Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Stepping away from Jay and Randal, Mex and Tod, Eric called, “So long, Barb.”

  Tod ambled over to joke with another customer about something, while the three of them went out to the truck to drive to Shit and Dynamite’s cabin.

  Easing around on the pickup’s seat, Shit’s hand went back on Eric’s shoulder, again to squeeze. “Me and Dynamite, see, we live in the nigger part of Diamond Harbor—what they call the Dump; ’cause that’s what it used to be. Randal should be over there, too. He’s as gay as a plaid rabbit.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “He was sittin’ pretty close.”

  “Was he, now? Randal?” Shit asked. “Ol’ Randal? Rubbin’ his leg up against some good lookin’ white boy he ain’t never seen before? Naw, I don’t believe it—I’m surprised he didn’t have his hand under the table before we left, jerkin’ you off!”

  Dynamite and Shit both laughed.

  “He lives over in Hemmings,” Shit went on. “Now the whole thing is Mr. Kyle’s. He lets all these gay niggers live over here. He got a’ office in Hemmings, where they interview you and everything. You just gotta be gay and homeless and not smoke. And black, pretty much mostly. But he kinda liked Dynamite. If you’re some serious alcoholic or drug addict, you gotta go into rehab for three months. They pay for that, too. It’s Mr. Kyle’s experiment. Besides, ’cause I’m a nigger—and my mama was a nigger whore who worked outta Turpens’ back lot, hustlin’ the truckers, that’s why we can live there—and my daddy was Kyle’s suck-buddy when they was kids, anyway. Dynamite, here, and Jay too, whored out there when they were my age; I done it a few times. I’ll take you over and show you how, if you want. You can get yourself a little spendin’ money that way—fifteen, twenty bucks. Last time I did it, a guy gave me fifty. Then I never did it again. I don’t know why—Jesus, that was two years ago, at least. He said I was real nasty, and I don’t think he meant it in a good way at all. He said the cheese in my cock was disgustin’ and at the motel made me wash it out—but he sure liked my dick up his fuckin’ butthole. I mean, he wasn’t like you at all. Hey, I like livin’ over there ’cause I get to fuck with all these niggers—the ugly ones, the cute ones. I bet you gonna like it better over there, too.”

  “Eric ain’t interested in that shit,” Dynamite said, not looking at them while he drove. “Hustlin’ down at Turpens, I mean. Besides, his mama wouldn’t like him doin’ that. And I don’t think yours would either…though I told you, since she done it, I done it, and Jay done it, too, I couldn’t really tell you ‘No’ on that one. But if his mama learns you’re takin’ him over there, and pimpin’ him out, she ain’t gonna let ’im work with us no more. The guys who use Turpens ain’t like the niggers in the Dump, Shit. The ones who use the back john, like us, is okay. But the ones who cruise in the parkin’ lot and wanna spend twenty bucks on some teenage crack head, that’s every faggot up and down the coast. They don’t know how to keep their own council. They’re all blabber mouths—” he turned to Morgan “—like you.”

  Shit grinned. “See, Dynamite’s always sayin’ he knows everything about that stuff, ’cause after he done it for a few years with Kyle, he done it for a few years with Jay. But I’ll still take you if you want.” He stretched. “Though he’s probably right about your mama, huh?”

  Parking, Dynamite rolled the truck back and forth a few times. Then he pulled up the ratcheting brake. They had reached a slope, over whose edge you could see the sea, with a scattering of houses in a web of aimless roads.

  Eric remembered looking out the truck window for the first time at the slope, at the ocean. About them stood various cabins, some closer together than others.

  Shit was saying, “See, before—we didn’t have no place to live for a while. I mean, he was too proud to ask Jay or Kyle for nothin’, ’cept maybe a job—they didn’t even know we was livin’ outta the truck—”

  “Well—” Dynamite interrupted, looking at Eric—“this is the Dump. Hey—you wanna come in? Maybe try out some of them truck stop moves you was gettin’ us off with, back at Turpens…? You guys bring in them produce sacks.”

  * * *

  [10] A WEEK BACK, the question would have set off a cascade of sexual anxiety. (With all the sex he’d had in parks and public rest rooms, Eric had never gone home with anyone before!) Eric asked Dynamite, “You were homeless?”

  They still sat in the cab’s crowded front seat.

  Dynamite said, “Yeah, sort of. We was back and forth between the truck and the boathouse at the Harbor for six weeks, once. We’d sneak in there after dark and get out by the mornin’. Then Jay found out and made us stay with him and Mex out on the island for another six weeks—then told Kyle he’d better find a place in the Dump for us, or we was gonna be homeless again—whether we was white or black.” Dynamite chuckled. “Jay always been my good buddy, ever since we was kids.”

  “That was about ten years ago,” Shit said, “when I was nine.” Then, from out of nowhere, he added: “Mr. Kyle owns Turpens.”

  “Hey—if you don’t wanna hang around, I’ll run you back to your house right now. You can come visit some other time. Or not at all, if you don’t wanna,” Dynamite said. “We don’t mind—”

  Surprised, Eric said: “Oh…! No, I thought…I mean I’d like to…come in. I thought you said you wanted me to…so I could—”

  “O-kay, then!” Dynamite laughed.

  “Course he wanna stay,” Shit said. “If he’s anything like me, that’s all he been thinkin’ about since he come down to the dock this mornin’.”

  “Kinda…” Eric admitted. “But I didn’t know if you—”

  “We just gotta get the work done,” Shit said, “first.”

  “Yeah,” Dynamite said. “He’s like you? Well, I didn’t see his dick comin’ out his damned pants all mornin’—like yours.”

  “Oh…!” Eric said.

  Shit shrugged. “Well, yeah—I figured it couldn’t hurt to remind him, now and then, what was waitin’ for ’im after the run. I didn’t want the nasty part to slip his mind, see?”

  Dynamite grinned. “Now, look—if you stay, you can’t do no major penetration till you get your paper. But I’m a good suck—and Shit’s imaginative. And if it comes to that, we got some rubbers around someplace. But he don’t like ’em, and I don’t, either. Hey. You can relax a little, hang out with us for an hour or so, take a shower with us—if you can wrassle him into the john. He gets into his own funk sometimes—hell, so do I. But at least once a month I make him take a good wash. Like that test, there, you probably shouldn’t tell your mama about none of this—leastways for a while. But you can help us get cleaned up; maybe grab a nap with us, do a little huggin’, a little tongue fuckin’; rub yourself off on my big ol’ redneck dick—that is, if you want. I like little puppy dogs shootin’ all over my belly—and I like shootin’ all over theirs. Hey, I’ll carry you on back this evening. You know what you should tell your mama is that she ain’t oughta be in that trailer she got up in the woods. Two or three big storms come, and them five or six cinder blocks proppin’ up that thing’re gonna sink right down or wash away, and that whole place’ll fall over or slip down the slope. Tell her to get a little place in Runcible—probably it’ll end up cheaper, anyway.”

  “Damn.” Shit opened his door. “So you comin’ in with us?”

  “Sure!” (Years later, Eric would say, “That was the fastest ‘sure’ what ever come out my mouth!”) His heart had started to pound again.

  “Hey,” Dynamite said. “You gotta speak out and say what you want, boy. Nobody gonna read your mind.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I’m sorry. Sure. Yeah. Sure.”

  Shit pushed off the torn blue seat out onto the dirt, and, in his falling apart sneakers, with their frayed heels and toes, kind of danced around on the circle of his own shadow. (Eric thought: I gotta remember those socks.) Shit squinted expectantly back at Eric.

  Pulling the DUMP PRODUCE FARMS shopping bags along with him, Eric jumped down.
Despite the heat, Shit’s arm fell heavily around Eric’s shoulder.

  “Mr. Kyle, he owns all this.” Shit squinted around the slope, with cabin, and tufts and banks of weeds and lawns irregularly cut. “He’s a real black feller, like your daddy. When they was kids, Jay, Kyle, and Dynamite couldn’t get their damned dicks out of one another’s assholes—or mouths— for more than five minutes. At least that’s what they always told me. That was in the summer—in the winter, it was just Jay and my daddy. Kyle, see, even though he was a nigger, ’cause he was rich, he used to go to school in Europe and all sort of things—and then come back to the Harbor and they’d fuck some more. That’s why he decided he was gonna build the Dump.”

  “Hey,” Eric said, “has Dynamite still got Al’s rubber?”

  “Huh?” Shit asked. “Naw. Soon as we got home, I made him let me wear it. He helped me jerk off in it—it was kinda a mess. But it was the kind of mess I like. Then we took it across and gave it to Whiteboy, and let him chew on it awhile. Maybe we shoulda saved it and give it back to—”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “Naw. That’s okay.”

  “Every once and a while, if a black guy comes along with a white boyfriend, Kyle’ll let ’em stay here, if they want—like me and Dynamite, or Black Bull and Whiteboy. But basically, it’s for black guys. Anyway, then we went home to bed.” Eric glanced down to see Shit had pushed his free hand into his own fly. “You know I busted the zipper on my pants about two months back: see, I’m tryin’ to find out how long it takes somebody besides fuckin’ Dynamite to notice. It’s like my experiment. But every once in a while my dick falls out. All by itself. Really.” Then, deliberately, he pulled himself free—it was three-quarters hard and slanted forward. “Like that.” He grinned. “But if he saw that, he’d think I did it on purpose.” Turning his head, Shit brushed Eric’s ear with his nose (only it was wet. Shit had licked him! Eric found himself with chills—and almost sneezed) to call back to Dynamite: “So what you wanna do with this guy?” He gave Eric another hug. Eric almost stumbled.

  Catching up behind them in the hot sun, Dynamite said, “Come on, now, Shit! I told you. Put it away, till we get inside.” He’d shrugged off his shirt, hooked the soiled collar on one finger, and carried it back over a hairy shoulder.

  “Why?” Shit grinned. “Ain’t nobody gonna see it but Black Bull—or Whiteboy.” He grinned at Eric: “Black Bull used to suck my dick when I was a little baby. That was when he was baby-sittin’ for me. ’Cause Dynamite tol’ him that’s how we did it—Mex an’ him.” He looked over at his dad. “That’s how they could always get me to stop cryin’ when I was a baby. Ain’t that right?”

  “Yep,” Dynamite said. “It still makes him pretty happy.”

  With pines behind it and fern banks beside it, the cabin sat a few yards up the slope. A single story with a flat roof, it was the same dark creosote as the boards inside Eric’s porch room at his mom’s. The roof extended to the front and out on one side. Looking at the blocky solidity, Eric thought: It’s like my porch room at Barb’s, turned inside out and blown up even bigger—more than twice the size of his mother’s entire trailer. Some chairs and cartons and—well—just junk stood on the roofed deck. A couple of windows and doors were on each wall.

  They walked up the steps.

  In the kitchen, Dynamite flung the empty peanut bag, which he’d carried crumpled in his fist, down in a full metal trash can just inside, its edges covered with a black plastic liner. (It was funny: so much stuff leaned against the walls and in the corners, inside it looked smaller than Barb’s!) Dynamite lay his shirt over the cluttered kitchen table’s edge, turned, fell into a chair, and leaned over to untie one work shoe, then the other. “You guys put that stuff in the vegetable bin in the bottom of the refrigerator. Don’t leave the corn out. You can set the onions and the potatoes on the table—if you can find room.” He glanced, frowned at the open toolbox and the stack of plates and the pile of wood. “Or on the floor right down there. Just don’t forget ’em.”

  “Come on,” Shit said, taking one of the shopping bags from Eric. He opened the refrigerator door.

  Sitting up, with the toe of one shoe Dynamite pushed off his other. Then, with his sock toe, he pushed off the first—which fell over on its side. (Every window in the room had a lot of stuff in front of it.) Something like curtains hung in front of the blinds in three of them: red, green, yellow, orange, and blue towels, threaded onto curtain rods. Eric grinned—it was colorful…

  Shit had just closed the refrigerator and stood up, his hip and arm pressing into Eric—there was hardly room for all three to stand—when a black dog rushed from around a carton on the floor and began to jump up on Shit, equally eager to nose between his hand and lap. Without releasing Eric, Shit said, “Hey there, Tom. Well, hello, there! Uncle Tom—this is our new friend.” Bending over and pulling Eric with him, Shit rubbed the dog’s head with one hand, gripped his lower jaw and shook, so that the ears flapped, then rubbed the black shoulders. “Hey—this here is Eric. That’s a good dog—that’s a real good dog. Yeah, Eric, this here is Uncle Tom. Tom, this is Eric…You wanna see this sonofabitch hump my leg?” Tom’s tail beat one of the empty bags, knocking it over, where it roared under one of Shit’s sneakers as he stepped around.

  “Jesus, Shit…!” Eric laughed. “All you like is nasty stuff!”

  Grinning, Shit licked Eric’s nose, then ran his tongue up Eric’s right nostril. Pulling his tongue back in his mouth, he leaned away. “Un-huh. Yeah. Damn—it tastes as good as mine. I was wonderin’ about that all this morning.” On the floor, the dog waited, eager, expectant. “Come on…let’s go to bed.” He nodded over to where his father had moved a piece of board with a metal housing for a motor bolted to one end from off the sink and was washing his hands.

  Eric tightened his own grip around Shit’s shoulder.

  Two inches taller than Eric, Shit sort of shrugged, and a moment later, Eric realized, was squirming a little, as though in Eric’s grasp he couldn’t think that well. “Um…we wanted, you know, for you to be, um, so…” An unfocused smile filled Shit’s face, that made Eric warmly happy and which, despite this bawdiness, after seconds he recognized as embarrassment! “We was real anxious for you to be—” Shit shrugged, but within the grip, not to get out of it. “You know, I mean—be okay, I guess…so, like…”

  Standing up and moving to the sink, Dynamite glanced at Eric, then turned, shrugged, and made lean muscles, the thinner skin on the inner sides of his arms run with veins, faintly blue through his tan. He yawned and stretched. “We wanted you to like us.” Dynamite spoke it with the emotional sureness Shit had lacked. “So you’d wanna come back. Like Shit told you, it’s a real big bed and you guys can do what you want in it. It ain’t gonna bother me.” As they walked into the back room, Eric looked down at Dynamite’s feet—he’d stripped his socks off. Between his broad big toe and the toe over was a line of black at least a quarter inch wide. Black lines ran between the others, too.

  Amber flypaper strips spiraled down from three of the bedroom’s corners. A large unmade bed, its covers pushed down to the foot, almost filled the room. Shit pointed to a smaller, made-up bed by the wall, covered with a green blanket. Boxes and what looked like a year’s junk, including a broken oar and part of an outboard motor sat on it. “That’s my bed,” Shit said. “We can use it if you want, but we’d have to clean it off first. Most of the time, though, I bunk in with my dad, unless I’m sick or got a cold or something. His is bigger and more comfortable. And he’s warm.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “That’s fine.”

  “Come on.” Holding Eric tighter, as if steadying himself, Shit said, “Take your clothes off and lie down with me. We can make out. He gonna be asleep in fifteen minutes, anyway: this is when he takes his nap. When he wakes up, he’ll grab some nookie off you, though…in about an hour, an hour-and-a-half.”

  On striped sheets, to the right, maybe two feet end to end, an irregular blotch was stiff
with—Eric realized what it was—weeks of spilled semen. When he looked up, Shit was grinning at him. “We keep most of that stuff on my side—’cause wet or dry, it don’t bother me. In fact I like rollin’ around in it…oh, hey! Look at you grinnin’ there. What? You like that, too?”

  Their medallion…?

  Shirtless, with his back to the bed, Dynamite dropped his pants, then pushed down his gray briefs (a frayed hole showed one hairy cheek), particularly soiled along the seams, and eased onto the bed’s left side. The mattress gave.

  As Dynamite started to swing up his legs, Eric said, “Wow, you got some dirty feet. Why don’t you let me clean that stuff off for you?”

  Dynamite said, “Huh…?” and put his feet back down and sat up again.

  Shit laughed.

  Eric pulled away from Shit, went around to the other side, and dropped to the floor, cross-legged, in front of Dynamite—who looked down at him curiously. “You sure you wanna do that?”

  “Un-huh.” One of Dynamite’s big feet was under Eric’s shin, and one was in front of him. “I did this a few times for some homeless guys I used to mess around with, in Atlanta.” Well, three times, anyway. The fourth, actually, was why he’d stopped. “They liked it.”

  “You gonna scratch mine there, when you’re finished?” Having dropped all his own clothes, Shit sat beside his father.

  Eric lifted Dynamite’s foot up onto the knee of his jeans. He pulled the big toe away from the toe next to it—

  “Ow…!” Dynamite said.

  Eric looked up. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. But that’s like mud—it dries and holds the hair on ya’ damned toe joints together.”

  Not just a line, the dirt was a black wedge (it might as well have been mud) a quarter of an inch wide—and a quarter of an inch thick. With his forefinger, Eric broke it off in three long pieces and two short ones, so that it fell, crumbling, on the gray, gritty rug.

  Then he ran his finger down between two others.