Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  And Eric wondered what had happened to the two men he’d been terrified might say something in front of his parents…Runcible and Hemmings—outside the latter of which was a mall—were a little more lively. But not by much. “You read comics?” Eric asked, eventually.

  “Dynamite reads them comics…sometimes, but me—I don’t read nothin’!” Then Shit sat back with his hands, as thick as Eric’s dad’s, as thick as Dynamite’s, on the table before him and said nothing, while Eric learned that, despite the occasional X-Men or Spiderman when he came across one, Dynamite did not know Moore, or Gaiman, or Wein, or Azzarello, or Ennis—which is also when Eric realized that, with Shit’s silence, Shit’s foot had moved away. So Eric went back to drawing Shit out, which he expected to be difficult: but with only a minute’s more attention, Shit was grinning again and nodding, his foot again on Eric’s.

  After an hour, with lazy and lingering good-byes, when she came up, Dynamite turned to Barb. “I told your boy he could work with me and Morgan, if he wanted.” And Eric realized Dynamite had saved him from the necessity of lying. “I wrote it down down on a paper there.”

  “Why, Mr. Haskell…that’s really…that’s really so nice of you!”

  Eric was surprised. But it took some pressure off him.

  Dynamite moved to leave the booth. “Course I don’t know if you really want him workin’ on the garbage run—”

  “Barb, that would be great!” Eric started to stand too. “I really wanna do somethin’…you know, physical!”

  “Well—” Haskell stood beside the table, taller than Barbara, Eric, and Shit—“slingin’ garbage sacks is about a physical as you can get—next to diggin’ ditches.”

  Looking a little confused, Barb reached over the table for the mostly empty cups. “If that’s what you want to do—”

  “He just gotta show up at the boat dock on Wednesday. That okay for you? It’ll give you a couple of days to settle in—learn where everything is.”

  “I don’t think the Harbor’s big enough where he got to do too much learnin’—” Shit scratched his ear—“’less’n he go over to Runcible or Hemmings.”

  “I wrote it all out for him,” Dynamite repeated. He and Shit both gave Eric a grin. “All he got to do is show up.” He started out the diner.

  Shit said, “So long. See you Wednesday,” and followed Dynamite.

  A broad black fellow picked up a leather cowboy hat from the table—the man who’d ordered the heated bear claw—and started out. Some others left too; some new folks came in.

  While Barbara was hanging her smock on the wall hook at the side, from the counter edge Clem offered a sudden cascade of apologies: “I’m sorry, honey. You and your fella—back before—looked like you was about to have a disagreement. And that was a big man in here. Black or white, I don’t like to get involved in them things in any way. I ain’t like Dynamite. He ain’t scared of black people—probably ’cause he lives with all of ’em, over in the Dump. He’ll jump into anything—and thinks he’s doin’ good. Sometimes he even does it. But I’ve always kept my own council and let things run on without my interference. For me, that’s the best way. I hope you understand.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Clem.” Barbara looked over her shoulder—she’d changed into a short-sleeved white blouse, with lace at the arms and the collar, which made her look a lot more like Eric remembered her—then turned from the hooks. “It all worked out.” She sighed. “I guess. And Eric’s…here.”

  * * *

  [6] TEN MINUTES AFTER that—

  In her seven-year-old Honda, Barbara drove back through the woods with Eric. “Looks like you made some friends. That Morgan—Clem thinks he’s slow…retarded. ’Cause he’s illiterate. She says he can’t even read his name.”

  “Oh…” Eric protested, as pine branches swept the window. “He’s all right. He’s…different. That’s all. He’s nice—they both are. Hey, tomorrow, when you go down to work, you wanna let me drive and you can navigate? I mean, I gotta learn where we are sometime.”

  Barbara swung the car onto another turn off. “It is confusing the first couple of times, isn’t it? That’s why I didn’t want Mike to do it alone.”

  “Yeah, he got lost comin’ in…”

  After a breath she said, “Maybe you’ll meet my friend Ron.”

  Eric recognized that tone, too: so there was a boyfriend.

  And chances were he was black. (Eric recalled Clem’s surprise at Mike. Probably it was because both Mike and Ron—he was pretty sure—were colored.) Clearly Barbara had put off mentioning him until Mike was gone.

  Ron would have upset Mike: Eric remembered the stonily grumpy evening with that black guy Barb had been seeing (whose name at this point Eric couldn’t even remember) who had dropped by minutes after Mike had delivered Eric to Barbara’s Florida trailer two summers before.

  Eric took a breath—Barbara glanced at him—and thought: There’s got to be another way to live…

  Evening settled among the trees. Scrunching down, Eric squinted up through the window to see late sun flicking between leaves, and thought of sunlight in the froth of that wave…

  Barbara asked, suddenly: “You have my cell phone number, honey?”

  “Mike’s got it,” Eric said. “I don’t.”

  “Well, let me give it to you.”

  “I don’t have a cell phone.”

  “Oh…!” she said, glancing at him, surprised. “Well, you probably should get one. There’s a couple of stores in Runcible—” from beside a meadow they again entered some woods—“and certainly in Hemmings, at the mall.”

  He noticed she hadn’t offered to get it for him.

  In the car, Eric pondered something he knew he was going to say, though at the realization his ears began to ring and his knuckles cramped in anticipation. Finally he decided to take three breaths and…do it.

  He drew them in, trying to relax. Then he lifted his butt from the seat and went digging in his pocket, filled with his KY, his wallet—and the folded paper.

  Pulling the paper out, he sat back, breathing heavier than he should be.

  Barbara glanced over. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” It sounded normal. Maybe he could make the rest of it sound that way, too. Maybe after another three—no, six breaths.

  At the end of the fifth, Eric unfolded it. And the sixth: “Barb?”

  “What?” She looked through passing trees.

  “You don’t mind me working with Dynamite and Shit on the garbage run while I’m down here? I thought that would be good, if I had some kinda job—”

  Barbara laughed. “That would be very good,” she said. Then she added, “But, honey, you really shouldn’t call him that. His name is Morgan. I know practically everybody down here does—but he can’t really like it very much. Would you?”

  “I don’t think it would bother me—I mean, if they weren’t making fun of me when they did it.”

  Barbara drove a little longer. Then she said, “You know you really have grown up…” She glanced at him again. “They get started pretty early in the morning, don’t they?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “Well, I get up early, too.”

  * * *

  [7] “WHAT WERE YOU thinkin’ about for dinner?” Eric pulled open the refrigerator’s pink door.

  “You like franks and beans,” Barb said. “Or you used to. I’ve got both here.”

  “I still do,” Eric said. “What were you gonna do with this chicken?”

  In its Styrofoam tray, wrapped in plastic, it looked like a pale, chicken-colored hill. Between rubber-covered wires—along a few inches on two of the tines the white covering had torn away—down though the plastic roof of the vegetable drawer, Eric saw blurred tomatoes, the pale rectangle of a celery bunch, tan onions within red strings. (In Texas, Mike’s relatives had smiled over Barbara’s keeping onions in the refrigerator.) Up in the freezer, he already knew, cans of frozen juice and lemonade stood with collars of ice.

&
nbsp; Behind him, Barbara said, “I thought we could have that—the chicken, I mean—tomorrow.” (Outside he heard a car—one, he realized, he hadn’t been in.) “I get off at four-thirty, and I could put it in the oven by five or five-twenty.” (The car stopped.) “We could eat around seven—it would be nice if we could do it a little earlier, but that’ll be all right…won’t it? And could you close the door, honey? I don’t want to let all the cold out,” she said, as, in its base, the old pump began to hum.

  Eric stood up and stepped back. “Oh, sure.” He closed the refrigerator.

  And outside, someone called, “Helloooo-ooo…?”

  Barbara turned her head. “Oh, hi, honey.”

  “Can I come in?” It was throaty voice, a black voice. “I’ve got mac and cheese. I just wanted to leave you a dish. I’m not staying—” The screen door opened and a rather straight up and down black woman, not as old and not as attractive as Barbara, stepped in. She carried a casserole under one arm, the top covered with tin foil that looked as if it had been used and spread out and used again. “I thought I might be interrupting you and Ronny. But who is—oh, you’re going to tell me this is Eric, now, ain’t you?”

  Barbara smiled. “It certainly is. Eric, this is Serena. She’s been helping me keep body and soul together since I’ve been down here. Serena, this is my son, Eric.”

  Serena wore a colorful scarf around her head. Her features were broad and she looked like she laughed a lot. “Where in the world,” she declared, “did you find a good looking boy like this? One this handsome? Naw, I don’t think this is allowed, honey.” She narrowed her eyes, like someone appraising. “Mmmm! She told me you was comin’, so I brought a little somethin’ over.”

  “Well, why don’t you stay and have some with us? We were going to make some hot dogs—”

  “No way, honey. Not on your first night. We both work at the Coffee and Egg. Different shifts, though. Clem used to let us run the place together, but I think she decided we was doin’ more gossipin’ than hash slingin’, so now she keeps us apart. And the talk’s got to be on our own time today. You can make me some decent coffee next Thursday mornin’, and I’ll drop by and you can tell me how it’s goin’. Here, take this—” She thrust out the casserole.

  Barbara took it and put it on the table. “Serena, that is so nice of you. Oh, it’s still warm!”

  Serena laughed. “I just wanted to be able to say I seen him. And now nobody in Diamond Harbor is gonna believe me when I describe him, unless they seen him for themselves!” (Such comments confused and embarrassed Eric—even as that is what he’d always hoped the Bowflex would give him.) “I’ll catch you Thursday, honey.” Again, Serena made the sound of someone savoring something delicious.

  “Well,” Barbara said, a minute later, after the screen door clacked closed—obviously happy: “I guess we have franks, beans, and macaroni,” while outside, a little down the slope, the car motor started again.

  *

  On the darkening porch’s bedstead, hands folded under his head, Eric lay on his back, smelling the new blanket, a strange pillow, the pines, the sea. From inside the porch, the Bowflex’s spiring exercise rods put shadows down the night forest outside the screening—it had taken him an hour-and-a-half to assemble it, until finally he found one of the nuts he’d first thought missing in the corner of the box, so that, he’d decided (for the first time in months) to skip his workout—lightened somewhere by the last of the quarter-to-nine sunset on the other side of the house.

  Mists lay above the trees, bringing…was it starlight? Flakes flicked across it, too small, dark, and angular for birds—

  Bats, Eric realized. He’d see them above the evening trees in Hugantown, when he’d return from watching Costas. (He liked to imagine—and often had, since—that the plumber knew someone observed him and wanted it. A few times Costas had glanced at the window—once, as Eric shot. That time he’d bitten the inside his cheek and almost swallowed his tongue—a moment easy to remember.) More likely, though—at least Eric had liked to pretend—Costas didn’t give a fuck, as long as whoever looked just spritzed the outside wall.

  It’s nice here, Eric thought.

  Though it’s kind of boring.

  How could he get back to Turpens—which, not including Mike’s getting lost, was six miles and seven minutes away? Pulling one hand from beneath his head, he reached down for his penis, which, already rolling up his thigh, flopped back toward his belly. He caught it—

  —and began to pump.

  Should he think about Shit and Dynamite?

  No. Save them for later. What about Jay? No, Mex. He could wrestle the stocky little guy, kiss on him while Jay took a leak in his mouth, touch his face with its smile and its rough craters and suck the cheese out of his barrel thick, long-skinned dick. Was that the fantasy figure to break his new space in with—

  As Eric had become more and more at ease in his garage room at Mr. Condotti’s, more and more frequently for the last three months that fantasy figure had been Mike, maybe every other day, alternating with the most interesting fellows from under the highway. It’s whom he settled with on the porch that evening—but was surprised how quickly (within a minute) it became Dynamite, with Dynamite’s irregularly toothed smile, Dynamite’s thick fingers like gray sandpaper, Dynamite’s nails gnawed three-quarters away and his deep ridged knuckles shiny with cum that was two thirds nigger piss anyway. When Eric came he was leaning against Shit in the pickup, jerking off together, grinning at each other—because Shit had the same oversized hands, the same bitten nails ringed in black, the same knuckles, the same cock streaked with cum—it’s overhang not pulled back a week now as Eric went down on it, digging inside with his tongue, while Shit dug a middle finger in a nostril, then let Eric suck it…

  —he woke, on his side, night’s crickets replaced by bird chirps and a breeze across his shoulder. Rolling to his back, he saw the screening crossed with sun. Outside, green boughs moved up and down. Eric stretched, feet taking away the blanket—to his hip, anyway.

  From the kitchen, utensils clinked in a drawer—a pot top on a counter—and he remembered he wanted to catch his mother.

  It could be as late as six-thirty, even seven!

  Eric pushed up, then swung around to sit on the bed’s edge, stood, and stepped through the duffle bags and cartons, around the knapsack on the floor, pushed out the door to duck across for the bathroom.

  From the kitchen, Barb’s voice came up the hall. “Sweetheart, put your pants on—please! There’s two of us here now. Come on, honey…!”

  And he’d had a piss-hard flapping.

  Such things had never bothered Mike—who would even joke about them. (What pretty lady you been messin’ with this mornin’?

  (That’s for me to know and you to find out. Eric tugged his T-shirt over his head.

  (Well, just make sure you clean ’er up. Then Mike’d laugh and, naked, stride back into the bed room.) Living here, Eric realized, was going to be notably different.

  (Did it mean anything that, last night, he’d abandoned Mike so quickly for Dynamite, for Shit…?)

  Glancing down the hall, he saw, in her pinkish robe, Barb look up as she closed the refrigerator door. He thought about going in anyway—Jesus, he had to pee. Wondering if there was any chance, once he’d been working awhile, of getting his own place, he turned, went back onto the porch, slid into his jeans, looked around the boxes and bent to open the top. He tugged out a T-shirt, this one clean. (Bending over like that, you could pee all over yourself!) That’s right. Mike had washed them all the previous night.

  Shrugging into it, he went back to the john.

  He stayed in there long enough to jerk off silently, eat it all, check to see that none had dropped. (Where might he start a medallion…? Probably not in here. Did Shit and Dynamite have one, perhaps?) Then he went back out.

  He’d already noticed most of the trailer part of the house was plastic, pink or orange, soiled with time’s gray. Basical
ly the built-on porch and the built-on living room were wood and wicker—looking new and artificial, surfaces sunk below an eighth-of-an-inch of polyurethane.

  Stepping into the kitchen he asked, “What time is it?”

  “Ten to seven,” Barb said. “You don’t have to get up this early—”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “If I’m gonna start on the garbage run on Wednesday, I gotta get up a lot earlier.”

  “The sea air down here does make you sleep.” She moved from the counter, where a large yellow box stood with a picture of a heart-shaped bowl filled with cereal. “Clem Englert gave me some Honey Nut Cheerios from the Lighthouse. Those used to be your favorite…”

  “I don’t eat the sweet ones no more.” Eric looked around. “But…well, since you got ’em, it’s okay.”

  “Oh…” she said.

  She was actually worried, Eric saw. “Really. It’s fine.” The trailer kitchen brought it back: when last he’d visited Barbara in Florida, he’d gotten really upset about some food he didn’t like—which, if only because today he couldn’t remember even what it had been, seemed silly.

  That brought back something else he hadn’t thought about since before they’d left the upstairs kitchen at Mr. Condotti’s, yesterday morning. Eric went into his pocket—he’d put his lube in a box under his bed—and came out with his wallet. Sitting on a chair at the kitchen table, he unfolded it and fingered through. (He was glad the condom had gone off with Dynamite and Shit—one less thing not to have to worry about Barbara finding and his having to explain.) “I should’ve given you this last night. Dad told me to make sure you got it—it’s his check for this month’s money.” Among green bills, he found the blue rectangle with HSBC across the front. Pulling it free, he held it out.