Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  He divided the potato salad in two, covered one bowl with foil and left it in the refrigerator, put the rest in a plastic container with a blue top, and carried it over to the Dump.

  * * *

  [22] SUN-BURNED FOREARMS crossed over his bib overalls, Dynamite leaned against the cabin corner. Gulls and blue spans among rumpled silver made the kind of day the summer people called perfect—though the three had knocked off work an hour early, and, Dynamite said, he dared any motherfucker to complain. Within smelling distance someone was barbecuing ribs.

  It was a hot Indian summer.

  Dynamite wore no shirt. His overalls’ straps did not quite cover either of his day-old tit rings, gold on his sun-browned chest, in the chestnut hair.

  “The ones Jay got was surgical steel.” Dynamite scrunched his unshaven chin down into his neck to look. “But I like these more. That’s the kind the niggers around here always get. Maybe that’s ’cause I live over here with ’em in the Dump. It was funny, though—this woman, big as a house, stickin’ a needle right through them things. It was Tank who done it. She surprised me, too. She had me sittin’ on that old, enamel, like-a-dentist chair they got in the back, and told me to take a deep breath and count to three.” It was perhaps his fifth time through the tale since he’d gotten them—with Jay—yesterday on his day off. “Only as soon as I breathed in, she goddam stuck me! By the time I got to two, she had that sucker in!” Possibly, Eric considered, it was Dynamite’s sore chest that had made him quit work early. “Then she done the other one, before I’d even settled with the first. She give me this aerosol can, too—it ain’t nothin’ but seawater. Or just plain salt water, for all I know. I’m supposed to spray ’em a couple of times a day for a week. Hey, son—” which was to Eric— “you wanna spray your daddy’s titties?” At the same time, he dropped his hand on Shit’s naked shoulder; he stood shirtless and just behind Eric. “After a week, you can go back to suckin’ on them things, like you like so much—if you want. Jay’s talkin’ about gettin’ some more pictures, on both his legs—from his ankles all the way up to his pecker. Cassandra’s busy drawin’ him up some ideas for ’em. But tattoos is a little much for me.”

  “Them rings is gonna be interestin’.” Shit frowned. “Maybe when I’m fuckin’ your asshole, I’ll reach around your chest and twiddle ’em for you.” They all laughed. “Surgical steel, huh?” Shit went on: “Naw, I think I like the gold ones, too.”

  “When you gonna get some, boy?”

  “Oh, I dunno.” Shit rubbed his head, where perspiration glittered under the edge of his tan hair. “Maybe a couple months after Hell freezes over.” Again they laughed.

  In the cabin’s kitchen, a pot of Eric’s Brunswick stew from the weekend was reheating—chicken, sausage, corn, carrots, celery, onions, mushrooms, and, over the top, two-and-a-quarter-cups-Bisquick-and-two-thirds-of-a-cup-of-milk dumplings.

  Shit had made a pail of lemonade. It sat—already half empty, along with some mismatched glasses—on the porch steps.

  Inside, half a plastic bag of ice was still wedged in the refrigerator freezer.

  “Hey,” Shit said, “did you ever talk to Jay about how he sent Bull over here to show you what to do with Eric?”

  “I talked to him and Mex both,” Dynamite said. “Why wouldn’t I? They know all about that stuff, ’cause they do it regular. Even though I liked it, see, I never had no kid around like Eric who really needed my piss before.” He grinned over at Eric. “A few times, some cocksucker over in the truck stop. But that’s all—and that, not for while.”

  “What’d you say?” Shit wanted to know.

  “What you think I said?” Dynamite answered. “I said ‘Thank you.’ Jay and Mex both say it sounds like I’m doin’ it right. I’m supposed to ask Eric here if he’s happy with it.” He gave a rough chuckle. “You happy, son? Is your daddy pissin’ in your mouth enough?” The chuckle became a laugh. “Damn, it tickles me to talk nasty like that to you, boy!”

  “Un-huh.” Eric swallowed. “Yeah…”

  “Just don’t forget how to suck regular.” Shit said. “I’d really miss that…”

  “I don’t think you got to worry,” Eric said, “not with all the dick cheese you niggers make.” (Father and son grinned at each other.) “Anybody hungry yet?”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “Me.”

  Overhead, Gulls swooped in from the sea and curved out again.

  * * *

  [23] BARBARA BROUGHT UP his finishing high school two more times.

  “Naw. I ain’t changed my mind. I still wanna keep my job.”

  During the final week of registration, though, she hadn’t mentioned it at all.

  Then the term was over—and he was still working with Dynamite and Shit.

  “I guess she’s gone along with you,” Dynamite said. “Goin’ to school woulda been good for you. I mean, you probably could do that stuff, the way you read and things. But I’m glad you’re still with us.”

  Shit grinned, then asked, almost shyly (they were lying, naked, in bed, all three, after work), “Hey, li’l brother. You’re such a cute blond-headed little nigger, can I fuck you?” He reached out and rubbed Eric’s butt, sliding one, then two fingers deep into the crevice between.

  “Sure.” Eric grinned back.

  “I’m gonna make you cum, too.”

  * * *

  [24] ERIC WAS OVER at Dynamite’s much of October. On the morning of November seventh, when they were lumbering out of bed, with only the bedside lamp on, and still horsing around before the pitch black windows—naked Dynamite stood beside the mattress. Shit was standing up on the bed, laughing; and, Dynamite’s dick in his mouth, Eric sat on the bed’s edge, also naked. Finished running his tongue under Dynamite’s skin around the head, with the hard shaft in his fist, Eric took it out of his mouth to say, “Come on. Go ahead—do it. You ain’t gone to the bathroom, yet.”

  “Naw,” Dynamite said. “Then I’ll have to smell that stink on your breath all mornin’.”

  Eric said, “You’re supposed to like it.”

  Fisting his cock and practically straddling Eric’s shoulder, Shit said, “Aw, you know damned well—he likes it as much as you like smellin’ that good stinky dick cheese. It’ll keep the pig fucker turned on, that’s all, and he’ll want you to suck him off half a dozen times over the rest of the day—’stead of haulin’ crap.” He laughed. “That’s what it do to me.”

  “Here—” Dynamite leaned back, taking his own cock in his rough fist, and, with the palm of his other hand, rubbed the head in its wrinkled overhang—“I’ll get it goin’ for you. Get ready…Okay, son, here it comes…” He dropped his hand from the half uncovered head, as it erupted.

  Eric moved his face forward. Dynamite moved his big foot over Eric’s on the gappy board floor. Standing on the bed, Shit put a foot on Eric’s thigh.

  “Oh, wow…look at it, there. Look at that yellow waterfall spillin’ into his mouth. Go on, drink it all down, Eric. Bet you gonna spill some—”

  “No he ain’t,” Dynamite said. “You don’t know your brother.”

  Eric held Dynamite’s bony hips.

  Two hands rested on Eric’s head. A third one, Shit’s, joined to press Eric’s face into Dynamite’s chestnut fur, while Eric took great, rhythmic swallows. He could feel Dynamite’s urine fill his belly.

  “Damn, that feels nice, son. Jay says Mex does this for ’im every fuckin’ mornin’, then sucks him off besides. But I swear, I don’t see how they get no work done. After I shoot, I get all lazy.”

  “Well, they don’t have to drive around and pull up twenty and forty pounds sacks of garbage all day. They just go back and forth on the scow.” Shit’s pumping fist brushed and brushed Eric’s shoulder. Shit’s foot shifted on the mattress by Eric’s hip. “You want Eric to stop when you run out?” His toes flexed on Eric’s thigh. “Or you want him to finish you off?”

  Dynamite slid his hands further around Eric’s head. “Since he started, h
e might as well go on.” The salt flush was hot and bitter and tonic. “Hey, you know I ain’t gonna do this for you more than but once a week.”

  “Why not?” Shit asked, voicing what, swallowing rhythmically, Eric wondered.

  “’Cause I got some pity on his goddam kidneys.”

  “Hell,” Shit said. “Doc Greene said you could do what he’s doin’ four or five times a day and it wouldn’t hurt ’im none. I’ll piss in your mouth any time you want, Eric. Guys do that up at The Slide all the time. You see Mex—after he drinks enough out of enough guys, eventually it comes shootin’ out his ass. Hey, you can have anything what comes outta me you want. It’s all I got to give you, anyway. You can have my fuckin’ puke if you want it. I told you about Frank, the guy from the factory? He was into that—what they call it? Projectile vomitin’—now that’s a real fuckin’ mess. But he would gimme these pills that made it easy to barf your cookies—”

  “I didn’t like ’im takin’ that stuff,” Dynamite said. “But he had to try out everything, you know…”

  “I only did it two or three times. I didn’t like it all that much, really.” Shit moved himself around. “Oh, yeah—back up a little, and lemme watch it spurtin’ in the white boy’s motherfuckin’ mouth. That’s really good.”

  Dynamite said, “I’m spillin’ on the bed, Shit—”

  “So the fuck what? I seen you piss in the bed, jump up and go work, let it dry and we didn’t changed them suckers for another two months—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Dynamite said (while Eric moved an inch to the side; warm urine rolled down one side of his chin), “but that was a long time ago, when you was really into all that nasty shit. And so was I—”

  Its acidic force cleansed morning itself for Eric.

  “Hey…” Then Dynamite chuckled. “What you tryin’ to do, Shit. Shoot a load in Eric’s goddam ear—?”

  Under the lamp on the night table, Dynamite’s cell phone chinked out The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

  Eric jumped a little, aware that Dynamite had not moved at all.

  Dynamite said, “Now who in hell is that supposed to be at this hour?” With a slight shift, his urine continued strong in Eric’s mouth.

  (Maybe once a month Randal would call with something about road conditions if there’d been a bad rain or, once, an accident…)

  A hand left Eric’s head. Without cutting his stream—it was so strong, Eric figured he couldn’t—Dynamite bent to the side, picked up his cell, and stood again. Above, Eric heard him say, “Hello…Oh…yes, ma’am…yeah. He’s here…Who? Obama?... He did?…You sure? I mean, it ain’t a joke or somethin’…huh? Yeah, well…Okay, just a second. Sure. He’s in the john. He’ll be out in a minute.”

  Without losing Dynamite’s cock, Eric tried to look up, over the ridges of the garbage man’s belly.

  “It’s your ma,” Dynamite called back over his shoulder, as if Eric was in the john. Finally, his water lessened. “Finish up, and come on out of the bathroom and take this.”

  Eric was surprised how unsurprised he was.

  A couple of final squirts—Eric swallowed them, went forward, then pulled back.

  Dynamite held the black and silver phone in a hand unwashed since yesterday. He rubbed Eric’s cheek, once sliding his broad, salty thumb with its mere third of a nail into Eric’s mouth.

  Dynamite’s cock still in one hand, Eric took the phone with the other, breathed in, sat back on the bed, and put his knee up. “Hey, Barb?”

  “He won, sweetheart!” he heard his mother say. “Last night, at about eleven, I guess it was. McCain conceded. Barack Obama’s the next President of the United States!”

  “Naw…” Eric was disbelieving.

  Still on the bed, Shit moved around in front of him, still pumping.

  Eric let Dynamite go, reached down, squeezed one of Shit’s feet, then looked up and pushed at him. “Come on, cut it out—!” He put the phone back against his ear. “Shit’s horsin’ around here. You sure it ain’t some kind of hoax?”

  “You sound like Ron.” Barbara laughed. “But Serena called me five seconds after they announced it! No, it’s for real. I knew you all would be asleep, and I didn’t want to wake you. So I waited till now to call and tell you.”

  “There’re gonna be a lotta surprised white folks wakin’ up this mornin’,” Eric said. “Why didn’t you call on my phone?”

  “Your phone isn’t on, Mr. Not Available…”

  “Oh—it must be still charging…” It had been charging, out in the kitchen, Eric only now remembered, for two days…He said: “I guess there are—at least down here. But probably they’re going to be a lot of surprised black folks, too.”

  “Ron said he wouldn’t believe it for certain till he got up and saw the headlines. But the TV news is already carrying in. He’s president elect—I guess that means he’s the next one.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “If somebody don’t shoot his black ass.” He took a breath. “I hope they don’t.”

  “Me too,” Barbara said warily. “Anyway, I thought I ought to let you know.”

  “Yeah, well…Hey, thanks. Some people in the Dump gonna be pretty happy about it. But I don’t know about outside.” Though they had talked about it, the registration period at the Dump Social Service Office had passed and they had not voted.

  “Well,” Barbara said, “I think it’s a good thing—though Ron and me were arguing for an hour last night, till I decided to let him have the last word. He’s still asleep. For some reason he thinks Republicans are gods.”

  Eric chuckled. “They got the most money.”

  “Anyway, I wanted to catch you, before you guys took off on your route.”

  “Well…thanks.”

  “Probably you’ll hear it a hundred times in the next few hours, anyway.”

  “Okay. Thanks for callin’ and tellin’ me.” Eric thumbed “end,” closed the phone, leaned over, and put it back on the table.

  Dynamite had gone into the bathroom to wash his face, his hands, his crotch. Now he came out, bent, and swiped up his gray underpants and his bibs from the floor.

  Still balancing on the bed, Shit said, “Come on. You wanted Eric to finish you up. Go on. Let him suck you off.”

  “He can do that in the fuckin’ pickup once we get started.”

  Still standing on the bed, Shit bent. His hand fell on Eric shoulder and he ran his stone rough palm around the back of Eric’s neck and tugged. “And you’re gonna suck me off right after him, ain’t you? While you still got a mouth full of his cum. That’s real nasty, when you got a mouth full of somebody else’s cum, and get to suckin’ on me next.” Grinning, he stopped pumping with his other hand long enough to reach up and dig in a nostril. “It’s like your mouth’s an old used scumbag. I’m gonna stick some snot under my skin for you. That sound good?”

  “I told you,” Eric said, “that’s not quite the same thing for me—”

  “But I like it. I like that a lot.” Then, standing, Shit took a big jump off the bed—hanging a moment, naked and awkward in the ill-lit room, to land and, a second later, stagger into the Bowflex. It almost turned over. As it righted, the spiring exercise rods swayed.

  “Hey, watch it—!” Eric stood up.

  Coming out the bathroom door, Dynamite said, “Look out, boy!” He stepped toward Shit.

  But Shit was laughing. And the machine still stood upright.

  “Come on,” Dynamite said. “It’s cold out there, Shit. Put on a warm shirt now, at least. And sumpin’ on top of it—you can take it off if you work up a sweat. I’m gonna sit there in the truck for the first hour, after I shoot in your scum suckin’ face, nigger—” He grinned at Eric—“and let both of you do the fuckin’ work for a change.”

  “Sure,” Shit said. “We don’t mind, do we?”

  “That’s fine,” Eric said, and went into the john to begin the long piss that, as usual, by the end had Shit and Dynamite both laughing.

  “Well, you’re doin
’ that for the two of us, I guess,” Dynamite said, when he came out. “Come on. Get your jeans on.”

  Minutes later, as they walked out onto the front porch, Eric said, “You know, this means, I guess—my dad, Mike, could even be president. Or you, Shit…”

  “Me?” Shit said. “How’m I gonna be president?”

  “I mean, nobody can stop you just ’cause you’re black.”

  “Oh…” Shit said, frowning, puzzling. “I don’t wanna be no president. I can’t read or nothin’. How’m I gonna be president if I can’t read?”

  Dynamite said, “Well, I always thought—” all three in work shoes this morning, in the dark they clumped down the porch steps, to start toward the pickup, fifteen feet from the door—“the best person for President I could ever imagine was Robert Kyle, the Third. The only difference between him and that Obama nigger in Washington is that Kyle’s two shades darker and as good a cocksucker as you are, son—and maybe a little smarter ’cause he was pretty much the smartest guy, black or white, I ever knowed.”

  Shit laughed—and so did Eric.

  They’d climbed in and Dynamite keyed the ignition. “Hey.” In the light from the dashboard Dynamite looked at Eric. “Since they got a nigger in there, I bet you’re glad it ain’t Ronald Reagan.”

  It took Eric a moment to get it.

  “You know…” Dynamite said. “Ronald Reagan Bodin.”

  “Oh…Yeah—I guess I am,” Eric said.

  * * *

  [25] WHEN, AROUND FOUR, Eric reached the cabin, the sun was bright against summer-baked siding. As he sauntered up, with dried grass sticking at his ankles under his jeans cuffs, next to Dynamite’s pickup sat a green car—the same model Chevy as Mike’s, he realized, though it was a lot dirtier and more beat up. Had Mike just driven down…?

  Dynamite sat out on the porch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at a magazine.