Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Do you know,” Shit said, “even with all the fuckin’ I been doin’ today, you’re actually givin’ me a hard-on again?”

  Lurrie said, “He’s getting’ one, too.”

  Shit said, “Bet you are, too. You gonna show us yours?”

  “Aw, no…” Lurrie let go of both.

  Shit looked over at Eric questioningly.

  “No…I don’t think I…I should do that.”

  “Why?” Shit asked. “We let you hold onto ours.”

  “I dunno,” Lurrie said. “I guess, ’cause…well, if you saw it, you wouldn’t like me.”

  “Why not?” Shit asked.

  “I dunno…” Lurrie looked around as if he dropped something on the floor. “I guess ’cause it’s…small.”

  “Hey,” Eric said, “that’s nothin’ to worry about,” though he sometimes wondered if it was.

  “Look—” outside his pants, Shit dangled loose—“you guys is just kids. But I’m a goddam old fart. I’m getting’ tired.” (It was one of Dynamite’s lines.) “How about we go on home, so I can catch a nap?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “We probably should.” He pushed his own softening cock back in his jeans, and, with his thumb, tugged his underpants forward, so that it slipped within.

  “Un-huh,” Lurrie said. “That was really nice. I wished I’d…kissed ’em.”

  Now Shit got a kind of ironic look. He pulled his out again. “Go on and kiss the fucker, then lemme get outta here. Okay?”

  “Jesus…” Lurrie whispered. He bent down, and the red flower caught against the waist of Shit’s jeans, while again he took Shit’s cock in his fist. After looking at it for five second, he let his face move forward, kissed it, and stood up. Alternately the red flower flopped left, then right. “Uh…thank you. Thank you.” He looked—longingly, Eric realized—at Eric’s crotch.

  Lurrie blinked. “You’re just so…beautiful!”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “He is—ain’t he?”

  “No,” Lurrie said. “I mean…both of you!”

  “Huh?” Shit frowned now. “Hell—I ain’t good lookin’. I’m just a dumb-shit half-breed nigger. But, yeah, he’s fuckin’ amazin’.” With a foreknuckle he prodded his upper lip away from his gum. “See,” he spoke with a distorted voice—“I don’t even got none of my teeth no more, hardly. But he says he likes that.”

  “Yeah,” Lurrie said. “I guess that makes it feel better when…you know, you’re suckin’.”

  “Well…yeah.” Eric said. “That, too…” Embarrassed, he’d been thinking about pulling himself out again—but Lurrie was already standing. “Hey,” Eric said. “I like your hat—I mean that flower you got.”

  “You do—?” As he stood there, a smile spread over Lurrie’s face. (Eric thought: The kid’s ears are grinning!) “My girlfriend gave that to me. Marlene. She’s my best friend in the whole world—in Chicago. She made it for me and gave it to me as a goin’-away present. Out of this special paper that changes colors. She said she thought it expressed my inner consciousness. It’s just like one she sent me on Facebook. I think it’s lovely—and it does!” Behind his glasses, Lurrie raised his eyes as if, despite the sunhat’s down-turned brim, he might see it.

  Eric found himself smiling.

  “My uncle thinks I shouldn’t wear it. But I wear it anyway. I think it’s good to show your inner consciousness like that out where everybody can see what it is. Don’t you?”

  Clearly not sure what he should answer, Shit looked at Eric.

  “Sure,” Eric said. “Ain’t no reason not to.”

  Lurrie said, “My uncle thinks it’s gonna get me in a fight.”

  Shit said, “It could—yeah.” Again he glanced at Eric. “But not over here—this is the Dump.”

  “I should go back and find my uncle.” Lurrie suddenly made nervous fists, opened them again, and then—equally nervously—patted his stomach under his basketball shirt. “He’s probably looking for me.” Looking up again, he blinked back and forth between them. “You guys are awesome.”

  Eric smiled. In a year-and-a-half, the word had fallen out of his vocabulary, since he never heard it here.

  Shit said, “Well, thank you. You down here for the winter; we’ll see you again—probably.”

  Lurrie nodded, smiled, then turned toward the john’s front. He walked out the door.

  Shit said, “That was interesting,” and turned after him, Eric at his side.

  Across the empty lot, coming from the back door of the Produce Outlet, perhaps ten seconds later, they saw a man, cocoa-skinned and wearing jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, maybe in his late forties or early fifties. He wore a green army cap, turned to the side. He had seen Lurrie and was hurrying toward him. “Lurrie, where in the world have you—?”

  “Mr. Potts,” Shit said softly, to Eric, as their own path carried them closer.

  “I was in the bathroom…” Lurrie’s explained in his whispery voice. “That’s all—”

  “Well, what were you doing in that place?”

  “Huh?” Lurrie asked, beginning to sound bewildered. “I was goin’ to the bathroom.”

  Shit chose then to call out, “Nice to meet you, Lurrie. We’ll see you some other time.”

  Lurrie turned. “Oh, yeah—Good-bye!”

  “And what in the world were you doing with those two?” Mr. Potts demanded, voice twice as loud.

  “Nothin’.” Lurrie’s was twice as soft. His inner consciousness was permanently red in the sunlight.

  “Don’t you know that’s Morgan Haskell. You are not to go into that place again, do you understand? That’s not what your mother sent you down here for. And she did not send you here to associate with those two—or anybody like them. You are not the sort of person who has sex with strangers in men’s rooms. Do you follow me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That place is an embarrassment—and thank God nobody ever goes in there.” Now Potts turned directly to Eric and Shit. “And I do not want to see either of you with my nephew again—he’s seventeen years old, for God’s sake! I am trying to raise him to be a good, proper young man!”

  Mr. Potts looked completely frustrated. He turned away and started across the bare dirt behind the row of stores.

  Shit and Eric had both stopped walking.

  Lurrie glanced at them, then hurried after his uncle.

  Suddenly Shit called after them, “Hey!”

  Mr. Potts and Lurrie walked on across the Dump’s hot dirt behind the delivery entrances of the Dump’s town stores. Lurrie glanced back at them. Mr. Potts did not.

  “Hey, Lurrie! Did I look like the scuzziest, low-down motherfuckin’ nigger in the Dump when I was suckin’ this goddam motherfucker’s great big black dick? I hope I did—that’s what I was tryin’ to do. ’Cause that’s what makes me feel fuckin’ sexy as hell!”

  Stopping a second time, Lurrie glanced again, but Mr. Potts just strode purposely forward. Then Lurrie turned to catch up to his uncle.

  “You know, this guy right here, he looks white—” Shit went on shouting, stepping back so that he was outside Eric’s line of sight—“but he’s really the blackest fuckin’ nigger you ever met! He’s more of a nigger than your goddam uncle. You don’t believe me? You should see his daddy—next time he comes around. He’s so much blacker than your fuckin’ uncle, you’d fill up them fuckin’ too-big pants with shit if you saw ’im—you better believe it! I mean, you lookin’ for a nigger to suck, this—” from behind him, Shit’s hands fell on the shoulders, left and right, of Eric’s T-shirt, pushing forward, as he gazed across the space—“here’s the nigger you wanna be suckin’!”

  Eric laughed, but his nervousness was an electric tingling around his arms and chest and back. He whispered, “Come on, now! Cut it out, Shit—! You’re gonna make things worse for the kid.”

  Shit stepped around beside him. “How they gonna get worse?” He raised one hand to his nose, closed off one nostril with a wide thumb, snorted, then clo
sed the other nostril with a forefinger and its broad, ruined nail, and snorted again. Moving his cupped, glistening palm over before Eric’s chin, he said in a whisper intense enough to shock Eric. “Okay, you eat that! Now—and I don’t wanna even see you look around to check out if anybody’s watchin’ or not. You do, and I’ll bust you in your rock-hard nigger head right here, white boy.” Shit’s other hand had risen in a knuckley fist: he hefted it like ball of bone and meat and callus.

  It was all Eric could do to slay the habit of checking, but—because neither Lurrie nor Mr. Potts were looking, at any rate—he lowered his chin and licked awkwardly at Shit’s palm. He hardly tasted it. But he saw Shit move his hand back before his own face to lick off the rest.

  “Okay,” Shit said, “now you can do all the Nervous Nelly lookin’ around you want!” He took a breath and started walking. Eric walked after him, looking around as he caught up.

  He expected to see no one.

  But what Eric saw was the thick delivery driver, in his cap and with his keys at his waist, wheeling an empty hand truck from the rear entrance of one of the stores toward his truck. The driver was looking directly at Eric and Shit—and looking surprised, too.

  Eric had gone through some barrier of embarrassment, and, on the other side, was now in some kind of neuter hyper-nervousness. “Shit…?” he whispered.

  “What?” Shit seemed to have returned to some sort of normalcy—if that was the right term.

  “You say you know everybody around here—you know him?”

  “Who?”

  “The other guy in the bathroom.” He nodded toward the driver, who, with a rope through a bright brass grommet, briefly blazing in the sun, was now tying the corner of a blue tarp down over his delivery.

  “Him?” Shit started walking, Eric with him. “What you mean? Yeah—I seen him before.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Why?” As they came out in front of the Produce Outlet, and turned toward Hurter’s Lumber, Steel, and Seed, Shit began to grin. “You wanna suck his dick?”

  Eric felt a tingle. “Yeah, he is kinda cute. But I was wonderin’—that’s all.”

  “You’ll probably learn yourself,” Shit said, “in not too long.”

  In front of the stores, they walked by the plastic-walled Shuttle Stop with its metal roof. The sunlight was distorted on the pavement beside it. The tingling nervousness had…stopped.

  Eventually Eric said, “I like Lurrie. He’s all shy. But he seems like an interesting kid. Sort of young, though. But he’d still be fun to know.”

  “I like him, too,” Shit said. “Too bad he’s got to deal with that asshole uncle—Potts!”

  “Yeah.” Eric sighed again.

  “You know, Eric?” Shit said, after a moment. “You’re a really good feller.” They moved over the gravel, dirt, and dried tufts. “You’re a lot gooder’n I am.” Then, while Eric was wondering what to say, suddenly Shit asked, “Hey, what you think my inner consciousness is?”

  Eric frowned a moment. “Well…You ever seen rabbits fuck? You know how the buck gets on the doe—bip, bip, bip, bip, then jumps off on to another one: bip, bip, bip, bip, bip? And then another one?” There had been rabbits in Texas…

  “Yeah…?”

  “Well, you could have a hat with a big ol’ furry, friendly, horny rabbit on the top, hoppin’ up and down. That could be your inner consciousness—”

  “Oh, fuck you—!” But both were laughing. “What’s that Facebook he was talking about?”

  “I dunno. I think it has something to do with computers.”

  They turned onto the dust road—more dust it seemed, anyway, than dirt—toward the Dump’s edge that took them back to Dynamite’s. Shit grunted: “Oh. Probably it’s somethin’ you got to read.”

  Eric frowned. “Maybe not a lot…”

  “Well, it’s a book, ain’t it?”

  * * *

  [32] OVER THE NEXT weeks, they met Lurrie—without his uncle Ezra—coming from the beach or sitting in the Coffee & Egg or walking down Front Street at the Harbor and at the comic store (not Hurters but the one in Runcible). Once they took him back and forth on the scow with Jay and Mex, and Shit spent the afternoon showing them both things and places on the island (Don’t worry—I ain’t gonna tell my uncle I was hangin’ round with you, and then to Eric, You really black?

  (Shit said, Sure he is. Can’t you tell?

  (Oh, yeah—sort of, I guess, and Lurrie frowned, bending his head to the side.

  (Naw, I ain’t really. Eric laughed. I wish I was, sometimes. But he’s right: my dad was. And when I pretend I am, it turns me on.

  (You guys is really lucky. Hey, you know this feels good…) that were new even to Eric.

  On Christmas, Dynamite said he could take the pick-up, and Eric drove to Runcible to spend the day with Barbara and Ron. Eric felt funny that Dynamite and Shit hadn’t been invited, which he was sure was Bodin, not his mother. There were some friends. Dinner was at three. At five, he said, really, he had get back to the Dump, basically because he felt uncomfortable. As he was leaving, Barbara thrust into his hand a shopping bag with half a turkey in it, half a Dutch pineapple Christmas cake, and plastic refrigerator dishes of greens and yams and walnut stuffing and a jar of eggnog and more icebox dishes of creamed onions and giblet gravy. “That way,” a guilty Barbara declared, at the kitchen door, “you all can have some Christmas, too.”

  When he got back to the Dump, the last blue had been gone from the sky for minutes, though it was not yet six. No lights shone in the cabin windows. Because they worked the next day, Dynamite and Shit were already in bed. He got the food into the refrigerator. When Eric crawled between them, immediately both wound themselves around him.

  Dynamite said, “You smell like whiskey, son.”

  “Eggnog.” Eric yawned. “I put some in the ice box—” which is what both Dynamite and Shit called the refrigerator, so Eric had been calling it that too—“for you, with some turkey and stuff Barb sent over.”

  “Smells good,” Shit mumbled.

  Already Eric could feel Shit’s hard-on against his thigh, though he was sure in moments it would go down.

  “It’s nice havin’ a drunk nigger crawl in bed with you on Christmas.” Shit pushed harder against Eric. “Makes me all horny.”

  (Or maybe it wouldn’t.)

  Shit squeezed him again, even as Dynamite relaxed and moved back an inch. “Chef Ron come over here on the way to work at Shells,” Shit mumbled on, “with some goose and some chestnut and sausage mush-up what he said was stuffin’ and let us have ’em. That part was pretty good. But the goose was a little funny—maybe that’s ’cause I never had none before.” He gave a contagious yawn, beard and mouth both against Eric’s chest—and, yes, his hard-on was subsiding. “Uncle Tom got most of mine, though.”

  Three days after New Years, Dynamite drove Shit and Eric down to Turpens. “We’re stayin’ here for an hour—one hour, that’s all. Then I’m goin’ home. I wanna take me a goddam nap.” They all split up to start out, at least, in different johns, though they’d come here enough times together to know they’d all end up in the active back one.

  Eric was walking across the lobby when, from the archway with its silhouetted MAN and WOMAN, he saw the stocky white driver, in his cap and his chain swinging down from belt to his bristle of keys, come out and amble toward the door.

  Eric wasn’t planning to say anything—maybe just nod—when the fellow grinned at him. “Hey—how you doin’? You been…” He looked around, kind of shrugging—“hangin’ out in that…what was it, ‘Gay Friendly’ place over in the Dump? I go in there, you know, but there ain’t never nobody in it. You fellas was the first guys I seen there the last three times I went.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think it’s too popular.” Eric laughed. “Naw—I ain’t been back since we saw you there.”

  The man glanced around—but, besides them, the lobby was empty just then. “Hey, you was givin’ that nigger on his kne
es back there in the Dump john a good time—you ever do any dick suckin’ yourself?”

  Eric laughed. “Truth is, I do more suckin’ than gettin’ sucked. Actually.”

  “A big guy like you—with all them muscles? They look pretty hard. But, then, that’s why I asked, I guess. I’ll tell you. I come in here, horny as a motherfucker—and if you wanted to—” Looking around again, the man grasped his crotch and squeezed—“do a little suckin’ on…my dick, I wouldn’t chase you off. I mean, ’cause it’s New Years.”

  “Oh.” Eric laughed. “Okay. Sure.”

  “Hey,” and the man stepped closer, while Eric bent a little to hear him, as he began to whisper: “When you and your friend was comin’ out that place and doin all that hollerin’ at them two back there, I thought I seen you and him do something…fuckin’ nasty. I mean…” He shook his head.

  “What you mean?” Eric asked.

  “Well, it was…” The man stood up. “Aw, it was probably just me thinkin’ I saw it. You know, in the bright sunlight, sometimes it’s as hard to see as when it’s half dark. You can think you see somethin’ that’s just in your mind—”

  “What was it?” Eric asked. He was trying to sound innocent.

  “It wasn’t nothin’. Somethin’ I used to do, sometimes, when I was kid—and it kinda tickled me to see you doin’ it with each other—especially after what you was doin’ together in the john. But I probably was, you know, misperceivin’ things.” He shook his head. “But I had me a cousin who did it till he was eighteen, twenty-one years old—then he went to Mobile; and from then on I ain’t really seen him at all. But, see, I stopped when I was a kid and people started getting’ disgusted with me, you know? Hey—I’m gonna go in the john. You wait three minutes, then come on in. I’ll be in the second to the last stall on the end—on the right. You come on inside, but if anybody’s in there, you wait around for him to leave. Then you slip on in, and I’ll let you have it.” He joggled his crotch again.

  “Okay,” Eric said, resigned.

  “Now, if somebody comes in there while we’re doin’ somethin’, I’m gonna zip up and slip out. You can wait in there for me—and when it’s safe, I’ll come back, after whoever comes in takes off. All right?”