Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
The moment Eric had moved, the boy had turned and fled.
Eric told Shit about it, later that day, who said, practically enough, “Probably somebody been doin’ stuff to him and hurtin’ him. He thought you maybe was gonna do the same thing. But that ain’t your fault.” Eric’s own mental explanations ranged from the possibility that the boy was an incipient masochist who’d wanted to be hurt to the possibility that he had already been deeply abused, or even that it might seem a natural question for someone that age, to a stranger, given what parents were always telling their kids these days.
Shit suggested they find him, take him off, and initiate him into sexual play so that he’d know they wouldn’t hurt him. “Jesus,” Eric said, “with two guys as big as we are? We’d scare him to death!” He went so far as not to point the child out to Shit when they passed him with his young parents on the Harbor’s busy summer streets. Eric saw the child three more times in town—the second, it hit him that perhaps the “boy” was, indeed, a pre-pubescent girl. (The erection he’d thought he’d seen could have been a fold or light play in metallic blue? Occasionally girls under thirteen or twelve wore boys’ briefs…) The mother’s hair was as short as the child’s. As she walked through the street, her husband’s hand in one of hers, and her son or daughter’s in the other, all three wore Bermuda shorts of different plaids. Then Eric’s questions were elided, rather than solved: the family’s two weeks Harbor vacation was over. The child had never looked directly at him again—for which Eric was grateful.
Assuming it was a girl (or, for that matter, a boy), Eric wondered if the encounter would evolve into some anecdote of violation and oppression, or if his benign intentions had somehow gotten through and the tale would join still others that, in maturity, would allow the young woman—or the young man—to recount how the incident had been part of an arrival at some healthy and open understanding of sex. That, anyway, was what Eric hoped. But he revealed neither that hope—nor its dark obverse—to Shit. There was always the possibility that, through repression, and because there was no one he felt comfortable sharing it with, it would become as small a part of the child’s memory as it eventually became of his.
The next thing that troubled Eric’s feelings about underage sex, in spite of Shit’s claim to first-hand knowledge of its harmlessness, happened…well, still months later.
Jay MacAmon had pulled up to the Dump cabin in his own maroon pickup. (They kept one in the dockside lot.) He’d come to the mainland on his day off from the scow, only it was Dynamite’s day off too. He’d run up to Hemmings for something at the mall. Only Shit and Eric were home.
“I wish you’d brought Mex,” Shit said. “I’d sit him right down here and get myself a good blow job. Mex still sucks some good dick, Jay.”
“I know he does,” Jay said. “But he’s doin’ the run in the scow back and forth by hisself, so I could come over here and visit.” He looked around at the junk that filled the kitchen. “Hey—” Jay sat on one of the chairs by the few inches of free kitchen wall—“I haven’t thought about this for a coon’s age.” (A kettle of potatoes was bubbling on the stove. Eric was making potato salad that weekend.) “But I remember when you was a little thing, Shit, maybe one-and-a-half, two-and-a-half years old. Me and your dad and Mex was all out here at our old place in the Dump. You was runnin’ around nekid, and Dynamite picked you up on his lap, and he laid you out there and dropped his face on your belly and goes…” Jay wagged his bearded head back and forth and made a blurred sound like Mubblewubblegubble…“You laughed and laughed…I think you was just startin’ to talk. ’Cause I remember you shoutin’ out, ‘Do it again, Dynamite! More! More! Go on, do it again!’ And Dynamite did. I remember sittin’ there and laughin’ too, and thinkin’ all of a sudden, I’m glad Dynamite took you to raise. ’Cause I wouldn’t have had the self-control to keep my hands off you and not try somethin’ stupid that might’ve really messed you up there. I mean, you know there was a while when we was thinkin’ about whether me and Mex should raise you out on Gilead or whether Dynamite should bring you up. But that’s when I realized we’d made the right choice.”
Shit said, “What you mean, Jay?”
“What you think I mean,” Jay asked, from his chair, “out there on that island? With nobody but Mex, me, them Injuns, and that graveyard, as sure as you’re born, I would have got you off somewhere and tried to stick my damned dick up your two or three year old asshole—that’s what I mean!”
“Aw, fuck,” Shit said. “You wouldn’t have done that, would you?” Most of the time, Eric thought of Shit as indefinitely older than himself. But now Shit’s twenty-one years seemed surprisingly young. “I mean, if I said no, I didn’t want you to. I wasn’t ever scared of you, Jay.”
“Maybe you shoulda been. Maybe now I wouldn’t. But back then, I don’t know. Yeah, I probably would’a done it—at least once, out of curiosity…then tried to figure out some cockamamie reason why it was really all right, anyway, even if your ass was bleedin’ like a knife-stuck pig’s.”
“But I stayed out there with you, lotsa times.” Shit protested. “Just likes Eric does there, with you guys now.”
“But you wasn’t livin’ out there with us—all the time. That’s a different thing. And your dad did tell me, more than once—” he rocked on the back legs of his chair—“in a real fuckin’ friendly way, now—that he would kill me if I ever did anything to hurt you.”
“But when I’d come to visit out there with you—” Shit turned away from the cabin window—“we fooled around. A lot, I remember.”
“Yeah, but we always let you start it.” Jay grinned at Eric. “This kid couldn’t keep his hands off of anything that was body temperature. I mean, we had a dog—big as Uncle Tom, there—” who raised his head off his forepaws, looked around, and again dropped his muzzle “—and I remember once comin’ in and you was playin’ with its…Oh, never mind.”
Eric laughed. “He was probably doin’ him just the way he does Tom today.”
“Hey, you did it, too…”
Jay looked back at Shit. “But that was later.”
“When I was twelve or thirteen.”
“When you was fourteen. Not thirteen—or twelve. Besides suckin’ your dick and beatin’ off together ain’t fuckin’ your ass. And fourteen ain’t twelve. Twelve is when Shad punched my teeth out. So I know what I’m talking about. And twelve sure ain’t the same as three, five, seven…No, you got the best deal, Shit, along with the best daddy. Admit it.”
“Well, I know I got a damned good one.”
It didn’t change Shit’s ideas on the topic. Over time, when it came up, Eric saw Shit end a couple of arguments at one bar or another about underage sex, which got pretty heated, with his flat, “Hey—just look at me!” But Eric was never that sure. When he was worked up, he still found Shit’s history a turn-on—especially the segments before he himself had come to the Harbor: Shit claimed to love it. And because Eric loved Shit, he loved whatever history had made Shit into Shit, as he’d loved Dynamite and Mex and Jay for being part of it, even if he was not sure what they did as a way of life was right for any but the four of them.
“And I tell yall this, too…yall know Jay MacAmon? Well, ain’t nobody punched my damned teeth out when I was a kid.” At the bar, Shit and Eric would drink more Coke. “Actually, most of them fuckers sorta fell out on their own…”
* * *
[29] DYNAMITE DID NOT take Eric to The Slide his first visit.
When Harlen couldn’t go with Fred, and Fred asked Dynamite to come help him load some deliveries for the store, on a Monday afternoon at a little after two o’clock, Shit drove Eric over.
“That’s about when they open up. Saul won’t mind.” Shit pulled up the gearshift on the pickup. “Ain’t nobody gonna be in there yet, and he likes the company. Besides, Saul remembers when the drinking age used to be eighteen—’stead of twenty-one. He says if you can take a gun and go off in the army and kill people, and if yo
u can go over to the public school and line up and go in that booth there and decide if you gonna have a nigger or white man for a president—and Saul’ll tell you, right out, gettin’ that nigger in the White House was the most sensible thing this country ever done; now all them big corporations and their representatives in Congress we call senators for some reason gotta let him do what he gotta do, but Saul don’t think they will—somebody who can do all those things ought to be able to go in and get a beer—and all I want is a pop, anyway.”
In a clearing among the pines, they stopped.
Out the window was an ordinary gray, two-story house, just off the road. A couple of cars sat near it—
There was room for more.
In the back, some kind of board construction, maybe twelve feet high, fenced in an area maybe thirty feet long all the way up to the building’s rear. The only things that let you know it wasn’t an ordinary house were that the windows were black and without curtains—and in two of them were neon beer signs: Coors in one, Molsons in the other.
“Used to be a sign what said ‘The Slide’ out front.” Shit opened the door and got out. “But a couple of years back, somebody run it down, and they never put it back. I guess they don’t really need it.”
Not that it was far from the Harbor. You could have walked to it from Front Street or Dump Corners, either one, in an hour-and-a-quarter.
Eric followed Shit around the front, up the ramp that was closer to them than the steps, onto the porch, and through the door.
Inside stood a bouncer’s stool, though no one sat on it.
Behind the long counter before them, a heavy black man, with short cut, ash-white hair and a sleeveless undershirt, plunged glasses into a rinsing sink, lifted them, and let them drip back into the water, then set them on a tray. He reached over to douse two more pint glasses.
Over the bar burned red, blue, orange, and yellow lights.
Toward the back, some overhead cleaning bulbs put the whole space in enough light to see.
Off to the side, in front of the bar, sweeping the floor with a wide push broom was a young black fellow in an upper body harness, leather pants, and boots.
“What can I do for you fellas?” the bartender asked, dunking two more glasses. He did not look up.
Just then, a door in the back wall opened, and a very muscular, very black man backed inside, carrying something. It was some kind of bench or table, and someone—an equally muscular white guy—came in frontward, carrying the other end.
Neither wore shirts.
Still without looking, the bartender called, “Hey—Jos? Dan? Put that back along the same wall it was at before you took it outside to fix it.”
The bare-chested men carried the bench over to the wall and set it down. Their muscular arms rivaled Eric’s. Standing up, they stepped back, and looked down at it.
Over the bar’s black walls, sunlight poured in the open door, making Eric realize how bright the outside was.
One of the two men—Eric wasn’t sure which—said, “I think it was over about a foot.” So they picked it up, then moved it.
“Hey, Saul,” Shit said. “I come to show Eric here the place. We been tellin’ him all about the Slide, and I thought he should see it.”
“Take a look,” the bartender said.
Eric realized that, for some reason, he’d been expecting Saul to be white.
“You want somethin’ to drink, Mr. Morgan Haskell?”
But Eric felt relieved he was black.
“What would you say,” Shit asked, “if I ordered a triple whiskey with a pint of Guinness for a chaser?”
“I’d say fuck you and the horse you road in on—and wonder why you were pullin’ at my leg like that.”
“Saul knows I don’t like to drink no hard liquor,” Shit explained to Eric.
Saul kept washing. (He hadn’t looked away from his work once.) “That’s one thing that you can say about kids who was raised in the Dump. They don’t drink and they don’t smoke. You can’t smoke, if you’re an adult. And them counselors are always taking groups to the hospital and lettin’ ’em see what it does to people—kids and grownups, both. That works pretty good on the young ones.” Saul snorted. “It’s pretty effective on us older guys, too. It made me quit. You and your friend want a glass of pop?” Without looking up, he took a towel and began wiping down some surface too low for Eric to see.
“Sure,” Shit said. “That’d be nice. Hey—” he was speaking to Eric—“Sometimes I’ll have one drink—maybe a beer. But I don’t see no reason to have much more than that. Besides, as soon as I start to feel it, I figure I’ve had too much anyway.”
Saul put two glasses on the counter, pulled up a siphon. One after the other, he filled them with Coke. “Take those—” he still hadn’t raised his eyes—“and look around all you want. They’re on the house.”
Shit stepped up, took a glass. “Go on. You take yours.”
Eric stepped up, got his glass, and, following Shit, walked around the bar’s oval end. Actually, the bar was half an oval. One end went up to the wall and stopped.
“Hey, Billy,” Shit said.
“Hello, Shit,” said the tall guy pushing his broom. “You say your friend wants to see things? Here, lemme turn on some lights.” He took his broom over to the wall, and on a bank of switches, just above shoulder level, he reached up and flipped one, two, three switches. On the side of the oval away from the door, beneath some eighteen feet of counter, all the way to the wall, one after the other three sets of lights came on, the bulbs hidden up under the bar. They shone on the tile backing and down into the recessed trough that was sunk four inches into the floor. The space under the bar went almost two-and-a-half feet back.
Half a dozen stools stood in front of it.
Eric looked down. Every eighteen inches, drains were fixed along the trough’s bottom. On the stone floor in front of the four-inch drop, presumably they caught any spillage. The smell of disinfectant was sharp on this side, though it had been undetectable at the entrance.
For some six feet, the front was open. Yes, you could squat down in that, even turn around and sit crossed-legged on the tiling under the bar counter. But the final dozen feet had widely spaced rods rising in front of it—bars, Eric realized, making the last fifteen feet a cage: a piss cage!
The whole thing was a big stand-up—or sit down—urinal.
The shirtless, muscular young men had wandered up.
For all his muscles, the black one was on the fleshy side. He wore jeans and—Eric glanced down—combat boots.
For a moment Eric thought that the white one was wearing black jeans and—for some reason—a pair of white (or gray) briefs pulled over them. He had on engineer’s boots. Now Eric saw a few jailhouse tats, including two tears on his face, under the outer corner of one eye. He had a friendly, welcoming grin.
As he got closer, Eric saw now they weren’t briefs. The whole groin area of his jeans had been cut away, so that they had been turned—more or less—into a pair of chaps, fastened to the sides of his wide leather belt. Holding his privates was a very worn, very gray (probably, Eric realized, very dirty) jockstrap. When he turned again to look at the bench they’d set against the wall, Eric saw the crevice between his butt cheeks, within the gray elastic bands that curved over his buttocks.
The black one—Jos—said, “Do your friend know what guys do in that thing? I mean, how we work it on piss nights?”
“I kinda told ’im about some of it,” Shit said, gesturing with his Coke glass. “Go on. You explain it.”
“Well—” Jos, then Dan, moved over to the counter, to sit on two of the stools before the urinal—“if you’re a piss freak, you can come in here and take all your clothes off—or only some of ’em if you want—and get down in that thing, and go behind the bars there, and sit, or kneel down or squat—or lie down and stretch full out, if there ain’t too many guys in there. Come on. Sit down with us.”
Eric and Shit moved either sid
e of them—Eric by Jos, Shit by Dan, on stools of their own. (On the counter, they had set their glasses.) “And the serious beer drinkers—”
“—like me,” white Dan said, grinning to one side, then the other, like a happy farm boy.
“—stand there at the bar, drink their beer, and when it’s time to take a leak, they whip it out and let it go.” Black Jos took up the tale again. “The guy who had this place before Saul—the one who built it—told Saul he got the idea from a bar he saw in Australia, when he was there as a kid. Only it was just a workin’ man’s bar—it wasn’t for no piss freaks. They had a urinal right under the counter, just like this one, so you never had to leave off drinkin’. While you were puttin’ it down, you could flip it out and let her run right there.”
“My kinda of bar,” Dan said. “But I don’t mind if there a few thirsty niggers under there while I’m spurtin’. It’s fun.”
“Don’t even have to go to the john,” Jos went on. “They can just whiz into the pisser—and on whoever’s in it. If they want a blow job, they can stick their peckers through the bars, and one of the guys down there’ll suck it.”
On the far side of the bar well, Saul had turned around. “It’s two-thirty. We’re open now—you can have your first one.” Walking across, he had gotten out two bottles of beer. He sat them on the counter, one in front of Jos, one in front of Dan. “Treat ’em kindly. After the first three, you only get one an hour.” Again, he turned and walked back to the other side, where he’d be facing entering customers.