Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “I got a better idea,” Eric said. “Why don’t we go into the john in the back of this place? Everybody who knows about that one, knows what’s goin’ on in it and don’t mind—”

  “Aw, no!” Raising his unshaven chin, the man shook his head. “Too many people in there—I mean, they got all them gay guys in here. They don’t like straights like me. And I don’t wanna get in no fight or nothing with ’em. I mean, in the back, a whole bunch of ’em is always lookin’ out for each other.”

  Eric said, “They’ll look out for us—if somebody who really doesn’t belong there comes in.”

  “Naw—come on, now. You do what I say. You don’t wanna fool around with none of them gay guys. They’re crazy. That’s crazy.”

  “Okay…” Eric repeated.

  With his keys and his chain swinging at his leg, the man walked into the front john.

  A minute or two later, Eric followed.

  But the third time he found himself sitting with the door closed, alone in the end commode stall, waiting for the trucker to return, his jeans around his knees, Eric thought: What the fuck am I puttin’ myself through this for? Well, he does have nice cock—it had turned out both longer and thicker than Eric had expected (it was in the same realm as Shit’s and Dynamite’s, actually)—and, yes, it had kept him there that long.

  “But,” as, the three were finally walking across the mica-flecked Turpens lot toward the pickup, Eric explained to Shit and Dynamite, “nice as it was, it wasn’t that nice. I mean, I wanted to suck him off and I did—got his load, too. As dicks go, it was all right. But the rest of the stuff around it—runnin’ in and out and gettin’ scared and startin’ and stoppin’—I don’t have time for that bullshit, not with the old john in the back, and me wastin’ my hour sittin’ up front.” Eric grimaced. “He was a smoker, too. You could tell from the taste of his damned dick cheese.”

  At the pickup’s blue cab—Dynamite had left it down beside the old scales, the worn planks with their metal bands, today lopsided in their pits, from when Turpens had had a working weigh station—they slowed to stand a few moments. Beyond the wire gate, trees whispered.

  You saw so much around here through diamond-linked steel, sometimes Eric wondered if that wasn’t why Diamond Harbor had its name, rather than the sun on the summer or winter sea.

  Shit grinned and opened the pickup door. “Told you you’d learn who the fuck he was, ’fore long.” He climbed in and Eric climbed in after. “You know, I think Turpens is more gay friendly and more straight friendly than that place in the Dump.” It was about the tenth time he’d said it.

  “Yup.” On the other side of the truck, Dynamite climbed in, pulled the door to, and started the ignition. “That’s why we come here—and don’t bother goin’ there. That gay friendly john’s one of that nigger’s ideas—Kyle’s, I mean—I don’t think ever really worked. Though I still swear by some of his others.”

  Dynamite drove from between the trucks and, after driving down the long parking lot aisle, turned through the gate in the fence, out of Turpens, under the trees, and onto the graveled back road that would take them directly home. “Now if you still wanna suck some good Georgia dick—”

  Dynamite dropped a hand between his legs, as dappled leaf light and sunspots ran up his forearm, and over his dirt-grayed denim. He thumbed apart one after another steel fly button (the pair he sometimes reserved for Turpens)— “you don’t gotta do too much more than climb over that boy’s legs there, sit in the middle, and get your head down here and stash this nasty ol’ thing inside your goddam face. I can promise you a good load, too, ’cause I didn’t leave a thing back in the john—and you probably gonna get one from him ’fore we get home. You know, you done got us both pretty well trained by now to do all our fuckin’ around in the old head there, then wait till we meet up with you again for the big finish—know what I’m sayin’?”

  Eric laughed—Shit looked very serious—and levered himself up to climb over. Shit gave him a hand and slid under Eric toward the door with its open window. In two minutes, while Eric’s face was in Dynamite’s lap (Salty enough for you, son? Eric nodded.

  (And Shit chuckled. That’s my piss, all over his dick—too), Shit had a hand down the back of Eric’s jeans and two fingers sunk two knuckles deep in Eric’s butt. Eric guessed that they were somewhere in town or near it, when he heard Shit call out the window, “Hey, Lurrie—how you doin’? Wan’ us to give you a lift?”

  Dynamite hit the brake a little too sharply. “Come on, Shit—you gonna make the cocksucker bite my damn dick off. Don’t joke around like that!”

  Eric raised his head.

  “Lurrie ain’t out there.” Shit chuckled. “I’m just funnin’ yall.”

  Though he got the promised load from Dynamite before they reached the Dump, Eric did not get his load from Shit in the pickup.

  He got two from him, though—one in the cabin bed, one out on the cabin porch—in the hour after.

  * * *

  [33] AT THE OPERA, Shit and Eric met a black kid just between them in age, called Big Man. Slightly under four feet tall, Big Man lived down the coast with his dad—a contractor, Joe Markum, who, seventeen or eighteen years before, had built most of the seventy-five cabins in the Dump and who, though not gay himself, was almost as permissive with his son as Dynamite. Big Man had a withered leg, walked with a crutch, and wore a permanent urine bag. Shit had known him vaguely back in school. His quarter of the sea-side Victorian down in Pinewood (half the second floor, with rubber rimmed fire doors between his rooms and the rest of the house) smelled like Dynamite’s deck the time Whiteboy had come over and they’d all had a piss fight out there and it hadn’t rained for a week.

  Shit had insisted it was Whiteboy’s stink. But both Eric and Dynamite told him, no, that’s what old pee smelled like—finally they got some disinfectant from Fred and sluiced it down.

  It reminded Eric of a few spots he’d smelled on Gilead.

  Big Man didn’t have much dick, nor did it get hard, but he was a scrappy little guy, a cut-up who delighted in foul talk. From under his dark bony brow and black wooly hair a dwarf’s wide-set eyes stared out, welcoming and enthusiastic. He loved to get fucked and had nothing resembling a gag reflex.

  Over years Eric had suppressed his. Big Man didn’t have one.

  Shit and Eric had fooled around with him mostly in the alley behind the Opera, at Hammond and Dusty’s insistence, or down in the Opera’s tiled restroom; or, at his home, in the “piss pool”—Big Man’s term for his rooms upstairs that his father had built him, with their rubber flooring, rubber mattress, rubber rimmed windows and doors, rubber sheets, and drains around the raised bed: when his connector hose to his urine bag worked loose from his cock in the midst of sex, he’d pee all over you.

  (Yeah, Joe Markum said. I want the damned kid to have some fun! That’s what him and some of his friends call it…)

  The November day was warm enough for June. Barbara had wanted Eric to come help her with some flowered decals she’d decided to put up under the windows. Then Serena phoned to ask her over, so she changed her mind. They’d do it later. Eric had walked back to the Dump—but Big Man had already driven up in his Camaro with the special pedals, picked up Shit, and taken him down to his place.

  Dynamite asked Eric to lend him a hand.

  As they started back from Hurter’s Lumber, Steel & Seed at Dump Corners to Dynamite’s cabin, Dynamite picked up his tar can to lug it by the wooden grip on the curved wire handle. In a cloth Dump Produce bag, Eric carried trowels, a leveler, nails, and two dozen shingles.

  In the long grass beside the dirt road or over the sparse growth beside the asphalt stretches, they passed the cabins—each on its acre and a half of land—that, years before, Big Man’s father had built to Robert Kyle’s architects’ specifications.

  Walking beside Dynamite, looking at their two o’clock shadows moving ahead over the dust, Eric wondered what Shit was up to with the ebullient dwarf. Now a
nd again, he grinned at Dynamite, who smiled back, his jaw dark with chestnut stubble, and whose chest hair curled between the straps of his bib overalls, clawing over the frayed top. When he glanced to one side or the other, his rings flared white-gold—again, today, he wore no shirt.

  Eric’s mind had started to wander, when he felt the big hand on his shoulder. (Today it was Eric who was barefoot.) Beside Eric’s footprints, Dynamite’s work boots left broad, sliding ones. This near Dump Corners now and again a car or a pickup still rolled by.

  “You know, we don’t got to get right into roof patchin’ soon as we hit home.” Dynamite sounded thoughtful. “This is our day off, after all. I’ll tell you what I’d really like: we go up on the back porch, put this stuff down, and maybe just do some sittin’.”

  Ahead, one after another, three crickets jumped off the asphalt edge into brush and goldenrod.

  Dynamite squeezed and released Eric’s arm, then slid his rough hand around Eric’s neck to rest there, without rhythm.

  It felt wonderfully affectionate.

  Above the bluff, behind their own cabin, a bank of clouds had risen, so that the silver was gone, replaced by deep gray. The light around them had taken on a sourceless radiance, like that in an eclipse.

  “Son—you wanna stick a finger in my fly and feel around on my dick? Fact is, I got somethin’ in there for you—had it on all mornin’, since you got back from your mama’s.”

  Eric frowned. With his free hand, he reached over for Dynamite’s crotch.

  “That’s right. But get it inside. Two of the buttons done popped. You’ll feel where they were—”

  Eric pushed two fingers between the frayed cloth’s edges, to touch something wet and smooth. “What happened—you come in your pants, you ol’ pig fucker?” He laughed.

  “Not exactly,” Dynamite said. “But when you and Uncle Tom went over to your mama’s earlier, Black Bull stopped by with Whiteboy in his pickup. He’d been out deliverin’ some of his messages for Dr. Greene. A bunch of those young fellows on the other side of the Dump is goin’ up to the city for a weekend, and he was there showin’ ’em how to put on a rubber. I guess they were all helpin’ each other out, and he got a little over excited and shot his load in his damned scumbag. He remembered I kinda liked them things, if they had a good load of nigger jizz in ’em. So he tied it off, stuck it in his vest pocket, drove by the cabin, and give it to me. I took my dick right out and slipped it on—that’s what I call neighborly.” Dynamite chuckled. “He even got Shit grinnin’, before the half-pint come by and the two of them took off. I been wearin’ that nasty thing all mornin’ and feelin’ kinda good about it.” Dynamite set the can down on the road’s edge, and slid his arm further around Eric’s shoulder. Leaning close, he dropped his voice. “Shit put a load in it too, ’fore he left—”

  “And you just didn’t bother to tell me?”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure you’d be interested. And I was still thinkin’ about the roof.” His whisper was close enough to Eric’s ear to sound like thunder. “Son, how’d you feel about openin’ up my overalls when we get back home, slippin’ a couple fingers up under my balls and inside my Georgia cracker asshole, to play around with the shit up there, and suckin’ on this half-toothless cracker’s big ol’ dick at the same time? I tell you, I’m about to piss all over myself. I’d be right obliged to give it to you and you could suck that black bastard’s thick ol’ nigger slime off my thing. I’d really enjoy you swingin’ on my meat when I let loose.”

  A hand around Dynamite’s wide back, Eric pulled him closer. He let the sack clank to the macadam. “You been savin’ up your cheese for me?”

  “Heyyyyyyyy…!” Softly, Dynamite grunted in Eric’s ear, to end by turning his tongue in the ridged trumpet. “I guess—” he pulled his tongue back in his mouth—“you ain’t licked up under my skin in a few days. You know how much of that stuff me and Shit both put out.”

  Eric began laughing. The laugh bloomed into something manic, and he pulled from Dynamite and staggered from the road’s rim, turned and almost bent double. Straightening, about ten feet from Dynamite, he watched the man’s big, rough fingers thumb apart the metal fly buttons. “Yeah…okay. Jesus, Dynamite, you still the nastiest cracker son of a bitch I met down here! And you’re as nasty today as you was on the day I come!” Eric’s bending and standing was more like one of Shit’s bursts of humor than his own. He pulled in a breath. “How come you were the first person I met when I got to Diamond Harbor—or almost the first person? And here I am almost half a dozen years later and we’re still fuckin’ around together?”

  Dynamite shrugged. “You just lucky.”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna suck you off. But I’m gonna do it right here, outside, on the road. And if somebody comes by, we ain’t stoppin’. I don’t care who it is. It can be Ron and my mamma for all I care. And I ain’t waitin’ till we get home, either. Okay?”

  Dynamite raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. “That’s fine with me. Go on.” He pulled his cock loose, three-quarters of it sheathed in ivory rubber, the forward half inch filled with something that hung straight down. With thumb and forefinger, he gripped it and hauled it loose. Lifting the condom, he frowned at it, tied it, then pushed it into a pocket on his bib.

  Eric stepped forward and gripped Dynamite’s down-curved cock. It was more sticky than wet. He squatted, one knee going down onto the dust beyond the shoulder, then the other grinding through denim onto macadam. “This is Bull’s, right? And Shit’s…?”

  “Well, I been leakin’ in it myself all mornin’.”

  Eric took it in his mouth—with its familiar size and shape and it’s unfamiliar taste: it was very salty—which tasted good; more like sweat than cum. He slipped one hand into the fly and got his fingers under Dynamite’s loose sack.

  “Come on,” Dynamite said. “Take your time, son. Take your time…”

  Back under and behind Dynamite’s testicles, Eric pushed one, then two fingers into Dynamite’s hirsute crack, running his fingers up and down till he found the sphincter.

  “Oh, fuck, boy…!”

  It wasn’t tight, and both went easily in.

  Eric supported himself with his other hand against Dynamite’s hip, till the lanky garbage man reached down and gripped Eric’s with his hard fingers.

  Almost at the same time, what Eric had thought was the rising sound of a breeze became a nearing motor!

  Oh, Jesus, he thought. From behind him, somebody was driving by. Why hadn’t he at least looked around to see…?

  Watch it be Chef Ron, Eric thought. Or Ezra Potts. Maybe Mama Grace—or some summer visitor, with no real knowledge of the Dump at all. Still, he continued moving his head in and out.

  When the vehicle got in the way of the sun, the engine slowed. The shadow that had pulled over them stilled.

  A voice very loud, very black, and very familiar said: “Hey, you ol’ pig fucker, couldn’t you wait till you got home…?” Followed by a great laugh too big for the day.

  “Hey, Bull,” Dynamite said. “How’s it goin’, Whiteboy? You guys just getting’ back?”

  But Bull said, “What’s he doin’, suckin’ your dick out here?” He laughed again. “Well, I guess Whiteboy gets like that sometimes when we’re just drivin’ around. Fact is, sometimes so do I.”

  “Oh,” Dynamite said. “’Cause I was afraid there for a minute you hadn’t never seen nobody suck a dick before.”

  “I seen it!” Black Bull declared. “Yeah, I seen it! Sure I seen it this mornin’.” He laughed again.

  Whiteboy said, “Eric looks funny down there.” (He must have been sitting beside Black Bull in the pickup cab.)

  Eric thought about comin’ off and giving Whiteboy both the finger and a grin. But he went on sucking.

  “You’d look funny too, if you had a mouth full of my big black dick and was suckin’ on it beside the damn road. Hey—Eric! Eric? Did this ol pig fucker tell you what we flavored that thing with this mornin’? Did
he tell you how we got it tastin’ so good for you?”

  “Why you think the nigger couldn’t wait till we got home?” Dynamite asked. “That’s why he had to get started here.”

  Again Black Bull exploded with laughter. “Yeah—yeah! I just bet he couldn’t. This one here’s the same way. Ain’t you, you two bit piece of hog crap?”

  Eric heard Whiteboy grunt happily, “Un-huh.”

  Again the motor revved, then slowed: “You pissin’ in that boy enough?”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll get out and give ’im some right now, if you dry—”

  “I’m pissin’ in ’im now,” Dynamite said. Though he hadn’t been, the cock head in Eric’s throat erupted hot urine, as it pulled forward in Eric’s mouth. It pushed forward again. Eric gulped.

  On his third gulp, Eric thought: Jesus, why the fuck am I so happy doing this…?

  Because, in every glittering extremity of Eric’s body, he was.

  “Well, that’s what you supposed to be doin’,” Bull said. “And that’s what he’s supposed to be doin’. Jus’ make sure that other crazy nigger you got knows it too, if you all gonna stay together.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dynamite moved one foot so that it was against Eric’s knee. “He does.”

  The engine got louder. The pickup pulled away; sunlight pushed off the shadow.

  Eric squeezed Dynamite rough hand—and drank.

  Dynamite squeezed back. “You okay…?” Eric coughed, and a dribble ran down and under his jaw.

  Eric nodded. And went on drinking.

  Dynamite called: “I know he’d stop and say thank you, if he wasn’t a little concerned about spillin’ some.”

  Bull called back (the truck must have stopped only ten or fifteen feet further away): “And I know you brought that piss pig up right. Both them is good boys, Mr. Garbage Man.”

  Eric squeezed Dynamite’s hand—who squeezed it back.

  Bull’s oversized voice came again: “Seein’ that nasty cracker doin’ ol’ Eric like that gone and got me all excited again. You wanna suck on dis here?…Damn, Whiteboy, at least lemme get my elbow out da way! Course I never knowed you when you didn’t wanna suck my dick—yeah, there you go. Come on, we goin’ home now.” Once more the motor got louder. Tires rasped on the small stones, the fading sound coming back to where Eric knelt in the road dust.