Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  It took a long time for Dynamite to run out. After a while, he moved his work shoe again and said, “Come on—get on up, now.”

  Eric backed away, and with a tug from Dynamite, pulled himself erect. He felt both unsteady and satisfied. He looked east, where, beyond Bull’s cabin, the ledge dropped away to the lower beach, then west, where, beyond Dynamite’s, the bluff rose toward blue and white and swollen silver cloud. Even the most familiar things—like Dynamite’s cabin, just over there—looked, somehow, new and bright.

  Now, down across the road in front of Black Bulls’, the black pickup had pulled up. Either Bull and Whiteboy had already gone inside—or they hadn’t gotten out.

  Beside Eric, Dynamite sighed. “You know, son, I worry about Shit, sometimes—not things like him eatin’ his snot. ’Cause then I’d worry about you, too. But I figure you both can decide if you wanna do it in front of other people or not. And since it don’t bother me, what you do around other people ain’t my affair.” Dynamite looked after a flock of gulls.

  Eric looked up, too. More gulls fell and pulled away at angles over the sky. “I wonder if anyone but me ever realizes how kind and helpful and funny and…well, carin’ that boy is. Just how much of a good person.”

  Eric said, “I do.”

  Dynamite looked down, questioningly. “Yeah, you do—don’t you. But what I mean, see, is I wonder about…well, the job I did bringin’ ’im up. You got this kid all of a sudden—a man now really, the two of you—and you love ’im to death and think he’s the greatest thing in God’s world—and you know you’re doin’ things together that a lotta people wouldn’t approve of. But he seems to like it as much as you do. Then, pretty soon, you realize he’s got a couple of what folks would call…well, pretty bad habits.” Dynamite dropped his hand from Eric’s shoulder, and brought it out in front of him. He looked down at the back of his own heavily veined hand, then turned it over in a loose fist and lifted it to his mouth. With what were left of his lower teeth, he began to demolish even further the ruins that had retreated—like Shit’s—more than half an inch back from the nubs. (Like Shit’s, Eric had figured, most of Dynamite’s nails, left alone, would have been big as quarters, or bigger, though, cuticle to nub, what remained were less than a dime’s diameter.) Dynamite started walking again, still biting on his own.

  Eric stepped up beside him.

  Around his gnawing, Dynamite said, “I mean…this goddam nail bitin’—maybe I could have broken him of that one. Made him normal, like.”

  “Could you?” Eric asked. “I mean, since you do it so much yourself—ain’t it kind of like hustlin’ down at Turpens, when you was a kid?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I just figured if I’d done give him a couple of whacks when he was real young, he might have stopped. But, you know, I never could hit a kid. And I seen too much of that when I was comin’ up—too many kids around here who got beat on. It didn’t help none of them. And since, like you say—” Dynamite moved to another finger—“I bite hell out of mine, it never really bothered me—except a few times when I ate ’em down to where they was bleedin’ bad or the whole nail come off—so I just left ’im alone about it the way I wished folks had left me alone about it when I was comin’ up. And you got to admit—” He glanced over at Eric; and winked—“if you gonna stick ’em up somebody’s asshole, this is a lot better than the dirty ol’ claws some other guys let ’emselves get.”

  Dynamite started walking again. Eric started, too. (For that reason, Eric kept his own short, though he rarely bit them.) Dynamite switched his tar can—and began biting on the fingers of his other hand. “You know Kyle really didn’t want people to be afraid of what other folks thought,” he said, suddenly and seemingly unconnected. “And he was willin’ to spend money on it, to make it happen. Sometimes it’s hard to know what you want, if somebody hasn’t figured it out and just handed it to you. That’s how all the best things come.”

  “You said that before—that Kyle said it.”

  “And I’m probably gonna say it again. I swear, I ain’t never knowed a nigger with more crazy—but interstin’—ideas, about how things should be. I mean, here was this brainy black sonofabitch, who went away to school every winter and sounded more like a Yankee than he did like a local black boy, tellin’ us all how sayin ‘ain’t’ and ‘yall’ wasn’t mistakes and too country, like everybody around us was always tellin’ us, but was real words what had developed to talk with, and how we should use ’em and be proud of ’em ’cause it was part of our dialect, and even how cussin’ and swearin’ and callin’ each other names—what did he say, now?—‘wove a community of culturally-invested language,’ and that we should all do it, as long as any of us could use it. ‘Culturally-invested language is for includin’ people, not for excludin’ them.’ I remember him tellin’ us that, too—and, the first time he said it, I thought that was the stupidest soundin’ thing I ever heard, and only half because I didn’t know what the fuck it meant.”

  Eric frowned. “‘Invested language’…?”

  “Swearin’ and cussin’ and callin’ people dumb-ass fucks and crazy nigger bastards and cracker shitheads. He was the first person, black or white, who regularly called me a ‘nigger.’ The first few times, it made me feel about as funny as it probably makes most black folks feel when a real ignorant white guy does it. The first few times, I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, ’cause I’d been told that was the worst thing you could call a black person, even though they said it all the time and so did I and everybody else. But pretty soon, it was makin’ me feel so damned proud as well, I practically busted my britches puffin’ up with pride, there. I mean, half of Kyle’s ideas was crazy—like that ‘gay friendly’ men’s room of his in the back of the Dump. But he was also the first person, black or white, with enough money to make them ideas real and actually built the damn thing to try it out—and a few years later, when I had Morgan to take care of, and I thought he probably didn’t even remember me no more, he went and made his teen-age white trash fuck buddy the damn garbage man for all the niggers around here.”

  “Did you love ’im?” Eric asked. “Kyle, I mean?”

  “I liked him—I still do. A whole lot. But we was just good fuck buddies, for a few years there—him and me, me and Jay; him and Jay, too.” Dynamite chuckled. “I love Shit. I love ’im so much I don’t know what to do sometimes. And—yeah—I love you, too, Eric—I do. ’Cause Shit loves you the way he do—and that kind of love spreads around.”

  “Yeah. I…love you,” Eric said. “And I love Shit. And I know he loves you. What…would you like from me, Dynamite? I mean, what could I do for you?”

  “You really want to know?” Dynamite grinned at him.

  “Un-huh.”

  “Well,” Dynamite said, “what I’d kinda like is if maybe we just went on up to the cabin, and took our clothes off and lay down on the big bed inside while we waited for your brother to get back. I could climb on top of you and rub my ol pig fucker around on you till I shot a load on your gut. Or if you wanted to, you could shoot one all over mine. It’s fun shootin’ on a scrappy nigger like you.”

  “Sure.” Eric bent to pick up the bag of tools, which clinked again inside. He hefted the sack. “Then we could lick it up afterward.”

  “Yeah.” Dynamite grinned at him, then picked up the tar can. Again they walked. “Now who you callin’ nasty, son? Still, sometimes, I wonder if all the stuff we done together was really good for…Shit. I never hurt Shit—I never done nothin’ with him or to him I wasn’t pretty sure he wanted. The only problem I ever really had with him was when I couldn’t beat the little fucker off me. Especially when he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen…I had to work real hard to teach ’im sometimes that there was other things we could do beside fuck and suck. But still, somehow, in all that we got to be pretty close friends.” Over a few more steps, new gulls soared up from the sea. “But a couple of times we went across the road to Bull’s…you ever talk to Whiteboy—I
mean about some of the stuff his real daddy done with him, before he come to the Dump? And stuff his mother just let his daddy do it, ’cause she had six other kids—four of what his dad was already fuckin’ in the house?”

  “A little,” Eric said. “And Shit told me…some things.”

  “I mean, how many years was it, he told us once, he was chained up in that loft in the damned barn—we still ain’t really sure what state it was in or what town it was near—if Whiteboy ever knew for sure. I mean, that’s how little they taught him. If they could be sure it was in Georgia, believe me, Bull woulda gone lookin’ for the guy—probably with a gun. But that’s why Whiteboy still don’t really talk right or move right, though he’s a lot better at both than when he first got here when he was ten or eleven. Whored out for a sexual punchin’ bag—for anybody what would pay five dollars for half an hour to beat on ’im. He told Bull himself, if it had been an hour ’stead of a half hour, he’d probably been dead a dozen times over. Then, see, you realize he got so much of that kinda treatment before he was even nine or ten, once he got away, he spent a year runnin’ around the country tryin’ to get guys to do ’im that way some more, along with stuff that was already crazier than his dad and his dad’s friends—till Black Bull found him sleepin’ in the rain under one of them derelict rigs they used to have in the back at Turpens by the old scales. Yeah, I guess it’s better, if that’s the way you are, if you got somebody doin’ it who actually cares about you and wants good things for you. But the whole thing can make you stop and wonder, sometimes, what the fuck you’re doin’ yourself. Well, that’s what I have—what we have—livin’ across the road from us, now, for the last dozen years.”

  Eric said, “Maybe having Bull and Whiteboy there keeps you…I don’t know, thinking about you and Shit, so you…don’t take things for granted. And having you across the road from him helps Bull do his best for Whiteboy, even with all the weird stuff they’re into.”

  “Maybe,” Dynamite said. “At least I hope that’s how it works. Come on. Let’s go on up in the house and mess around.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I wanna do some of that. I wanna hold onto you awhile. Come on.”

  They turned up toward the cabin.

  “Course, sometimes, yeah, thinkin’ about that stuff with Whiteboy’s family makes me wonder if me and Shit ain’t gone a little too far. But then, when it does work, it’s hard to imagine Shit bein’ any happier. Not to mention you—” Dynamite grinned—“you nasty little piss hole.”

  When they reached the cabin steps, Dynamite took two steps up, then turned and waited for Eric. When he reached Dynamite, Eric asked, “Dynamite, did you ever play blackjack, I mean, professional blackjack…in Atlantic City?”

  “Huh? Naw—I never played no cards hardly at all. Where’s that Atlantic City anyway—is that like in Las Vegas? Why’d you wanna know?”

  “’Cause, well…it’s in New Jersey. But that’s where my real dad was. When I was little, sometimes I’d think maybe Mike was my real dad, the guy Barbara met in Atlantic City, but because I come out so stupid blond and dumb-ass white lookin’, they told me it was somebody else—Cash, she said his name was. But, well, sometimes I…I wish you was him, like you’re really Shit’s father.” Eric looked at the ground. Then he looked up. “That would make it even better when we did stuff together…Huh?”

  Dynamite smiled. “You’re just saying that ’cause you know it turns me on, ain’t you?”

  “Well, yeah. Some. But also ’cause it’s…true.”

  They walked up the last three steps together. “You happy, Eric?”

  “Yeah, I’m happy,” Eric said. “With Shit and you? I am.”

  Above the bluff, clouds rose higher and grayer and darker, indicating, Eric was sure, only the changes in light and beauty the landscape placed about them.

  Together, they reached the deck.

  Again he heard Dynamite set the tar can down—on boards this time, not earth. A second later, Dynamite stood up, reached around, and ran his hand down the back of Eric’s jeans.

  Eric dropped the canvas sack from his hand. It clanked the deck. One corner landed on his little toe but must have contained only some nails and, maybe, the trowel’s wooden handle so—miraculously—didn’t hurt. He pulled his foot sharply back anyway.

  Eric felt his front button ease open and his pants slip down. With the same hand he grabbed the waist to hold them up.

  Over the deck rail, out between the pines, across the Dump’s grasses set with clumps of fern and stubby sumac groves, between the cabins and beyond the rise, Hurters and the Dump Produce Market, the shuttle stops and Dump Corners were out of sight.

  The air moved his hair, now long enough to tickle his ears.

  Beside him, Dynamite rubbed belly and chest against him. He ran a hand over Eric’s shoulder, his arm. “Hey, strong fella, your muscles feel nice.”

  The wrist of Dynamites other arm tugged the back of Eric’s jeans. “So does your hand.” The front button of his pants was open. So was his fly, pulled out around his hips. “How many fingers you got up my asshole?”

  “Three,” Dynamite said.

  Eric grinned. “I couldn’t tell if it was two or four.”

  Dynamite’s wandering hand came to Eric’s chin, his mouth, his neck. “Come on, you little sonofabitch, let’s go inside. We can put one of them pillows in the middle of the bed under your hips. You can stretch out on your belly over that thing, and I can stick my redneck dick up your goddam asshole.”

  Eric looked back over his shoulder. “Yeah—that’s sounds good.” He tried not to smile too much.

  Dynamite pulled his hand loose.

  They turned toward the door into the bedroom.

  Inside, while Dynamite pulled away the covers and pushed a pillow into the middle of the mattress, Eric dropped his clothes and lay down over it. One of Dynamite’s work shoes then the other thudded to the floor. With his hands folded under one cheek, Eric closed his eyes. He heard the rush of Dynamite’s bibs dropping to his ankles—and the click of a metal snap against the side of the bed. The springs gave beside him as Dynamite’s knee sank into the mattress.

  When Dynamite knelt astraddle Eric’s legs, he pushed one hand on the small of Eric’s back. The other felt around, prodded the crevice of his butt, then retreated. A moment on, the head of his broad cock wedged into the crevice and pushed.

  The condom was gone, doubtless stripped off and crumpled on the night table under the lamp.

  Eric raised his head and looked back. “Hey, ain’t no hole there! Down about an inch! You been fuckin’ my ass since I was seventeen. Ain’t you figured out where it is by now?”

  Dynamite grinned down. “Well, turn your butt up a little!”

  The pressure slid down—and eased in. Eric whispered, “Oh, shit…yeah!” Above him, as the garbage man came forward, Eric felt Dynamite’s heat and breathed in his automotive smell, as the garbage man lay out his full weight on Eric’s back.

  From somewhere, Dynamite dragged over another pillow to support his own head. With one hand, he gripped one of Eric’s muscular arms. With the other, he pushed beneath him to finger Eric’s face. “Hey, it’s good you got your lube in already.”

  “Well,” Eric said from under Dynamite’s chest, “I figured this is where we was headin’ all along. It’s feelin’ pretty good, too.”

  “Come on,” Dynamite said. “Lemme stick some fingers in your mouth, so I can play with that slick suckhole of you got. You know how that turns me on.”

  “Yeah…” Eric said. Three, then four fingers went in to hold—and move over—his tongue. Dynamite’s hip pulled back and pushed forward, pulled back and pushed forward.

  In reverse rhythm so did Eric’s.

  Between Eric’s hips was a glassy pool of pleasure; the front two inches of Dynamite’s cock dipped into it and disturbed it and stirred it about and made it ripple and flutter and splash.

  With one hand, Eric gripped Dynamite’s forearm. “Yeah,
fuck me, big guy…!” Though Dynamite probably didn’t understand him, since he spoke with a mouthful of Dynamite’s fingers.

  It was a leisurely fuck. At each plunge, the pool grew fuller, spilling through Eric’s body. He didn’t know if either of them was going to come—nor, right then, did he care. Eric closed his eyes.

  Dynamite had been fucking him for twenty or twenty-five minutes—perspiration’s salt had long gone from the rough fingers he’d been sucking—when Dynamite’s hips halted, and he whispered through a big grin, “Hey, you stay there, boy. I’ll be back in a second.”

  The weight and the heat on his back lifted. The hand pulled from his face. Eric was tempted to open his eyes as the garbage man left the bed. Within the second the bed sagged again—he was already returning.

  Eric pulled in a deep breath, to ready himself, bent one leg, then straightened it. With an urgency that was foreign to the garbage man, once more Dynamite straddled him—

  One hand grasped Eric’s hip. With a sureness that was simply not Dynamite’s, the cock pushed home.

  Someone not Dynamite said, “Oh, fuck, man…I’m gonna dick this nigger and make him shoot. Gonna make you come, too, y’ol’ pig fucker! You guys is just foolin’ around!” A weight that was not Dynamite’s at all fell on Eric, hips already bucking.

  Eric said, “Shit…?”

  It was Shit’s hardness and Shit’s musculature and Shit’s smell with other smells mixed in. Eric opened his eyes, because one of Shit’s shoulders, on top of his own, began shaking at a convulsive masturbatory rhythm.

  Dynamite was laying across the bed again, this time on his side. (Eric hadn’t even felt him.) Shit had reached up and grasped his father’s cock and was vigorously jerking it. “Go on—yeah, go on. Stick it in the nigger’s mouth. You like watchin’ ’im suck your big cracker dick much as I do.”