Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Oh, honey!” Barbara looked at Eric. “Say thank you to Mr. Bodin!”

  Ron’s hands dropped beneath the table edge and he sat forward. “Ron—Eric got to call me Ron, now.”

  “I was gonna say thank you.” Eric sucked in his own breath to keep from adding, If you’d give me a chance—

  A white haired couple at the table next to them smiled at them.

  Barbara said, “Make a wish, honey.”

  Ron grinned. “I told you, you couldn’t get away with nothin’ down here. Imagine! Havin’ a birthday and not tellin’ everybody. Happy birthday, boy.”

  Eric looked around the table, said, “Oh, wow…Hey, Ron, thank you. This is…great,” and thought: Please. I wish I would wake up in my own bed and have three more hours to sleep…He blew out the flame.

  Using a knife with a fancy handle, Marvin cut into the chocolate buttercream. The slice came loose.

  The cake was chocolate all through.

  Eric took a big breath—and thought: I know. I’m not gonna get my wish. But I’m gonna smile through it, say thank you, go home, and go to bed. Then it’ll be over. He glanced at Barb.

  She was smiling.

  Could this, he wondered, be what growing up was all about?

  Eric was not exactly allergic to chocolate. But when he had been eleven, in Hugantown, one afternoon he’d eaten much too much of it, thrown up, and had diarrhea for three days—so that the flavor, ever since, had made him queasy.

  *

  All the way back from Hemmings, Eric slept in the back seat. The next morning, miraculously he overslept by only twelve minutes.

  Stepping out the kitchen door, in his gray hoody, onto the wet wooden steps, he was about to take off into the blackness, when he grabbed the doorframe and swung around. Out loud, he said, “Jesus—!”

  For the third day, he’d left without Shit’s socks. Sprinting back through the house to his porch room, from his sock carton on the floor against the wall, he grabbed a handful, carried them into the kitchen, pulled out a plastic bag from where Barbara kept them folded behind some empty copper canisters marked rice, flower, and sugar on the counter. As he pulled the bag loose (the canisters clinked into each other), he managed to unfold it, and shoved the socks in. Behind him, he noticed a pair had fallen to the floor. He picked them up and got them in, too. There were only seven pairs: the things were bulkier than he’d figured. He’d wanted to make it a dozen. But that would do for now.

  Then he took off, through the kitchen’s screen door and into the dripping, pre-dawn dark.

  Except for a road light here and there, the run down through the pines was black and wet, and the lower legs of his jeans were sopping by the time he got to the dock.

  “We was about to take off and go without you,” Shit said. “’Cause you was out partyin’ last night—over at that fancy place, in Hemmings.” He wore a gray, button-up sweater with a couple of large holes that looked like it had belonged to someone else—maybe Dynamite.

  “He’s lyin’,” Dynamite said. “We wasn’t gonna leave without you. What was you doin’ over at Shells?”

  Shit’s sweater buttons were in the wrong holes, too; one side hung lower than the other by three inches. It looked like he had no shirt on under it, either.

  “How’d you know I was there?” Eric asked. “Barbara’s friend took us out last night—Jesus, I thought I was gonna go to sleep on the table, I was so tired.”

  “Well, now you know.” Dynamite chuckled. “It’s hard to work a job like this and party all night—though I know you’re gonna try it a couple of times. Everybody does.”

  “When we was startin’ out this morning,” Shit said, opening up the cab door, “we seen Ron comin’ home from work—he’s the cook out there. He said he done seen you and said hello and all like that.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Yeah, he said hello to me. I don’t remember ever seein’ him before, though.”

  “You know,” Shit said, pausing at the pickup door, “right across the road where Bull lives…?”

  “Un-huh,” Eric said (who wasn’t really sure who Shit meant), ready to climb up after him.

  “Well, his is the house thirty or forty yards to the left, toward Dump Corners.”

  “Oh.” The plastic bag in one hand, Eric pulled himself up and inside. Now he held it out. “Hey—I got a present for you.”

  Shit asked, “Huh?”

  “Remember?” Eric grinned. “I told you I’d give you some socks.”

  “You got ’em…?” Shit looked bewildered. “I thought maybe they was too expensive after all, or something. Or your mama didn’t want you to give ’em to me. I figured yesterday I wouldn’t say nothin’ and make you feel bad. But you got ’em!”

  “Oh, fuck…” Eric said. “Now I do feel bad. Yesterday, I just forgot. That’s all. Here. Put on a pair. Go on, I mean if you want…”

  Shit took the bag and held it. “Ron said it was…your birthday last night. We should have a present for you.”

  “You did,” Eric said. “Those gloves you’re lettin’ me wear, till I can get some of my own. You know. My hands? Your feet? Besides,” he added, “givin’ presents on your own birthday’s fun.”

  Dynamite finished whatever he was doing outside the driver’s open door—pissing on his fender, Eric realized from the sound—then opened it further, and, in his usual work shirt and T-shirt under his bib, climbed in.

  “Hey,” Shit said, as Dynamite slammed it after him. “Look what Eric gimme.” Between Dynamite and Eric, in his baggy sweater Shit clutched the plastic bag in his lap—but didn’t move to put them on, though. “Socks.”

  “You can really use them things.” Dynamite grasped the keys swinging from the steering post and turned on the ignition. “That’s good.”

  The side windows were droplet speckled. The truck started moving. Drops slipped down the windshield into the wipers’ half circles.

  Shit’s sweater didn’t look as if it would keep off much water. (Where the sweater had slid from Shit’s shoulder, Eric saw, Shit did wear an old T-shirt—with more holes in it than the sweater.)

  Eric was—surprisingly—not exhausted.

  At first.

  Still, in the wet morning, as he lugged dripping plastic sacks over lawns and driveways and porches and sidewalks, he felt as if his body’s pieces were connected along edges and angles, rather than by rounded joints.

  That afternoon, they drove back to the Dump, left the truck, and walked with long, tired strides to the steps and up onto Dynamite’s porch—yes, that must be Chef Ron’s, over there, left of Bull’s—

  With his unshaven smile, Dynamite asked, “So how you like this job now, after doin’ it in the goddam fuckin’ rain?”

  Eric stepped in a puddle on the boards that rilled to the edge and spilled over. “I like it…”

  “You—” Morgan Haskell said, gripping Eric’s shoulder with a wide, wet hand—“are a lyin’ sack of shit!” Though he was grinning.

  Inside, they stripped naked and lay down in the big bed, Shit on his belly, Eric on his back, with Dynamite beside him. Then Shit practically leaped on Eric, who, surprised, grabbed his shoulders, while Shit’s tongue went into Eric’s mouth and his face twisted against Eric’s. Their tongues went seeking gaps and crevices and wetnesses Eric had hardly realized were there. The garbage assistant’s arms shook with the force of his grip—then the grip relaxed.

  As Shit pulled away, Eric saw his eyes were closed. Shit’s hand dragged over Eric’s chest. Eric looked…to see the downward arc of Shit’s engorged cock retreating, shrinking, softening.

  Shit, he realized, was…asleep!

  And in another minute-and-a-half, so was Eric

  To the feel of a shaking mattress, Eric woke on his side to see Dynamite on his back, naked, beside him, vigorously pumping. The garbage man turned his head and, with his unshaven face, grinned at Eric, his fist slowing. “Well,” he said, quietly, “since you two fuckers is too out of it to service a hard
workin’ Georgia redneck, what the fuck else am I supposed to do?”

  On his other side, eyes closed, Shit said: “He’s just kiddin’—he likes to beat off by hisself from time to time, no matter how much nookie he gets offa me—or you. If he don’t, he gets all evil.”

  Outside on the cabin deck, again Eric could hear the sound of rain—like insect wings beating the boards, the walls, the roof.

  Dynamite’s fist, and the bed’s shaking, increased in speed. Then, from his fist, his cockhead erupted—

  Four gouts, the second of which almost hit the green ceiling and the third of which shot up four or five feet.

  They fell back over Dynamite’s belly, flank, wrist. His heavy hand urged the skin up over his dickhead. His fingers closed over it, in the gleaming spillage, as he rolled toward Eric. “Here, you go…” Releasing himself, he pushed two drooling fingers into Eric’s mouth—beneath the running mucus, his flesh as hard as wood. (Cold and kind of damp, Shit’s butt pressed the small of Eric’s back.) And Eric was again asleep before Dynamite pulled his fingers loose, as though texture, flavor, or both had put him out.

  * * *

  [12] SHIT’S GRATITUDE FOR the socks erupted into sex three times—once at Dynamite’s the day of the giving (an hour later, Eric woke with Shit—cold feet against his ankles, face and belly warm—on top of him, his tongue lancing eyes, nose, mouth…), once behind the Citgo Station in the Harbor the next afternoon; and the following morning, to Eric’s surprise, Shit was waiting in the dark, outside Barbara’s trailer: “Hey…Eric! Come’ere…!”

  “What you doin’…?” Eric had chills: for a moment he’d thought someone had been about to leap out and grab him.

  “Come on—over here!”

  Twenty yards down another path joined it, where a road light stood.

  “I come up early, ’cause I wanted to see you. Come’ere and gimme a hug.” When they’d been fucking around in the bushes ten minutes, a police car (of course) rolled by on the road, though they were sure they hadn’t been seen.

  Then Shit took Eric’s hand and they walked down toward the Front Street dock. (Hadn’t he been dreaming something like this…?) Eric remembered how baggy Shit had looked on his rainy birthday.

  This morning, Shit wore no shirt at all. As they walked down to the Harbor through black morning and the occasional road light dragged its illumination around them, he looked to Eric like the god of sex himself. Shit said, “You never come that fast when I sucked your dick before, back at the cabin. I gotta do that more often. I like makin’ you come. It’s fun.”

  “Well, I was surprised…” Eric said, “I guess. I liked it—a lot.”

  “I know you liked it,” Shit said, “the way you was huggin’ on my damned head. I liked it, too.”

  “That’s ’cause I was real sensitive. And if you moved too much, I was gonna have to shout out.”

  “You can do a little shoutin’,” Shit said. “That ain’t gonna hurt nobody.” Both of them laughed. “Dynamite don’t think you should do too much fuckin’ before you go in to work. But that’s my favorite time. And makin’ guys I really like shoot off in my mouth where I can feel it and taste it is fun. You tasted good, too. I’m gonna have that taste in my mouth all mornin’. I may not even say nothin’ no more—so I can just enjoy it while I’m slingin’ shit. ”

  “Yeah…” Eric looked around the dark road. “It was fun. Should we be doin’…this, though?” Eric lifted their joined fists. “Suppose that police car comes back?”

  “It won’t,” Shit said. “Besides. You can’t get arrested just for this—I live in the Dump. So it don’t matter,” which didn’t make a lot of sense. But Eric let it slide.

  At the dock, Dynamite and the pickup waited.

  “What the fuck you two been doin’?” Dynamite said. “It’s time to take this stuff to the Bottom.”

  “Bottom?” Eric said. “That was the name of a friend of mine, back in Atlanta.”

  From the middle of the truck seat, Shit grinned. “Did you fuck ’im?” (In the bedroom talk flowering lazily among them in their previous afternoons at the cabin, Shit had bragged to Eric about his—if not Dynamite’s—fooling around over the years with practically everyone who lived at their end of the Dump…)

  “Naw. But I should have.” Then Eric said, “He lived in our building. I was scared my dad would find out.”

  “Well, my dad’s good about that. ’Cause he’s a faggot, too—like me.”

  When they joined him under the dock light, Dynamite said, “Hey, I’m glad you two hooked up. I thought you might miss each other, when I run Shit up there near your place.”

  “I sucked his dick,” Shit said. “I took ’im right off in the bushes beside the road, got down on my damned knees, and sucked him till he shot. He shoots almost as much as you do—not as much as Al. But I felt it. I ain’t never took Eric’s load all in my mouth at once, before, ’cause you always wanna see some of it and play in it. But it was nice.”

  “Um…yeah,” Eric said, surprised.

  “He really liked it, too. So don’t talk about me not suckin’ no dick. We seen a police car. But that wasn’t nothin’. They didn’t even stop.”

  At the wheel, Dynamite glanced over at him—and took the truck onto a narrow road. (Eric wondered if the glance was an accusation of cowardice or an offer of sympathy.) “See, I told ’im if he wanted to keep you around, he better catch a little more of what he pitches.”

  “It’s nice suckin’,” Shit declared. “’Cause I know you’re feelin’ what I’m feelin’ when you doin’ it to me. And there ain’t no fuckin’ thing that feels better.”

  Dynamite chuckled. The truck pulled forward.

  *

  Working with Eric that day, Shit and Dynamite finished the houses along the Runcible Road toward eleven. Dynamite said, “Now, like I told you, we gotta take all this over to the Bottom, see, and toss it.”

  “I can show off my new socks to Al, there. Hey, these are really great!”

  “Honestly,” Eric said, “it’s nothin’. I’m glad you like ’em.”

  At the storage Dumpster beside an abandoned railroad car, they reloaded the truck.

  Twenty minutes after that, when the sky had begun to lighten, Dynamite turned the truck down a path where the brush whispered on the sides, till they reached an eight-foot fence topped with helixes of razor wire. Dynamite climbed out to lift the horseshoe hasp from the vertical pole, then pushed the gate back. The bottom grated on a round of cement. In the truck again, they rolled through to pull up by a shack that looked as if, years ago, it had been painted gray. A black man stood to the side, in jeans and work boots. He wore a black knitted cap and a white and orange road vest, but, like Shit, no shirt. “Recognize ’im?” Shit asked Eric. “The nigger there’s Al Havers. He fucked your white ass—in Turpens.”

  Eric recognized the black man with the shaved head.

  Again in the truck, Dynamite had already started to back up and turn the truck around, to back further toward what looked like a cliff. For a second, Eric thought they were going over, and lurched forward to grab the cab window’s edge. But Dynamite set the hand brake, then called out the window, “Hey, Al. This here’s our new helper, Eric.”

  “You got another one now?” Al said, with not much enthusiasm.

  Shit grinned. Then he called out, “Hey, Al. You gonna let me get out this time so I can show Eric here how to empty the truck? I gotta show you my new socks, too. They’re green. You can see ’em right through the holes in my sneakers.”

  “Dynamite—” Al ambled over—“tell yo’ nigger bastard I ain’t lettin’ him set foot on dis ground if he don’t have some real work shoes. He know dat—you both do. He can’t come around here barefoot. I done told you guys dat before. Dis ain’t play, now.”

  “Oh, I see,” Shit said. “Oh. So, you don’t want me to get no splinters in my toes, here. Al’s a real thoughtful feller. That horse dick he got swinging between his legs is just full of that t
here compassion.”

  Ignoring Shit, Dynamite was saying, “He ain’t gettin’ out the truck.” He blinked at Eric. “Come on, son. Get y’ass out. I’ll show you how we do it. Shit knows he got to stay inside.”

  Eric opened the door and jumped down. Junk strewed the dirt. Coils of cable lay about, metal wrapping loose here and there along it, points protruding. A pile of hubcaps leaned against the shack’s wall. Eric started toward the cliff edge, curious to see what lay over it. Dozens and dozens of birds made their loud arcs on the sky.

  “And you—?” Al said.

  Eric looked back.

  “You only got on a pair of runnin’ shoes? Hey, I ain’t gonna let you work here less’n I see work gloves and a good pair of shoes—or you stay in de damned truck with Shit. We don’t got no insurance for dumb ass nigger kids or dumb ass white kids what cut deah feet all to hell an’ come down with tet’nus or somethin’. I wouldn’t let my kids come out here like dat—” His next look went to Dynamite. “I don’t see why you brung dis one along if he ain’t got no proper shoes.” That nod went back to Shit, who grinned out the truck’s side window.

  At the mention of work gloves, Eric turned back from the cliff’s edge to the truck.

  Shit must have read his mind, because he reached in and handed out the striped gray canvas.

  Dynamite said, “I was just wonderin’, Al—” (beside him, Eric felt Dynamite nudge him with his elbow—) “if’n you wanted to take this boy here over to the cabin for a bit, while I’m tossin’ sacks, maybe mess around a little with him. You two was getting’ it on pretty well the last time I seen you together, and it’s his birthday…”

  “His birthday, huh?” Al took a leisurely step, then—slowly—frowned. “Oh…yeah. You’s dat white kid Jay brung into that Turpens shithole wid us all, ain’t you?” Al let his head fall to the side. “How’d you like dat load I sent you home wid in my used scumbag?”

  Eric said, “It was…real nice!” He glanced at Dynamite, and grinned. “Yeah…” He looked at back at Al—