Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  HEIRESSES MEET ON GILEAD

  Indistinct with the early technology of another century, it showed three women sitting at a lawn table, in bizarrely outdated summer dresses, identified, beneath it, as:

  Mabel Dodge, Nancy Cunard, and Doris Pitkin.

  The date was 1923.

  Beside it was another, larger picture, under glass—this one an actual photo, maybe eight by twelve, glossy, with a thin white border. Looking back and forth between them, Eric realized the women were the same—indeed they even wore the same clothing they’d worn in the newsprint picture. The table behind them was the same. So was the background vegetation. The two pictures might have been taken minutes apart, even less. (He imagined the photographer calling, “Now, just the ladies…”) But in this picture, each woman stood with a man. The man beside Mabel was a solid looking fellow, in western clothing, who could easily have been an America Indian. Black braids hung at the side of his head. The man beside Nancy and the man beside Doris were both distinctly African American. Were they servants? Eric wondered—though the tall and heavily braceleted Nancy had her hand on the black man’s arm, which made Eric doubt it.

  Below was a line of names:

  Mabel Dodge, Tony Lewan, Nancy Cunard, Harry Crowder, Doris Pitkin, Robert Kyle…

  White light filled the windows both sides of the wall. As he looked, the photograph turned black. In the rectangle of glass over it, now Eric saw the reflected books and bookshelves on the wall behind. He stepped backward, then turned to look at the other bookshelves, as lightning lit them. Thunder filled up the room; the lightning faded. For moments Eric thought the tower was cracking and crumbling. And moments later, again he was looking at the three couples smiling under glass.

  Though Eric had been a high school history buff, his expertise did not overlap enough of the history of the artistic production of the twenties, thirties, and forties to explain the gathering.

  Standing in the middle of the floor for five, six, seven breaths, waiting for more thunder, he walked back to the stairhead and, holding the banister, started down. Only when he had gone some seven steps, did a flash behind startle him, so that for a moment his shadow folded before him, down the stairs’ maroon carpet.

  In the flare, after two more steps, thunder came again, more distant—as if the house were trying to absorb it.

  At the bottom again, in the grand second floor sitting room, Eric walked from the arch; and again flinched, because—outside—the branch had moved, and, again, he had been sure the metal beast had swept its great arm and a great wing through the moonlight.

  Catching his breath, and trying to suppress the tingling that tidaled his back and thighs, his belly and arms, Eric hurried away through the chairs and sofas and tables, trying to see the entrance to the stairs that would let him return to the ground floor.

  “I’m not going to find it,” he whispered, wondering if he would end up sleeping, naked, on one of these couches—when he stepped around the edge of a bookshelf and found himself at the descending steps.

  Down in the corridor with the doors to Jay and Mex’s room, the bathroom, and his own bedroom, finally Eric stopped. He walked toward his own—it was an inch ajar—then hesitated.

  Because he heard something up the corridor.

  Eric looked to see Jay’s door pull in and a tousled Jay, naked as Eric himself, lumber into the hall. Only after three steps did Jay glance up and see him. “Hey, there, puppy. What’s a matter? Can’t sleep?”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “I’m okay. I was just…Hey, Jay?”

  Lumbering by, Jay frowned. “What…?”

  “Can I come and bunk in with you guys?”

  “It’s kinda late for that, puppy.” Jay headed on toward the bathroom at the hall’s end. Back over his heavy blond shoulder, he said, “We gotta be up before daybreak.” Walking away, he rubbed his big, colorful arm with a blond hand. “You shoulda asked about that earlier, if that’s what you was interested in.”

  “Oh,” Eric said—he thought he had. Pushing into his own room, moving slowly lest he stub a toe or bark a shin, finally his thighs bumped the mattress…

  —someone sitting on his bed’s edge woke Eric. “Oh, Mex. Hey. I guess it’s time to get up…?”

  Mex had turned on the lamp.

  As Eric pushed out from the cover, Mex—who had on his pants but no shirt—enfolded Eric in his arms. Eric hugged him back. Jesus, it felt good holding the thick, warm-chested fellow. Mex released him, put his thumb tip to his mouth, and tilted up fisted fingers, which Eric knew, by now, meant, Want some coffee? (or, when he did the same thing to Jay, with the fingers a little tighter, Want a beer?).

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “That’s a good idea. Lemme get my pants on.”

  At the kitchen table, they drank from their mugs. The windows were as dark as they had been at dinner.

  It made Eric feel strange.

  The walk back through the woods reminded him of his four-thirty hikes through road and meadow to meet Shit and Dynamite.

  When they entered the boat house, Mex flipped on the florescent lights: Eric saw Jay’s Technicolor arms as the boatman stood with one work shoe on one of the metal cleats by the dock edge. He remembered Jay had left the house in only a thermal vest. As nonchalantly as he could, Eric said, “I thought maybe me and you and Mex were gonna…you know, fuck around out here. The way me and Dynamite and Shit do in the Dump.” Even Eric could hear that he sounded petulant—the tone he’d wanted to avoid.

  Stepping down onto the scow’s deck under the light from the boat house ceiling, then looking back, Jay raised a hempen brow. “Yeah? You did? Now, what made you think that? Nobody said nothin’ about fuckin’—you sure didn’t.” With one great hand (and his toothless grin), Jay gripped the rail.

  Mex had wandered over to where the ropes were wrapped around a metal cleat on the scow’s deck. Squatting, he began unwrapping the hawser.

  “I don’t know.” Eric shrugged. “Maybe…because, well, how we done back at the truck stop.” Without the pressure of desire, he might have been able to explain that his first afternoon with Shit and Dynamite had formed the expectations of his visit to Jay and Mex’s. Their behavior, however, had been as unexpected as the house itself.

  “Now, you ain’t eighteen yet. You’re still seventeen. What did you think? We was gonna jump on you, bring you down, and rape you in our own guest bed?”

  “I don’t know…” Eric swallowed, looking around for something to do. If he could help, he knew he’d feel better. “It was a little…funny.” Eric didn’t shrug. He didn’t feel like shrugging.

  “Well, yeah,” Jay said. “A good fuck is nice sometimes—especially with your friends.”

  “I guess…maybe you don’t think you should do nothin’ with kids under eighteen…?” It was more than petulant. It was plaintive.

  “I didn’t say that. But I do think that if you’re under eighteen, you got to be able to ask for it, clear and direct—especially if you want it from older guys. You know, this sex business ain’t about mind readin’. It’s about sayin’ what you want, gettin’ an answer—yes, no—and acceptin’ it.”

  “How did I ask for it back at the truck stop?”

  Stepping up on the damp dock matt, Jay crouched, leaned forward, and grabbed his crotch—with a sudden and surprising grin. (Eric remembered Dynamite, outside Miss Louise’s in the parking lights.) “‘Can we do stuff in there?’ As I recall, puppy, them was the first words out your mouth I ever heard.” Jay straightened up, his hirsute chest broadening between the padded vest’s edges. “And the second was: ‘Can I suck your dick? I do it good.’ Sure, I like suckin’ and fuckin’ with puppies like you. But I figure if you ain’t big enough to ask for it, then you ain’t big enough to do it. That’s all.” Jay gave his crotch two, three rubs, then dropped his hand. “That’s a nice thing about havin’ a big ol’ house. You can do pretty much anything you want in there, and nobody else really got to know about it. But you still got to know what
you want and be ready to ask.”

  A hand fell on Eric’s shoulder. He looked aside to see Mex—who was grinning. Then he looked down.

  Mex’s fly was open.

  Mex’s thick penis was in his other, wide, callused hand.

  Eric closed his own hand on the Mexican’s warm cock. “Oh, Jesus, Mex—thanks.” (Mex…growled. Was that a laugh?) “Yeah, hey—I wanna do…somethin’, at least…” He took another breath, and chuckled, hearing his own nervousness. “For a minute, I thought you guys had given up on me. Can’t we do…somethin’ —?”

  Jay moved toward them, and put his arms around them both.

  “…before we get home?” Eric finished. From outside, a first sun sliver lay brightly along the dock matt. “Look,” Eric said, “can I please suck some fuckin’ dick?”

  Jay stepped back. “Jesus, boy. I don’t know—I mean, I didn’t take no shower this mornin’—neither one of us had time.” He nodded toward Mex. “And the truth is, this is one of them days Mex didn’t even have time to get to it. I got so much fuckin’ cheese under my fuckin’ skin—I mean, all yesterday’s and the day-before’s—the damn thing feels twice as heavy as it usually do, with all the shit in there.” The bottom of the vest’s armholes were all frayed and stained with summer’s perspiration. (In the scow cabin, Jay kept a denim work shirt hanging on the back door, like one of Mike’s, which, as summer had progressed, he wore less and less.) He began to claw—slowly—at his jeans. “And I know this fuckin’ spic got enough fuckin’ dick scuz in ’im for a half a dozen fuckin’ enchiladas. See, that stuff up in there makes me so fuckin’ horny, I don’t even know if I can wait long enough for you to get on your knees and tug it outa my damned pants. I may just shoot right in your eye—or your fuckin’ ear. You ever had somebody so fuckin’ hot that he shot it all in your hair while you was on your knees tryin’ to put it in your mouth? I mean, I’ll try to hold off. But—” Jay sucked his lower lip—“I don’t know if I’ll be able to—”

  “Jesus, Jay!” Eric said. “You’re gonna make me come in my jeans, talkin’ like that—even if you’re kiddin’!”

  Beside them, his dick still in his fist, at Jay’s performance Mex was rocking forward and back, laughing louder and louder.

  “What the fuck makes you think I’m kiddin’? Will you—” in mock anger Jay yanked down his fly—“please hurry the fuck up?”

  Later, when they were on the boat and Eric was standing under the wheel shelter on the scow with Jay, and Mex had come up to stand at the back of the space, one bare foot propped up on its toes, Eric said, “Hey—you know I really liked it, Jay, when you took a piss in my mouth. I mean a real one.” Eric drew a breath. “I mean, Mex—” he glanced back—“I think I can understand what you’re about with all that. I wish the fuck I could ask Dynamite to do it…maybe when we’re joking around, I could get Shit to.”

  Jay looked out across the shattered flat of water, still dark under half light. “Whyn’t you ask him? You didn’t have no trouble askin’ me.”

  “That’s ’cause you and Mex already do that…stuff.” Eric shrugged. “With Dynamite, I just…don’t think I can. It’s like I…want it too much, I’m afraid he’d say no—and I wouldn’t know what to do. I mean, hell, I admit it. I’m scared.”

  “Maybe—” and Eric saw something that might have been a smile (or maybe a frown) in the curling gold that hid Jay’s lower face—“you’re just gonna have to learn to deal with that, scared or not. Anyway, right now we gotta get you back to your mama’s.” The three of them stood in the sea’s whispering, as they pulled nearer and nearer the Harbor.

  *

  That night in the mainland woods, in bed on the porch back at Barbara’s trailer, Eric dreamed about looking over a cliff into the Bottom, to see a city, flickering with green fire, along all its alleys and avenues, luminous and putrescent, with doorways and signboards and letters on them in languages he could not read—Japanese? Sanskrit? Russian? Hebrew? Greek? Windows in its tenements were backed with sky—a city glowing, growing, shifting up from the Bottom, beside the ocean. Among great mansions and falling apart cabins, for a while in the dream he was in a bare room, without light on the ceiling or any lamp, looking out at gold and green flickers through and around a yellowish window curtain. Then he was walking through streets not yet finished, coursing with black water, dropping suddenly onto lower shelves, over whose edges he could look down and see urban offal, pulsing, weaving, changing, as if on a great machine. All of the refuse was churned and braided into walls and bridges and pipes and electric wires and antennas. Four and five feet above streaming liquid, huge gold fish floated between stone walls, coming from the mouth of subterranean tunnels, passing a silhouetted fountain, to be caught and lovingly reformed by a naked woman with red, living hair. Sometimes someone held his hand, but if it was Dynamite or Mike or Shit—or even Mex—he wasn’t sure. Serpents flew and cockatrices preened on teal beams, gulls and eagles and dragons shrieked—in celebration or in warning? He wasn’t sure, but he careened, further and further through cobbled alleys, into city lots, empty, where, through shadows from the wire gates, herds of scorpions, seahorses, and spiders crawled at angles to his headlong lope.

  * * *

  [19] A WEEK LATER, when, at Dynamite’s, Shit and Dynamite lay down with Eric after work, the evening sun came in a gold spear through the Dump cabin window, bending at the wall corner. Eric got one rough, puffy tuft of Shit’s beard in his mouth and sucked it and chewed on it, till all the salt was out and there was only its wiry texture in his mouth. Finally, he let go and asked, “You mind me doin’ that?”

  “Naw. Go on. It’s in’erestin’.” And a little later Shit said, “I wonder what’d happen if you sucked on my dick like that.” Outside, sea birds kept up their mewing, as they did all through the Dump. “I mean for hours and hours and hours.”

  On the other side of the bed, Dynamite chuckled. “I guess everybody thinks about that at one time or other. It’s one of them questions everybody eventually has.” Moving closer, he rubbed his rough hand low over Eric’s bare back. “You mind me doin’ that?”

  “No. Go on. It’s nice.”

  Dynamite slid nearer. “When I wasn’t that much older than you two, I set that up once, with a friend of mine. Kyle, actually. I’ll tell you both, either the cocksucker gets tired—or you get bored. It don’t take no hours and hours, neither.”

  “Naw.” Shit looked up at the cabin’s uneven ceiling. With one hand he nubbed the rough hair on his face. “I ain’t gonna get bored, believe me.” Shit’s other hand moved under his father’s on Eric’s back, and Eric realized their fingers had meshed to slide down to Eric’s naked rump. “I know that much already. “Hey—I don’t mean workin’ at it real hard. I mean just holdin’ it in your mouth, lazin’ your tongue around on it, so I could relax, drift off, maybe think about strange stuff.” Shit glanced down. “You wanna try that someday?”

  Eric looked up and said, “Sure.” Then he added, “I always wondered what it would be like if somebody stuck his dick up my ass and left it there for a few hours. He could fuck me when he wanted to, but mostly he’d just keep it in there and hold on to me and leave it sit.”

  Turning now, Shit pulled Eric closer. “That sounds good, cocksucker. And after we do that, we can tell the ol’ pig fucker here what he’s missin’.”

  Dynamite grunted from his side of the bed. “I forgot to tell you—your mama called and left me a voicemail. She’s goin’ out with Ron tonight, and they may be out late. She said she wondered if you wanted to stay over here—and if I would mind keepin’ you.” He chuckled, not looking at them. “Tomorrow’s a day off, too. Be nice to have you around—”

  “Damn,” Eric said. “Sure…”

  Eventually, Eric realized that what happened later that night was only because the next day was a day off.

  But with the yellowish light from the lamp beside the bed in his eyes, Eric woke to find naked Shit cross-legged on the mattress, while, w
ith his rich doggie smell, panting Tom lay on his back, one leg up and kind of kicking. On his side, Dynamite watched, head propped on a fist, while Shit gripped Tom’s bristly sheath, rubbing as the red, wet, white, and raw cock-stock with its irregular point thrust free further and further.

  Shit ginned at Eric. “Go on—suck this horny sonofabitch till he shoots in your mouth. My daddy likes to fuck that stuff when you got a load of it up in your face.”

  Dynamite grinned down at him, too.

  Eric said, “Huh…?”

  “Hey,” Shit said. “I’ll do it, if you want—”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “Naw, that’s okay. The damned dog’s got a dick.” He moved himself further down in the bed—“I’ll suck it—” then took the white and red stalk in his mouth. It was kind of slimy. And salty.

  Under the Atlanta highway, there’d been no sex with animals, but the men there had described and joked and spoken endlessly about sucking and fucking cows, horses, sheep, dogs, and goats so that Eric felt as if he owned the experience already. His mouth against Shit’s callused fist, he looked up to see Tom had put his head back and was vigorously tonguing with Dynamite who was licking back.

  “Oh, yeah,” Shit said. “I can feel it. This dog’s about ready to shoot. That’s why he was up here botherin’ us.”

  Tom hunched, quivered, and stayed hunched—and Eric received the first, narrow, three or four second stream of dog cum, followed two seconds later, by another. And another—and another—and another.

  “He gonna be doin’ that for a whole minute,” Shit explained. “Don’t spill none, if you can help it.”

  Eric was surprised—and excited—by how different a dog’s orgasm was from a human’s. As well he marveled how quickly that led Dynamite, then Shit right after, to follow and fuck his face, while Eric gripped first Dynamite’s buttock and worked a thumb up his ass, then held Shit by his lean, thrusting hips till he erupted after his dad. Among their sexual repertoire it was the only thing whose passion made Eric suspect it was beyond negotiation, though for all that, it felt wonderfully settling, wonderfully safe—and among his favorites. When they’d laid their two-in-the-morning loads on top of hefty Tom’s—Eric came in Dynamite’s hand, lubricated with a handful of spit—and all four, finally, lay, panting and nuzzling knees, toes, claws, hips, muzzle, or tongue, while Dynamite licked his fingers.