Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Could it have been poverty?

  How old were Shit’s pants? Did he have others?

  When Shit got down to haul garbage, Eric also saw that the wale on his butt was equally flat-worn.

  At Barbara’s, Eric had a carton full of socks: a third he’d brought with him from Atlanta; two-thirds Barbara already had with her. (She lived as if she always expected Eric to turn up, unannounced, and move in: but, till now, he hadn’t.) Three times Eric had started to offer to bring Shit some of his. But now, Eric thought, as they bounced through the night’s end: I’m thinking like a kid again. That’s silly. I’m just scared—and you can’t be too scared to help people. “Hey, Shit?” he said. “You guys brought me the work gloves. I’m gonna bring you some socks next time I come—tomorrow, I mean. That’s gotta be more comfortable.”

  “You got some of them socks?” Shit turned with a wonder at their potential presence as great as Eric’s had been at their absence. “Oh, wow! That’d be great. I bought some of them white ones, once, that come in a package—a dozen for six dollars? But you wear them things twice and wash ’em, and they come all to pieces. That’s expensive. I didn’t have enough to get no good ones what’ll last. Oh, fuck, man—that would be great!”

  With Shit’s gratitude, Eric felt relief cascade through him, chest, back, and belly. “Sure. I’ll bring ’em tomorrow. Hey—you don’t use no work shoes, like…” He hesitated between “your uncle” and “Dynamite,” then chose: “Like Mr. Haskell, there?”

  “You mean this ol’ pig fucker?” (Again, Eric was shocked, though Dynamite drove on.) “Yeah, I got ’em. But I don’t wear ’em ’ceptin’ on the days we take the stuff over to the Bottom to toss—and even then. I mean, at least, most of the time, I don’t bother. But, man, if you can loan me some socks, I can wear ’em again.”

  “Loan ’em? I got enough to give you a bunch.” Then he wondered if that meant the work gloves were only a loan. Still, the relief left him even more silent than he had been before, rather than more voluble.

  The next ten minutes’ driving seemed the longest in Eric’s life. But what ended it? Did they reach their next job? Did Shit say something? Or did Dynamite? He remembered his glimpse of Miss Louise through her curtained screen or Dynamite swinging his nuts outside the truck, though he could recall no other detail from the dark hours of his first garbage run—except stopping just down the slope from Barbara’s, tossing her sacks in the pickup, and driving on to the next house without comment.

  For years, though, the rest of the day remained as clear as a film.

  Behind clouds squashed on one another over the sea, the sun rose and, for four or five minutes, stained sky, sand, and water a scarlet as intense as a neon tube or an LED display.

  “Now, that’s a color you don’t see around here so often,” Dynamite muttered as they coursed beside the beach. The flesh on his own neck and face looked as if it had been burned a brick hue by the light through the window. “I mean, you get coppers, oranges, all sorts of golds. But not that red.” Even as he spoke, the sun started paling to orange. They turned away, and the dawn was redder than the earth piled by the highway constructions they pulled past or what heaped in a new foundation’s sloping pit, or—seconds later—where a cinderblock wall rose beside a leafy turnoff.

  Then the clouds were gone. Blue reclaimed the sky.

  They turned from a smaller road onto a larger. Over the trees the sun was full up and an unwatchable white. The dash’s clock said six-twenty, though Eric seemed to remember that’s what it had said when, in the dark, he’d first climbed into the truck. Maybe it was broke. Beyond a wooden rail lay a good-sized cornfield. Hundreds of tasseled ears moved together. Beside it stretched another, a foot shorter. On the far side, dark green and purple produce grew knee high. Dynamite turned the truck in by what looked like a two-story barn—or a barracks. Half the ground-floor wall was widely spaced slats. Spots of light in it suggested the back wall was the same, letting through sunlight from the field behind.

  They pulled up, and Shit was out the door and down by an old fashioned hand-worked pump, painted orange and standing high as his shoulder. As Eric followed Shit from the truck, he saw the pump sat on a six-inch concrete base. Three pickups—only one less than three years old—and two cars were parked near.

  “We gotta get the bags outta them cans.” Shit nodded toward a row of ten oil drums along the barn/barrack’s side wall, with—in most—black bags bulging from the top and dangling red ties down the sides from under metal lids that, in two cases, had slipped off, one flat on the ground, one to lean against the dented drum.

  In a knitted cap and sleeveless thermal vest, a strong-looking black fellow ambled around the building corner:

  “Hey, there, guys. I thought you’d be here half an hour ago.”

  “We got a new man with us today,” Dynamite said, as though that explained it. “This here’s Eric. He’s gonna be helpin’ me and Shit—” who had already gone to the first drum, tossed the cover against the building wall, and hauled up one, two, three sacks, then, with his other hand, reached in and hauled out two more.

  Eric went over and did the same to the second drum—the thing must have held six. As they went back and forth to toss them into the truck bed—the last clattered, full of glass and cans—another black fellow came around, lugging a brown shopping bag in each hand. He was heavier and darker than the other. “Hey—Dynamite! I put some good stuff together for you. Some green peppers—and I know you like that corn. There’s some eggplants, some onions, some potatoes…”

  “I like the corn.” Dynamite grinned. “But it’s a little rough on the teeth—when you don’t got so many.”

  “You don’t have to eat it on the cob,” the fellow said. “Boil it up, cut that stuff off, give it a few scrapes with the back of your knife to get the good shit out, then fry it up in some bacon grease with some cut-up onions and peppers—put some of them summer squash in there, salt and pepper, and you got your dinner. Do it with some real bacon—and it’s a good dinner, too.”

  Dynamite said, “You gonna come over and cook it for us?”

  “You guys don’t want no fresh herbs, do you?”

  Eric asked, suddenly: “You got dill? And maybe some basil?”

  “Dill and basil, comin’ up! I thought Ronny and his goddam cookin’ class was the only ones interested in stuff like that.” He wandered off.

  In a minute, he was back with the herbs, one leafy, one stringy and feathery, both roots wrapped in squares of newsprint. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” Eric took them and tossed them in through the truck’s window.

  “You know how to cook?”

  Eric said, “A little.”

  “Wow…!” Shit said, full of wonder.

  The man laughed, a high, black laugh that Eric associated with his Texas relatives. “Why don’t you bring that cute nigger you done whelped over here more often—and, hell, this one, too—” he nodded toward Eric, as he turned back for the next can—“so we can feed sumpin’ real good to both these boys.”

  Dynamite said, “I told you a long time ago, Horm.” He started toward the cans now. “When Shit’s gets twenty-one, he can come over any time he wants. And fuck anyone of your black asses he has a mind to.” He flung off a lid, and grabbed up one, three, four bags in one hand and four in the other—as did Shit. Both Shit and Dynamite’s all but nailess hands, during actual work, seemed big as steam shovels. Everyone was always saying how large Eric’s own hands were, but he could just about hold two in each.

  Had his inexperience really delayed them half an hour?

  When he came back for the next can, he made himself carry three and three—and by the time, even in the gloves, he got to the truck bed (one sack nearly dropped)—the skin between thumb and forefinger on his left hand was a burning agony. The thumb on his right throbbed. But he went back for six more.

  The fellow who had set down the shopping bags hooked his thumbs under the sides of his je
ans, and pushed them down from the upper half of his copper buttocks and the crevice between. He turned away and backed up, displaying his bare bottom. “You mean you gonna let that pig fucker make you wait dat long to run yo’ sweet dick up my easy-meat canyon—?”

  Suddenly Shit dropped his sacks, snatched one of his gloves free, and swung his hand to smack Horm’s butt. But Horm hooted and leaped aside, then doubled over laughing, thumbing his jeans back up. In a moment, Shit had the sacks again, carrying them to the truck.

  First Dynamite, then Eric started laughing.

  They climbed back into the cab. Shit and Eric’s knees rattled the paper bags the fellow had sat on the truck-cab floor. In tan letters, a-slant the bags’ brown side, it read: DUMP FARMS PRODUCE.

  Eric picked the newspaper-wrapped herbs off the seat.

  “Hell.” Shit grinned at Eric, as they drove back. “I been fuckin’ Horm’s asshole in the Opera—and fuckin’ around with the gay guys out here at the Produce—which is all of ’em—since I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen. He—” from the nod, he meant Dynamite—“knows that.”

  “Sure I know it,” Dynamite said. “But you still gotta keep up appearances.” Then he frowned. “I never snuck you into the Opera when you was no twelve-years-old.”

  “I know.” Shit frowned. “But that didn’t stop me from sneakin’.”

  “Oh…” Dynamite looked puzzled.

  Shit chuckled. “They used to treat me pretty nice.” (Out the window they passed a sign in red and gold letters on gray planks: DUMP FARMS PRODUCE, like the bags. On the side of the sign was a large picture of the orange water pump. Driving in, Eric had not seen it. Perhaps he’d been looking out the other window.) “That’s ’cause they knew he was sittin’ down in the front row, beatin’ his meat. But they used to get back in some corner with me, and let me go to town on ’em. When I was a little guy, I loved to fuck more than just about anything. And all them fuckin’ farm niggers knew it, too.”

  “Like you still don’t,” Dynamite said dryly.

  “Sometimes if it was a few of ’em together, they’d wait in line for me to finish with one and go on to the next.” Sunlit shadows rushed over their laps, their arms, and—down in the bags—the green husks, the yellow and black tassels, the peppers shiny green between their knees, with the dill and basil in their newsprint wrapping on top of the one between them.

  Eric looked back up. “They give you food for takin’ away their garbage?”

  “Naw,” Dynamite said. “Everybody gets vegetables and stuff from the Produce. That’s Kyle’s, too. He’s my friend—me and Jay’s—what started the Dump, where we live. They bring it down to the market at Dump Corners. But we get ours in the mornin’, ’cause we’re out here.”

  As, again, the truck neared the beach, half the sky was a silver too bright to gaze at. The sand was white-gold and stuck with umbrellas. Half with trunks to their knees, beachgoers wandered about, some with towels over their shoulders, some carrying beach chairs or baskets. Hours after, beyond wire-woven pickets, the sea’s edge swarmed with swimmers. You had to squint. By ten to noon, the July Wednesday was over eighty-five.

  Finally, they finished with the squalid houses along forty miles of forking back roads.

  Four miles away in Runcible, they pulled up just beyond the Opera House and two doors down from a tattoo and body piercing emporium, Cave et Aude—in purple curlicue letters, with gold highlights.

  They’d stopped at the clinic building.

  On the broken pavement’s corner were two four-foot posts topped with black tarnished horses’ heads.

  Dynamite took Eric in through the red-framed door. Colorful wall posters showed smiling black, white, and Latino young people, advertising HIV medications. Mr. Haskell told the heavy black woman with man-short hair at the desk that Eric wanted a test. “But I don’t think he’s too anxious his mama should know he’s gettin’ it.”

  “Of course.” She smiled at Eric.

  “Me or Jay’ll come by and pick up his paper in a couple of days for him, if he can’t get over here hisself. He works for me, now—like Shit.”

  The woman slid her hands out to the blue blotter’s edge. “You know, Dynamite: the rules are that this has to be confidential. We’ll give the results to the young man here. But he’s the only one who can get ’em.”

  “I thought,” Dynamite said, “yall could bend ’em a little: he lives in Diamond Harbor and don’t got no car of his own. But we’ll do it however we have to.”

  “Fine.” She smiled at Eric again. “We have to get a little blood from you; that’s all. You step into that room there—” it had a Dutch door, like Bill’s in Mr. Condotti’s basement; except it was all white—“and someone’ll be with you in a minute.”

  While they waited, Dynamite talked with lazy openness about who he could fuck with in the Dump and who he might hold off on, none of whose names stuck in Eric’s mind. In return, Eric told Dynamite about getting the test before in Atlanta, when Mr. Doubrey had sent him and Arnie to the free clinic there.

  When they were again in the pickup, Dynamite slammed his door.

  In the middle, Shit looked back and forth between them.

  Dynamite said, “When they get it, she’ll give it to Jay. She’s Hugh’s cousin: she knows we look out for the puppies comin’ ’round this part of the coast. You don’t have to tell your mama if you don’t wanna. I mean, that’s the damned law. Every nigger in the Dump got his. That’s one of Kyle’s rules for living there. We should all probably have ’em laminated and nailed up on our doors.”

  Eric grinned. “I guess it’s like the foundation of the world.” He wondered if either would say anything about that. But neither did.

  Shit asked, “They stick that needle in you?” (Probably because he didn’t understand it, he didn’t ask about it.) “It don’t really hurt. Hey, you want some boiled peanuts?” From somewhere, while they’d been inside, he’d gotten a bag. Probably it had been down in one of the Dump Produce sacks.

  Outside, a white police car with two blue lines around it, separated by a thin red one—“Runcible Township & Highway Constabulary”—rolled by. “And that there’s another,” Shit said, though Eric wasn’t quite clear what that meant. But neither Shit nor Dynamite explained.

  “If you end up inside one of them cabins and you wanna mess with one of them black bastards—” back in the cab, Shit made fists near his shoulders and stretched—“don’t be shy. Down here we figure any kind of suckin’s okay; kissin’, anything like that. But when it comes to fuckin’, you need your paper—or a rubber.” Yawning, he raised his elbows.

  Dynamite positioned himself at the wheel. “Ask to see it and make sure it’s less than four months old. It’s free, and it don’t cost ’em nothin’ to come over here and get it. That’s been keepin’ the guys in the Dump pretty healthy since eighty-five, eighty-six now.”

  While Eric wondered if he should ask more about Kyle, Dynamite started driving.

  At about two, they drove back to the Harbor, where they stopped to say hello to Barbara—she had another shift at the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg.

  Jay and Mex were there. Eric grinned when he saw them. Dynamite hailed them—and they all squeezed into a booth together. It was as easy and anxiety free as that first day had been fraught. “You know, this guy here—” Jay grinned up as Dynamite sat beside him—“has been my best friend since I was a lot younger than you.” Today Jay’s arms were covered in a denim work shirt.

  Two other black men came in—“Hey, Randal,” Jay called.

  Dynamite said, “Eric, this is Randal and Tod.”

  “See,” Shit explained. “This here’s our boss man, Randal. He tells us where to go every morning.”

  “It’d be fun to tell you where to go, if I thought for a minute you’d go there.” Randal squeezed in next to Eric, and grinned at him. “How you like workin’ with these clowns?”

  Tod was thick and friendly looking and hovered about twenty-five—he sat across
from Eric, next to Shit. Then got up and got a chair, put it at the tables end, and sat once more.

  Randal’s leg cleaved to Eric’s, and for a moment Eric wondered if Randal was hitting on him—or if it was just some country way.

  Pressed around a single booth table, four garbage men and two boatmen, Eric realized, did have a smell. It wasn’t even unpleasant—but it was recognizable.

  Shit said, “You got to get Jay to show you all them pictures on his arms. Tank and Cassandra did that, right over in Runcible. He got some good pictures on ’im.”

  Eric frowned a moment, then realized that—probably conscientiously, the whole Turpens experience had fallen out of their conversation, even as—for Eric—it made everything about it that much more vivid in memory.

  “Yeah,” Tod said, who was only a couple of years older than Shit. “Go on, show us, Mr. Boatman. If he shows them half a dozen more times, I may go get me some.”

  Barbara brought coffee for them all.

  Jay sipped from his mug loudly and did not open his shirt.

  In the corner, with his black denim jacket and (still) no shirt beneath, his pockmarked smile, and his big hands folded on the table, Mex was still the winner for sex appeal, at least for Eric. Finally, Dynamite (still close second) said, “I think we’re gonna run Eric here out to the Dump to see how the other half lives. We’ll get you back by the time your mom gets home.”

  “Good idea,” Jay said. “Have fun.”

  “Dynamite’ll bring ’im back to the house by dinner time, Mrs. Jeffers,” Shit called—and sounded a little awkward, doing it. “Cross my heart.”

  Dynamite slid from the booth to stand and stretch.

  As the crush at the booth table broke up, the chair at the end where Tod had been sitting scraped back. Guys stood, digging in their pockets for wallets or change. “So long, Mrs. Jeffers,” they called.