Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Eric waved back and they walked on. “You know, the first time he did that, I got all scared we were gonna have to go up there and, you know, get to really know ’em and have to have some big meetin’ together with all the piss drinkers in the Dump, where we all talked about drinkin’ piss and how we got started at it and all that shit.” The hello’s and the nods and the smiles had started with the black men Shit had identified to Eric as Einman and Abe and—coming down through Dump Corners with his donkey and three wheeled cart—Brick, days after the call to Dr. Greene; who apparently had been as quick to call the Dump’s other urolangliacs about Eric a day after he had told Eric about them. “But I don’t think they want nothin’ like that—I mean, some full-out support group or some consciousness-raisin’ meetin’—any more than I do, like I seen on TV once for shoplifters.” He pulled his breath in—and was surprised when Shit took his hand. “But you know—it’s funny. It is nice to know they’re there.” He looked at Shit, who smiled. “And that they know we’re here.” Together, the two headed on down to Hurters to get their first handyman assignments.

  * * *

  [36] DRIVING SLOWLY BESIDE the sea, in the new garbage truck the Chamber of Commerce had delivered to Dynamite the previous day, with a new experimental low-emissions motor, the lanky garbage man said, “Now we gonna celebrate a little. It’s the weekend. We got some beer and some Coca-Cola—and I don’t expect to do nothing except lie around and do nasty stuff with the two of you till at least Tuesday mornin’. It drives nice—but it don’t quite smell right. To me. Yet…”

  “Sounds like that’s gonna be some major cuddlin’ time to me,” Shit said. “Nobody gonna get riled if I do a little fuckin’ while we’re at it…?”

  “Long as somebody wants to suck on my big Georgia dick, you can fuck me till the cows come home—and probably Eric, too, if I judge right.” Dynamite put his big hand on Eric’s shoulder and began to rub. “But I do not intend to go to into the bathroom from the time I get home to the time we next get up to go into work. So—” he looked at Eric—“son, you gonna have to do a little runnin’ back and forth to get that stuff in there for me.”

  “Sure,” Eric said.

  “Long as I can watch.” Shit’s far arm hung out the window down beside the door, “—and do a little kissin’—it sounds good to me.”

  “Damn,” Eric said. “Dynamite, you’re the one who always says we shouldn’t fool around at work. But—well, how long have we been together, now—and I still get a damned hard-on every time you put a hand on me.”

  “You mean like this?” Dynamite let his hand drop in down Eric’s chest to land in his lap, where the big fingers curled around Eric’s crotch.

  “No,” Eric said. “I mean anytime you touch me at all—even on my shoulder like you was doin’.”

  “Really?” Dynamite grinned out the windshield. “Maybe that means I still got a little energy there—you know. For gettin’ it on.”

  Eric put one hand in Dynamite’s lap—who was iron hard across his crotch, and one hand in Shit’s—who, not surprisingly, was the same. (Sometimes Eric wondered if the two of them weren’t connected by arcane telepathy.) Shit’s hand came in from the window and dropped down on Eric’s. “Well, I don’t even need to go home. I mean drivin’ along in a new truck while somebody’s sittin’ there playin’ with your pecker’s always kinda fun. Least ways, I always like it when he done it.”

  Woods on the left and sea on the right chattered at each other, while handfuls of birds mewed and called above.

  * * *

  [37] UP OR DOWN Gilead’s six coastal miles facing the mainland, only Jay, Mex, Shad, Hugh, and the Holotas actually lived there. Last month, some Indian kids from out of state had gone camping on the island’s far side, near the old Creek graveyard.

  Standing on the Gilead dock, Jay explained, “Ruth Holota made up this Indian dish out of bolted cornmeal and took it out to ’em. Walter’s a real Injun—he grew up around here. But his wife is a white woman, though you’d never know from the way she cooks. I mean she can do them good Injun dishes—roasted goat and stuff. You ever tasted that Aye-talian polenta? I mean that’s what it was, really. When I was a little kid, half the fishermen around here who wasn’t black was Aye-talian—I had it a bunch of times. I went out there with her, too—she gimme some. It was pretty good.” He turned from Dynamite to Eric and back. “But they all gone back to school.” He dropped his hand on Eric’s shoulder. “So you comin’ out there with us?” Late-day summer light glinted in his bronze beard.

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “That’d be fun.”

  (That September was even warmer than usual.)

  “It’s fine with me,” Dynamite said, “long as you got ’im back here by Monday.”

  Sitting in the door of the pickup, barefooted, shirtless, Shit grinned. “What you guys gonna do? Give him a belated birthday present out there?”

  Jay said, “Well, I wasn’t thinkin’ of that exactly. But, who knows, we may do a little of that. Now you sure you don’t mind us borrowin’ this little fuck-stick for a night?”

  “Hell,” Dynamite said. “When they’re this age, they s’posed to be humpin’ anything that moves. I’m just glad I’m still wigglin’ enough to get mine.”

  From the pickup door, Shit said to Eric, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this one here while you’re out doin’ them two.”

  “Hey,” Eric said. “I’ll see you back here tomorrow.” Then he waved and followed Mex onto the scow. “By the way, Mex, I got somethin’ for you.” He went digging in his jeans pocket. “Yesterday, after work, Dynamite took us over to the Opera—when I was up in Nigger Heaven, Al gimme somethin’—he said it was for my birthday, too—but I thought I’d pass it on.” He pulled out the oversized quarter-filled rubber and held it up, as its viscid load collected in the bottom. “Dynamite let me keep it in the refrigerator last night.”

  Mex’s large hand fell on Eric’s shoulder. With a single hand, he signed: Listen up, boy. Every time I see one of these things, it always surprises me all over again. I’m gonna drink this down right here—you can have some, if you want. As they stepped over the scow’s edge, Mex took his hand down and with both said: This here is gonna be my goddam lunch. That nigger’s got enough to keep half the cocksuckers in the state happy. It’s like I can never remember how big the damn things are till I actually see ’em again.

  “Me neither,” Eric told him—as Mex took the bulbous tube and hefted it on his callused palm.

  *

  That night, all three slept in Jay’s bed.

  It was fun, too. With Mex and Jay, Eric had four orgasms inside an hour and fifteen minutes, for the first time in his life. (That was the kind of thing Shit prided himself in doing, usually! Not Eric. Maybe, though, it was rubbing off.) He felt drained and, at once, wholly refilled.

  When he got up, Eric climbed over Mex and went out into the little john that looked like it wasn’t finished. It still needed a patch of drywall over some recently replaced copper piping.

  Naked after his crap, he wiped himself with paper from the wire roller, stood up from the commode, flushed, and padded into the hall and out to the long kitchen.

  Though the screening, over blue sky and bluer water, sunrise’s gold spilled in through oceanward screens, aslant the kitchen’s wooden walls. Covered in yellow oilcloth printed with red and green flowers, the table was so bright he felt as if he’d never seen it before. Eric looked…not breathing, lest that luminosity—which seemed something added to the sunlight rather than something that came from it—vanished.

  Sleepy and tousled, Mex walked in, with his pitted and indented cheeks, from the adolescent acne that had been so fierce. Eric still found that pockmarked face all-but-unbearably sexy, ever since he’d seen him sitting on the commode, barefoot and shirtless, in his denim pants and jacket, in Turpens. He remembered moments from the night, when the thirty-eight year old Mexican had chuckled voicelessly, while, in the dark, Eric had fingered the unev
en skin of his cheeks and neck that bore craters as from buckshot. At the orange counter, naked Mex pulled over the black and silver drip pot from under the window. A few pits dented his buttocks and the sacral slope above.

  It was all Eric could do not to go over, bend down, and lick them…some more, the way he had last night.

  On the sill, against the screen, stood a cut glass vase, in which a twig leaned. Had that held a flower?

  Unsteadily, stretching, yawning, Jay lumbered in. “…Jesus.” With big bright arms bunched and raised, he looked like a bearded statue in a museum, flocked with blond fur. He lowered his muscular arms, pictured all over. His gut, flattened into his belly, lowered into place. “Will somebody scratch behind my balls for me—or do I gotta do it myself?”

  At the counter, Mex put down the carafe, turned back, and signed to Eric: “You do it. I’m making coffee.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Sure. Yeah.” Turning, he reached between the heavy, hirsute legs, to slide his hand into the warmth behind Jay’s testicles. (Eric looked again at the orchitis. In three years Jay’s other testicle had also started to swell: today it was as big as a medium-sized tomato, next to the one now half again as large as a softball—though Jay, at least, was not worried. Last night he’d said, Actually, I like the idea of them fuckers matchin’ a little more.) On the right of his abdomen, Jay’s appendectomy scar gouged through hair and flesh.

  “Both of ’em,” Jay said. “Yeah, like that—in the back, you little Aryan bastard scumsucker. That’s good.”

  All three were naked.

  “The doc—that’s not Doc Greene, either. I got a special one, just for my nuts. The Foundation pays for it—always says there ain’t really nothin’ wrong with ’em except them extra fat deposits. But every two or three days—” while Eric scratched, Jay shook his shaggy head—“especially when I come more than once in a night, I wake up and the thing is fine. Only then, soon as I stand up and take two or three steps, it commences itchin’ and ticklin’ like a motherfucker!” A drop from the nozzle on Jay’s flopping penis wet Eric’s wrist, rolling over the back. “Oh, yeah—that’s good.” He smiled at Eric. Sunlight gave a gold backing to Jay’s amber eyes.

  Still rubbing, Eric grinned. “Hey, that’s my pet nut—the real big one.”

  At the counter, Mex looked back, signed something quickly, then turned to pick up the black plastic scoop and measure out grounds from the red and yellow Bustello can.

  “Huh? Jay—what did he say…? ‘Yours…in Runcible’?”

  “He said, ‘Yours and every other cocksucker’s in Runcible County.’” Jay shifted his weight. “Them things is popular, boy.”

  Still scratching, Eric laughed.

  “You know—” Jay grinned down at him—“that’s why I like to get the nigger puppies in here—’cause they got that rough hair. Sometimes when it’s really plaguin’ me, I put a foot up on the chair and get one of them boys to squat down and put his head under them things and rub it around like you’re doin’ with your fingers. That hair us fuckin’ white guys got is fuckin’ useless for scratchin’.” (Since he felt more or less the same, Eric grinned.) “Yeah, now that feels like fuckin’ heaven, scumsucker! Not that what you’re doin’ ain’t nice. But if your balls ever really start to itch you, get your brother there to get down and do that for you with his wool. That nigger’s got the hair for it. Man, it’s somethin’. Go, on—harder. You can really tear into ’em. I do the same thing for them boys with my beard…though it ain’t quite identical. Still, it’s better than white folks’ hair. That ain’t got no holdin’ power at all. Yeah, harder—believe me, it don’t hurt me none. Mex’ll tell ya.”

  “His balls are very tough—very strong.”

  Though he got a word or two from context, Eric understood it all. (Today, largely because he could spell, Eric was more facile at sign language than Shit.) He scratched harder. “That’s what you do with the black kids?”

  “Ask your fuckin’ brother when you get back to the Dump, if you don’t believe me. They laugh at me sometimes, ’cause they think I’m funny. But they do it—Nigger Joe, Paten—they don’t live around here no more—and the one I always called Dog Turd, ’cause that’s the color he was. God, he was a good lookin’ little black buck. What the hell was his real name?” Settling a hirsute arm around Eric’s shoulder, multicolored in the window’s sunlight, Jay gave Eric a squeeze, tight enough so his muscles actually shook. The last time Jay had hugged him like that—an hour back—he’d been sucking Eric’s cock, his arms wrapped around Eric’s butt while he’d shot—and seconds later Jay had shot his own load into one end of Mex or the other. Holding Jay’s head, in the dark, with his eyes closed, Eric had not actually seen which…

  From the counter, Mex turned back to sign, “Ben. His name was Ben, you dirty racist fuck.” Grinning, Mex stepped over to fill the carafe at the sink.

  “Yeah, well—Dog Turd’s what the puppy wanted us to call ’im. Hey, that’s good, y’Nazi shit stain. You can’t say I don’t spread it around. Keep that up for another minute or two.”

  Two more drops fell on Eric’s forearm.

  “And he wasn’t no puppy. He come to the Harbor in the summer, with his parents.”

  “He was a puppy when he first come out here—with Shit. That’s why he had to get himself a new name—Dog Turd. ’Cause Shit had his. And he was jealous—and he wanted one that was nastier. I had to think of one for him in about three seconds. That was the nastiest one I could come up with. But he couldn’t tell his parents. Course, we didn’t start no real puppy trainin’ with him till a few years later, when he was seventeen, maybe eighteen. You remember, Mex. We used to keep that collar out here for him. Hey, Mex is gonna make his special chili, tonight—that was Dog Turd’s favorite. I tell you, that’s a real popular dish around here. He used to eat it out a dog bowl, right down on the floor, there, while we sat up and ate ours at the table. That nigger was a good puppy. He’d do anything me or Mex’d tell ’im.” Jay put his head to the side. “You think you’d be interested in somethin’ like that? A dog collar, maybe? I don’t mean right now. But sometime, if you find yourself takin’ to the idea, lemme know.”

  “Maybe.” Eric shrugged, scratching harder—enough to make Jay sway. “I don’t know…”

  “If it sounds interestin’ to you, talk it over with your dad and your brother. We don’t got to rush nothin’. The idea is to do what makes you feel good and comfortable, like you belong. It ain’t about goin’ to no extremes, just so you can say you done it. Okay, there, puppy—you can stop now.”

  Eric pulled his hand away.

  “Did…Ben tell his parents what you were doin’ out here—with him?”

  “No!” Jay looked surprised. “If he had, his father would have been out here with a shotgun or an ax, tryin’ to take some heads off. But, see, Dog Turd didn’t have a daddy like you got, now. One he could talk about things like that with—get some advice.” Turning, Jay walked bare-assed back to the table. “He was one sweet nigger puppy, though.” He turned to sit. “Damn, that always happens, too, when you scratch that thing—look at that. It got me drippin’ piss all over the damned floor. Hey, puppy dog, get down and lick that up.”

  Eric dropped to one knee, then lowered his face over the vinyl tiles, where Jay had left an irregular puddle half the size of Eric’s palm. One of Jay’s toes had smeared the edge. Smaller drops made an irregular trail to the chair. Because he’d done it for Jay before, licking up Jay’s pee felt more comfortable than talking about eating from a dish. The collar sounded nice—like the goth kids used to wear in school. It was funny, sometimes, what could make you feel good.

  From the floor, Jay’s spilled urine tasted like…well, urine. It wasn’t anything special. Still, he liked it, anticipating it, remembering it.

  And Dynamite…

  “Okay, puppy dog—” In the chair, Jay’s knees were wide—“come on over here now. Let ol’ Jay show you how much he likes you.” Heading between Jay’s
legs, Eric paused to lick up another drop from the floor. Then Jay leaned forward, caught Eric’s head, and began to rub and rough it. “There you go—good boy! Good boy! Good puppy! Come on, puppy. Come on—gimme a kiss. Come on and swap some spit with this nasty toothless Georgia racist—” Jay glanced at Mex—“redneck fuck.” Eric turned up his face, still between Jay’s thick, rough hands, and felt tongue and more tongue pour into him. Jay’s face turned one way and another, as he rooted around in there. Eric moved one hand over Jay’s foot, his other onto Jay’s thigh. He wondered if he should growl—and growled.

  Jay growled back, grinning.

  After some thirty or forty seconds, Jay lifted his face. “Man, that tastes good. You’d think you’d been lickin’ piss up off the floor, son.” He let go of Eric’s head with one hand, pushed a thick forefinger into one nostril, stretching it, twisting it. Pulling his finger free, he glanced at it, then pushed it in Eric’s mouth—more salt. “That’s for bein’ such a good little puppy. Now get on over there and give my personal spic a suck.” His callused forefinger dragged free of Eric’s face, for a moment turning down Eric’s under lip.

  Swiveling on all fours, Eric had assumed Mex was still standing at the counter. But the Mexican had come to sit on one of the heavy chairs, which he’d moved forward of the table, his shoulders hunched down, his feet pulled back under, one hand in his lap, absently tugging himself.

  As Eric’s face moved between Mex’s knees, Mex caught Eric’s head, pulled him forward, and began to push himself repeatedly into Eric’s mouth, hips lifting from the chair cushion. Soon Mex locked one leg behind Eric’s. Grunting and moving his hands around over Eric’s head, Mex guided Eric’s rise and fall, first slowly, then faster—and faster. Through all that, Eric was aware Jay himself had gotten up and moved to a closer chair—presumably to watch. Mex’s separate grunts became one growl—as had happened before when Eric had blown him. He wondered if the man would fall out of the chair (as had happened on a previous visit), when the tube along the underside of Mex’s cock, while still moving in and out, thickened on Eric’s tongue, retreated, and thickened again to flush Mex’s semen into Eric. Mex’s hands locked behind Eric’s head. His abdomen heaved, hardened, softened again on Eric’s forehead. When the meshed fingers loosened, Eric pulled back. For a moment Mex’s cock head caught on Eric’s chin. “Jesus, that was fuckin’…real good, Mex. Thanks.”