Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Barb stepped forward to take it. “Oh, honey—you could’ve lost that!”

  Eric looked at her strangely. “No, I couldn’t,” he said—remembering when, in Turpens Notions, he’d thought his wallet gone. “It was in my wallet.”

  Barb took it, looked at it, sat down across from him. Then she looked up. “You know, you really have grown up so much. I’ve got to get used to you all over again.” She smiled at the check. “Maybe Mike has, too.”

  Eric laughed. “You gonna let me drive you to work?”

  “Sure—but you can’t have the car all day. Sometimes things come up and—”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I was going to walk around anyway and explore.”

  When, in the gravel lot by the Lighthouse, they got out of Barb’s Honda, with seven-twenty sun coming in across the waves instead of going out across them, the whole street seemed different from yesterday. By the yellow rail, Barbara walked up the cinder blocks, stopped to finger over her keys, found one, and pushed it in the lock.

  Behind them, someone called, “Hey, there, li’l feller. Mornin’, Mrs. Jeffers. Now this’s gotta be Eric who you been talkin’ about for the last three weeks.”

  With the door open an inch, Barbara—she was wearing pink jeans and white sandals (flats in her straw bag)—stopped and looked back.

  A step below, so did Eric.

  In the rough black denims he’d worn yesterday, open over his brown belly, with his broad rough feet, bare on the grass running between the narrow pavement and the street and his smiling blasted face, Mex walked a step ahead of bearded Jay, who towered behind him in a blue work shirt, his sleeves rolled up from colorful forearms. Under hay-hued fur, Eric saw an anchor he hadn’t noticed yesterday—perhaps an older image, around which oranges, violets, and greens clustered and spiraled (probably it had been on the arm away from Eric when they were messing with Mex)—the denim buttoned up to three button holes below his beard, at the bottom of a pie slice wedge of chest hair. “How long you been here, son? A couple of days now? Or did you get in this mornin’? Yeah, your mama been going on and on about you for days. Probably I’d’ve recognized you anywhere…”

  Was that, Eric wondered, Jay’s coded way of saying that, at the truck stop yesterday, he had? (Maybe he’d already known Mike was black, and spotted him in the car through Turpens’ glass doors…) Yet MacAmon’s reticence said relax and be easy. So Eric relaxed.

  “Good morning, Mr. MacAmon,” Barbara said. “Yes, this is Eric. His dad brought him down from the city yesterday afternoon. I’ve talked to him on the phone, but it’s been more than a year since we’ve seen each other. Hasn’t it, honey?”

  Eric smiled at them.

  “Mornin’, youngster. What’s a matter? Cat gotcha tongue?” Jay gave him his grin without incisors. “Hey—don’t you say good mornin’ to folks?”

  “G’mornin’, sir!” Eric really was pleased to see them.

  “Now, that’s better—good to meet you.” Jay reached out and shook Eric’s hand, which momentarily vanished in Jay’s, rough, hot, hirsute, and hard. “This here’s my partner, Mex.”

  Eric shook again. He thought: I came in this guy’s mouth yesterday, while Jay was pissin’ all over my dick…Yes, though this meeting was all charade, it was easier. Mex smiled at him warmly.

  “He’s grown up so,” Barbara said, “I don’t quite know what to do with him yet.” She laughed. “Eric’s already got himself a job with Mr. Haskell.”

  “Dynamite?” Standing two steps up, Eric was as tall as MacAmon. “You sound like a busy young man. And responsible, too. Dynamite’s a good feller—I don’t think you could have yourself a better bossman. We used to work together, so I know.”

  “Well, that’s nice to hear.” Turning back, Barbara finished pushing the door open and went in. Mex and MacAmon followed behind Eric into the empty café.

  “See—” MacAmon grinned at Eric—“your mom’ll tell you: Mex and me almost always stop by and have a cup of coffee in the mornin’ when she opens up the Lighthouse. We’re pretty much always her first customers.”

  Beside Eric, Mex raised his fist and, in the sun and shadow around the curtains on the booth windows, made a rapid sequence of signs.

  “Really—” Barbara walked to the counter’s end and stepped behind to the urn, took a dinner plate sized paper filter, held it up in one hand, looked at it, put it down, and took two bags of coffee from the shelf with the other, tore them open, and poured both into the scalloped paper basket—“he’s got so grown up. He’s going to be tired of hearing me say it, pretty soon.” She turned a spigot above the urn. Like a river in a cavern, water falling into metal rang through the room.

  “Come on, let’s sit down and have some coffee,” Jay said, which may or may not have been translation of something Mex had just signed.

  Swallowing, Eric thought: These guys have done something, been somewhere, seen something—and because Mex can’t speak, the energy he carries with him is three times as intense as that of any ordinary person. Is that sexiness?

  Or is that just to me…?

  Eric followed, about to sit with them, but Jay leaned to the side and gripped a corner of one of the square tables and pulled it closer. “Come on—you sit there, Eric.” Turning to Mex, Jay’s great hand said something in silent signs.

  Mex laughed—as silently—and signed something back.

  “That’s so you can see what we’re sayin’.”

  Eric sat in the chair, looking at both men either side the table. “What…are you guys sayin’ to each other?”

  “I’m sayin’,” Jay said, softly and pointedly, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to pull down his jeans, bend over the table, and let you fuck ’im right here with your mama standing at the—Hello, Mrs. Jeffers!” Jay sat up, smiling. “Yeah, we’ll take that coffee, soon as it’s ready.” He turned back to Eric. “You gonna have some?”

  Eric twisted around in his seat, to see Barb coming across the café, two cardboard containers in one hand, a cup—for Eric—in the other.

  Mex sat back, hit the side of his hand under his nose twice, dropped his hands, made a double rub up his bald belly, then pointed with both hands.

  “Mex is saying how that smells real good, Mrs. Jeffers,” Jay announced, tall enough to look over the booth back with one arm across it.

  “You’re teaching Eric some of Mex’s sign language?” Barbara asked. “Well, at least he’ll learn something while he’s here.” She set the milky container before Mex, the black one before Jay, then put the third coffee—a regular white crock—on Eric’s table. “I’m going in the back and scrape the griddle off—Coby leaves it in such a mess—then he complains all morning when he comes in. Uggh!” She turned back behind the counter.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Jay called.

  Mex signaled silently.

  And Eric called, “Thanks, Barb.”

  Jay turned back to face the table.

  “He can…hear,” Eric said, “can’t he? Mex, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Jay said. “Mex can hear just about as good you and me—if not better.”

  “Then why can’t he talk?” Eric looked back and forth between Mex and Jay.

  “’Cause some mean motherfuckers tried to cut his damned tongue out when he was a kid, and carved up his larynx with a knife while they was at it.” Again, Jay’s voice dropped. “It’s a wonder he can still suck a fuckin’ dick. Thank God he got across the border—and found this place.”

  Eric looked at Mex, who sipped his coffee, looking back with hard, dark eyes, then pointed up to the wall clock.

  “Hey,” Jay said. “We gotta get out of here and make another run. Or somebody might start complainin’.” Jay hiked his elbow back and dug into a pocket to pull out a stuffed wallet that looked more like rag than leather. “I keep waitin’ for this place to start chargin’ sixty cents for a cup of coffee like all the places in Runcible. It ain’t subsidized like the Dump or nothin’. Last place for a fifty-cent java.
Throw a quarter on that, Mex, for Mrs. Jeffers.”

  So Mex went digging in his own jeans and tossed down a silver coin showing a horned bull’s skull above the mountains—Big Sky Country. That was Montana. Earlier in the year, they’d seemed the only quarters you could find in Atlanta.

  Jay slid from the booth. “We gotta go—”

  “Can you show me the Gilead Boat Dock?” Eric asked. “That’s where I gotta meet Dynamite on Wednesday.”

  Jay looked at him as if he thought perhaps he was kidding about not knowing where it was. “Come on. It’s just down the street.”

  Mex got up.

  So did Eric. “Barb…?” he called. His mother had finally gone into the kitchen. “I’ll be right back.”

  Barb didn’t answer.

  He went outside with Mex and Jay.

  They walked down pavement, grass, dirt.

  “See—” Jay pointed across a lawn, where a cannon sat off center before a gray building with white trim—“that’s the Post Office.” He turned around. A wooden deck extended over the water. A wooden rail ran across it. To the left a boathouse was painted dark green.

  “And this here’s the Gilead Dock.”

  Beside it was a lamp post with, near its top, a gray metal shade hanging from a wooden arm. Beside the boards, a roughly painted barge-like boat—white—moved up and down on the water, roped to metal cleats fixed to the dock. “And that’s the scow.”

  Mex took a peg out of the gate and lifted it. A series of rhomboidal forms changed their angles as it went up.

  “Don’t look like nobody’s here. You still gotta make the trip if you don’t have no passengers?”

  Jay chuckled. “The Chamber of Commerce pays us to go back and forth—so if somebody does wanna get from here to there, there to here, there’s a way to do it.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. Three gray gulls—one, then two more—soared in, to land on the lamp spar. The sky was gray-blue. Dark green water was rolled and ribbed with waves.

  “What are those docks over there?”

  “That’s what they call the marina,” Jay explained. The several levels of wooden web wove over the water.

  Eric could only see three boats.

  “Captain Miller still keeps his fishin’ craft tied up there. The other two are wrecks. I don’t even know who belongs to that one. Hey.” Jay crooked his forefinger and looked at it. “You seen your snot buddy again?”

  “Huh? Shit? Oh…well, yeah. At the Lighthouse.”

  “I thought you two might get along, back when you was first suckin’ on my finger before. Shit’s been eatin that stuff all his life—first thing I thought of, soon as you started nursin’ on mine. I guess nobody in the Dump ever told him to stop.”

  “When we was tongue fuckin’—before, back at the truck stop, me and…Shit. I…did it, with his finger, when he went into his nose like…well, what I did—with yours.” Eric was embarrassed. “It just happened. I wasn’t even thinking.”

  “Probably better you wasn’t,” Jay said. “It’s okay during the winter. But sometimes Shit forgets and does it around the summer people—at least he used to.”

  “Do you do it…?”

  “Nope.” Jay said it flatly enough that Eric was startled. But then he chuckled. “It don’t bother me, though. Fact is, I think it’s kinda cute. That’s always how I been with pretty much everything nasty.” Suddenly he reached out and hooked his elbow around Mex’s neck, and dragged him back against him, the way he’d hugged Eric in the hall outside the john the day before. “Like this piss-drinkin’, shit-eatin’, toe-suckin’ motherfucker.” Mex caught his balance against Jay, and grinned. “We love all that stuff, don’t we, Mex?” Still gripping Mex in a headlock, Jay looked up at the clouds, the gulls. “So at least you got four people you don’t got to worry about offendin’.”

  “Four—?”

  “Mex, me, Dynamite, and Shit…” Jay chuckled—and released his partner, who pushed himself upright again, still looking pleased. “Shit got some devilment in him. He likes to have his fun. But he’s a good kid.”

  Eric swallowed. “I…like him.”

  “Good,” Jay said. “’Cause I got a feelin’ he gonna be after you a lot. Dynamite seen how you and Shit was gettin’ along; that’s probably why he offered you the job. He looks out for that kid.”

  “But how did they know I was going to be staying in Diamond Harbor?”

  “Same way I did. We all kinda figured yesterday you was probably Mrs. Jeffers’ boy. I told you, Mex and me have a cup or two with her practically every blessed mornin’. She been talkin’ ’bout how you was comin’ for three weeks.” He winked. “So then when you said you was…Eric—?”

  “Yeah, I’d begun to figure you…knew me.”

  “Well.” Jay laughed out full. “She ain’t been talkin’ about nothin’ else. Hey—what’s wrong? Don’t worry. Nobody ain’t gonna say nothin’. And Mex here can’t. Why in the world would we wanna do that? That’d be pretty stupid, don’t you think?”

  “What about Shit’s folks?” Eric asked. “Who’s his father…?”

  “I believe, if I remember right, you already sucked ’im off,” Jay said, “back at Turpens.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dynamite. Shit’s Dynamite’s boy.”

  “Huh? Dynamite—? But I thought you said he was…You mean he’s not his nephew…? Dynamite, the guy whose ass Morgan—Shit—was fuckin’ when we came in, is…his dad?”

  “Yep.” Bearded Jay nodded. “But you ain’t supposed to talk about that. Though God knows people around here do.” Frowning, he lowered his voice. “If anybody asks, you go on sayin’ you think Dynamite’s his uncle. Like everybody else. That’s how we do it. A fair number of local folk know. But that just mixes it up a little. I don’t know why, but people feel that’s better—even those what suspect somethin’ goin’ on. Besides—” Jay stood up straighter, looking serious—“you don’t know nothin’ about them two foolin’ around with each other, anyway, do you?”

  “Huh? Oh…oh, I see. Like goin’ to Turpens. Yeah…No. No, I don’t know nothin’ about that.”

  “Good.”

  “But—his own…dad? That’s awesome…! I don’t think I ever—What about his mama?” Eric was thinking of Barbara. “I mean, I know Shit…he’s black. They said his mother was colored—like my dad—yesterday. I mean…His eyes are green. And his skin’s the same color as mine, just about. I mean, his face looks like Dynamite’s, except his nose…and his hair—’cause it’s yeller…or, I guess, brown. Tan—”

  “Mildred—that was her name. I don’t think either me or Dynamite ever knew for sure what her last name was. She was about half or a quarter black—so I guess Shit is, too. She run off six or seven months after Shit was born. The three of us—her, Dynamite, and me—used to whore down over in Turpens’ back lot. She come to the Harbor for about a year, a year-an’-a-half—she was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. Me and Dynamite was just twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. A little older than Shit, now. She was around long enough for us both to fuck her a few times and decide we didn’t cotton to it. But we still kinda liked her, if you know what I mean. Till he came out, it was a toss-up whether the bastard was gonna be Dynamite’s or mine, ’cause we usually fucked her at the same time. She dropped Shit right there in spring—and took off with a Polack trucker she met in the parkin’ lot back out there on New Year’s Eve. By the fifth of January, she was gone—nobody done seen her since. Even while she was here, Dynamite—well, Dynamite and me, with a whole lotta help from Mex, once I hooked up with him—did more raisin’ of that little bastard than she did. I will say this, though—she breast fed him for four or five months, but once she got tired of that, she’d leave ’im with me or Dynamite for three or four days at a time. Takin’ care of that kid was what got Dynamite out of hustlin’ at the truck stop. Kyle helped, too. She could always make more than we could anyway, especially back when she was pregnant—for some reasons, straight guys seemed to lik
e that. They’d pay extra for it. Her and Dynamite was never livin’ together or nothing like that. But she’d drop Morgan off and go to work. Only half the time she wouldn’t bother to pick ’im up. Hey, if I hadn’t been his daddy’s suck buddy since I was your age—” again grinning, Jay pointed at the gap in his teeth with his sausage of a thumb—“I might think Shit was a mite excessive in his beatin’ off. But he comes by it honestly. Dynamite was always a ten-time-a-day feller hisself—”

  “I do it about that much.” Eric grinned. “Well, maybe…six or seven.”

  “Good.” Jay snorted. “Then he won’t worry about you, neither. Looks like everybody wanted a taste of you—and everybody got one, too. They know not to hog you on your first visit. Kinda pass you around—truck stop manners.”

  Gulls mewed overhead, then circled down around the dock, the lamppost, finally to fly off.

  “Does your partner—Mex, really like that stuff? I mean you and guys…pissin’ in his mouth and all?”

  “Fuckin’ loves it.” Jay looked across the dock where Mex had wandered and called out: “Doncha, you piss guzzlin’, asshole eatin’ spic? Get back over here!” Jay winked at Eric. “When he gets real turned on, yeah, he’ll eat my shit. Maybe we’ll let you come watch some day.”

  Mex stood up, grinning, looked around the glittering waves, then turned to lumber, his thick legs slightly bowed, to where Jay stood at the dock head.

  “I mean…how do you know he likes stuff like that?”

  “’Cause we done slept rolled up in the same blankets for fifteen years now—” again Jay dropped his big arm around Mex’s black jacketed shoulder—“my big smelly feet all up in his face and his big hard ones kickin’ around my beard all night…” Again he chuckled. “He likes the salt, too: you learn that about your partner. Besides, he tells me. You know, every day about an hour ’fore I swing out of bed, Mex gets a lip-lock on my pecker—and I let ’er run. That’s fuckin’ heaven. And that spic don’t spill a drop, neither. That’s the only reason I don’t stink like an ol’ pee pot, today. This damned spic here wipes the fuckin’ shit out my ass with his tongue and drinks my fuckin’ piss. Doncha, boy?” Again Jay gave Mex a one-armed hug.