Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Haulin’ garbage. You remember the guys who helped us get the stuff to Barb’s? I work with them, now.”

  “Oh,” Mike said. “Well, that sounds okay. They seemed like good guys.”

  “Yeah, they’re real nice. I like ’em…a lot.”

  “Well…that’s good.”

  “It sure is better than goin’ to school.”

  At the other end of the phone, there was silence.

  Finally, Mike said, “I was just gonna ask you, if you was givin’ any thought to your schoolin’.”

  “Just that I don’t think I wanna go no more.”

  “You know Doneesha just got started in nursin’ school a couple of days ago. She says she really likes it—and she’s gonna be able to make a lot more money. And I had to go to the technical college for my weldin’.”

  “That’d be fine,” Eric said, “if I was gonna be a nurse—or a welder. But there ain’t no classes you gotta take, at least down here, to be a garbage man. And it’s good work—it’s hard. But it’s fun.”

  “You told Barb, yet?”

  “Naw. I ain’t really talked about it.”

  “Don’t be surprised if you have a’ argument on your hands, when you get ’round to it.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “Maybe.”

  “You really think droppin’ out of school’s okay?”

  “It ain’t like droppin’ out in the middle. I just wouldn’t start in September.”

  “Well, if it’s what you really wanna do, I guess so.”

  “It sure would be nice. So far, I really like the job.”

  “How long you been workin’ with ’em?”

  “A week—ten days. Maybe nine…”

  On the other end of the phone, Mike laughed. “Oh…!” He laughed again. “Well—all I can say is, see what it feels like after a month. Or three.”

  “Yeah, that would be kinda smart, wouldn’t it?”

  “Smarter than makin’ up your mind right away. Hey, I got your number. In a few weeks I’ll call you, maybe—or you can call me. We’ll see what you’re feelin’ like, then. You got my number in your phone, don’t you?”

  “Um…well, I know it. But I’ll put it in.”

  “Good. I gotta get back to work, though. Okay. It’s nice to know you’re doin’ okay. Remember, workin’ hard is always good. I love you, boy.”

  “Me, too,” Eric said. He took the phone from his ear and closed it.

  Next to the men’s room door stood a man who looked to be about thirty-five or forty. He was leaning against the wall, and as Eric looked at him, he dropped his hand from his crotch and looked off down the hall.

  Eric frowned. Was the guy cruising him? Two other guys came out of the men’s room. Eric wondered what would happen if he sat there, but he also wanted to get home to help with dinner. And the guy was not as interesting looking as either Dynamite or Shit.

  Suddenly the guy stood up, and left.

  Probably Shit knew what he was talking about, having to wait a long time out here.

  So Eric left, too.

  Twenty yards along the mall corridor, Eric was trying to remember which direction to go for the shuttle back to the Harbor, when someone called, “Helloooo-ooo!”

  He turned to see Serena, in a purple and orange headscarf, carrying three very large shopping bags, which bulged out the top with cushions and pillows.

  “Oh,” Eric called. “Hey…!”

  She came up to him, looking proud. “The bed place was having a sale, and I’ve been wanting something to add some life to my little eagle’s nest, up over the grocery in Runcible. That’s where I live. I wish you and Barbara was over there—it’s so lonely out where you guys are. Are you goin’ back to the Harbor? Or are you gonna hang out here for a while?”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “I was gonna get the shuttle back.”

  “Oh, come on,” Serena said. “You’ll be waitin’ for that thing half-an-hour, forty minutes. Lemme give you a ride. I’m finished here, anyway.”

  “Hey,” Eric said, “thanks. You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure,” Serena said. “Besides, I still have to steal a cup of that Dutch diesel fuel from your mama.” She turned and looked at him under lowered brows. “You like that stuff your mama makes and calls coffee?”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “I don’t see how she drinks it.”

  Serena grunted. “Oh, God—me neither. But there ain’t nobody else around here I have more fun sitting with and tattlin’ about folks—that’s if she ain’t too busy takin’ care of Ronny Bodin. Hey, I’m parked in the back over by Penny’s.” They turned by a square glass column into which etched letters told where the movies and the perfume and the comics were. Down another hall, guys in jeans ambled with their wives and girlfriends among crowds of loud adolescents.

  *

  The next day, in the truck, Eric told Dynamite he had a cell phone now, as they jounced through the morning.

  Dynamite said, “You know the best way to use that fuckin’ thing, don’t you?”

  Wedged between Dynamite and Shit, Eric looked at the lighted numbers in the dark. “Huh? How?”

  “You put my number in yours. I’ll put yours in mine.” A morning highway light swept through the cab. “Then we both forget we got ’em. And you just be where you’re supposed to be—and I’ll always come get you when I’m supposed to get you. That way, don’t neither one of us have to ever use the motherfucker.” Another light swept through.

  Eric looked at Shit—

  —who was smiling, with his missing teeth, sexy, and superior: “I don’t use them damn things, ’cause I can’t read the letters.”

  Eric wasn’t sure if the annoyance in Shit’s voice was at the phones or at himself.

  * * *

  [15] ERIC’S PRESENT, WHICH came home that Monday, three days late, from Barb—in a square, green and white Atlas carton—was a set of work shoes.

  “I wanted to give them to you Saturday, on your birthday. I went to the mall outside Hemmings. But they’d run out of them,” Barbara explained, “in your size.”

  “Thanks, Barb!” Surrounded in the box by green tissue, they had reinforced steel toes (like Dynamite’s) it said so on the box top Eric held. “Hey, I really…needed these.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m glad I’m giving you something you can use.” She had brought home ice cream, too—and a vanilla birthday cake, whose white box with green letters from the Hemmings Mall Bakery still sat on the table, not yet put away. “We can have your…real birthday now. I know you’ll be in bed in an hour-and-a-half. Hey, I know I keep asking you the same question. But is it sixteen or seventeen, honey? I can’t keep it straight. You’re going to think your mother’s retarded.” Then she added, “Ron is coming by to take me out, later—but you’re going to be asleep by then. That won’t bother you, will it?”

  “Naw,” he said, wondering why she’d think it would.

  * * *

  [16] SHORTLY, SHIT GOT an open-topped wooden box from Black Bull across the road in which to keep the socks Eric had given him, under his own unused bed—at the end where, when they came out the drier, Shit’s clothes lay in an unfolded heap. Eric’s gifts Shit folded neatly, the unused pairs to one end, the ones he’d worn for two days of work folded and pushed to the other. At the end of two weeks, he safety pinned them together—Dynamite’s suggestion—and put them in the wash, dried them, took the pins out, and folded the socks and pushed them to the unused side, while loose safety pins slid over the bottom.

  Shit never actually said thank you for them.

  But once Eric had given them, he’d smile at Eric off and on through the rest of the month with what looked to be a species of incommunicable joy. And whenever he folded them up, or put them in the machine, he always looked over at Eric with the same smile. Six months later, he was still taking them off, folding them up, and putting them away, every day after they finished their run.

  And still smiling.

  Once Dynamite said
, a little grumpily, “He knows he can wear any clothes I got—socks, shirts, shoes. But Shit likes runin’ around lookin’ like a bumpkin.”

  “’Cause I get more nookie that way. Even Eric says he likes it. Hey—you wanna wear some of mine? I mean, the ones that Eric gave me? I like to wear Eric’s ’cause he likes takin’ ’em off me so much. If you don’t wear some socks in your shoes, you don’t hardly get no smell. That’d be okay…” Shit looked questioningly at Eric.

  “Sure,” Eric said. “You can both share ’em, if you want.”

  The next morning, Dynamite said, soberly, “Hand me a pair of them things out your box.”

  And, grinning, Shit did.

  After work, cross-legged on the bedroom rug, beside the bed, Eric stripped off first Dynamite’s (and gave his big foot a hug, then a sniff and another hug) and then Shit’s.

  Dynamite smiled quietly behind four days of unshaven moustache. Shit had his happiest, goofiest smile. And when Eric got tugged up onto the bed by both of them, in a complicated hug, everyone seemed pretty happy.

  That smile and Shit’s playful, plentiful sex were clearly Shit’s way of saying thanks at an intensity that was as luminous as it had been on the first day. Sometimes, watching Shit sitting on the bed’s edge, taking them out or putting them way, Eric felt he could hear Shit thinking: I got socks to wear! I got socks! Then he’d grin at Eric again as if he’d just received them.

  * * *

  [17] AUGUST’S LAST DAYS brought a steady breeze in from the water, which, on the twenty-third and again on the twenty-fifth and the twenty-seventh opened into full out rain. During let-ups, the truck window by which Eric regularly sat took on a cataract of mist, which, when he wiped it away with his hand’s heel—so that for moments he could see a gray-green lawn, pine trees slipping beside the road, or an aluminum sided house with a window crossed by a branch shadow—grew back its fog in three breaths. Dynamite slowed before another driveway and, leaning forward between them, Shit whispered, “Come on. Let’s work!”

  The morning of the thirty-first was drizzly, though by noon clouds had unwrapped the sun.

  That afternoon, Shit and Eric were walking—both barefoot that day—on the road’s red mud, up from Dump Corners, where Dynamite had let them off, and were coming home with their eyes full of the light on cabin walls and sides of trees that seemed to have been gone for weeks.

  They neared Chef Ron’s, with the grove of pine beyond it…or was it Bull’s: Black Bull was on the steps with a coil of rope over his big shoulder. Whiteboy squatted, scrawny and naked, at his feet.

  But it was Chef’s place. Bull turned to the newel under the porch roof and ran the rope through some kind of hook there—then gestured to Whiteboy, who stood up.

  In his leather vest, Black Bull lifted Whiteboy’s bony arm and tied the rope around it, up near the shoulder, then again down at his wrist.

  Eric said, “What’re they doin’?”

  “I dunno,” Shit said. “Probably deliverin’ one of Bull’s messages.”

  “Huh?”

  Now Bull squatted and ran the rope around Whiteboy’s lean thigh, then again around his ankle. He worked quickly with deliberate movements. Then he was over at the far post on the porch, and tugged the rope—which ran through some metal eyelets screwed into the lintel, across the top. Whiteboy’s arm and his leg were tugged up and out, so that he stood on only one foot. His deep armpit looked as if it had been hollowed by a rotated fist. A tendon stood out taut from groin to leg.

  Bull went back to the other side. The rope formed a web, Whiteboy at its center. Moments later, Bull looped another length around Whiteboy’s scrawny ribs.

  Shit stopped about fifteen feet away, so Eric stopped, too.

  Bull said, “That tight enough for you, you stupid piece of shit?”

  Whiteboy grunted, then looked over at Shit and Eric and grinned. “This nigger’s tying me up real good. He knows how to do this stuff.”

  Lumbering in his big boots, footfalls oddly soft, Bull came around the front, looped the rope about Whiteboy’s head, knotted it, then, after running it through two more eyelets set into the porch pole, grabbed Whiteboy’s ankle and tied that. Whiteboy lost his balance and began to swing from the ropes. One arm hung free. Ankle high, his naked bony feet were stained with rusty mud. (Bull grunted, “Y’okay?” and went to the side, where he hauled on one of the ropes.) So were the edges of Bull’s boots. The entire web, with Whiteboy in it, rose between the porch poles.

  “Yeah,” Whiteboy said. “That’s good. Yeah, you really got me good now.”

  “I sure do, you honky piece of shit.”

  The door in the gray blue wall at the back of the porch opened. In a pair of jeans and an unbuttoned black shirt, Chef Ron first looked out, frowned, then stepped outside. “What the fuck are you—?”

  Whiteboy looked back over his shoulder. All the ropes had tightened, and he wasn’t swaying anywhere as much as he had been. Bull was tying up Whiteboy’s other arm. Whiteboy’s diminutive, uncut penis hung down one side of his high, tight nuts. “This nigger’s tyin’ me up real good, with no clothes on, right here on your goddam porch, so everybody who walks by gotta see me.”

  Chef Ron said, “So I gather…Bull, what are you—?”

  From inside, someone called, “Ron, what’s goin’ on?”

  Chef Ron called back over his shoulder, “I’ll be honest, Joey. I don’t know. But I sure don’t—”

  But now Bull vaulted over the porch railing and walked up to Ron. “Come on, see how I got him tied up there. I can show you just how I done it, too—”

  Ron frowned. “Now why do I wanna know how you truss up a—” at which point a younger black man, by about half a dozen years, came out on the porch, and said:

  “Jesus Christ—!”

  “You Joey, huh? Good.” In his big boots and his black vest, Bull said, “Hey—come on, both of you. Take a look how I done this, now.”

  “Come on, Bull,” Ron said. “Why you wanna tie this poor sonofabitch up on my porch like this?”

  “Why the hell not?” Bull said. “’Cause he likes it. That’s why. It’s humiliatin’.”

  Whiteboy said, over his shoulder. “Yeah, Bull knows how to tie up any motherfucker. I can’t move at all. See, now he can whip me—stick stuff up my ass.” In the web, naked Whiteboy shrugged. “He can suck on my dick, if he wants. Now everybody can see what a tiny dick I got. And I can’t do shit about it.”

  Bull dropped a big hand on the younger Joey’s arm—he was wearing what looked like an old high school jacket. “You want somebody doin’ you like that?”

  Joey chuckled. “Well, you know—maybe, sometimes. I guess I…”

  “Then lemme show you both how I done it. That’s what I was sent over here, for. One or the other of you been talkin’ to Dr. Greene. See, the main part of it, you gotta use a double rope for the support, here, here, and across here.”

  Eric felt Shit’s elbow against his side.

  “You want me to tie you up like that?”

  “Huh?” Eric whispered. “Naw—I don’t think so. I mean…No. I don’t.”

  Shit said, “’Cause Bull knows all these fancy rope tricks and things.” Overhead birds—two, then a third—gave out rough calls.

  Bull said, “It supports ’im in enough places where there ain’t none of them gonna hurt ’im. Hey, fuckface—tell ’im about the safeword.”

  “Yeah,” Whiteboy said. “I got a safeword, too. Somethin’ I can say if somethin’ goes wrong and I need to get down—but I ain’t never used it, yet. Except when we givin’ demonstrations, like this one. But I can say it any old time I want—and Bull gonna let me go, no matter what he’s doin’, see?”

  Bull brought Joey, in his red and blue jacket, over to the web that held Whiteboy like an albino insect. Bull pointed. “You see this line up here? That’s the one you tug on to raise and lower the whole thing.”

  Whiteboy looked forward, at Eric and Shit. “Bull does this stuff re
al good. See, we got messages to deliver—and this is how we do it. We show people how you get it done. We can come if the sun is out shinin’ or even if there’s rain’—“

  Suddenly Bull moved across to the other side of dangling Whiteboy, grabbed a rope, pulled it—and Whiteboy flung up an arm and twisted in the air. The ropes all slid through their eyelets at once and Whiteboy dropped in a naked crouch on the porch’s upper step. One of the ropes fell over his shoulder, the others lay around him on the boards. One was still loosely around his wrist:

  “—see there?” Grinning, Whiteboy looked up.

  “That’s his safe word,” Bull said. “‘Rain.’ The second he says that, no matter what, I stop what I’m doin’, I don’t care what it is, and pull the safety—and the whole thing comes loose at once.”

  “Now, you gotta learn how to fall in that thing,” Whiteboy said, standing, rubbing at his groin. “Soon as you feel it go loose, you gotta throw your left arm up and over, so you turn proper. Couple of times, man, when I was first learnin’ all this shit, I plumped down on my goddam bony whiteboy ass. Nigger like to busted his gut, laughin’ at me—’cause I looked so stupid and surprised. But now, see, I know how to do it.”

  “So you wanna learn how this is done?” Bull asked.

  Chef Ron was looking a little bewildered.

  Joey laughed. “Come on, Ron. Let ’im show us.”

  Sort of resigned, Ron said, “Okay…”

  Boots silent on the steps, Bull came down to turn before the house. “I can have anyone of you up there again in five minutes…or all three of you, if you want—”

  “Come on,” Eric said. “Let’s go home. I wanna try tyin’ you up in the bed sheets.”

  “Hey,” Shit said, “I don’t wanna get tied up.”

  “Good,” Eric said. “’Cause I don’t wanna get tied up, either.” As they walked back, Eric said: “But I guess they like it.” He looked at the road, with footprints on one side and the other of the central tuft down the middle. Dynamite’s cabin was beyond the grass and up the slope. When they’d gone half the distance to Bull and Whiteboy’s cabin, Eric stopped.