Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Sometimes, especially when Uncle Omar was drunk and happy, and going on about this “nigger scumbag” and that stupid “nigger son of a bitch,” and Lurlene was too busy for anybody to relax—except Omar himself—Eric would get an erection. He wondered if Hareem did, too.

  “Really, I’m gonna take one later—”

  “Eric—that’s not the point!” she said it sharply and suddenly.

  Eric started, feeling hurt and confused. Then he swallowed. “Hey, Barb—?”

  She blinked at him.

  “—are we having an argument about somethin’?”

  She kept blinking.

  So he asked, “You wanna drink?”

  She took a big breath. Then she said, “Sweetheart, I want a drink so bad I don’t know which way is up! I’ve been thinking about having one all the way home, and I’m standing here blaming it on you that I didn’t walk right in and get one.”

  Eric said, “It’s in the living room. You want me to get it for you? Or you want to get it yourself?”

  Now she swept around the table in her pink jeans and strode toward the arch into the hall. “No, I’ve got it.”

  Moments later she was back with her own glass in one hand and, in the other, by the neck, the bottle of Heaven Hill. “Actually, I’m going to have it with some of your lemonade. And then we’re going to sit down and have some of this very nice dinner that you were so sweet to fix. No, we are not arguing. At all.” She sat. “I’m just a little jumpy—that’s all. Hey—if you want a chicken sandwich, you go ahead. There’s bread in the icebox—but I’m sure you know that. I’m just going to have a few slices on a plate. All right? You really remembered how grandma made her tomato salad…?”

  As they ate—her glass tumbler half bourbon and—as she poured from the metal pitcher—half lemonade, Barb said, “You know we can turn the television off, but when you’re by yourself, sometimes you like to have a little…I don’t know: background noise.”

  “I don’t mind it.” Really, it was kind of annoying. “But no, we didn’t watch too much TV at Dad’s.” Eric put a top slice of whole wheat bread on his chicken sandwich, then bit into it. “Mike likes video games.” The only time Mike regularly turned on the TV in his bedroom was just before going to sleep. A third of the time, it would be on when he got up. He’d only flipped it off—sometimes—when he came from the bathroom after his first middle-of-the-night piss.

  “Mmm.” Barb took another sip from her bourbon and lemonade. “That’s your dad—a big kid. Video games.” Smiling, she shook her head, put the glass down, and looked at it. “You haven’t gotten so big that I should be offering you one of these, now, have you…?” She nodded toward the glass.

  “Nope,” Eric said. “I haven’t.” He knew she thought of drink as something to fix the jumpiness, but he had learned—in Florida—it was something that, the next day, created it.

  “Well—that’s something.” As there had been in Florida, Barbara kept a second TV in her bedroom, though not the living room. Was that, Eric wondered, a holdover from her marriage?

  “You know, Barb, your boss is funny.” Eric pushed the tray toward her. “Clem was sayin’ before how she doesn’t like to meddle in people’s business. But she sure started meddling—I guess that’s what you’d call it—in mine, telling me how she doesn’t think I ought to work as a garbage man. I’m not gonna be a garbage man—just a helper.”

  “Oh, good God!” Barb laughed. “That’s all Clem Englert does is meddle! Probably I should have warned you. She was going on to me about that, too—don’t pay her any mind, honey. You listen, you smile, you even say thank you. Then you go on about your business. That’s the only way you can survive down here—listen to your mother, believe me!” She laughed again.

  And finally took up a piece of chicken.

  Eric relaxed when she took a bite, then another.

  “Why was she so bothered by it?”

  “First, I think she thought you were a lot older. And second, all those black guys who live in the Dump—or work for the Chamber of Commerce, I guess—still kind of worry people down here a little. They shouldn’t. They’ve been here long enough. You’d think they’d all have gotten used to it by now.”

  “Used to what?” Eric asked.

  “Well,” she said, “at least as I understand it, because…well, so many of them are gay, honey.”

  “They are?” Eric asked. “Since I am too—” there, he’d said it—“that shouldn’t be any problem for me. Right?”

  Barbara sat pensively and lifted a tomato wedge on her fork. “So you…” she began after a moment, “still think you’re gay? I mean, you feel that you’re…gay—still feel that way, I mean?”

  Eric nodded. He’d wanted it to sound kind of light, kind of jokey: “Yeah.” It had come out pretty serious.

  “I thought, maybe, it was something you’d decide you’d…I dunno: grown out of.” She ate the tomato. “You didn’t put any dill in it.”

  “You didn’t have any dill,” Eric said. “We could get some.”

  “Down here?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “No,” Eric said. “No—I haven’t. Grown out of it, I mean. I don’t think people do.”

  “Then it’s probably good you’re here,” she said, sitting back. “I mean, I don’t see how your being here can hurt.”

  Eric asked, “Does your friend, Ron…work for the Chamber of Commerce?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “No. No, Ron is perfectly normal—I mean.” She frowned. “No, I mean, he’s got his own business over in Runcible. Computer programming. This has been such a depressed place for so long, they’re trying to attract new business and things—make it more attractive. To people like Ron, and—I guess—the people in the Dump as well. You didn’t go over there today, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Well—you’ll probably meet Ron in the next couple of days. Actually, he’s away for a computer conference in Savannah. But he’ll be back, I think, on Thursday. You’ll see him then. He’s really nice.” How long ago, Eric wondered, had he learned that “really nice” was Barbara’s code for black. But now he was sure. “I know you’ll like him.” Of course, he’d heard her say it to disbelieving and long-suffering Grandma, three different times back in Hugantown.

  “You think I should ask him about a job in his office—too?”

  “Honey—” and here Barb leaned forward. “I want you to do whatever it is you’re happiest doing. Really. That’s all. That’s the only reason I wanted you to come down here.” She sipped from her glass. “Honestly, sweetheart.”

  “You know, Barb,” Eric said, “if I keep that job for three months, I can start makin’ some real money. It’s not as much as Mike makes—but it’s more than twenty thousand a year. Twenty-seven, I think Dynamite said. That’s pretty good for seventeen or eighteen.”

  Barbara looked at him, soberly. “You’re going to be working with them that long—?”

  * * *

  [9] IN THE THREE days after Shit and Dynamite helped take Eric’s stuff from the Lighthouse up to Barbara’s, Eric ran into them twice—once on Front Street, going into the post office, and once up at the Citgo Station.

  The first time, on the tree-shadowed concrete by the squat, square, black-and-aluminum pumps, Shit was still barefoot and in the same green shirt with the torn off sleeves; Dynamite was still in his work shoes, overalls, and garbage truck T-shirt—just what they’d worn at Turpens.

  The second time, beside the large orange and brown roadside sign for Hurter’s Seeds, Tools, and Lumber, both got out of the pickup to say hello. Eric looked down at the frayed cuffs of Shit’s pants to realize Shit, though still sockless, now wore falling-apart basketball sneakers, from which his soiled toes showed through three rips in the rubber and the once black cloth. Some of the eyelets had pulled loose from the cloth and one sneaker was laced with brown twine.

  Both times Eric assured them he’d be at the dock on Wednesday, four forty-fi
ve sharp. Both times, with Georgia seaside seriousness, Dynamite answered: “Sure. That’ll be good. We’ll see you,” while Shit stood behind his “uncle’s” shoulder, in the sun, looking so pleased Eric thought he might shout out in the street.

  Over those same Harbor days, Eric learned Shit was called variously “Morgan” or “the Haskell boy” or “Haskell’s nigger bastard” by most of the Harbor’s permanent residents. From both black and white customers at Clem’s by now, he’d heard all three. (Maybe he felt “Shit” was an improvement.) Apparently Shit was only six or seven weeks beyond his own nineteenth birthday, which Eric also knew—now—came at the start of the second week in May. Over the same time he learned that Jay MacAmon lived out on Gilead Island at the old Kyle place—with his uncle Shad and that dumb (as in mute) Mexican of his, and Kyle’s cousin Hugh.

  Both MacAmon and Haskell were nigger lovers—a term Eric already knew from East Texas and Georgia and West Virginia, all three, since it had been repeatedly applied to his mom. It had wounded him deeply till, in a kind of despair, he had adopted the strategy that a young, liberal, eighth grade teacher had told his class about—appropriating the enemy’s term: like the Radical Faeries and the Wry Crips. And Eric decided (he was not quite brave enough to do it out loud, but it represented a major internal change), Okay, that’s what I am! As well as a goddam cocksucker—and felt a little better.

  And he’d started sucking a lot of cock—much of it black.

  At five forty-five on Wednesday, four days before his own seventeenth birthday, after hiking down the dark path through the pine woods, over the meadow, and into town, Eric reached the surprising openness of Front Street and its night lights and the Gilead Boat Dock, where he started work for Dynamite Haskell.

  *

  In the pre-dawn dark before the sea, under the florescent ring in its tin shield above the dock’s slat gate, unshaven Dynamite waited, one big hand splayed over the truck’s forward fender’s two-and-a-half colors. “Good to see you, boy.”

  To the left a similar light lit the dimmer web of the marina’s docks.

  Now, looking again at the garbage vehicle, Eric saw that the orange between the two grays—one of them blue in daylight—was rust, not paint. “This is a good day to come—we can use you.” The hand slid off into shadow. Dynamite stepped forward.

  Moths and things that looked like fleas flicked at the headlights, at the overhead circular bulb, or tinged its metal cone.

  Grinning over his missing teeth, Shit reached out a hand as big his dad’s and grabbed Eric’s, to help him into the cab.

  “Hey,” Eric said, as, on the other side, Dynamite opened the door and pulled himself in. Dynamite slammed the driver’s door. Eric said: “I…had fun, you know, thinkin’ about what you guys was doin’ with…um.” He sounded awkward to himself. “Al’s rubber—that I gave you.”

  Dynamite and Shit both looked over at him. Shit finger was just coming down from his mouth. Eric wondered if he missed a dig and a suck—probably. Both were grinning in the dashboard’s lights.

  “I mean, you know…jerkin’ off over it.” Eric wondered if he’d needed to say that.

  The pickup’s motor turned over. “Well,” Dynamite said, “good for you. Then all three of us got somethin’ out of it.” The truck moved forward. “Only now it’s time to haul some fuckin’ garbage.”

  “It’s just pickin’ up bags and throwin’ ’em in the truck bed.” Shit slid over to make more room for Eric. “Foltz Truckin’ handles the recycled stuff—the tied-up paper and the plastic. They take that out the county. We don’t even see that shit. We just do the black-bag stuff. It ain’t nothin’, really.”

  The dark seemed to blow through the cab window, even flicker above green and red dashboard lights, as Eric took his first run along the garbage route. “Right in there.” Beyond the rubber-padded wheel and outside the windshield—wipers had smeared it with arcs of bugs—Dynamite looked at the tufted mound the headlights lit along the dirt road’s center. “There’s our first stop.” Between red parking reflectors, the truck lights washed the corner of a cabin, laundry hanging across the porch, and three black garbage sacks beside the steps—the lowest of which had come loose on the left.

  Dynamite parked. They all got out, while quietly, Shit said, “This is Miss Louise’s place. She’s sixty-four years old.” Apparently, she was also already up.

  As Eric lifted one bag against his belly, he saw her inside the screening, sitting at a kitchen table in something limp and green, thin hair undone, drinking a mug of coffee and smoking a cigarette above a broad flesh-colored ashtray where ceramic Disney figures of the seven dwarfs paraded after Snow White along the edge, in which were mountains of ash and butts.

  Walking back from the next house over, lugging two trash sacks in each hand, Dynamite tossed them in and turned from the truck’s rear. “Hey—put your dick back in your pants. And don’t tell me it kinda ‘accidentally’ got loose.”

  “Well—” Shit grinned—“it did.”

  Eric looked over and down, saw—it made him start—where Shit hung, visible among his trouser folds, and found himself grinning.

  “He’s doin’ that ’cause you’re here.” Dynamite looked sourly at Shit. “Keep that for when you go to the Opera.” He looked over at Eric. “Someday he’s gonna do that when she decides to step out and tell us somethin’ about her fuckin’ crap—she’s gonna see his thing hanging there. And she’s gonna—” in an abrupt crouch, Dynamite leaped with a growl (Eric flinched, then felt stupid at his own surprise)—“rip that sucker off!”

  Inside, behind her translucent curtain, Miss Louise glanced at the window, then at her cup.

  Shit pulled back, but only smiled, while his father stood up. The smile went to Eric.

  And Eric realized (as he’d soon learn about all coastal jokes) it had been performed before.

  But Shit pushed himself—leisurely—back in his corduroys.

  As he walked to the cab, Dynamite chuckled. “Someday he’s gonna hang himself with his goddamn pecker.” At the fender, he turned to face them. Then, standing by the amber parking light, with work-gloved fingers, suddenly Dynamite yanked down his own fly, reached into his overalls, and tugged free his testicles. The heavy penis flopped forward over his glove’s knitted wrist. In the yellow gleam, he swung them side-to-side, six, seven times. “Now you know he ain’t the only one with enough to shake at you.” He pushed them back in and, in his gloves, fingered for his zipper, got it, tugged it up. He reached to open the cab, turned, and climbed in.

  Chuckling, Shit climbed in the other side. He wore those low-cut basketball shoes, coming apart at heel and sides—and still no socks. Eric climbed in after him, dazzled by two generations’ display of such raunch.

  Dynamite started the truck.

  Eric looked up to see Shit still grinning at him. “You can toss them bags two at a time, if you want—even four. It goes faster.”

  “Yeah—okay.” Did Shit own socks, Eric wondered.

  “Give ’im them gloves we brung him.” Dynamite switched gears.

  Shit pulled them off the dash’s counter to hand to Eric. “But you ain’t gonna need ’em till we get to them stores in Runcible. Mostly around here it’s just house garbage. But sometimes there’re broken bottles and stuff…”

  They drove through coastal dark. Across the seat, the three of them felt like twice as many people as had sat there before. Only now Shit’s leg leaned easily against Eric; Dynamite’s arm pressed his arm. No one scrunched over so as not to touch another in a space in which that would have been impossible, anyway. It was more comfortable and relaxed than the three individuals who had been there before. (Later, Eric decided, perhaps only he had done the scrunching; or maybe Shit, in response.)

  When they weren’t hauling green rubber trash barrels or black plastic sacks, but were driving, Shit pulled off his own gloves to lay them in the wedge with Eric’s between their thighs—half-an-inch of thumb on one of Shit’s had frayed awa
y—then (once more) dropped his own thick-fingered hand around on Eric’s far shoulder—

  —and began, rhythmically, squeezing.

  While he squeezed with one hand, Shit bit at the nails on his other, or prodded in a nostril wonderfully wider even than Mike’s, then put it in his mouth. Yes, it got Eric hard. A few times Eric did some nose picking, too—then glanced at Shit to see him grinning over in a flicker of road light through the cab, chin tufted with a late teen’s tan beard, his nostril rim or his eye-socket roof lit by the dashboard dials. Then he changed hands. Eric imagined offering him some, but finally ate it himself.

  Lifting first one hand from the wheel, then the other, with committed intensity Dynamite gnawed at his own nails. Driving, he paid as little attention to the boys as Mike would have. Eric fingered and fed himself those saline crusts, those lengths of mucus—and caught Dynamite giving Shit a grin, which, because he was looking, now shifted to Eric, as one or the other of the boys sucked a finger clean, index, middle, or ring.

  A few times, during that first morning’s ride, in a headlight’s gleam over the road from the other side of the trees, or from Shit’s leg moving against Eric’s on the seat cushion, Eric saw that, in Shit’s baggy corduroys, the wale was worn flat on both thighs.

  Shit’s fly was still open.

  From the crotch hair glimpsed in there, clearly Shit wore no underpants. Did he have any? (Back in Atlanta, Buckethead Zawolsky said his mom had simply never bought him none. And Scott used to joke that, for all Buck’s six-four height, his dick was too small to raise sweat enough to need them.) Goin’ commando, the guys on the team had called it, giggling.