Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Somehow, with lots of spit—and rain—Eric got himself lodged in Shit’s ass…and started humping him. Belly down on the growth and little stones, now Shit growled: “Come on, you white sonofabitch, fuck my black ass—fuck it harder!”

  “Hey…” Eric paused for a moment, to move his knee outside the fork of Shit’s legs. “You okay—?” It was interesting—and sexy—to hear Shit talk to him like Shit himself talked, sometimes, to Dynamite.

  “Fuck this nigger’s asshole, till you fuckin’ pass out, you mother fuckin’ white cocksuckin’ scumbag!” (Among overturning slabs of sea, beyond Gilead, spastic mantises of white fire strutted across black water, under black sky.) “Fuck my ass till it splits open, you piss-drinkin’ asshole eatin’ scumsucker!” (Eric thought: It’s probably good you can replace “fuck” with “suck” in pretty much any sexual exhortation. If Shit had been egging Dynamite on, it would have been “suck.”) “That’s it. Yeah. You fuckin’ it good and hard, now! But I bet you can fuck it harder—”

  That’s what Eric was doing when another crack and bolt—he felt Shit jerk beneath him—jarred and blinded him enough to make him lose half his hard-on. He hadn’t pulled loose, though. With three more breaths and the sound of Shit under him, moaning, his face on its side in the dirt “—Aw, Eric, fuck this nigger…! Hey, go on. Fuck this nigger, white boy…! You do it so good. Yeah, fuck this goddam nigger…!”—it was back again. Near his shoulder, Shit gripped a fistful of gravel, grass, and sand, which spilled between his knuckles.

  Eric’s orgasm within Shit was the strongest feeling he’d ever had, till then, in his life. (Being white had never turned him on before, and it scared him that it did so much now.) Its force disoriented.

  During his next five desperate breaths, he couldn’t remember where he was, or why water rushed over him. Half the water on him was sweat; half was rain. He held onto Shit’s hard shoulders so tightly his arms shook. His face dropped blindly into Shit’s neck. He was afraid if he moved more, an electrified knife would slash his groin and gut him.

  Up beneath his chest and over his opposite shoulder, one of Shit’s hands now gripped one of Eric’s, grit and grass between them.

  “Jesus…” Eric said. “Stop movin’ your butt, nigger—you gonna kill me! Gimme a minute.” Finally, he asked, again, “You okay?”

  Beneath him, Shit nodded. “What about you?” Rough hair rubbed Eric’s cheek, all wet.

  “Yeah. I’m good. Did you come?” Eric wanted to know.

  Shit turned his head. “’Bout five or six times. It wasn’t like regular comin’…but it was about as much as I could’a stood.” Then he turned his body beneath Eric’s—

  In the wind, Eric screamed, “Ahhhhhh!” and Shit caught him and pulled him close. Their faces and groins and chests pressed one another’s. The knife had slashed. Eric’s body had been sundered through its core.

  But he’d survived.

  Shit said, “I spilled so much jizz in this grass just now, I expect the rocks around here is gonna birth my first six kids. I’ll tell ya’, it was fuckin’ great.” He kneaded Eric’s shoulder. “They gonna put you in jail, nigger. ’Cause makin’ another nigger feel that good has gotta be a crime!”

  Eric grinned. “Yeah, I know what you mean…”

  “Every once in a while—not a lot, now, ’cause you’d kill my nigger ass if you did—but you gonna have to do a little somethin’ like that again. Maybe a couple or three times a year. It’s like the time we all three come so hard together, after Bull came over and pissed on you—”

  “Oh, yeah…” Eric said.

  “I mean that was another one of those where I came so hard I thought it was gonna kill me. Hey—most of the time, though, can we do it like usual? Please…? That’s better, day to day…All right?”

  “Yeah…” Eric said, gratefully. “That’s not gonna be no problem.” He closed his eyes, thankful, under rain.

  Shit squeezed him. “Thank you…I mean, it’s great. But I don’t think I could stand too much of that.”

  A little later, as lightning lit the insides of their closed lids orange, Eric asked, “Did Dynamite ever fuck you?”

  He felt Shit shrug. “Yeah—a few times, back when I was a kid. But that was ’cause I asked him to. I wanted to see what he was feelin’ when I corn-holed his butt for him. He said he didn’t think a father fuckin’ his own son was all that good of a’ idea. He said that was child abuse.”

  Eric rocked back with laughter. “He thought that—” He opened his eyes—“was child abuse—?” to see Shit’s eyes and face go from gray-white back to green and bronze as lightning dimmed.

  “Yeah. I had to beg him—then go get a beer bottle and stick it up my own ass. Like he was always doin’. So, finally, he said, cut it out, okay, he’d do it for me. Then he got some lard—and did it real nice, real greasy, and real slow. I liked it. But I figured since now I knew what it felt like, the next person who did it, he’d really have to lay me the fuck out. Yeah. And in case you’re wonderin’, that’s you…But I figure now I don’t have to do it that often, either.”

  Eric shook his head. “With all the suckin’ and fuckin’ and ass lickin’ and pee fights and beatin’ off together and jerkin’ each other off all over each other and all the piss drinkin’—”

  “Hey—now the piss drinkin’ is what you like doin’. Me and Dynamite just like doin’ it to you—”

  “—that’s what he calls child abuse?”

  “—’cause you like it. Well, you see—” and, almost as if the storm itself wanted to hear, the rain stopped, and the sound around them dropped by half—“a lot of that other stuff started when I was a baby. Whenever Mex or Dynamite or Jay or even Black Bull was baby sittin’ for me, they’d suck my dick to keep me from cryin’. It worked, too. Mex explained it all to Jay in sign language—how mamas in the villages near his home in Mexico used to do that to keep the boy babies happy.”

  “Well, you musta been a pretty happy kid.”

  “I was!” Shit grinned up at Eric. “Hell, I still am. But I guess they just kept on doin’ it. And I kept on really likin’ it. By the time I was eight or nine-and-a-half—I shot my first load, I’ll never forget it, right in Mex’s mouth. When I felt my pecker start to go off, I grabbed both his ears and held onto them things for dear life. I’m surprised I didn’t rip ’em off. He had red blotches on ’em all afternoon. It’s funny how something what feels so good can about scare you to death. I shot my second load in Dynamite’s hand, when I come to him to find out what had happened the first time and he tried to show me—well, I tell you, soon you couldn’t get Mex and me apart. Dynamite was thinkin’ about making a deal with Jay to get Mex to stay with us, permanent, to do regular suck service for us both. Only then I discovered I could do it in my dad’s butt hole and that was as good. Course, everything Dynamite did to me, I wanted to do to him. The first time I made that man come in my mouth, I was so proud I didn’t know what to do. I had to run around and tell pretty much every nigger in the Dump—there’s still a couple of ’em, down at the south end—Phillip and Everett—what don’t really like to talk to us ’cause they think our relationship is unnatural, though they’re as gay as Mama Grace. Black Bull was the only one what really stayed sociable—but I guess that’s ’cause what he used to do to some of the guys he had was a lot worse…maybe. These niggers around here may be gay, but the truth is, they don’t hardly approve of nothin’!” (To Eric it sounded like an exaggeration.) “Naw—that’s the truth. It is. That’s what people said.” On his back, Shit shrugged. “The rest I guess kinda just followed.”

  On the slope, in the rainy grass, Eric nodded. “Mmmm.” Finally he asked, “Shit, how come you wanna be a nigger so bad?”

  Shit said, “Huh? What you mean? I am a nigger—’cause my mama was one.” Then he laughed. “Naw—it’s just something I get into when I’m doin sumpin’ nasty, like with you or my dad. Why you wanna be white?”

  “I don’t wanna be white!” Eric raise
d up his head and looked down at grinning Shit.

  “Well, neither do I.” Grappling Eric, Shit pulled him back down on him. “Bein’ white, like you and my dad, that’s nasty—” Shit gave a grimacing smile—“ain’t it?”

  “Yeah…I guess so.”

  “Bein’ white’s about the nastiest thing I can think of.” Then he growled. “That’s why yall white guys turn me on so much,” and he opened his mouth all over Eric’s mouth and Eric’s nose and Eric’s cheek, and began pushing his tongue in Eric’s nose and in his mouth and in his ear, till he pulled away to breathe. “Bet you think bein’ a nigger’s nasty, too.” Shit narrowed his eyes for a wicked admission. “Besides…callin’ me a nigger gives me a hard-on, especially when white guys do it who wanna suck my dick—like you and my dad.” Then, immediately Shit thrust his tongue into Eric’s mouth again before Eric could answer, turning his face, grown gigantic with its nearness, on Eric’s.

  Eric pulled his mouth from Shit’s. “Yeah, me too, I guess—’specially when I’m doin’ it with one of you. Or when you do something like that, to get me hot. But, then, I don’t go around all the—”

  In the grass a pock-pock-pock-pock-pock-pock had begun. Then first hail hit the back of Eric’s head, his buttocks, his thigh, his cheek, his shoulder…

  “But I do,” Shit said—then his grin dropped away and he squinted up. “’Cause I wanna fuck all the time. Hey—we gotta get outta this…Owww, man! Oh, shit!” and they were up, grabbing jeans (Eric), cap, and sneakers (Eric) and jeans (Shit).

  They hustled back down the slope, Eric’s arms and back and hips stinging under ice pellets.

  The long grass seemed to hold twice the number of twigs and small rocks and scallop shells as on the way up.

  Jay was going in through the door when they got down past the path’s last turn.

  Six seconds behind him, bursting into the kitchen, dropping their clothes on the floor, hopping on one foot and brushing off the other, then switching, Shit asked if anybody minded, ’cause they were both in their birthday suits, while hailstones bulleted the roof. Eric had on his soaked cap, but that was all. Everybody laughed. Both boys were covered with leaves, grass blades, small scratches. Shit had a cut on his cheek, under his beard, and another on his shoulder from hailstones. Eric had scraped up one knee pretty bad—but there was no other blood.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor by the sink, Chef Ron was eating an ear of corn. “That’ll teach you fools to go runnin’ around in a hurricane with eighty-five-, a hundred-mile-an-hour winds, buck-ass naked!” On the roof the hail’s rattle increased. Over his cob, he grinned. “Sure wish I’d been out there with you.”

  Eric said, “You really brought over some good food. That chicken was good—I was so tired, that night I had it at the restaurant, I don’t think I got to taste it.”

  “Well,” Ron said, “the rest wasn’t bad either.”

  And Jay said, “You ought to done figured it out by now. Anything worth a tinker’s damn down here always comes outta the Dump.”

  Shad had eaten a paper plate full of chili and was asleep in his wheelchair. A few beans over it, the plate balanced on his knees. Black Bull was trying to help Mex get spilled beans out Shad’s beard with a piece of paper toweling.

  “Looks like I shoulda been up there helpin’ you fellas out,” Jay said, taking off his soaked plaid and hanging it on the kitchen doorknob. Beneath, the bulk of his hairy arms displayed their undersea and surface colors. His big laugh filled the house. “Now that sounds like it mighta been some fun!”

  A day later, on Gilead, half the trees had been torn out by the roots. Near the island boathouse, right behind the dock, a twelve-foot piece of cement had turned up to lean on its side against a bolder. “It looks more like a goddam earthquake—” Jay scratched his head—“than a hurricane.” A part of the roof on a maintenance shed behind the Kyle mansion had blown loose. So they all went back and forth in the scow a couple of times to bring over supplies and help put on a new one—the new one was supposed to be hurricane proof—and had another potluck chili dinner in the long kitchen.

  Dynamite and Black Bull kept trading these jokes about the chili that Shit kept laughing over, while Eric pursed his lips, or—sometimes—smiled.

  * * *

  [44] IN 2013, THREE days before Christmas, at seven twenty-five in the morning, gray-white sun seeped beneath the overcast to make a quarter of the winter sea dull steel. In the cab of the half-loaded truck, in his overall bib pocket, Dynamite’s new cell-phone played the opening notes of “This Land Is Your Land”—which it had been programmed with when he got it. Dynamite had not known the song; though Eric had and told him about it. Now Dynamite fingered it free, looked to see who it was, then raised it to his ear. “Hey, Hugh. How you doin’?…Oh, yeah…Hmm?...Oh…! Jesus—well, how’re you holdin’ up?…Yeah…Yeah…Oh…Yeah, sure…But you’re okay…Okay, I will.” He dropped the phone toward his lap, blunt thumb seeming to press three buttons—though he was only pushing “end.” (Eric wondered sometimes how he could do it.) He took a breath, then dropped the phone back in his pocket. One denim edge had come half loose and hung down.

  Ten seconds more driving, and Dynamite said, “Shad died this mornin’, out on Gilead. Hugh can’t raise Jay on the scow. He wants me to go down, wait for ’em to get in at the dock, and tell ’em.”

  Between them, Shit looked first at his father, then at Eric, with the puzzled humor of a child facing the momentous. “Oh, fuck—Wow!” At twenty-five, faint wrinkles held Shit’s green eyes. “Shad’s dead…”

  Already, Eric was wondering what the death would mean to Jay—or Mex. Or even Hugh.

  Again Dynamite lifted the phone, thumbed it open, looked down to thumb up a contact, then raised it to where his brown hair, run with white, curled over his ear. “Hey…Tad?…Yeah, this is Dynamite. I’m gonna run back to the Harbor and wait for Jay and Mex to get in…Shad died this mornin’, out on Gilead…Yeah, the old man, Jay’s uncle…Nobody can get Jay on the scow…Un-huh…I gotta tell him. Can you phone Randal and let ’im know? Then, maybe, you could swing round and do the Runcible-Hemmings half of the run this mornin’. Yeah, it’d be a favor, and I’d appreciate it. Well, do what of it you can. I don’t think nobody’s gonna go crazy if we get back to it tomorrow…Yeah, I’ll call you after I talk to Jay.”

  This time when he put the phone away, Dynamite slowed the truck, pulled off the road into Mrs. Morganhill’s driveway, turned around, and started back to Diamond Harbor.

  *

  Yards before the dock, Shit said, “I think Jay’s gonna be glad the ol’ coot’s gone.”

  Dynamite nodded. “He might be. But then, he might not. You know he been takin’ care of that ol’ fella a long time.” The truck slowed. “You get used to things like that, Shit—even Shad. Sometimes it’s hard to go on without it.”

  Beside the dock light on its post, Dynamite parked the garbage truck. As Eric glanced up and Dynamite pulled out the hand brake, Eric saw the florescent ring-bulb still burned. In the winter, its timer turned it off at seven-fifty.

  They got out. Cool damp chilled Eric around the wrists and neck of his thrown back hoody. Under his bib, Dynamite wore a waffle-knit undershirt, neck opened, its frayed and buttonless collar dark gray, despite a trip through the washing machine last week.

  Shit wore a gray-green flannel with no buttons at all. Not that it was really cold—it felt like the mid-forties—and hauling sacks could keep you fairly warm. Still, Eric wondered how much of Shit and Dynamite’s insistent ignoring of the weather was metabolism and how much some sort of theater they indulged for one another.

  By the time the scow pushed its hedge of foam and froth into shore, Eric glanced up to see the bulb was now gray—he’d missed its going out.

  With a work shoe on the dock and one on the scow’s rim—rising and falling above the winter waters—Mex gave them a grin and a wave, then bent to secure the scow’s front to the dock cleat, while Jay came out fro
m the shelter of the wheel housing to call, “Hey, there, guys. What yall doin’ out here this late?” and went down to tie up the stern.

  A dark young man in black denim jacket and jeans, a watch cap, and a white turtleneck showing above his collar, carried his green duffel sack toward the scow’s edge. He was wearing a shirt that said:

  IAIA

  And below that:

  Tie a feather on it.

  —though Eric wasn’t sure what that meant.

  Black hair in a ponytail over one shoulder, he waited for Jay and Mex to finish. Roan Holota was returning to school at the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, after spending part of his holidays with his aunt and uncle, Walter and Ruth Holota, on Gilead, in their cabin up from the Kyle place.

  Eric had seen him in town twice that week—and smiled at him now. By the scow’s edge, Roan nodded, without smiling. The facts of his visit had come to Shit and Eric from overheard conversations at the Lighthouse, on a couple of drop-ins for coffee.

  Jay finished tying up, stood, stepped to the dock, and, in his gray and blue jacket, strode over, grinning in preparation for another hello.

  Roan stepped over, too, to walk only a little more slowly, looking around as if—Eric thought—he wanted to remember all this before he left.

  Taking the spike at the gate’s edge from the metal eyelets, Dynamite dropped it on its clinking chain and lifted the folding rhomboid of slats up against the light post. The spike swung down to tink the pole three times, each more quietly than the last. “Afraid I got some bad news.”

  Jay slowed (and so did Roan, though Eric suspected Roan was trying not to look too curious). Through his beard, Jay’s smile faded. “What is it?”

  Dynamite turned to him. “Hugh phoned me up when he couldn’t get through to you. Your Uncle Shad passed, out at your place—about an hour, hour-and-a-half back.”

  Jay stopped. “He did?” He raised a hand and scratched his nose with his thumb. “Well.” He looked down at his shoes, shifted his weight from one to the other, then looked up again. “That ain’t no surprise. He had that sedentary pneumonia. Dr. Greene come out and looked at him, twice. Jesus—the last time was just yesterday mornin’. He wasn’t eatin’, he wasn’t movin’ much—wasn’t talkin’ none.”