Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“You know, there are some people who think that sadomasochism doesn’t have a place in healthy gay relations. It’s a symptom that something is wrong.”
Eric chuckled. “There’re people who think men changin’ into women—and women changin’ into men—is wrong, too. But we got ’em here in the Settlement. And we should have had a lot more in the Dump—or I should’ve known the ones who was there better than I did. Hey, how old are you?”
Ann looked up, blinking. “Pardon me—?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” she said, “last week.”
He started to say, You too? But that was the detritus of some dream. “And how long you been researchin’…sexuality and the gay community?”
“About three months now.”
Eric laughed right out. “Oh, well…then you probably just don’t…” He halted. “Naw, I ain’t gonna say that. ’Cause you’d think I was one of them old guys who believe a young person can’t know nothin’. And that ain’t true. You young folks know as much as us old people do. But, see, all of us at different times know different things. That’s all. It ain’t a matter of more or less. Just different.” He took his glass from the desk and sipped at his ice soda water. “Naw, Bull and Whiteboy was really nice neighbors to have—they was right across the road from our cabin. Sometimes they’d come over and have coffee. Sometimes we’d go over there and…” He stopped—for two reasons. First, because he’d been born in another century, he wasn’t sure how far he should go in detailing what she claimed to be interested in. Second, was the surprise on her face.
She said, “You…lived in the Dump?”
Eric looked back with equal surprise. “That’s right…”
“I didn’t realize that,” she said. “We’ve been talking to dozens of people, it seems, who knew people who lived in the Dump or worked with them or heard about them from parents and aunts and friends. But you’re the first person—or persons, I suppose—we’ve talked to, or I’ve talked to, who actually lived there. Mr. Haskell somehow led me to believe that you first lived together upstairs in the old Opera House, when it was a pornographic movie theater.”
“We did,” Eric said. “Pretty much all during the thirties—till we come out here to the Settlement. But before that, we lived in the Dump, all three of us—Shit and Shit’s daddy and me. I met Jay MacAmon the first day I come here. And Shit and Dynamite, too. Dynamite was what every one called Wendell Haskell, Shit’s dad—though a lot of people thought he was his uncle. I guess I met Bull and Whiteboy pretty much by the end of the first week or so—though I couldn’t say I was friendly with ’em till a little later. But Black Bull used to baby-sit for Shit when he was a baby.”
“Baby-sit—!” Apparently the idea astonished Ann.
And Eric found himself imagining what might have been in those pictures.
“Oh…well,” she reiterated. “During the time I was talking to him, Mr. Haskell didn’t make that clear.”
Eric put his glass down. “Truth is, Shit ain’t never been too good with his dates. He’ll tell you ’bout somethin’ he’ll say happened fifteen years back, and you go look it up and find out it was forty years ago—not that I’m too much better. But at least I know I got the tendency. Also, see, when we all lived in the Dump, that was before his daddy died—and he don’t like to talk too much about that time.”
“Oh, well I can understand that. Did Mr. Haskell have a particularly…difficult relationship with his father? Dr. Zucker, the supervisor of our dissertation group, told me—” and Eric had the impression that mentioning a supervisor was a great admission for her—“that many gay men—he said ‘most’—have a particularly difficult relationship with their fathers.”
Eric shrugged. “I had a pretty good one with mine. I don’t know about most. But they were very close, Shit and Dynamite—and loved each other very much. Shit and Dynamite…Dynamite was Shit’s father, like I said—were…well, best friends. That’s how they described it. All three of us were…” Eric let the sentence hang, leaving her to decide wither it had ended or continued. “But when he died, it was real hard on Shit. That’s why he don’t like to talk about it, I guess.”
“How old were you, then?”
“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight when Dynamite had his stroke. Which would make Shit thirty-nine or forty. And really, I started livin’ in the Dump when I was seventeen—maybe eighteen. So that’s a fair amount of time to get to know a place—not that you ever gonna know the whole thing. But enough of it.”
“We had such an impossible time trying to find people who lived there.” Clearly, Ann was again surprised. “There are all these mentions of it, through all this rather ephemeral gay literature from the nineteen eighties on. But when they tore it down, the people who lived there pretty much scattered to the four winds. Dr. Zucker found one man, a hundred and three, in an old-age home in Ohio who’d lived there—Ronald Jones. He used to be a cook in a couple of restaurants in this area—”
“Ron Jones?” Eric said. “Chef Ron? Yeah, we knew him. He didn’t live far from us either.”
“Well, he’s the first person who made Dr. Zucker decide that all this would be worth researching. He died a few years back. He had a younger partner, Joe, who’d lived with him in this area, too. But Joe had some serious memory problems.”
“Ron made it to a hundred and three?” Eric frowned again. “Hey, that’s gettin’ up there.”
“So you actually lived there—and had coffee with Black Bull.”
“And that ain’t all I had from ’im. When he went, I was really kinda sorry. We both was.” Eric laughed. “You know, Chef Ron baked me my seventeen-year-old birthday cake. At a restaurant. Chocolate…I don’t like chocolate very much. Upsets my stomach—did back then, too. But he didn’t know that—he was a real neighborly fella.” He took his glass for another sip, then set it down again. “Real nice. Good cook too—except for birthday cakes.” He chuckled. He looked because she was writing again, and in the space on the page where she was not, three paragraphs appeared and vanished in quick succession, two of them red and one of them blue.
“Hey, were you here five, maybe ten years back—it could’ve been longer—when that art historian was giving his talk at the Hemmings Interdenominational on Mrs. Kyle’s sculpture? That’s Doris Pitkin Kyle, Robert Kyle’s grandmamma. I’m talkin’ about the one they got out on the commons now?”
Again, she looked up. “I didn’t visit Gilead for the first time till about eight, nine months ago. Ten years—or longer—back, I was fourteen—or younger. Why do you ask?”
“Well, he probably had the answers—or some of ’em—to Ed Miller’s Satanic magic rumors, if you ask me. Maybe they got a copy of his talk somewhere in the library. I’d look it up, if I was you. It might be interestin’.” He moved back in the chair. “You know, Shit’s daddy, Dynamite Haskell—Wendell Haskell—was Robert Kyle’s lover when they were kids. I mean, eight, nine, then, on through twelve and thirteen—up to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Then Kyle took up with Jay MacAmon—Jay and Kyle would fool around in the summer, and Jay and Dynamite would fool around in the winter, when Kyle was off at school in Europe…” He stropped, because Ann was frowning.
She said, “What do you mean—nine or ten?”
“Yeah, that was the same age I was when I used to fool around with my cousin in Texas—”
“Mr. Jeffers,” she said. “I’m afraid Mr. Haskell was misinforming you. Or, at any rate, you are misremembering. Children don’t have sexual relations at that age. It’s a biological impossibility. Boys don’t reach adolescence until thirteen or fourteen at the very least.”
Eric frowned now. “Oh…?” He wondered if Harry—Hareem—were still alive.
*
After their session, Ann Lee wandered out to speak with them both and asked how they’d feel about meeting with her again.
(As they were leaving, Eric asked, “Shit, what’d you tell her about them Satanic rites she w
as all interested in?”
(Shit frowned. “She didn’t ask me about no Satanic rites.”
(“Well, what did she wanna know about?”
(“Sex. Lord, that woman’s got a filthy mind!” Shit grinned. “How many and in what positions and with who and where did John put it when Jim couldn’t see it—it was fun.”)
Over the next month, Ann Lee recorded nine more hours of Shit, fifteen more hours of Eric, and three hours of both of them together—those didn’t go too well, “’Cause we’d end up arguin’ too much,” Eric explained to Ed, down by the dock, laughing—though as soon as they got alone, they’d start chuckling about it and hugging each other in bed a lot, even more than usual. It wasn’t exactly “fight and fuck” because fucking per se was pretty much in the past, but it was not far from it.
*
At relatively infrequent intervals, Eric would take the maglev tram and ride it around the island. Sometimes he would get off a stop early and wander up to the Old Kyle Place/New Library—he was never quite sure why.
The very first time he went, he tried to get up into the tower room but a door had been installed there, and it was locked. He managed to sit down in the downstairs office with the Library Supervisor, Arnolda Hamilton, who explained they didn’t let anyone upstairs these days. No renovation had been done above the second floor. He tried to describe the orrery—he still didn’t have the word. She did, however, and said she had never seen anything like that upstairs—that was the day she broke down and, in her shiny black pants and her bleached silver hair, took him up there. The shelves were empty. Nothing was on the walls. One window—broken apparently—was boarded over. It was very dusty. The floor was uncarpeted and, she told him, sections of it were actually unsafe, though, if they stayed near the stair head they should be all right. So far no one had fallen through. And it smelled funny.
Eric said thank you, smiled, they went down again, and he left—visiting the octagonal room had been like visiting a space in an entirely different building.
Once, when he returned and was walking around the ground floor, and the women who sat behind the desks would look up at him and smile and nod (Ms. Hamilton—that day in red slacks—even came through, smiled, and said hello), he saw Ann Lee coming down the central steps, from the upstairs. They said hello; she’d been here to finish up some of her research, actually.
“Well, here it is.” He looked around the renovated rooms. “A thousand years later…”
“What was that?”
“Nothin’.” Eric laughed. “Wasn’t nothin’.”
“How is Mr. Haskell?”
“He’s doin’ fine,” Eric said. “He’s just fine there.” In truth, though, Shit was slowing down.” And how’s everything comin’ with you…?”
They wandered together across the ground-floor lounge. “You know, there’s a lot of history,” he told her “in a place like this. But you know that. Still, the trouble is, you can’t see it a lot of times. ’Cause everything gets cleaned up and rebuilt and polished over, and there it all goes.” He stopped, and looked toward one of the walls, near the floor. “Over there, for example—that wall?” He wondered, did he have the right wall—or was he a room away? “When this was the big, downstairs livin’ room, right at the door, there used to be mark—a big black dent in the molding down there, from where a sad old feller kicked a cat to death and the young feller what owned that cat and loved it lost his faith in God and, I guess, began to get his faith in humanity. You know who that was, don’t you?”
“No,” Ann said. “Who?”
“Jay MacAmon.”
“Oh…!” Ann said, brightly. “Really? You know, he’s a very important figure in our study.”
“I know he is,” Eric said. “You already told me that. But, see, when they made this place all modern and turned it into a library, they took that old wall out and put a new one in and tore out the molding with the dent, and put in new floorboards. So there’s no way to see it no more; nobody can ask now, ‘Hey, what’s that mean? What must have happened, I mean, right there?’”
Ann was looking around at the ceiling, not at the floor.
“And I guess if you knew about them things, it’s a little hard to see ’em go.”
“With all the stories and documents and papers about MacAmon, there’s almost nothing official about Jalisco, except that they lived here with Mr. Kyle.”
“And before that, so did Mr. Haskell.” Eric shrugged. “Havin’ an alternate way of talkin’ can be a pretty good thing—teaches you a lot.” Eric thought: I’m fallin’ in love with my own voice, tryin’ to sound like a wise old man. Lemme shut up, or I’m gonna really start soundin’ like an old fool.
Ann said, “I’m not even sure where Carlos Jalisco was from.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure who she was talking about. “Um…Mexico, I guess. But you probably mean what little town he come from.”
“Have you any idea what happened to him—I mean, why exactly he couldn’t speak?” Ann asked. “Was it some childhood disease?”
“The story I got from both of ’em was that some pretty nasty people had done some pretty awful stuff to him, back when he was a kid, south of the border—but he got away from ’em and run north.”
They wandered slowly through the web of offices that, really, had obliterated and absorbed the mansion.
Ann said, “I wonder what they didn’t want him to tell.”
“Now, that’s funny,” Eric said. “I never thought of that.”
“Shit and me was talkin’ about it. Shit remembered more than I did, but then, he’s lived here longer. He said there was a group of non-hearing gay men and women who used to get together in Hemmings—I told you Pinewood, but he said it was Hemmings—for about three years—on the last Thursday of the month. They met and talked with each other in ALS, and kept minutes and attendance records. They had meals together and went to movies with each other. Mex was part of that group for almost four years—”
“They have the minutes upstairs. I was reading them over last week. Most of the time they met at the house of a man named Bob Bancock, who kept the minutes. He left them to the Hemmings Library. Jay used to bring Mex over from Gilead Island, then drive him to Hemmings, and stay for the meetings. He’d practice his own ASL with Mex and the others. Bancock was very impressed with him—he made a couple paragraph long notes about how committed Jay seemed to be about him—Mex. Bancock didn’t have a partner himself, and I think—oh, just from some of the things I read—that he would have liked a similar relationship. Bancock moved to Ohio in the middle of oh-three, and—like I told you—gave the minutes to the Hemmings Library, who were going to throw them out a few years ago, but they ended up here. I mean, that is a lot, learning a new language, bringing your friend to meetings, month after month. I understand what MacAmon did for Jalisco. I’m just wondering what Mex did for him.”
…drank his piss, ate his shit, sucked his toes, fucked with any of his friends and puppies that Jay wanted him to, taught ’em to make chili, truck stop-, orgy-, and everyday-manners. Even though her study was about sexuality, maybe it would be a little crude to go into all of that, right here, right now. “I’m pretty sure they did a lot for each other,” Eric said. “You can count on that. But I never knew nothin’ about the deaf-folks club—that’s all from Shit. Oh-three was before my time in Diamond Harbor. I didn’t come till oh-seven.”
*
Two weeks later, just before they came for their penultimate session together, outside Ann’s door, Shit asked Eric, “We gonna have us a good argument, where we yell and cuss each other down to the devil, so we can go home and lie around and hug a lot?”
Eric chuckled. “Probably.”
“Then let’s make it a good one.” And grinning, Shit rapped on Ann’s front door under the hanging wisteria. But Ann—who was not there to see that part—seriously wondered whether these heated exchanges weren’t damaging their relationship.
* * *
 
; [110] WET SAND SWIRLED his wrists, washed under his knee, over his heels. He crawled through black sandy water slashed with light—the twentieth time, the thirtieth? Stone brushed his shoulders. He moved after the flickers before him, trying to breathe. Was Shit still ahead of him…?
Was he in some basement?
A light glimmered before Eric, and—the church cellar in Hemmings; somehow they’d gotten caught down there?—he reeled upright to stagger forward—
Sand gave under Eric’s work shoes. Piled left and right, plastic sacks rose fifteen-feet here, forty-feet there. On the topmost tier of benches, half a dozen moppets, most naked, girls and boys, age nine or ten, sat with Ann. Their faces were serious, interested; many were black or Asian. Many had their hair brushed up in a small pyramid on top of their heads.
In front of the benches was a tall post. Someone had nanobolted a board to it bearing the motto:
THE GIFT MUST MOVE…
…which meant they must be in the Gilead Elementary School. Had they somehow gotten up to the first floor?
And why was the floor covered with sand…?
It didn’t look like the school. It looked like a canyon among the garbage sacks making up the Bottom.
Still, the youngsters carried themselves like students.
Eric dragged in a breath: it was cool and easy to breathe—thank all the generous universe.
Shit came around the corner, wearing only a vest and work shoes—but otherwise naked. He herded some dozen more children ahead.
“Everything okay?” Eric asked. “You guys talk to Dynamite?”
Shit grinned—he wasn’t wearing his upper plate. “You know, he loves them kids. They asked him all sorts of questions. They were all over him—he was great!”