Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  So I would be happier.

  It’s so easy to remember this now—but tomorrow mornin’ I ain’t gonna recall a thing of it; maybe I won’t even remember Shit’s in the hospital.

  Unless I write myself a damned note.

  He looked around for paper.

  Eric sat frowning over his mug. Lifting it, he took a sip, waiting for warmth to unroll down his neck and upper chest like a heated bib under his T-shit. But it was milky and cool. What Eric didn’t know as he sat, imagining Shit’s answer, was that, on the mainland in Runcible, some forty minutes after the hospital dinner service, which Shit had pretty much said he didn’t feel like strugglin’ with and left most of it in the plastic plates, a pastor from the Father Goldridge Hanover Memorial New Order of Holy Luminescence looked into the room and asked Shit if he minded his coming in and talking with him for a few minutes. The pastor was a man in his middle-thirties, with a very narrow forehead and sharp cheekbones. He wore a gray jacket and a gray shirt and held an electronic notepad in his hand. Nearing the bed, he pulled up a chair, sat, and said, “Now, you’re Morgan…” He glanced down. “Haskell. That’s your name?”

  Shit said, “Yeah.” And waited.

  “My name is Brother Lucas.” He smiled, but he did not reach out to shake hands. “I’ve been assigned to come around and speak with the older patients. I was just wondering if perhaps you could tell me some of the things you’ve done in your lifetime, what you remember as most interesting—maybe even most important.”

  This is what Shit said: “Now what kinda question is that? I ain’t nobody special. Why you askin’ me? See, you wanna be askin’ that to somebody like Eric. He’s real smart and can read and write—he reads all that philosophy stuff, and busts his ass helpin’ people and tryin’ to understand stuff and make it all make sense. He’s a special person. They got his picture up in the Settlement Library of a big important meetin’ he was at. Me, see, I ain’t no different from how my daddy was. Who you really wanna be talkin’ to is Eric.”

  “Um…” Brother Lukas asked, “…who’s Eric?”

  “Don’t you got it down on your clipboard?” The notepad looked like a small sized clipboard. “Don’t it say ‘domestic partner’?”

  “Oh…” Brother Lukas’s eyes brightened. “You two were…married?”

  Right then a nurse in blue scrubs brought in a ceramic vase that held an odd succulent. “Mr. Haskell, someone sent this. See? You got a nice present.” Taking it to the windowsill and setting it on the ledge, he turned over the card. “It’s from someone named—Anne. . .? She says ‘Get well soon.’ It’s pretty.” But he frowned. “The card even plays some music when you open it, and got a picture of some stars…”

  Brother Lukas said, “We’ll be finished in a minute—”

  “No, I’m done.” The nurse held up both his hands. “I’m done. Good evening to you both,” and, smiling, backed halfway across the room, turned, and left.

  Shit was already saying, though, “Naw—we di’n’t never bother to get married.”

  “Was that because…your partnership did not involve…intimacy?” In the counseling workshop he’d been at last Sunday afternoon, Brother Lukas had been told about the various advantages of delicacy versus straightforwardness: frankly he’d left confused. “That is, sexual intimacy?”

  Shit said, “You mean did we fuck? Goddamn, I don’t even remember sometimes. But we did just about everything nasty two fellas could do—with each other and everyone else. And I mean real nasty, too.” Shit laughed. “Wait a minute! What the hell am I talkin’ about? Course we fucked! We fucked like damned rabbits! Each other and everything else what come by. I did most of the fuckin’, but when that boy turned around and stuck his dick up my goddam ass I thought the sky had opened up and the Congress and the President of the United States had just declared Shit Haskell was the king of everything. I loved to piss in that boy’s mouth—and he loved me to do it. But I got that from my daddy—Dynamite. Him, me, and Eric, we had a lot of fun! See, my mama was a whore—a nigger whore—and that’s a real good inheritance to have if you gonna live like we did, so she probably helped a lot. And Dynamite said she was a good one—a fine colored lady. I just wished I knowed her. Hey, every night he or me wasn’t fuckin’ someone else, Eric and me was together. Only we did so much else…rubbin’, lickin’, cuddlin’, suckin’ out each other’s assholes, eatin’ each other’s snot, and that boy drunk so much o’ my goddam piss I’m surprised he ain’t done dissolved—but I done told you that…”

  Sitting up in his chair and flattening his hand over his pad, Brother Lucas said, “Mr. Haskell—?”

  “I’d come home with some nigger’s shit all over my dick, and he’d eat that stuff right off. And I sure ate enough shit offa his. That’s how I got a taste for it, all by itself—that’s what made me a real pervert—thank the Lord. God or Nature, Eric’d say. Same thing. Bein’ a pervert was the only way I ever learned anything worth knowin’. I hope you do that with your partner.” Shit narrowed his eyes. “You ate your partner’s shit? Male or female, I don’t think it matters—I used to. But not no more, since I been livin’ out on Gilead.”

  “Huh? Uh…no, I—” Brother Lucas’s eyes had gotten very wide.

  “Only, see…I’m tired now. I’m real tired. If I could just hold onto him for a little, I wouldn’t have to talk about it. And talkin’ about that shit’s just gonna get me worked up, anyway, and I ain’t gonna be able to do nothin’ about it.” Reaching down under the covers, it was clear through the cloth, Shit had grasped his genitals. Under the sheet, clearly he was shaking them. “I still wanna—but I ain’t gonna be able to. That’s ’cause I’m so tired. Maybe you could excuse me…?”

  “Yes!” Brother Lucas pushed back his chair, then stood. He was not exactly appalled, but he was not comfortable, either. “Yes. Of course, I—”

  “Or, if it don’t bother you, I’ll just do it right here. Or I’ll pull the sheet down so you can watch, if you want—like the guys at the Opera all used to, lookin’ out the corner of their eye and pretendin’ they wasn’t, while me and my daddy’d sit there there and do it, till one of them got up the nerve to—”

  “—understand. No. Please, no don’t—”

  “All right, then. Hey, we I had a lot of fun—Eric and me, we had a lot of fun together. But I’m gonna go to sleep. The only thing about fun is you always wanna little more of it…” He chuckled—but Brother Lukas had left the room. Well, that was one way to get some privacy. Shit moved his head around on the pillow. In a place like this, that smelled so sterile, Shit thought, he’d never get to sleep…and slept.

  * * *

  [113] AT FIRST ERIC remembered nothing about Shit’s death.

  When Ed and Lucille brought him back to the Holota cabin, he sat down on the kitchen chair and said, “Christ…I am so tired…” He put his forearm on the wooden table, on fliers, pension slips—some that still said Dump Chamber of Commerce, before they’d switched over to the Robert Kyle Foundation—advertisements (some with their pictures still changing, some with images frozen or faded, years—even decades—ago), bills…

  “You’re due to be tired,” Ed said. “This has been a hard day, sir.”

  Standing inside the door, in her jeans and her plaid flannel, the woman…yes, it was the young boat woman, Lucille—had folded her arms. The light and his dimming sight made her a shadow on the screening. “Mr. Jeffers, you could go in and lie down—I mean, if you’d like.”

  Ed had gone across the kitchen to look in the refrigerator. Beside the maroon enamel, the refrigerator light lit Ed’s black, craggy face. “You remember—Lucille was up on your roof day before yesterday.” (The cragginess still surprised him. It was odd looking at a man of seventy-five you could recall at fifteen.) “She hooked all them old solar panels you got up there to your generator wire, so you could have a little extra power, when you heat your dinner.”

  Eric said, “Aw, thank you, sweetheart. Shit put those up there a c
ouple of years ago. But when we got the new generator, they disconnected them. What you lookin’ in there for, Ed?”

  “I’m makin’ sure you got somethin’ to eat.” Now he looked back across his shoulder, his face sliding again into silhouette. “What’s all this bubbly water in here for?”

  “Shit keeps that in there for me. It settles me after meals, when I get gassy.” Eric began to frown. “But I ain’t even touched any since Shit’s been…in the hospital.” There was something he should remember.

  Ed stood up and closed the refrigerator.

  Eric saw Ed and Lucille glance at each other, as people did when sometime he forgot something important—like where he lived, or the name of this place. What did they call it? Yes, the Gilead Settlement. He remembered. “Shit’s got to remember that stuff for me, ’cause I can’t remember nothin’ no more—what I’m supposed to be doin’, where I put somethin’ soon as I set it down. He always says I can’t remember nothin’ ’cause I’m busy thinkin’ about too many other things—philosophy and stuff.” Eric laughed. “But I think it’s just because I’m a forgetful ol’ fool.”

  Lucille said, “Those panels go back a lot further than a couple of years, Mr. Jeffers. Yall must’ve put them things up back in…in the thirties—lucky for you. That’s when people got interested in ’em again and thought they were gonna be usin’ ’em forever—built ’em to last. They look funny. But they work.”

  “Oh…” Eric said, bemused. “When’s Shit gonna get back? Did he tell you where he was goin’, Ed? I don’t like it when he just runs off like that. He ain’t as steady as he used to be. I don’t want him to take no fall. He took a couple of falls a few years back and somebody had to…you brought him home, Ed. Remember how we thought he’d broken his hip? It like’ to worried me to death! Hey, you folks want some coffee? Shit’ll make you up a good pot of coffee when he gets here. He can’t do nothin’ else in the kitchen, but he can sure make coffee.”

  Lucille unfolded her arms and let out a long breath. “Mr. Jeffers? You have to understand, and I know it’s hard for you. But Mr. Haskell isn’t coming back anymore. You, me, and Ed, here, we all just came from buryin’ him—not an hour ago.”

  “Now, honey—” Eric chuckled—“Mr. Haskell been dead and buried a long time, right in the graveyard over the bluff there.”

  Ed said, “He thinks you mean Dynamite Haskell, ol’ Haskell’s daddy.” Ed turned toward Eric. “No, sir. That was Morgan they buried out there, right across from Jay MacAmon—” he took his computer from his shirt pocket and glanced at it for the time—“like Lucille said, not an hour back. You remember Jay, don’t you? The guy before me who run the boat out here?”

  Eric frowned. “That was Shit they was buryin’…? I didn’t know…Did you tell me that…? That was…Morgan?…Oh, Jesus!…” It was not a curtain opening before a stage but rather falling in a heap below a window. Mostly old, mostly black, some twelve men and women stood around a grave, as four of them, three in gray jackets, one in shirt sleeves, lowered a pine box into it on canvas ribbons. Parked toward the edge of the marked out section of the graveyard was a mini-backhoe with yellow fenders, under a green throw with false grass on one side.

  Only it had slid half off…

  Water collected along his lower lids. “Oh, that’s dreadful…that’s…I didn’t realize that was…Oh…That was…Shit? What am I gonna…?” They’d told him, of course—the doctor by the nurse’s counter at Runcible Memorial, the people who’d come to help, Holly, Hannibal, Lucille, Ed—that it was going to happen. He’d acted resigned. But part of him had been sure they were…well, not serious. (Hadn’t somebody once said something like that to him?) “What am I gonna do, now…?” Was it Ron?

  Lucille said, “You sure you don’t wanna go in and lie down? We’ll come and check on you tomorrow.”

  “No,” Eric said. “No, I’m gonna sit here. For a while…”

  Lucille said, “Ed, this is the third time we told him since we left the cemetery. You sure he don’t need somebody to stay with him?”

  “Well, it can’t be you,” Ed said. “And it can’t be me—not today. Holly’s expectin’ me.” Stopping, he looked up at a corner of the kitchen and did something with his jaw that meant he’d activated the invisible bud deep in his ear. “Yeah, sweetheart. No, I’m on my way now.”

  For the hundredth time—in how many years?—Eric thought: You can’t even see the phones no more, they’re so small. Maybe it was time for him and Shit to break down and get some. He’d call him now, for sure.

  Ed dropped his chin and said, “He’ll get it, now he’s in his own place.” (Was he still talking to Holly—or Lucille?) “It may take him a couple of more times. Believe me, though, he’ll be all right. Come on, now.”

  They left. Thank God, Eric thought. The young are so tiring. They thought so fast, moved so fast—always chattering with each other, no matter where they were. Watching them exhausted him. When would Shit be back? Probably he’d gone off with that boy—what was his name? Caleb? No…Within Eric, like a circling diorama, on whose stage the past replayed, time turned: and, yes, he could see it. Eric sat up and was frightened, not by the past’s content, which—again—he understood, but by its suddenness.

  Where in hell had Shit gone?

  They should bring him back from the hospital!

  Shit had wanted to die at home.

  Eric had wanted him to, too—only partially because Shit had wanted it.

  He said out loud, “Takin’ care of that boy is the only thing I’m here for in this sea beaten world…” Or did he only think something like the last words? Or feel them? But they’d kept telling him it would be too much—that he couldn’t do it. As if to care for the dying were something only women did. (Just try that one on some of these lesbians out here…!) Finally, though, he hadn’t been up to arguing. Sending someone to help him would probably have been too…Oh, they could have done it, if they’d wanted! Still, it made him feel he’d been robbed of something as precious as a child. Who were ‘they’? Ed? The doctors? He would have trusted himself with the washing, the cooking, yes. When Shit had first taken to his bed when his colon gave out (it wasn’t even cancer…), he’d done that, anyway. But…

  Eric stood, walked to the side of the kitchen, and with his foot pushed away the pile of newspapers that half covered the sill for the door to the porch—when’s the last time they’d used it? Probably before Caleb was here. But because the road went by it now, it seemed as if going out in the front of the house was only inviting distraction and annoyance. He turned the knob—had they locked the thing? No, it still opened. It had been sitting unlocked more than a decade. That’s right, someone had misplaced the key years and years back. Two decades. But now Eric wanted to see something.

  He stepped outside.

  In cool, low light, he didn’t look at the highway’s macadam but at the porch rail, then down at the warped boards flooring the thing. Each plank was a colorless gutter, running beside the newels and in front of the steps. Lord, he thought, looking at the unpainted posts. I didn’t realize this needed paint so badly. I remember what those things looked like when…when I was down on the porch here, staring at those blue posts over Shit’s shoulder. They were blue then. Pale blue. I remember that: how those boards felt under my arm. Oh, lord—we didn’t know. We didn’t…

  When we lay there, holding each other, we didn’t know we were going to be old. We didn’t know one of us was going to be…dead—!

  Hard as those boards were, we lay here, feelin’ so good, because we could feel each other. Why didn’t we…know?

  (You know this graveyard is really three times as big as what they got marked off with that new fence. Who was it who said that? It was him, Eric. He said it to tourists he started talking to in the market. He’d said it to two or three people standing around the grave. But people, even someone like Anne Frazier, standing next to him under the sun shot trees, for all her quiet, compassionate smile, did not seem to under
stand what a great part of the world the dead actually were…)

  On the road, in the afternoon sun, which glinted off a silver fender, three young folks, a young man and two women, puttered by. (Traffic like that—why we’d stopped going out here.) He looked at the old boards, at the newels, at the rail devoid of color. And that’s what happens to everything, to every part of it. The young ones pass, and they don’t see it, it’s too washed out, they don’t know people made love on it.

  Maybe even the Holotas…?

  Turning, he stepped back inside.

  And then it was with him, clear as glass, like Shit’s life, Shit’s dying—Shit’s death—was over. (Behind him, he closed the door.) Only going on made sense.

  Shit’s dead, and I am the terrified boy, who everybody knows has been doing something awful, who everybody knows has some god awful habit he’ll never break. Remembering his forgetfulness (he’d been tested; not Alzheimer’s, it was some nameless, still incurable dementia), he thought: Shit’s dead—but he didn’t die today. When? I don’t remember. Two days ago? Five days? Does this mean I’m doomed to live through this, again and again? Have I gone through this every day before—only I don’t remember it? That’s torture—but like Dynamite’s, like Barbara’s, like Mike’s, like Jay’s, Shit’s death’s in the past, as, thank the heavens and the earth both, most of my life is. At least there won’t be much more of it.

  And…(he took a long breath) there’s still nothin’ to be afraid of.

  Thanks to my Dump Pension and—their Health Insurance. No, they don’t even call it that, no more. I can’t even remember its name. The government’s is okay. But it ain’t never been that good. Most of the women around here don’t got one half so good as Kyle’s today…

  Really, it’s the only thing wrong with the Settlement.

  At least I think so.

  If I stay lucky…

  Suddenly, again, he couldn’t remember what Shit looked like—until, after seconds, the quarter lit face of a boy came back, in a dark truck cab, smiling over at him. But who was driving? Dynamite? Mr. Kyle? Had he ever even known anyone in Shit’s family? (Hadn’t Jay used to say they were related…?) What had Shit looked like last month, last year, last week…?