Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Actually, that don’t sound too different from me when I was this one’s age—till I started hangin’ out with Jay as well as Kyle—and a Haskell ain’t even close to a Turpens.” Dynamite chuckled. “But I didn’t go around gettin’ in no fights over it.”

  “And he’s tellin’ ’em it don’t matter, ’cause they ain’t real human bein’s anyway—well, some of our black customers didn’t take to that. They told me about it, too. Well, after the fifth fight started up there in Nigger Heaven, with him in the middle of it, I was afraid somebody was gonna throw ’im over the damned balcony rail. Even Al—he gets a lot of that kinda stuff (he broke up three of the fights)—lost patience with ’im and said he didn’t care what the fuck happened to him no more. So, mostly for his own sake, as well as some peace and quiet, Dusty hauled ’im front and center and I told him to take his damned eight inch pecker and get the fuck out.” Hammond turned at a bend in the hall. “And he’s still all smiles and ‘Shucks…’ and ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ and grinning—still didn’t have no shirt either, and his fly was gapin’ (I think he musta busted it) and grinnin’ at us like he’s all embarrassed…and left. I think he really liked the place. Hell, I kinda liked him. But you can’t have people startin’ fights in a public place.”

  “Come on,” Dynamite said. “You’re good to be shut of ’im—a fuckin’ Turpens. Stop jawin’, and let us in, now—”

  “Yeah, well…” Hammond looked up. “I suppose so.”

  “I told you. Eric knows all about what goes on here.”

  Hammond stepped back into the doorway. “But it ain’t gonna hurt him to hear it again, all at a shot. Now come on in, boy.”

  Eric stepped in, and Dynamite, smiling, fell in beside him.

  Above them, small orange lights made a long row; Eric’s eyes had only started adjusting—

  Something brushed his pants, then settled between his legs—it made Eric jump a little, but he smiled, looking at Dynamite (one of whose hands was in his overall pocket, and one arm was hooked around the bag with his beer), then at Hammond.

  Hammond had groped Eric—and now looked over at him. “There—that’s just the smile I want on your face when anybody goes reachin’ for your dick. That don’t matter if they’re seventeen years old or seventy-seven, black or white.” The hand patted Eric’s groin and moved away. “Like I said, I ain’t tellin’ you that you gotta say ‘Yes’ to everybody who comes on to you. But you do have to smile and say your ‘No’s’ politely. And maybe even think twice before you say ’em, since you ain’t payin’ nothin’ to be in here.”

  “Yes, sir,” Eric said. “I understand.”

  *

  That night, Eric had a late conversation in the bedroom of the cabin in the Dump. Outside the windows the sky held enough blue for it to be eight-thirty or nine. Dynamite snored. Eric asked, “Hey, Shit?”

  Shit turned toward him and—almost automatically—put an arm around him. “What?”

  “Suppose you’re at the Opera, like I was today, and somebody real old, like fifty-five, sixty, comes onto you. How do…you tell ’em to go away?”

  “Huh?” Shit pulled himself closer. (From earlier, a wet spot on the sheet cooled Eric’s knee.) “What you wanna tell ’em to go away for? They got guys in there what’re seventy, eighty—probably ninety, for all I know. I like the old fellows. They hardly got no teeth so they can really give you a good suck.”

  “You…do?”

  “Yeah.” (Eric realized Shit’s dick was rising against his belly.) “Besides, they make me feel like a little kid again—like I’m nine or ten years old. I guess that’s ’cause back then, everybody looked to me like they was a hun’erd years old. Even guys I know now was just thirty or thirty-five—I used to think suckin’ dick was what old guys was for. When I go to the Opera, hell, I still do. And they’re interestin’ to talk to, sometimes.” Shit pushed his face into Eric’s neck. “But I still like a few young scumsuckers, like you. Hey—” and he pulled his face away—“before we get up tomorrow, suck off my dad. I bet he still got a can of that beer in ’im somewhere he needs to get rid of. I know I got some pop in here.”

  “What are you tryin’ to do? Turn me into Mex?”

  Holding Eric, Shit shrugged. “Sure—if that’s who you wanna be.”

  From the other side of the bed, Dynamite stopped snoring enough to mumble, “That’s too high for Shit. He don’t go up in them balconies, especially the top one. He gets his vertigo and stays away from that. He’s stays downstairs in the lounge restroom. Come on—shut up and go to sleep.”

  Within the blackness of his own closed eyes, Eric remembered how, as he’d adjusted to the Opera’s obscurity, the theater’s dark had begun to pull back…and back…and back…The space was…well, like a fuckin’ cavern! He’d been standing in a side aisle. Acres of seats stretched away. You could look up and see the balcony rails, the first, the second, and the top one. And like a hundred feet off, on the screen, two naked women and a naked man were doin’ their thing with each other. He hadn’t really realized it would be straight porn. Though, it turned out to be a lot more interestin’ than any gay stuff he’d seen. Soon they were showing the coverage of some porn convention that must have been in Europe, because everyone spoke Italian, and, in some huge hall, a man was fucking a woman on a desk in odd positions while about a hundred photographers, mostly men but some women, were crowded around, taking pictures, sometimes just inches away.

  At first Eric hadn’t thought there was any audience at all in the theater—then he’d realized he could see some heads…maybe twelve of them, scattered along that row, nine along another, six or seven guys sitting together…probably there were more than a hundred people! But the space—just the orchestra—was built to hold ten times that. And when he’d looked down at the seat beside him, he saw this stocky black guy right in the aisle seat, who looked up at him and said, Hey…How you doin’? Remember me? Then the guy had looked down into the darkness of his own lap. Freddy—stop suckin’ my peter long enough for me to introduce you to a friend. It was the black driver Eric had sucked off back at Turpens, when he’d met Shit and Dynamite the day he’d first come to the Harbor. The guy said, Hey—I was wonderin’ if I was gonna run into you again!

  Then a head lifted from the darkness of the driver’s lap—black haired, sharp featured, probably Latino. Hello…!

  Yeah, the driver said. This white kid here sucks almost as good as you do, Freddy. Grinning, he’d nodded. This is my friend Freddy.

  Fred had reached up. Eric had reached down. They’d shaken hands in front of the guy. Eric said his name…

  Fred said, Yeah, then dropped his face back into the driver’s lap.

  In the dark, Eric blinked. “Hey…?” he whispered. “Shit are you still awake? While I was at the theater, I saw that guy who we—”

  “Goddam,” Dynamite said, loudly, from his side of the bed. “Tell ’im in the fuckin’ mornin’, will you? Now, go to sleep…!”

  Shit chuckled. And squeezed Eric.

  And they slept.

  * * *

  [27] ERIC FIRST SAW

  THE KYLE FOUNDATION

  NEWSLETTER FOR

  THE DUMP

  topping a stack of papers fourteen inches thick, bound with brown twine that creased the F, went between the T and the E, lay to the right of the P, and continued across a lush photo of pine trees and the bluff slope below heaping cumulus. The stack sat askew on the grass slope next to the gravel road.

  Eric and Shit were walking through the Dump.

  Eric assumed the bound papers were for the Foltz Carting Company that picked up the recyclables—or perhaps had even been inadvertently left behind.

  Still later, in Dump Corners, when they went into the lumber, magazines, and houseware section of Fred Hurter’s Steel, Seed, and Lumber, beside the cash register was a stack of the things. Someone just ahead of them took one—apparently they were free. Eric thought about taking one and didn’t. But a day later, when they were
in the post office, among the fliers and adverts in Dynamite’s box was a copy.

  “Hey, lemme see that,” Eric said.

  Dynamite handed it to him, before dropping the rest in the square trash container beside the gray table with all the little shelves below it for custom forms and certification forms and express letter forms and the dozen others.

  In the pickup, wedged between Shit and Dynamite, Eric paged through the magazine, to find himself in an article on the school system and class visits to emphysema wards and lung cancer wards to meet amputation victims—fingerless, toeless, legless, handless—with nicotine allergies only recently diagnosed, congestive heart failure wards, and how effective this had been in creating a generation all but non-smoking from the working class on up in Runcible County—

  “What you readin’ that for?” Shit asked, as Dynamite drove. “That ain’t no comic.”

  So Eric closed it. “Shit, when you were in school, did you take class trips to the hospital?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t learn much in the classes. But I sure learned how them poisons like alcohol and nicotine could kill you—’cause we met a lot of people they was already killin’.”

  Dynamite chuckled. “Yeah, that was something Kyle was really interested in—makin’ sure workin’ people knew how rich people didn’t give a shit about sellin’ ’em stuff that was gonna wipe ’em out. I drink my six-pack over the weekend, then I stop. He sure got me convinced of it.”

  In the pickup, while sea breeze tumbled through the window, Dynamite said, “I don’t know why you carryin’ that one with you. You can find them things all over the Dump.”

  Eric held up the folded magazine. “Well, I got this one already…”

  Dynamite chuckled and changed gear. “You keep readin’ that thing, we’ll have you goin’ to town meetin’s for us.”

  “Good,” Shit said, looking out at the passing shore. “Maybe that means you can let up on my ass about goin’.”

  Later that afternoon, Eric settled on the steps to read more.

  Eventually, Shit came out and asked, “Can I sit here beside you and put my arm around you while you read, and just like…sit up against you?”

  Eric blinked up at him. “Sure.”

  So Shit did.

  Like a web whose strands reached—glittering—over the landscape, the Robert Kyle Foundation held almost everything in the county together.

  With the Foundation’s support, the high schools taught evolution, women’s studies, black studies, and courses in animal (and human) homosexuality.

  The Robert Kyle Foundation, which had built the Dump and currently controlled the county Chamber of Commerce, with its credit union and its pension plan and its broad range of subsidized public services, was the most influential institution in the area and had been for more than a decade and a half.

  Those who protested were told they could move. Many had, while a fair number of others, concerned with their children’s health and education, whatever their feelings about the Dump, had moved to the area.

  Eric had starting learning much of this from a photograph of a bronze plaque fixed on the red bricks of the Social Service Building at Dump Corners:

  This is the original office of

  The Robert Kyle Foundation

  that first opened its doors on April 25, 1984,

  the week of the announcement of the discovery of

  the HTLV-III virus (HIV),

  an institution dedicated to the betterment of the lives

  of black gay men and of those of all races and creeds

  connected to them by elective and non-elective affinities.

  Eric had read the plaque out to Shit, and as they’d walked back home in the August sun, Shit had said, “Hey, I never knowed that. That’s ’cause I can’t read. But I remember them school trips, though.”

  “You want me to read this to you?” Eric asked.

  “Naw,” Shit said. “’Cause I’ll just get bored. I don’t know what them words mean—and I don’t wanna know, either. It’s better me sittin’ here and maybe imaginin’ what you’re readin’ about. That’s more interestin’.”

  When Eric finished the article, he asked Shit, “So what you imaginin’ about?”

  Shit chuckled. “How my daddy and that rich nigger, Kyle, used to suck each other’s dicks and fuck each other’s assholes every chance they got—at least that’s what he told me. He even lived with him for a while, out on Gilead, once Kyle’s parents died. I mean where Jay lives now. That was before Jay went out there. But Kyle had to travel around a bit, and my daddy just wanted to stay down here and take care of me, I guess. So they finally split up. They’re still friends, though—I think.”

  Eric looked down to see another article under the banner type:

  BLACK STUDIES, WOMEN’S STUDIES, GAY STUDIES, AND EVOLUTION TAUGHT IN THREE RUNCIBLE KYLE FOUNDATION FUNDED HIGH SCHOOLS…

  Eric read the classes over to Shit. Then he looked up.

  A big green Foltz recycling truck rolled down on the road.

  “Now, them classes actually sounds kinda interestin’. Maybe I should’a given a try to that high school thing…”

  “Why?” Shit asked.

  “I don’t know. Just because…”

  “Ain’t that thing supposed to be so you can get a better job?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “So what kind of job you gonna do where you got to know about niggers and women and faggots—I mean what about ’em can’t you learn from nosin’ around on one most nights like you do me? Or walkin’ around through the rigs in the evening out back of Turpens when the horny guys leave their doors open or hangin’ out in the damned back lot? Besides, your mama’s a woman, and you know pretty much all about her.”

  “Well, I—”

  “I mean, is there some special job you gonna get ’cause you know all that shit? Somebody’s gonna pay you more money—?”

  “Well, you know, maybe,” Eric said, “knowin’ how other people got along in the past and what they were able to do might help you figure out how you wanna do things now. I mean, I bet Robert Kyle had to know a lot of that stuff, just to set up—”

  A clatter of claws clicked on the steps.

  They looked down as Uncle Tom bounded up, to flop a paw on the open newsletter and lick at Eric’s mouth.

  Shit released Eric’s shoulder, reached around, grabbed the dog’s head, and pulled him to the side. “Hey, come on, dog. Cut it out, Tom. You wanna kiss on somebody? Come over here and kiss on me. Eric’s readin’ now. He’s learnin’ stuff. He ain’t a dumb dog like you and me.”

  Down on the road, two more of the recycling trucks grumbled by.

  * * *

  [28] THE VERY FIRST time Eric had asked Shit had been only weeks after they’d met. Shit’s answer had been flat and sure—so flat and so sure, Eric wondered about it: “What do I think about little kids havin’ sex with older guys? Hell, I been havin’ sex with niggers and white men around here—and even some of the summer tourists—since I was a kid! I mean with grown-ups. I wasn’t even interested in havin’ sex with people near my own age until way later. Hell, my dad and a dozen damned niggers been suckin’ my dick since I was a baby. It didn’t do me no harm. None of ’em never hurt me nor did it when I didn’t want ’em to. I liked it then; I like it now. You can suck it right here if you want. That always feels good to me.”

  When Eric had lived in the Harbor through his first tourist season (if you could call the week or two-week vacations of the sixty or seventy people who materialized over July and August a “season”) even Eric had realized that, with his ruined nails bitten three quarters off his fingers and his missing teeth and his nose-picking and his on-going affair with his dad (with his nails in the same shape) and a third of the men in the Dump and out of it—not to mention his terror of heights—illiterate Shit was not most folks’ ideal young man.

  The summer people socialized only with each other, were polite enough to the “townies,” but someh
ow assumed you were always free and willing to work for them.

  Still, nobody knew the beaches and bluffs and backwoods, the escarpments, rocks, and gullies over Gilead and along the mainland coast better than Shit. Nobody was more generous in wanting to share all—from his body to his time to his knowledge—with Eric. And no one had ever shared Eric’s own “perversion,” much less shared it with such enthusiasm. No one had ever been so generous with urine and affection, semen and cheese, with or without sex. The result was that Eric had discovered a great craving for it, which, from Shit—and, soon, much the same, from Dynamite—he could fill.

  Up the beach, a grotto of rock and old logs and long grasses gouged into the mainland’s sloped flank. A rill of sea foamed in and out over its bottom. Shit and Eric often went there to talk, to masturbate themselves and each other from a frenzy into dozing (and Shit, sometimes, actually drooling: Eric was astonished) idiocy—Shit said the drooling had something to do with his teeth—to fuck, or even sometimes, singly, to be alone. Both enjoyed it because, often, when one had been there for ten or twenty minutes, the other might come, look in, and join.