Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Oh, Shit, it ain’t like that—”

  “That’s sure the way it works for me. I mean, I don’t care or anything—”

  “Look. Once you have yours, we can both start in on him.”

  It was…kind of a success.

  “It makes food taste a little funny, though. And you say it don’t even make me sexier—you want me to take ’em out, before we start fuckin’ around. I thought that was why I was goin’ through all that shit!”

  Still, the following Sunday, from the old dock down at the beach in the Dump, they took Dynamite’s outboard in the dinghy to Gilead to show off Shit’s new smile to Mex and Jay.

  On the Kyle mansion’s deck, outside the rollback windows on the back sitting room’s wall, against tangled leaves and standing stones beyond the deck rail, for moments Jay’s heavy arms looked like the greenery itself. Then, after Mex’s shoulder lamb chops and greens in the kitchen, Shit and Eric walked back to the Gilead boathouse.

  The evening was layers of light and green.

  Under the roof, the dinghy rocked on glistening black, while the walls ran with silver from the low sun. Light wove and unwove on the gray planks, on the scow’s white hull in the other slip, on the walls beyond the barrels and coiled ropes and cleats and empty three-foot spools.

  Shit climbed down the wooden ladder to step, barefoot, into the outboard’s sloshy bottom. One hand on a rung, he got over the middle bench and turned to sit on the front seat.

  Eric started down after him. Reaching the boat, in quickly soaked runners he stepped to the back seat for the tiller.

  While Eric sat, Shit leered the leer of someone who, till then, had often thought twice about smiling too broadly.

  Eric pushed the starter. The propeller whirred below water. The boat’s stern lifted, then settled.

  Twisting, Shit loosed the rope and draped it through the lower ladder beside them.

  Eric pushed down. The outboard got louder; the boat moved toward the opening, into the low sun.

  * * *

  [39] IT WASN’T TWO full weeks afterwards that Eric was walking back up toward the cabin on the crinkly grass, when he saw—at first he thought it was Dynamite—someone standing by the corner. He was holding something in his arms. Then—from the sneakers, actually—he saw it was Shit.

  Shit cradled the dark thing—and Eric saw the forelegs thrust out together, claws in different directions.

  As he walked up, Eric asked, “What happened?”

  “Uncle Tom,” Shit said, looking up. “He died.” His voice was bleak and inflectionless.

  Despite the afternoon’s over ninety heat, cold spread through Eric, from his throat down his chest to his belly and his gut. “When?” It swirled away like the far sound of a March breeze.

  “This mornin’.” Shit looked up and blinked. “Maybe last night. I don’t know.”

  “When you find him?” Because of the blank look that came through Shit’s tufted beard, Eric stepped up and put his arm around Shit’s shoulder.

  Tom’s eye was open enough to see a white sliver.

  “Maybe ten minutes ago. I seen he hadn’t eat no food what you left for him this mornin’. So I picked his pan up and banged it on the porch post. Usually, that’ll bring him out from under the steps, you know?”

  “Un-huh.”

  “But he didn’t come out. So I looked in under there—and I seen him. And he wouldn’t move when I called. Then I crawled in and pulled him out.”

  “Does Dynamite know?”

  “Naw,” Shit said. “He’s down at the Seed and Steel. He was a real old dog. Sixteen, seventeen years. You know how he was real stiff…? Dynamite said he wasn’t gonna last much longer. He was pretty weak. Remember how he wouldn’t come up the steps no more, most of the time? Hey, I gotta put him in a sack, so we can bury ’im. I don’t think he was too happy no more, anyway.” He sucked in a big breath that sounded surprisingly wet. “Probably it’s better.”

  “Un-huh…” Eric squeezed Shit, who laid his head on Eric’s shoulder. And sniffed.

  Shit said, “I played with his dick—to see if that would get him hard. But he ain’t gonna get hard no more. He’s dead.”

  “You better put him on them newspapers up on the porch.” Eric looked around. “Then we can walk down to Hurter’s and see if they got a sack—and tell your dad.”

  “I was gonna hug him a little. But I done that now. Dynamite’s gonna be sad,” Shit said. “I liked ol’ Uncle Tom a lot. He was my dog, but my dad really liked him. And you fed ’im all the time…” Shit drew in a large breath. “You liked him?”

  “Of course I did,” Eric said. “I sucked his damned dick, didn’t I? I liked him—a lot.”

  Tom’s muzzle lay out along his forelegs, black lips back from his remaining teeth.

  Shit pulled away and began to walk loudly up the steps.

  When he came back down, lean arms swinging awkwardly like emptied tongues from his ragged armholes, Shit said, “We gotta get that sack so we can take ’im out to Gilead and bury that ol’ boy in the graveyard.” He looked up the steps, where Eric could make out the gray-black bulge through the porch newels. “That’s where he goes. That’s where all our people go.” Turning back, he shrugged. “Uncle Tom was almost…a people.”

  “Yeah…” Eric said, because he couldn’t think of anything else.

  Shit walked on past him, so Eric turned and caught up, while Shit said, “My dad’ll call up Jay and Mex and tell ’em we’re comin.”

  The next morning, all three carried the sack down to the Dump docks. “You comin’ with us?” Shit asked.

  “Naw.” Dynamite took a breath in the misty March morning.

  Shit smiled. “I didn’t think you was.”

  “You guys can go and plant ’im. You say hello to Mex and Jay for me, you hear?”

  In the rear of the outboard, they took off into the foggy overcast, just as they had when they’d gone to show off Shit’s teeth. After about ten minutes, Shit said, “It’s funny. The last time we was comin’ out here, two weeks back, it was to show ’em how I could smile, now. ’Cause I got my teeth. I sure as shit don’t feel like smilin’ now, though.” The sack lay between them in the bottom of the dinghy. Shit gave a sour smile, anyway.

  After they tied up at the boathouse on Gilead, they started up the wooded path. They took turns lugging the burlap with the tied corners. Eric would have sworn that Tom weighed two or three pounds less than he had the day before.

  They hadn’t been walking three minutes when Mex came down the path in the other direction. He was carrying a piece of wood.

  “What’s that?” Shit wanted to know.

  Eric took the wood, which was stained and varnished. “It’s a marker. See? It says ‘Uncle Tom, Good Dog, of Morgan Haskell, Wendell Haskell, and—Eric…’” surprised he looked up—“‘…Jeffers.’”

  “Jay run that up on his power tools,” Mex explained. “He’ll meet us at the house. He got some shovels for you. Some of it, he carved himself last night, by hand.”

  “That’s nice.” Shit was looking over at its carved letters upside down. “I can’t read it. But it looks nice.”

  Then Eric and Mex picked up the sack between them and started walking again. Shit carried the polyurethaned wooden marker.

  * * *

  [40] ERIC PARKED ON the sea-road. Indian summer moved through the pickup’s windows. Three cars and two trucks were parked across in the pull-off, where Randal was climbing down the pole’s staples. Five young people watched and joked—three black women, and a Latino guy whom he didn’t recognize at all, with no shirt, a scattering of jailhouse tats, and kind of sexy because of it, and all within three or four years of Eric’s age. Below the swoop of wires and the size of a small door, a solar panel tilted toward the clouds up near the sun. High on the pole hung some kind of transformer; and above that a light.

  “Damn,” one of the women said. “I think we got ’em all up. That didn’t take long.”

&nbsp
; And one of the men: “That was a short three months. It seems like we put the first two up a couple of weeks back—but it was August, when all the summer people was gawkin’ at us.”

  On every pole along three joining roads was a 300-watt generating panel. Eric had already grown used to them, twenty feet up the thirty-foot poles, leaning into the day.

  Randal stepped back, looking up, then around. “Well, why don’t you all go on to Fred’s. I’ll see you there.” He turned and saw Eric in the truck. “You goin’ toward the CC office? I still ain’t quite figured out why the Foundation had to pay the company to let us install ’em. But we still saved a little money by it.”

  “Hey, I’ll run you over.”

  “Good,” Randal said. Then he called across his shoulder, “I’ll see yall back at Fred’s later.” He strode across the rode, opened the passenger door, and pulled himself into the cab. “I’ll see you over there, Ace.”

  The shirtless Latino raised a hand and smiled, as Randal climbed in with Eric and closed the door.

  “He’s pretty nice lookin’,” Eric said. “You ready?”

  “Sure—” Randal cleared his throat. “He’s cute—but he’s shy.”

  Eric started the truck.

  “Talk about a fast three months—but you been here…how long now? Two years? Three…?”

  “I got there in July oh-seven.”

  “That’s just over three years.” Randal shook his head. He was a stocky black man from Arizona. “I remember the first time Dynamite called me and said he wanted to start you on the Kyle plan—and I thought he had him a black kid. ’Cause I’d heard about your daddy—I guess everybody down here did. Then you and Shit walked in, and I was really surprised. But, like you say, it’s worked out pretty good. I was just thirty-nine, back then. Here I am, forty-three. But I been kind of wonderin’ how me and Ace are gonna do—with just the two of us.”

  Again, Eric was surprised. “You guys are…together?”

  “Um-hm.” Randal looked around. “At least I guess we are. We been sleepin’ in the same bed, and I hardly wake up when he ain’t down between my legs, tryin’ to suck me off. I don’t come that way a lot. But if he don’t mind it, I sure don’t: It feels good. I got him at Turpens—fished him out of this real orgy they were havin’ in there in the back john. And he grinned and come on with me. But he was really enjoyin’ all the guys at once—that’s a taste, I know. The way you guys like doin’ two at once; and he likes…” Randal shrugged. “Ten or so, I guess. Only we ain’t been back there again. At least I ain’t. I mean, a couple of times he got off by hisself for most of a day and I figured maybe somebody gave him a ride up there. That’s fine with me. And he always come back wanderin’ into my place, later. Makes me feel kinda young. Now, if I could manage to get an hour’s more sleep at night, it’d be perfect.” Randal chuckled.

  “Well,” Eric said, “that’s sounds pretty good. How old is he?”

  Randal shrugged. “Twenty-nine—thirty, thirty-one.”

  Eric made a considering sound. “Maybe he’s getting’ ready to settle down.”

  Randal made one back.

  “Hey.” Eric turned up the north road. “You two wanna come around next Sunday? I’m gonna be roastin’ some ribs. I can always put another rack on the grill. We’ll have some slaw and some corn-on-the-cob with butter. That’ll give you both somethin’ to do—not to mention some food that ain’t your own cookin’, or Clem’s…”

  “We been eatin’ in the Lighthouse a lot.”

  “Yeah, I seen you in there a few times now.”

  “Well, hey—that’s nice of you.” Randal pulled his arm back through the window and joined his hands—the blue cuffs pushed up his dark forearms—in his lap. “You sure that’ll be okay with Shit and Dynamite?”

  “Sure it will,” Eric said. “They’re always curious about new guys like Ace.”

  That’s when, up ahead, under the trees to the right, Eric saw Shit wandering in their direction.

  “Well, there’s Shit now—” Eric moved his foot from gas to break—“We can ask him.” The pickup slowed.

  Randal sat forward and, as Eric stopped the truck, opened the door.

  Shit stuck his head in—“Well, this is a surprise—” then pulled himself up. “Hey, boss—what you doin’ in the truck with Eric? Come on, move over. Move over, there—so I can get in.” He squeezed in and—now—slammed the door. “Hey, Eric, what we gonna do with this fine lookin’ ol’ fella? We gonna take ’im out in the woods somewhere, lay ’im down on the leaves and trade off fuckin’ ’im and suckin’ ’im till he comes like a damned fourteen-year-old? You remember how I used to come with you when I was fourteen, I bet!”

  “Actually, I do.” Randal chuckled.

  “I still do it that way, too.” Shit grinned, and moved one leg—a square kneecap pushing through the hole in his jeans—over Randal’s. “That’s a real good thing I done inherited. And I don’t think you ever even had this fella here, yet. Eric is some good nookie—real enthusiastic. A couple of times with him and he’ll have you so he just gotta grin at you and you gonna stiffen right up. That’s about how he’s got me doin’. And don’t even talk about Dynamite—”

  “Actually,” Eric said, “I just asked Randal and his young fella to drop over for ribs and corn next Sunday.” The road got slightly smoother. “If you and Ace aim for one o’clock, that’ll be about when the first rack comes off the grill.”

  “Oh, hey,” Shit said. “That sounds real nice. We can have us some good food and a good orgy, too, all of us together. Eric cooks up a storm. We don’t mind old farts like you and Dynamite—and it sounds like Ace don’t, either.”

  Randal laughed out. “Shit, do you think you could hold off on the orgy part? Ace is a little on the shy side, and that might be a bit much for him on a first meetin’.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about me.” Shit slid his leg off of Randal’s. (Somehow the knee on his jeans ripped further; Eric heard it.) “I’ll break out my company manners if you really want me to.”

  Ahead on the left, behind a scrap of lawn, stood the rough-out timber planks of the Diamond Harbor CC office. Two women from the solar panel installation crew sat on the steps. “Hey,” Randal said. “You can let me out here—my car’s around the back. That’s real nice of you guys. Ace is probably inside—he likes that air conditioning they got in there. Next Sunday—we’ll come over around one.”

  “Good,” Shit said.

  As the truck stopped, Randal reached over for the door. Then, after climbing and laughing (“Oh, Randal—come on, stay on my lap awhile. Gimme one of them lap dances everybody tells me you do so good—oooooh—wheeee! That feels nice! When you come over, you gotta teach ol’ Dynamite how to do this.”

  (“Come on, now. Let go of my ass, Shit! Lemme out of here—”) Randal was down on the side of the road. “See you this weekend.” Laughing, Shit pulled the pickup door closed.

  Again the truck began to move. Here the road was shadowed with pines.

  “So he gonna bring that Spanish fella who been stayin’ with him over?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I think he’s a little worried that Ace ain’t enjoyin’ hisself while he’s around here as much as he might. So I just thought I’d be neighborly. He might have some fun—and get some good ribs.”

  “Enjoyin’ hisself?” Both Shit’s eyebrows rose. “Enjoyin’ hisself is about all that scrawny jailbird spic do! You remember last day off, when I left you and Dynamite alone at the cabin to have some of that there quality father-son time the two of you like so much, and I went and hitched a ride to Turpens, where, as you know, I don’t ever, ever go: I seen Ace over there, too. I had him three times, in the front john, in the side one, and then out just behind the rear one with four truckers, who I was showin’ the way around the place, and how we do back there. You don’t have to worry about me tryin’ to start up nothin’ raunchy with him out at the Dump come Sunday. I already had ’im three ways goin’. So I think I can re
strict myself to ordinary social intercourse, ’cause I ain’t got curiosity raggin’ me on. I already know how good it is.” Shit moved over the seat and dropped a hand on Eric’s thigh. “He should be pretty happy with old Randal. The nigger ain’t keepin’ ’im on what you’d call a short leash, no more’n you or Dynamite does me.”

  “Now, why should I be even vaguely surprised—” Eric laughed—“you already had your dick in that feller, stirrin’ it around and gettin’ you a taste of it before all the rest of us?”

  “Aw, come on. You know that’s just who I am. That don’t mean you ain’t number one.” Shit’s rough hand moved further over between Eric’s legs. “I’ll bring you on down to the truck stop with me next time, so if he’s there you can grab a taste, too—”

  “Oh, that don’t bother me, Shit. You know that.” Eric hauled on the wheel. “I was just hopin’ it don’t bother Randal. He’s a good boss-man feller.”

  * * *

  [41] AT OCTOBER’S END, ESPECIALLY on Mondays and Tuesdays, many of Jay and Mex’s autumn runs on the scow carried no passengers. (Ruth Holota came in to do her shopping at the supermarket in Runcible on the second or third Thursday of the month—these days about the closest thing they had to a regular customer.) Still, the Runcible (i.e., Kyle’s) Chamber of Commerce paid Mex and him to go. When the heat returned, Jay would make the run on the Gilead—the motorized flat-bottomed scow—as barefoot as his partner. Since there was no garbage collection on Sundays and Mondays, often they still took Eric (and sometimes Eric and Shit) with them, for company.

  On the Gilead’s deck, Eric would look at Jay’s immense feet, coming out from his frayed jeans cuffs, and wonder how a man as big as Jay—or Dynamite and Shit, for that matter—could bite their toenails as bad as their fingernails.

  It was pretty amazing.

  Jay stood by the wheel, under the wooden half-shelter in the front, steering with one hand, when Eric finally broke down and asked.