Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Dan looked around Jos at Eric, then over at Shit, then back, grinning. “Hell, I already killed a six pack ’fore I got here. I really like pissin’ on the niggers. They’re fuckin’ animals, anyway. I don’t usually like messin’ with no white guys. It ain’t nothin’ personal, I mean. But I’ll let niggers do pretty much anything to me—’cause it don’t really matter. But pissin’ on them’s always fun—and those is the niggers we mostly get in here at The Slide.”

  “Is your name…” Eric started. “What was it…?” He tried to remember what Hammond had told Dynamite, months—or was it a year ago, now?—back. “Danny Turpens…?”

  “Un-huh.” Dan’s smile became expectant of an explanation.

  “Damn,” Shit said, “I didn’t know there was no Turpens faggots. You bisexual or something? My daddy ain’t gonna believe this. Well, I guess things change in the world all the time.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said, “somebody told me they met you…over at the Opera.”

  “Yeah?” Danny kept grinning. “But I don’t go over there too much no more.”

  Jos picked up his bottle, took a swallow, and set it back on the wet ring it had left. “Dan’s a good guy—he talks a little crazy—but he’s okay.”

  Eric, though, was trying to recall the details of why Dan had been ejected from the theater.

  “’Cause you’re white—” again Dan smiled at Eric—“that’s why you and me wouldn’t get along.”

  “Hey…!” Shit leaned forward to talk past Jos. “Ain’t I a nigger?”

  “Huh?” Dan turned away from Eric to frown back at Shit. “Well, if you told me you was white, I wouldn’t argue with you; I got too many cousins and uncles and aunts complected about like you, and they swear all up and down they’re as white as you can get down here.” He chuckled. “Fuckin’ bullshit…But, sure, if I was just passin’ you on the street, I’d probably think there was a touch of the tarbrush about your nose and your hair—and you don’t got no half moons on your fingernails—at least what’s left of ’em that I can see.”

  “Then what the fuck makes you think this boy’s white—Eric there? His dad is blacker than Jos, here. I shook his damned hand, when he brought Eric down here to stay with his mama. So I know.”

  Now Jos frowned at Eric. “Is you the kid who’s helpin Shit and his uncle on the garbage run in the mornin’s?”

  “Un-huh.” Eric nodded and drank his Coke.

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “This nigger’s Eric.”

  Jos frowned even more deeply at Shit. “Yeah, I remember somebody sayin’ he was in the Lighthouse when your daddy brought you down here, last year—and that he was as black as the ace o’ spades. At least that’s what he said.” Jos took another other swallow from his bottle.

  “So that means Eric’s gotta be at least as black as I am,” Shit said, sitting back on the stool. “Or blacker if you seen his daddy.”

  Dan looked at Eric, and for a moment a frown ruptured his rural grin. “Well, that’s okay, then. I mean, it’s possible. I seen niggers before what was as light as you. Not many. But some. Yeah, then I wouldn’t care if you done stuff to me, too.”

  Jos chuckled again. “Danny means it, too.” Suddenly he turned to Dan, took Dan’s bottle from the counter in front of him, and leaned back on his stool. “Watch this here.”

  Shit and Eric both leaned back.

  “All right, you white racist scumbag.” Jos brought the neck of the bottle sharply forward, between the straps of Dan’s jockstrap, thrusting it hard in the crack between his butt cheeks.

  On his stool, Dan straightened out his big shoulders and gave out an “Ughhh…”

  “See. He’ll let any black sonofabitch do shit like that to him. That’s why he works here. He’s a good bouncer, ’cause he don’t really mind all that much getting hit, long as it’s by a black fella. Funny, ain’t it?” Meanwhile, Jos was twisting the bottle one way and the other. More and more of the neck disappeared between Dan’s buttocks, till they spread apart for the thicker cylinder of brown glass.

  Finally, Jos let go and sat up.

  Lodged in Dan’s butt, the bottle was firmly stuck.

  Forearms on the counter, Dan leaned forward, grimacing.

  “How’s that feel, you white piece of shit?”

  Dan grunted—and said through the face he was making, “Like a fuckin’ nigger just shoved a beer bottle up my ass! But you guys can do that, ’cause you’re just fuckin’ animals—black animals. You don’t got no ethical faculties at all, is what it is.” Again he grunted.

  “Well, yeah, he’s right. I sort of lose ’em around him.” Jos picked up his own bottle and took another swallow. “Funny. I ain’t never been too much into no S-and-M before.” He chuckled. “But somethin’ about Danny here brings it out in me.” Again he leaned back, reached down, and gripped the bottle bottom, lodged in Danny—and yanked.

  “Arhhhhh…!” Dan’s head went up and his back arched.

  “It ain’t as bad as it looks. He always keeps a pretty good supply of grease up his hole, in case somebody suddenly tries to fuck ’im.” Jos came forward and slammed the bottle’s bottom on the table in front of Dan. “A nigger, I mean. Now drink that, you racist scumbag!”

  “Huh?” Shit said. “Eric do that too, sometimes, when he comes over and see us, don’t you, brother?”

  Eric couldn’t tell whether that registered with either Danny or Jos.

  Dan lifted one naked shoulder, lifted the other, arched his back again, and again grimaced.

  Foam pushed from Dan’s bottle neck to run down the label to the counter.

  “Can I wipe it off first?”

  “No!” Jos declared. “Drink it just like that, you white fuck!”

  “Oh,” Dan said. “Okay.” He lifted the bottle, drank, and set it down. Wrinkling his nose—and the two tears under the corner of his eye—he said, “I can sure smell where the fuck it’s been.”

  “Good,” Jos said.

  From across the bar, without turning, Saul said “You fellas wanna bring me up four buckets of ice?”

  “All right,” Dan said. “I guess we gotta get back to work.” He lifted his bottle again—and probably finished it.

  “Yeah,” Jos said. “Come on.” They got down from the stools and started out the open back door, through which sunlight still fell. A step outside, Eric saw Danny reach back and rub his butt, move his fingers over—he heard him grunt again—and scratch deep in his ass crack.

  “Come on,” Shit said. “Lemme show you the rest.” He climbed from the stool, so Eric got down, too. They walked to the bar’s end. “See where it goes up against the wall—under there, that’s actually a little half-pint door that they leave open at night, and after you gotten yourself hosed down till you’re happy, you can go right out there, and you’re in the back. There’s a shower right where you come out. You can rinse yourself off—I mean, if that’s what you wanna do. I seen Mex come here a couple of times and wear that stuff all fuckin’ night—and not just Jay’s piss, either. Come on.” And, leaving the Coke glasses on the bar with the bottles, Shit led Eric out the sunny, full-sized door, still open.

  They were in the wood-walled enclosure they’d seen from outside. Up against the house, three showerheads stuck from high metal pipes. A rubber base beneath had four drains. And on the wall beside it, near the water spigots, Eric could see a small door’s outline, about as high as his belly button—the height of the bar counter within.

  “The part that ain’t a shower is like their outdoor grope room. This is where everybody really gets it on.” Shit looked around the space, with the board walls. “There ain’t nobody here now. So unless you just want me to fuck you out here so you can say you done something more on your first visit than watch a nigger shove a bottle up a white Turpens asshole—”

  “No,” Eric said. “No, that’s okay. We might as well go back. At least I know what’s out here, though.”

  Just then, on the other side of the clearing, from a trap door
that Eric hadn’t even seen, much less realized it was open, first Jos then Dan came up, lugging pails of ice in each hand.

  “Okay,” Shit said. “Let’s go, then…”

  They followed the two men back into the bar.

  The cleaning lights were off now. Jos must have turned on another switch, because the red and blue and yellow lights were blinking all around the ceiling. Music was playing.

  Without his broom, tall Billy said, “Close that, would you? We don’t usually open it till after dark.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Sure.” He turned back and pulled the door to.

  “Hey, Saul! Thanks for the Cokes,” Shit called as he rounded the bar end.

  “Yeah,” Eric called, coming after him. “Thank you.”

  Saul didn’t look and didn’t speak.

  Out on the porch, they walked down the steps this time, instead of the ramp, and went back to the pickup, as a car and another pickup, one behind the other, rolled into the parking area. “Guess some payin’ customers are startin’ to get in.” Shit climbed in the passenger cab door.

  “You sure Saul likes the company?” Eric asked, as they turned onto the tree-enclosed road.

  “Yeah. He really does,” Shit said. “He told me so once.”

  “You ever get in under there? I mean, in the trough in the back.” He climbed up into the driver’s side, then moved under the wheel.

  “Yeah—a couple of times, with Mex, when I was a kid. We took all our clothes off. Then we climbed in under there. I sat in his lap, and he hugged me from behind, and guys pissed on us for two or three hours. All his gay deaf friends was there. And Jay. And Black Bull—all of them, and lots of guys I didn’t even know. We’re talkin’ sign language, and guys is pissin’ on us, all night. It was fun. Most of ’em probably thought I was a little deaf kid—which is why they let me in there. Like it was somethin’ that deaf people did, so it was okay that I was doin’ it. People are funny about things like that. There was a few other guys under there with us, too. We was all splashin’ around. Mex had a hard-on the whole night—and drank half of it down what the guys was hosin’ on us. Then he pissed it out—all over my butt, mostly. It was fun, but I didn’t get no hard-on at all.”

  “What did it feel like?” Eric asked.

  “Warm. And wet…And fun. I mean the warm and play-in-it and splash around and have fun part I can understand. But that’s why, you know, I was askin’ you before about the other part. The I-gotta-get-it-all-inside-me- as-much-as-I-can part. That’s the part I don’t quite follow.” Shit shrugged. “But then, I don’t have to. That’s just somethin’ you like. I got stuff that makes me special—and you got stuff that makes you special. That’s all it is—at least I think so. And it don’t hurt that what makes you special kinda turns me on. I just hope it works the other way around.”

  “You mean the part of you that’s gotta stick his pecker in any fella that walks by? Yeah, I kinda like that part of you, Shit.”

  “Oh,” Shit said, sounding surprised. “Well, good…”

  After more bouncing along the unpaved road, Eric said, “That was kind of nice, what you did in there—about me bein’ black. But I wasn’t quite sure why you was doin’ it.”

  Shit said, “Well, Danny sounded like the kinda guy you might like to get a lip lock on, one of these days. And I just thought it’d make it a little easier for you, if he thought you was a nigger. Jos is okay—but I don’t see you wantin’ no beer bottle shoved into you when you ain’t expectin’ it.”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “I don’t think I would.”

  “I mean—” Shit cackled—“I don’t care how greased up you was!”

  They pulled out onto a wider road.

  “Hey, we still got the rest of the day. You wanna take us over to the Opera? We can get in there and fuck around with each other, or maybe find somebody we ain’t had, yet—or had too many times. You could put a dick in one end of ’im. I could put mine in the other, and we could have some fun.”

  “That’d be somethin’…Sure—why not?” Eric reached over the top of the wheel to tug it around and take the sharp curve that brought them out from under sun-shot leaves. “If we’re there more’n an hour, you can call the old pig fucker—unless you wanna run over and pick ’im up and bring ’im with us…?”

  “Nope,” Shit said. “Let’s not.”

  “No…?” Surprised, Eric glanced over, where Shit stretched his knees wide and pushed an arm along the seat back, behind Eric’s shoulder.

  “No matter what happens in the Opera, you know damn well once you heat up them sausages and that spaghetti sauce you got in the refrigerator for dinner, you, me or both of us is gonna wanna a shoot a load up his butt. He’ll be nice and happy about that. But if he gets all tired out at the movies, he’d gonna go to sleep before we get to it. He’s always sayin’ he can’t keep up with us—and I don’t think he can, no more.”

  “Well, yeah,” Eric said. “That’s true…”

  “I’m just used to fuckin’ him at least once before we go to sleep—and it looks like you about got used to it, too, by now—no matter how much nookie we all get durin’ the day.”

  “I guess so.” Eric drove another three minutes. “You know, it’s funny, Shit. ’Fore I come down here, what I was lookin’ for was all the goddam motherfuckin’ sex I could find. I mean, I figured there’d be somethin’ to do around here—somebody to fuck or suck with. But I didn’t think I’d have all the goddam dick I could want, within a dozen miles one way or the other of Diamond Harbor.”

  “Oh, you mean,” Shit said, is his mocking tone, “you get more sex down here in the country than you do up in the city, Mr. Big Ol’ Sophisticated Atlanta City Slicker?”

  “Well, I do,” Eric said. “Between you, your dad, Turpen’s johns, the Opera House, and the guys who hang around waitin’ to pick you up for a fuck around Hurters, not to mention Uncle Tom, and now The Slide—yeah, I think I got all the sex I can fuckin’ handle. And I don’t have to spend six and seven hours a day runnin’ after it, either. At the most, it’s a mosey down the road—if it ain’t already at the house. I was thinkin’, you know, now I got it, I should do something with it.”

  “How you mean—do somethin’?”

  “I mean, go on and do something else along with it, ’cause I’m really satisfied in that department. I told Barb, last year. You know what I’d like to do?”

  “What?”

  “I wanna try bein’ a really good person—’cause I’m so happy and get to fuck and suck so much.” He glanced over. “I didn’t tell her about the sex part and what that had to do with it. But that seems like a good reason.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. So that’s what I’m gonna start doin’.”

  “I think you’re a pretty good fella already. You make our fuckin food damn near every night. How much better you got to be?”

  “As good as I can. I mean, I’m gonna have to put a little thought into it. But I’ll think of somethin’. You be as satisfied as I am, and it’s just a shame to waste it all on yourself and get too lazy…”

  “Well, that’s gonna be interestin’. A really good person, huh? Am I supposed to give you a hand?”

  “I’m serious, Shit.”

  “I’m serious, too, nigger. Hell, it’s gonna be interestin’ to see what one looks like.”

  As he drove, Eric felt Shit’s hand fall over his thigh, then push on between his legs. “What you doin’?”

  Shit shrugged. “Helpin’, I guess. See, I’m gonna suck your dick on the way to the Opera, while you think about all the good things you wanna do. You sound all sexy when you talk crazy like that.”

  “I do?” Eric grinned. “Damn…!” Feeling his dick harden under Shit’s hand, Eric slowed some. “Go on, then. Suck it.”

  Shit twisted in the seat. His other hand joined the first. “I figured that’d be some kind of help, no matter what you was doin’.” He lowered his head. “Get you damn elbow up—so we can get ready for t
he movies…”

  * * *

  [30] NOT A FULL two months after Eric’s eighteenth birthday, in September of oh-eight, Barbara gave up her house in the pines and moved in officially with Ron in Runcible; and Eric moved permanently to the Dump with Shit and Dynamite. Over that week, at the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg, Barbara had several conversations with the garbage man, who stopped in a couple of times without the boys right after work, where, sitting across a booth from her, he said, “Eric works hard, Mrs. Jeffers—and he don’t get in no trouble. He’s a good influence on my boy—tryin’ to teach Morgan to read and stuff. I could never do it.” (Eric had also managed to make Shit more circumspect about eating his snot in public, unless the two were trying to gross someone out in the Runcible bus station or in the Opera House, where, soon, Shit was the one who would let him in through the rear service door. But that remained unmentioned.) “Since you’re movin’ to Runcible with your friend, Mr. Bodin, if you don’t mind Eric stayin’ with us, ma’am, me and Shit…uh, Morgan—we’d both be obliged.”

  Shit was goofily happy at the prospect.

  And, as Eric said, it was what he wanted, more than anything.

  So, with only some misgivings, Barbara agreed. Her friends and regular morning coffee customers at the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg, Mex and Jay MacAmon, both clearly fond of Eric, said they thought it would be a good idea.

  For a while now, Barbara had known that Eric and Morgan shared a bed in Dynamite’s cabin. (No one had mentioned Dynamite slept in it, too.) And Ronald Reagan Bodin had said several times he was not that keen on living with an adolescent—especially no gay one.

  Finally, Barbara had been impressed by how committed and consistent Eric was about his job. He had an account at the Dump Credit Union, where, these days, a check from the Chamber of Commerce was deposited for him every two weeks, the way it was for Shit and Dynamite.