeth gone?) It was purely oral data, from purely oral pleasure…

  “Oh, Dynamite—uh, Mr. Haskell.” (And Barb knew his name…!) Barbara blinked. “Mike, can’t you stay a couple of hours? Or for a while, anyway—Mr. Haskell, I can’t ask you and your nephew to go out of your way like…”

  For two-and-a-half years—three, actually—Eric’s world had held lots of public sex. Often he’d spent hours a day at it. Whether at his grandmother’s in Hugantown, at Mike’s in Atlanta, or at Barb’s in Florida, coming home and behaving as if those hours did not exist was adamantine habit. But under the ceiling fans in the Lighthouse Coffee, Egg & Bacon on the Georgia shore, Eric intuited that his world had become much smaller.

  Barb was saying: “Morgan, Mr. Haskell—that’s very nice of you. Really. But, Mike, I was hoping we could make a day of it—”

  “Come on, Barb.” Mike sounded petulant and irritable, as he hadn’t at any time on the drive down. “You didn’t say nothin’ to me before about stayin’. I bought Eric down—I got a car full of his stuff. You wanna let me leave it off here?” Mike looked around, the way (Eric thought) someone in a room with a known murderer might glance around for exits. “Or up at your place?” he repeated. “You got your car outside. If you want, I can repack his stuff now so you—”

  From his booth Dynamite laughed. “Unless he brought just a knapsack or a duffel bag, I can tell you, it ain’t gonna fit.” With a foreknuckle, he pushed aside the spotted curtain at the booth’s back beside the wall’s CD player, leaned over, and glanced out. “All what you got piled up in the back seat of yours ain’t gonna get in that thing Mrs. Jeffers got. And if you got more of his stuff in the trunk—Hey, we got the pickup. We’ll put the tarp down. It won’t get messed. I mean, Mrs. Jeffers has a pretty small car—”

  Barbara was actually swaying, and rubbing her hands together, which nervousness, Eric knew, would make Mike that much more anxious to leave.

  “Yeah, I know.” Mike looked around. “Her Honda. That’s why I said I’d take it out there.” He looked up, blinking.

  The way they could grate on each other was as familiar to Eric as Barbara’s laughter, as Mike’s repeated tags and tales. Because it was outside anyone’s control, though, Eric felt upsurging frustration.

  “Well, yes,” Barbara said, “but I—”

  Then, with surprise, Eric realized: frustration, yes. But he was not terrified by it, as, two, three, five years ago, he would have been. Only annoyed…

  Standing up from the booth, Dynamite frowned at Morgan—

  —who flapped both broad hands on the table edge to push himself up and step out, looking as happy as Barbara herself when she’d first seen Eric.

  “All you got to do is follow behind us.” Taller Dynamite looked back at Barbara, reached up and rubbed a thumb knuckle under his nose, while Eric thought: These guys are all hands and feet! “We promise not to lose him, ma’am. Come on. When we get there, Mrs. Jeffers, you want us to take it inside for you?”

  “Well, if you put his things out on the porch…” Again Barbara looked around, as though hoping someone else would offer assistance. “That’s going to be Eric’s…room.” (Clem had started putting juice glasses on a shelf and didn’t seem about to suggest an hour off.) “I mean, the door’s open…There’s a bed out there. I put sheets on it already. But, really, I can’t ask you to do—”

  “You don’t gotta ask, Mrs. Jeffers.” Dynamite started across the floor among the tables. “We’d do it anyway. Come on. Once we get his stuff in there, your feller here can be on his way and we’ll bring your boy back and have that sociable cup of coffee. At home I let Morgan do the coffee making—’cause he do it better than I ever learned. But the Lighthouse brew is pretty decent, I guess—enough to make these fellas come back and risk their kidneys on another cup.” Three or four customers laughed. Dynamite chuckled at his own joke, nodded toward another coffee drinker—a black man, Eric noticed—then reached the door.

  A little hysterically Eric thought, I was just suckin’ off these guys in a fuckin’ men’s room, less than an hour ago…! Then, at once, the situation didn’t seem dangerous or hysterical or menacing at all, but, well…funny! Looking after them, Eric laughed. “Come on, Dad,” he said, only a little too loud. “They’ll show us, Barb.”

  Shit walked past, giving Eric an even bigger grin. Then the two were out the screen, that chattered and banged closed, unslowed by the piston at the top, supposed to keep it from slamming. “We’ll be back,” Eric called.

  Mike said, “So long, Barb. You and Eric’ll have a good time, now. I know you’ll have a good time together down here,” and stepped toward the door. “I’m really sorry I can’t hang around some.” And Eric realized his father wouldn’t see his mother again this visit—and had planned it that way.

  Eric followed his dad to see Shit and Dynamite climbing into their pickup, cab forward in the corner. “Don’t worry, now,” Dynamite called, without looking. “You just follow us. We’ll get you there.”

  As Eric stepped from the door, out on the water, beyond the postage-stamp lot, a wave broke to sputtering foam, aglitter across green sea beside them, advancing shoreward with the inexorability of distilled time itself. As Eric reached the bottom step, it vanished under the shoal, and, as he put runner to gravel, he heard it roooosh the shingle. (Thirty yards out, another wave gathered.) He thought:

  I’m going to remember that wave the rest of my life!

  He recalled it a dozen times that day—and half a dozen that night; and even a few the next day. But within the month its sound and look had melded with so many thousands he’d seen, both outside where Barb worked and from the Harbor’s docks and marina and local beaches, from places among the trees that looked over the sea, some in leaden storms and some on glass clear mornings, neither that first nor any other could retain its specificity.

  * * *

  [5] IN THE CHEVY with Mike, they watched the pickup pull from the lot—it was painted two, possibly three, blues, with some orange on the front fender—with black marker (SHIT &) and silver gaffers’ tape (DYNAMITE) across its tailgate (REFUSE), and all of it dusty. A chain rattled at the gate’s side. Eric wondered if Mike had seen it back in the truck stop lot. But, as they followed onto a path that took them into coastal over-growth, all Mike said was, “I can’t believe your mama not only leaves her damned door un
locked down here but would announce it to everybody in a goddam public restaurant in town! But—hey, I dunno—maybe Diamond Harbor is that kinda of place.”

  Six yards ahead, country slow, Dynamite’s pickup moved forward on the dirt path. The taped tail gate jounced and swayed.

  “What you gotta go back to the city for?” Eric asked. “You gonna see Doneesha?”

  Beside him, uneven ground joggled the wheel in Mike’s dark hands. “Yep.” (It was Kelly-Ann, actually. But Eric didn’t need to know that.) “See, I told her I’d drop by when I got back. I’d really like to say hello—since it’s the weekend.”

  “Oh.” Both proud of his knowledge—incorrect as it was in detail—and at the same time uncomfortable with what felt like Mike’s betrayal of Barb, Eric thought: yeah, sure you did. But he did not say it. Then—the thought came with his greater relaxation—wasn’t Eric himself deceiving both his parents with the truck stop men?

  Or was he?

  Mike grunted. “Barb probably don’t want me goin’ up to her place ’cause she got some damned boyfriend at home and sittin’ in her kitchen right now, who she don’t want me to run into and cause no ruckus—”

  “Oh, Dad—!”

  “Not that I could give a fuck!” Mike looked over. “Hey, I’m sorry, son. I shouldn’t be talkin’ like that in front of you, I know…”

  Since, whenever Mike and Barb had been together for the last half dozen years—or even talked on the phone—the moment they separated Mike did talk like that, Eric’s protest and Mike’s apology were more habit than true upset. But now Eric knew, for the first time—the knowledge was both new and surprising—Mike’s motivation was guilt.

  He hadn’t a year ago—or even three weeks back!

  Mike didn’t put on the air conditioning. But, beside Eric, the window dropped into the door.

  After two miles of turning paths, mostly unpaved, the house where the pickup slowed sat halfway up a thickly grown pine slope on a cinderblock foundation. Starting as a trailer, it had been enlarged with a fair-sized room built off the back. When they walked up to the porch—Eric’s “room”—an outer door was hooked closed inside: they could see the latch through the screening. At the other end of the building, in the blistered siding, at the top of the built-out wooden stairs the kitchen door was unlocked.

  Mike, Dynamite, Shit and Eric got everything except the Bowflex into the house and onto the porch in ten minutes. When he was walking out, Eric glanced into the living room, to see, on a shelf beside the sofa, three bottles of Heaven Hill near an oriental tin lamp (Eric recognized it from his Florida visit—another thing he hadn’t thought about in a year).

  One bottle was half empty.

  Wondering how much Barbara was drinking, Eric returned to the kitchen, where, just stepping barefoot out the door, Shit glanced back.

  “See.” Outside, Mike rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand and said, more or less to Eric: “That’s why I spent so much time packin’ the car this mornin’. It unpacks at lot faster that way.”

  “Now, there, Shit,” Dynamite said to his nephew, who had ceased to be Morgan as soon as they’d gotten off from the Lighthouse—though the twice Dynamite had called his barefoot helper that, Mike hadn’t seemed to be paying enough attention for it to register. “This man here knows somethin’ you don’t. About packin’. And he just learned it to you, too. Now you know it.”

  And Shit was grinning as much at Mike as he was at Eric. Shit’s grin seemed so intensely sexual Eric had a brief panic—were they going to put the make on Mike, too? But that was crazy…

  Then, one at either end, Dynamite and Eric carried the re-boxed Bowflex into the house, Eric going backwards, Dynamite going forward and giving grinning grunts: “Left—no, right!” (The first two confused Eric, since they were Dynamite’s right and left, not his—but then he switched them in his mind.) Eric backed along the hall, and onto the porch. As Dynamite’s side bumped a doorframe, and he moved over to get it past, with a smile on his unshaven face as though he were inquiring about the operation of an eccentric sex toy, he asked, head cocked and looking lackadaisically at Eric, “What the fuck is this goddam thing, anyway?”

  “Um…” Eric got the cardboard more firmly in his right hand, which was beginning to sting. “It’s just an exercise…thing.”

  “Oh.” They set it down over by the wall in front of the screen. The rolled up carpet swatch was already there behind it. Dynamite shook his head a little, as if there was no understanding city folks. They walked out together.

  After looking around the quiet trees, at the sparse clouds, or listening to the crickets, Mike said, himself easy and smiling, “Hey, it’s nice here. You guys is lucky to live someplace like this.”

  Dynamite took a long breath of the pine-rich air. “We think so.”

  Was it the landscape or just the minutes of labor that had relaxed Mike? Or even that Shit, however light-skinned, was black? (Somehow, that made Eric happy, too.) Turning now, Mike said: “You guys won’t take no offence if I get on my way?” Or was it only getting away from Barb? “It don’t sound too…friendly, I know. But I got to get goin’—there’s some stuff I gotta do back in Atlanta.”

  “Course,” Dynamite said. “You got your business to attend to.”

  By now Eric was positive Mike’s city engagement was pure improvisation. A thought Eric had first had with glassy clarity at fifteen returned to him, equally clear now, days shy of his seventeenth birthday: Barb and Mike were both always inventing tiny deviations from the precise truth that had no other purpose than to upset the other.

  “Not at all,” Dynamite said. “Not at all. His stuff’s inside—now that’s Eric. Right?” (Eric thought: Teeth or no teeth, Christ, he looks good.) “We’ll run him back to his mama at the Lighthouse.” Shit—and Dynamite, too—smiled at them both.

  “Good-bye, Dad,” Eric said.

  “Good-bye, boy”—then Eric found Mike hugging him. He hugged his father back, hard. A breeze rose among the pines, and Eric thought: It sounds like the…

  “Down here by the sea, you’re gonna enjoy it,” Mike said, “and I’m gonna miss hell out of you.” The hug tightened. “I really am.”

  Eric thought about saying, Then why don’t you stay? But he was too curious—even eager—to know what would happen once Mike left.

  And, among the trees, the sound of a wave stilled. But it was merely breeze.

  Dynamite gave some instructions: “Follow this path dead on straight—it runs into a real road about hun’erd yards up—and take it on right down over a little trestle bridge onto the highway…” (Mike climbed into the Chevy.) “Take a right, and you’ll be on your way to the city.”

  The window rolled down. “I think I got it.” Mike called out. The motor started.

  Dragging a cloak of reflected leaves across the door and fenders, the Chevy drove off into the trees.

  When, between Dynamite (who drove) and Shit (who sat by the door), Eric was in the pickup cab, hunting for something to say, suddenly he came out with: “All of you guys down here…smell so good! I mean at the truck stop—”

  Smiling at the windshield as he drove, Dynamite said: “Well, thank you, son.”

  Something suddenly weighed on his foot. Eric glanced down.

  His heart (and throat) thudded. Swallowing, Eric was actually dizzy.

  Though he’d been too surprised by it to get an erection, Eric realized his response couldn’t have been more sexual if Shit had reached over and grasped his crotch:

  Shit had put his wide grubby foot on Eric’s runner—Eric looked up at Shit, who smiled at him again over his missing teeth—as he had in Turpens restroom with barefoot Mex.

  Eric glanced at Dynamite, who hadn’t seemed to notice—any more than Mike would have if Eric had been staring out the side window, picking his nose.

  Finally Eric got out, “You guys…ain’t afraid of anything down here, are you?”

  Shit actually laughed.

  At the whee
l, Dynamite said, “Well…we don’t wanna rub nobody’s nose in our business who ain’t really interested. But mostly there ain’t nothin’ to be afraid of.”

  “Hell—” Shit spread his knees, one pressing the door, one pressing Eric’s leg, while, with both hands, he gripped his groin—“soon as I go in there with this guy here, I pull his overalls down, let everybody see his furry ass, squat down and tongue out his shithole, stick a few fingers up there and wiggle ’em around. Then I dick the pig fucker. And while I’m dickin’ ’im good, I make these good nasty noises—Oh, shit! Oh, fuck…! He slippin’ that wet hot shit all over my damned dick. Actually, he’s pretty clean—but they don’t know that. And I don’t give ’im time to get too dirty! But in that place, they like anything that’s nasty. Oooooh, that’s one wet sloppy shit hole—so everybody in there’ll know how good it is. That gets everybody else turned on—you see, you need to do a little of that.” (At the wheel, Dynamite was smiling.) “’Cause when you got five or six people in there who’re on the shy side and don’t know each other too well, you can stand around for half-an-hour, an hour-an’-a half, waitin’ for someone to get up gumption enough to make the first move. So I throw myself right on in there—I don’t give a fuck! Mex and Jay are pretty much the same way, ain’t they?”

  “Pretty much.” Dynamite pulled on the wheel, then let it straighten.

  “I’ll go in there, squat down, and start suckin’ the dick of the oldest fucker at the pee trough. That way everybody knows they can get started. I mean, who wants to hang around that place and waste half-a-day twiddlin’ your curtains? Know what I mean?”

  “Un-huh,” Eric said, surprised he did—though he wouldn’t have described it as his own way of entering a john. Still, he’d already begun to appreciate those who did.

  “Ain’t no reason for it. At least—” Shit closed his legs and moved a hand onto Eric’s thigh, glancing at him—“if you live in the Dump.”