Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“Well, don’t think for a minute you’re alone.” Again Bill nodded. “While, true, politically it’s not very effective, still, the closet has its uses.”
Standing up, Eric looked around the yard. The sun had widened over more than half of it. “Hey, my dad’s gonna wake up around seven-thirty.” The backs of his thighs tingled. As he stepped from in front of his chair, his shadow slid forward over Bill—who, in Eric’s shadow, ceased to squint. “I should grab that shower and finish packin’ my shit.” Eric turned and, by the arms, picked up the lawn chair. “Lemme take this back. Then I’m gonna make some oatmeal upstairs—before we leave. Hey—that’s pretty gay, huh?” Over one arm he grinned at Bill. “Makin’ oatmeal for me and my dad…?” Then, holding the chair by its arms, he started for the table across the grass.
His mug again in both hands, eyes again narrowed, Bill called: “Have you ever seen the original King Kong? I mean the 1933 Merian C. Cooper version—with the uncredited Harry Redmond effects; and Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot? A Mrs. Fischer did the actual screaming for Wray.”
Putting the chair down, Eric stopped to look back.
“They dubbed her in because Fay wasn’t too good at it herself.” Bill went on. “I’m not even sure Peter Jackson knows that. When my dad knew her in the fifties, Mrs. Fischer was a librarian in his elementary school up in New York City.”
“I seen some of it—a few times, on TV.” Eric lifted up the chair again. It wasn’t that heavy, just clumsy. “The old one. I never watched the whole thing, though.” He was still near enough to see that, through the basement window, no television flicker played on the wall. Bill must have turned it off when he’d gone in for their chocolate.
“That reconstructed spider-pit sequence—honestly, that’s such a beautiful example of how you can have a childhood dream and, when you grow up—if you’re lucky enough—make it real. Now, go on, put that back by Mr. Condotti’s table.”
* * *
[C] A CARDBOARD BOX in his arms, Eric was coming from the garage, when, in jacket, slacks, and loafers, Bill walked up.
“You’re workin’ on Saturday?” Eric asked.
“And without a jot of sleep, either. The tribulations of maturity.” In shaving, Bill had left a goatee’s shadow across his upper lip, around his mouth, and over his chin. “The trouble with having a gay uncle, Eric, is that once we start giving advice, we can’t stop. Last year a friend told me—I just remembered it—he’d found a pretty active truck stop, maybe half a dozen miles north of Diamond Harbor. Said it was a lot of fun.” Bill shrugged. “Since that’s where you’re goin’, maybe you’ll get a chance to try it.”
“Yeah?”
“Um-hm.” Bill nodded. “And having nothing to do with that, you can read this…when you reach your mom’s.” A July breeze moved through the leaves, as Bill held up a folded paper.
“Sure.” Almost dropping his carton, reaching up with one hand, Eric got it. “Is this somethin’ my dad—or Barbara—can see?” (Out at the curb, Mike was trying to refit duffle bag, boxes, mountain bike, and Bowflex into the Chevy’s trunk and back seat.) Eric wondered how Bill’s beard would look fully-grown.
Bill would look weird with a goatee…
Bottom smiled. “Of course they can. It’s harmless—at least I hope so!” Then, laptop case hanging from the black, red, and green brocaded strap across his shoulder, Bill turned to crunch up the gravel. At the alley’s end Eric saw him enter Montoya’s sunlight. “Hey, Mr. Jeffers—Mike?” (The breeze ceased.) “Eric’s got another carton coming. You guys have a good trip.” Bill started toward Forty-Fourth Street for the Q-23 stop.
Coolness had slipped from the morning. Carton finally secure in one arm, Eric pushed the paper into his pocket beside his KY tube. He looked at the sun angling over Bill’s crumbling steps. The cooler air had been pleasant an hour back. On its maroon ground, only half the brass foundation of the world was in shadow. In leaf-mottled sun, Eric read:…et consumimur igni.
It was just after eight.
* * *
[B] THE MOON’S CRESCENT hung high on the day. Below steel clouds and three-o’clock sun, the sea blazed. Along the ocean, the highway yielded up its baritone hum.
In the air-conditioned Chevy, Mike drove south. Eric sat beside him, looking out the car door’s window—in order to dig out one nostril or the other. (Since he was facing away, Mike, from the driver’s seat, couldn’t see.) Finishing, Eric would again look through the windshield while the highway expanded toward them.
When Eric was younger, Mike had worried about his son’s habit. But Omar’s boy, Ralphy, did it, too—and when they’d stayed in Texas, Mike and Omar had talked about it a few times when the kids were in bed. Man, you don’ gotta worry about shit like dat. His fren’s gonna shame ’im out of it—or he ain’t gonna have no fren’s.
Yeah, but Ralphy’s six, Mike explained. Eric’s eleven.
I’ll tell you. You catch ’im directly, go on—tell ’im right there, cut it out. Believe me, though, his fren’s’ll take care of it. Ralphies’ done already started. So that’s what Mike did; and wondered if that had anything to do with why Eric had as few friends as he did. And what about when you didn’t catch him directly but he was looking away from you in the car; still, from his arm and shoulder movements, you knew.
Well, you had to let the kid live.
At that moment, actually, Mike was not thinking about Eric, but about how well Doneesha cooked—not that he was worried. And Kelly-Ann had a curious nature…and a movie-star perfect ass—as, something of a doofus, Jake had whispered to him more than a dozen times. Still, Doneesha’s was fuller, firmer, and closer to Mike’s own ideal. She was more relaxed about letting you do what you wanted with it, too. Yeah, after a couple of weeks with Kelly-Ann…
At that moment, actually, as he sat beside his step dad, again looking out the windshield, Eric was wondering what the coming months held for sex—not that he was worried. He’d tripped over it in Maryland and bedded down with it in East Texas: three houses away, Omar’s sister (Mike’s half sister) Lurlene, had a dark, all-but-silent, stunningly good-looking ten-year-old, Hareem. (Harry looked enough like Mike to make some folks in the neighborhood wonder.) Whenever eleven-year-old Eric stayed over, she’d put both boys in the bed in the back room with each other. They’d lain there three long minutes, till Harry had made the first move. His way of dealing with it socially, though, next morning (which, with intense whispers, Harry had made clear to his visiting white cousin), was that—during the day—You Didn’t Talk About It None. Never. At All: Hareem would hardly speak to Eric during daylight, though that night they were all over each other the moment the door closed.
As for the nose picking, back then Eric had been trying harder to keep it private than he was now, so that, during their separate games on their separate sides of the sidewalkless East Texas road, Eric was—relatively—successful.
During the three months he’d stayed with Barbara at her own mother’s in Hugantown once they gave up their own place, Eric (then twelve) had found another sexual outlet. Around the corner, at the back of an overgrown lot, through a crack in a bathroom window of an isolated cabin, he could peer in and jerk off while watching a twenty-seven-year-old Greek plumber’s assistant, who was mostly doing the same. On the first day, where the frosted glass had pulled from maybe four inches along the frame, Eric had looked through into the shadowy john and seen that Costas—who, with his boss, Yoti, had once done a job for his grandmother, which is how Eric knew their names—had papered it all, even the ceiling, with pictures of nude or negligeed women cut or torn from porn magazines. The second time Eric had wandered back there, attracted by the grunts and whispers, he’d looked through and seen, in only a ripped T-shirt, black body hair pushing through the holes under the neck, with no shoes and gaping workpants, toes coming out the hole in one tube sock, Costas, leaning against the sink, pumping and muttering, Mallakas…! Cock-suckin’ bitch…! Mallakas…! till he staggered forward to
feed his semen onto one or another pair of bright lips yearning from the wall.
Outside, standing on leaves, pieces of a broken chair, old boards, Eric gripped the sill. Both breathing heavily, he watched Costas move back, sit on the commode’s edge, and push his work pants down to strip out of them entirely, leaving them on the concrete floor.
Costas started in again.
Then he did it again.
Then again…
Sometimes, at his climax, gasping, quivering, Costas—naked, now, except for one sock—fell to his knees on the bathmat, near black with dirt, to spatter a cold, scarlet smile.
As low as Costas’s scaly ankle and as high as his hairy ribs, the pictures on three walls and part of a fourth were as clotted and coated, much of it gone orange, as the dinner plate medallion in Mr. Condotti’s garage, or inside the top-floor Atlanta school john door.
(There was so much, Eric had been looking almost an hour when it struck him what it was. Costas had lived there four years: that’s how Eric recognized it two years later in the Atlanta high school boys’ room.)
A creature of habit, Costas confined it to the bathroom—unless he slipped off to spill a few when he was out with cigar smoking Yoti at his job. Costas had a four- or five-load session in the hour-and-a-half before going into work, another couple right after coming home. Then he came in to drop a few more before turning in around ten. Staying up to watch those last got Eric yelled at by both his mother and his grandmother.
But the back wall of Costas’ cabin, below the bathroom window, now carried Eric’s own growing stain.
Saturdays and Sundays, Costas did it non-stop, leaving the john only to eat—or, more often, bringing in a sandwich wrapped with wax paper, a cardboard boat of French fries, and a king-sized Bud, which he parked on the tub’s enameled edge, while, with stubble-blackened cheek and neck, tufted knuckles, sable chest hair, and hirsute arms bespattered, he labored to loose another load. Once fallen on thigh, belly, wrist, arm—or shiny photo—it stayed. As far as Eric could tell, three weeks without a shower and only a hand washing every couple of days was Costas’ norm.
Till then Eric had thought he himself held the record.
But it was no contest.
That Memorial Day, in back of the creosoted wall, Eric got there before sunrise. He tried to keep up, but stopped after two hours—though he wouldn’t leave except to return to his grandmother’s for lunch and dinner. Between six in the morning and ten twenty-seven that night, Costas busted his nut twenty-two times that Eric counted, all over himself or his stained ladies. (Unlike Eric, Costas never ate his spunk, though he’d rub the remains around balls, belly, and gut.) Feeling a lot better about his—back then—five-to-six-times a day, Eric had left Hugantown to live with Mike.
If Costas was an indicator, half a dozen a day was nothing to worry about…
There would be something to do in Diamond Harbor.
To the highway’s right a blue and white sign said TRUCK STOP ½ MILE. “We gotta pull in there.”
“What in the world for?”
“’Cause I gotta shit—that’s why.”
“Oh…You know, Diamond Harbor’s only a few more miles.” Mike slowed the Chevy. “You’d think you could hold it fifteen minutes till we got to Barb’s—”
“You wanna hold it for me?” Eric grinned. “Cup your hands. Look, I won’t be long.” (There couldn’t be two truck stops so close…)
“I think you’re more comfortable goin’ in a public john than in your own home. Me, I can piss anywhere. But I cannot shit in no road-side can.”
“Well,” Eric said, “that don’t bother me.”
“You be happy you ain’t got none of them hang-ups.”
Like one of Mike’s repeating stories, the exchange occurred on every drive of any length. Eric said, “I am.”
Forty seconds later, they turned into Turpens Truck Stop. (A GEORGIA INSTITUTION SINCE 1937! in antique gold, green, and red on gray planks chained to a horizontal post.) Mike parked his car among some dozen pickups. Further down stood the big rigs.
To the right was the window for Turpens Parts & Notions, filled with boards of gaskets, towers of batteries, racks of calipers, rows of ratchets, wrenches, sparkplug testers, CBs, pressure gauges, and radar “cheaters,” along with bandanas, coffee mugs, snap-button shirts, flags—American, Puerto Rican, Italian, Irish, Hells Angels, Mexican, Confederate, Union, Marine, Navy, one flag with horizontal white, brown, black, and tan stripes and a paw print in the upper left (Eric recognized it and Mike did not: in a gay bookstore window, derisively Scott had pointed one out to Eric that Saturday back in Atlanta: That’s for old, fat, hairy guys…Uhhh! Eric had thought about saying, So what’s wrong with that? But not to Scott), and one that said only Turpens—dashboard raccoons, fuzzy dice, and grass-skirted hula dolls, black, brown, and pink—and caps: “Turpens,” with an eagle flying off above the visor. Left of the recessed entrance, another long window looked in on the blue booths, wooden walls, and slowly turning fan blades of Turpens Homestyle Eatery.
Around the car, mica glittered in concrete.
“Now don’t get all caught up checkin’ out junk in the store.”
“Don’t worry!” Eric spoke with the adolescent impatience Mike had learned to ignore—as Eric now ignored Mike’s repetitions. “I’ll be back in fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.” Eric opened the car to climb out. As he turned, hot air exchanged with the air inside. “And I gotta go into the store when I’m finished. I need a cap.” Holding the door’s rim, he grinned at Mike, then slammed it.
Christ, Mike thought, looking at his bronzed step son in his blue tanktop, the wide body-builder shoulders and full, rounded arms, sheened already from seconds in the sun. That’s one good lookin’ kid. Remembering their Bowflex workouts, he thought: Yeah, he keeps me young.
Kelly-Ann (five months legal, as Mike thought of her) was only a year-and-a-half older.
* * *
[A] HEAT LIKE STONES on his shoulders, against his temples, Eric walked toward the double layer of glass doors across Turpens’ entrance.
Between the pickups, wearing beige slacks and fingering a cell phone into a yellow shirt pocket, from which stuck a handkerchief’s purple points, a thin man ambled over. To Eric, the handkerchief—and a slight sway, kind of like Bill’s that morning—said “faggot.”
At the same time, behind layered glass, Eric saw a second man walking forward, about to leave. This guy was a head-and-a-half taller than Eric (who was five-nine), stocky and in his late thirties. Six-five? Six-six…? Through the glare, Eric caught his dull blond hair, his orange cap, his brazen beard.
Well, if I follow the gay one, I’ll find the right john fast. Eric paused, stood straighter, and rubbed his hands up his sweating face to let the slender man reach the doors, so that, once he was inside, Eric could follow, steps behind.
The gay guy pulled open the outer door and went in—which is when Eric saw that inside the bearded man had stopped.
Eric followed the thin guy through one glass door, through a second—
Turpens’ lobby was frigid with air conditioning. In moments the cold was painful along the sweat trickling behind his ear, beneath his jaw. When Eric lifted a bare arm, someone slid a cold slab beneath it.
He did not look directly at the bearded man—though from the corner of Eric’s eye, it seemed the guy wore a red plaid jacket. (In this heat…?) With darkly gleaming sleeves, it hung open. Under it—as with Bill earlier—he wore no shirt. Between the jacket’s edges, over belly and chest, hempen hair swirled up to obliterate his navel’s sink.
Then, because Eric was walking, the bearded man—standing still—was behind him.
On the wall to the right, another indoor plate glass window glared before automotive parts, case knives, more cowboy shirts, and oversized belt buckles with rhinestone letters: “World’s Greatest Dad,” “World’s Greatest Lover,” “World’s Greatest Stud,” “World’s Greatest Trucker…” The inside door to Turpens P
arts & Notions stood off to the left.
On the right, the indoor entrance to Turpens Eatery was beyond the motel-style counter. Keys with white tags hung before a rack of pigeonholes.
No one was behind the desk.
Eric watched the gay guy cross the lobby’s plank flooring. In an alcove, silhouetted on the right was a small man and, on the left, a small woman. The gay guy—if he was gay—walked up and turned right.
Eric took two steps after him.
And slowed.
Then he turned—and risked looking at the bearded blond, full on.
The guy still stood, looking away from Eric. His cap said Turpens. The visor slanted down over the curly hair bunched above his left ear. Then he looked back—maybe at Eric…or the one who’d gone into the men’s room.
Nor was he wearing a jacket:
A red-and-black plaid shirt hung, unbuttoned and wide, back from belly and chest. (His first glance, Eric had misread it…) The sleeves had been torn away—there were none at all. Thigh-thick arms—probably why Eric had thought they’d been enlarged by jacket sleeves—were gouged into muscle groups. Both bore full-sleeves of ink, shoulder to wrist. (Not many men that hairy had tattoos.) Thick as a D-cell, a thumb hooked his jeans pocket. On the back of that furry hand, in blue and green a serpent’s head flicked a red tongue between yolk-yellow fangs. Green-scales coiled into heavier hair to drape the muscle. On his upper arm, barbed wire ran through the sockets of the skulls circling the biggest bulge. With blue fins, dolphins breached a blue-gray wave breaking along his lower. His triceps spilled stylized blood where a knife stabbed through. Spiraling his biceps, dragons dove from his shoulders among clouds and flashing zags and zigs. Even under the florescent lights hair hazed the smaller pictures. As were chest and gut, hands and arms were so furry that, despite the images, they looked like hempen bales.
As the tattooed and bearded man started, not toward the john but toward the hall running off beside Turpens Parts & Notions, Eric moved his glance away. . .