Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“He throwin’ up?”
“Naw,” Jay said. “It wasn’t like your daddy’s heart attack at all. It was just like, you know, he stopped talkin’ and hollerin’ and quit all his hell-fire preachin’, and…gave out.”
“Oh,” Dynamite said. Then, from somewhere, he started to chuckle. “You had Dr. Greene out there—?” He tried to swallow his amusement.
Jay said, “He’s the best doctor we got and he’s on the Kyle Plan—”
“Hey,” Dynamite said. “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against ’im. He’s the one Shit, me, and Eric go to—when we remember.” He grinned over at the boys.
“Besides,” Jay said, “he’s the only one around here what’ll come out and make a house call. All them white doctors’d just tell you bring ’em in and stick ’im in the hospital—and you know that would’ve been the end of Shad, right there.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dynamite said. “But Greene is as black as the Ace of Spades. That’s probably what killed Shad—havin’ a black doctor look at ’im. His heart couldn’t take it. And a gay black doctor at that!”
“To me, it didn’t even look like he noticed,” Jay said. “Which was just as well.”
“Hey, you know, I’m sorry, Jay. I didn’t mean nothin’.”
“I know you didn’t. But I just…” Jay took a deep breath. “I don’t know what I just was…feelin’ there.”
“Relief?” Dynamite asked.
“Naw. Not exactly.” Jay turned around, and hollered across the dock. “Hey, Mex. That pneumonia done took Shad this mornin’. He’s dead.” (On the scow’s edge, Mex stopped working, stood up, and waited.) “Hugh called and told Dynamite.”
Pausing for seconds, Mex stepped down to the dock—he had on work shoes today—and started across the boards.
“Eighty-seven years that man spent, makin’ as many people as he could manage to, miserable. Now we get to be miserable for another couple of days, till we can get him in the ground.”
Mex stepped up beside Jay, and moved his hands. “Hugh called and told you? We knew it was coming, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what happened.” Jay nodded. “I was just sayin’ here to Dynamite, it weren’t no surprise.”
“You remember,” Dynamite said, “he wanted to be planted in the church yard, over in Hemmings—the place that’s the Interdenominational now. That used to be Shad’s church. You gonna carry ’im back over here and put him down there—?”
“Hell, no!” Jay said. “He’s fuckin’ dead—and he was a bastard all his life. I never knowed nobody what was less of a Christian than what he fuckin’ was. I don’t feel like draggin’ his dead ass back across the water a last time. I’m gonna put him in Gilead Graveyard where he belongs, with our own people and yours—” He looked over at Roan—“and yours, boy. That’s where he goes.”
Roan volunteered, “I’m sorry about your loss, Mr. MacAmon. I couldn’t help hearin’—” He seemed unsure if he should stay or go.
“Thank you, son. You remember three years ago, how me and Mex drove you all the way across to school—we had fun, didn’t we? You know, I’m tempted to say fuck it, get in the truck and drive you there again. But…” Jay shook his head. “Well, I guess that ain’t so realistic. Hey, you go on and catch your bus over at the Library, now. It should be there in a few minutes—you don’t wanna miss it. Ain’t another one till three thirty.”
“Yes, sir.” Roan hefted up his green bag, nodded toward Shit and Eric—who nodded back—and started for the street’s grassy edge.
Mex put his arm around Jay and hugged him.
“Hold up, there,” Jay said. “I got one more thing I gotta do—call the funeral place in Hemmings, so we can get the damned burial permit.” He reached into his jacket pocket, took out a cell phone—and frowned at it. “Damned thing’s turned off. No wonder Hugh couldn’t get me.” He opened it and pressed a button, which, Eric figured, with hands like Jay’s, Shit’s, and Dynamite’s, was as much an achievement when Jay did it as when Dynamite or Shit did. “You’d’a thought I’d knowed it was comin’ and didn’t wanna be bothered. Well, maybe I didn’t.”
*
Then it rained.
With his shirt open and back from his chest, Shit ambled upright, ignoring it. Trying not to hunch against the sprinkle, Eric hurried out of Hurter’s to the pickup. In a plastic sack, he’d bought two Sharpies, one red, one black—and, at the Produce Market, a large jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Shit unlocked the passenger door and tugged it open. Opening the driver’s door, Eric pulled himself up and slid beneath the wheel. “Okay, come on. Let’s get back before the water in those potatoes boils all away. I don’t know why Dynamite can’t boil a goddam pot of water without burnin’ it.” Eric started driving.
“You told ’im to watch ’em for you; he’ll sit there and watch ’em burn all up, then wonder what he’s supposed to do about it. Nigger, am I glad you know how to cook.”
“I guess I am, too.” Eric grinned. “‘Culturally-invested language.’”
“I’m gonna culturally invest you up side your head,” Shit told him. “Why you always sayin’ that?”
“You know what it means. I told you a couple of years ago. So did Dynamite.”
“I know. But that ain’t no reason to say it every time I open my fuckin’ mouth.”
“Well, it’s about the only kind of language what come out of it.” Eric laughed. “Okay. I’ll cut it out.” He wondered if the death of the mean-spirited invalid didn’t signal the proper time to retire certain jibes, be more mature, admit he’d grown older.
Back at the cabin, with the onions, celery, and peppers he’d already cut up in the big bowl, Eric finished making potato salad. He covered it with tin foil and put in the refrigerator. To the back of the stove was a pot of beans he’d been cooking all morning with onions, peppers, and a pork shoulder, till it was pretty much falling to pieces.
At the kitchen table he’d lettered on a piece of cardboard:
NO BOAT SERVICE TO
GILEAD ISLAND TODAY
ON ACCOUNT OF A DEATH
IN THE MacAMON FAMILY
Eric had put blue highlights on the left side of the letters.
“Damn,” Shit said. “That looks real nice. What’s it say?”
Eric read it to him. Then he said, “We’ll string it up on Gilead Dock with some wire when we go out there tomorrow morning with Captain Miller,” one of the remaining black fishermen at the Harbor. Miller had volunteered to go out for the burial anyway and was taking a boat load of people.
Someone knocked at the door.
Shit said, “You could be a’ artist or somethin’—or a sign painter, I bet—I mean, if you wanted to.”
Dynamite went to see who it was. Opening the door, he called back over his shoulder, “Hey, it’s Chef Ron,” who came in with a large crock of chicken salad.
In his yellow slicker, Ron explained, “Yall tell Jay and Mex I can’t get away from the restaurant. But at least I thought I’d send them somethin’ to nibble on.”
“Well, I know they’ll appreciate that.” Then Dynamite frowned at the crock, which was eighteen inches across. “Hey—how much salad did you make?” He took the bowl from the shaved-headed black man. “This thing is heavy.” It joined the pork and beans and potato salad on the table.
In his rain jacket, Ron grinned. “There ain’t no rush for the
bowl back—” it was a handsome, glazed ceramic—“but maybe, Eric, you could rinse it out and get it back to me in a couple of weeks…?”
“Sure,” Eric said, walking over.
“Your beans smell right good.” Chef Ron smiled. “You guys give my condolences to Hugh and Jay and Mex, all right?” As he went outside, Ron pulled his yellow hood up over his dark, gleaming head, and hurried down the puddled steps to his blue jeep—fenders, hood, and windshield flecked with drops.
*
They put the stuff in the pickup’s bed with a tarp under it and another over it—the full-siz
ed garbage truck they’d been using for the last two years stood beside it—then drove it down to the marina.
Walking up and around the maze of docks from the boat, holding a family-sized, black umbrella, came a heavy black man, with a dark suit, a rough white beard, a black denim shirt and a black tie that Eric only just noticed, and a white captain’s cap.
In the rain the man was barefoot.
“Hello, Dynamite. Mornin’ there Morgan, Eric—good to see you boys. Too bad it’s such a sad occasion.”
Shit said, “I don’t know how sad Jay is actually gonna be, Cap’n Miller.”
“Oh, you don’t gotta say that.” Under his umbrella—two circles of black cloth that let the wind escape between the bigger and the smaller—Captain Miller waved his hand dismissively. “Shad and I had some good laughs together, back when him and me was your age—or just about. Course, that was ’fore he found religion and the Aryan Brotherhood. He was ten years older than me. I got Eddie on the boat, ’cause it’s my Saturday to baby-sit. But we’re all gettin’ on. I want him to see the Indian graveyard. If he stays around here, probably that’s where he’s gonna end up.”
(Eric was saying, “Hey, Shit—hold the sign for me, so I can get it wired up. Yeah, that’s right. No, over about three inches. Lemme put it around this one, now…”)
(“You think it’s gonna run?”)
(“Well, them things is supposed to be waterproof.” Eric stood up. “I hope it don’t. That’s about the best I can do for now.”)
“Eddie’s in his Sunday best—so am I.” Captain Miller grinned down at himself. (Eddie was Captain Miller’s “surprise” child, with Doris, his third wife, twenty-two years his junior. Arriving in the Captain’s fifty-ninth year, Eddie had just turned seven.) “Only I don’t got my shoes on yet. I’ll stick my feet in ’em if we get there and it looks like anybody’s gonna be offended.”
Falling from the morning overcast, plumes of rain swept the multi-leveled marina. Boards and macadam streamed with what looked like molten glass. Bits of matting flicked and shook as wind dozed away the water.
A gray SUV pulled into the all-but-empty lot. The side door slid back, and a large person emerged in a glistening red rubber rain suit preserved from four or five wars ago. From the driver’s door, a not very large umbrella with pale blue and pink blossoms all over it opened up, and a very large woman stepped out under it, in flapping pastels. The wind caught it up. The rain, Eric saw, soaked the dress in seconds. In her dripping pastels she walked around the headlights and started across the lot in what looked like bathroom thongs.
The one in red rubber leaned back into the car to lug out a wicker trunk.
Over the rain, Dynamite said, “We got some stuff to bring on board, too, Cap’n.”
“Oh?” Captain Miller looked puzzled. He turned around, raised the umbrella high, cupped his hand beside his jaw and shouted, “Billy?—Billy! Get your lazy self on out here and help these boys carry on some of these collations.”
In a dark green watch cap and a sweater with a few snags and holes, a young white man, maybe Shit’s age, came hurrying up the dock, hunched over, through less and less falling water. Billy’s black sweater must have been soaked. Like his captain, he, too, was shoeless, his feet wide, wet, and red-toed, with frayed denim strung around the heels.
Shit said, “Looks like everybody’s goin’ barefoot. I should take off these goddam clodhoppers and get myself fuckin’ comfortable again.”
“Go on and get your stuff,” Captain Miller said. “Looks like you got five minutes of let up, before it starts to pour again. But watch the language there, Morgan. Eddie don’t hear too much of that kinda talk.”
“With this guy around?” Shit raised his eyebrows, and looked at Billy, who, starting to laugh, declared:
“I don’t cuss none in front of the Cap’n’s kid. Cap’n Miller’d skin me alive, if he caught me.”
“Darn right I would.” Captain Miller lowered his umbrella. “I’m tryin’ to raise a good, well-behaved boy.”
“Then I guess if I can’t cuss, I’ll keep my shoes on—to remind me.” Shit turned to the truck. “None of that invested cultural language, huh?” Probably he didn’t expect a response—and got none.
Looking over their heads, Captain Miller called, “Hey, honey-bunch! How you doin’, sweetheart? Good to see you ladies come to pay your respects. Shad MacAmon was a good Christian, and it’s nice to see good people comin’ out to respect a good Christian’s departure to the better place.”
In the now-sopping, flowered dress that clung to her breasts, her hips—easily she was three hundred pounds—a few steps ahead of red-suited Tank, Cassandra walked up, looking around, bronze hair a wet helmet that became a bronze veil over her freckled back and shoulders. “Christian!” Two tears were tattooed on her face, beneath her left eye, from a juvenile jail term. “That man a Christian?” She humphed. “I guess it was a day like this one I last saw him alive—’bout a year-and-a-half ago. Jay and Mex was rollin’ Shad in his chair through Runcible, and it started to pour. Just like now. So they brought him inside our shop, out of the wet—and suddenly he went off. He called me and poor Tank here every sort of Salome and Jezebel and whore of Babylon they got in the damned Bible and six or seven others besides that they wouldn’t let into no holy book.”
Under her red rubber hood, Tank’s sharply pulled-back hair was a thick black outline around her Indian features, as she watched her partner.
“Daughters of Sodom and all the whores of Babylon and I don’t know what-all—and there we are, with five sorority girls from the college in Valdosta who want to get some lady-like butterflies on their right butt cheeks. Jay MacAmon is my good, good friend, and I know it wasn’t his fault. He was tryin’ to shut ’im up. But it was all I could do to let ’im sit there and embarrass them poor students and not throw that foul-mouthed reprobate back out in the rain. He’s just yellin’ and screamin’ every kind of nastiness that you could think of at two women tryin’ to do their day’s work.” Cassandra shook her head. “He about scared them women to death—naw, Jay is our friend. And we’re goin’ out there because he’s our friend. But I don’t have nothin’ good to say about Shad, other than that he’s dead. And Tank ain’t seen the graveyard for a while—have you, sweetheart?”
Tank transferred the hamper from one hand to the other, but didn’t say anything.
Here, Cassandra put her heavy arm with its load of flesh around Eric’s shoulder. “Hey, honey—when you gonna come and let me put some pretty pictures all over you? You always tellin’ me how much you like the ones I did for Jay. I know these two fellas—” she nodded toward Shit and Dynamite—“is too chicken to let me go stickin’ a needle in their cute butts. And Dynamite here is basically another hairball, like Jay—if he got ’em, you couldn’t see no pictures on him for the fur. But—now, Eric—you got the right kinda skin for some real good needlework. You could be a prime sample. I can show you some things me and Tank been thinkin’ about recently.”
“Hey,” Shit said. “That sounds nice. Can I come and watch?”
“Sure, you can, honey,” Cassandra said, while silent Tank smiled.
Billy called, “Hey, come on, get your stuff. Let’s get it on the boat, before we get soaked again. Okay? Come on now—”
Then they were at the back of the truck with Shit handing down the bowls and crocks and pots. In single file, they started out to Captain Miller’s Doris, lugging pots and bowls against their bellies.
One by one, forty feet along the walkway, they climbed on the twelve-meter New England lobster boat that, locally, had been converted into a tourist fishing vessel. It rose and fell beside the boards. Tad—still the youngest of the black garbage drivers—was already on deck, to help carry things into the galley. “Set ’em on the floor by the wall. Or you can put some of them on the counter there—’cause it’s got an edge.”
In an incongruous blue suit, tie, and brown leather loafers, a slim black child looked around: C
aptain Miller’s son, Eddie.
“Ain’t he a big boy? He just had his seventh birthday two weeks back,” Billy said and laughed. “He’s almost growed up.” When Billy set his pots down, he looked out the galley’s screen door. In the sky were a few clear patches. “Come on,” he said to Eddie. “Lemme show you what I was about to do when your dad called me.”
Eric stepped out behind them.
On the deck by the galley door stood a number ten tin can with no top. “See, you want me to take a big handful of them wriggly-squiggly nightcrawlers and eat them suckers right now?”
Eddie looked a little horrified. “Nooo…! What you guys always wanna do that for? That’s disgustin’!”
“Oh, you wanna see me do it, then. Well, that’s good. ’Cause I’m gonna show you,” Billy said. “Like this.” He plunged a large, nail-bitten hand into the can and pulled up the churning and twisting worms, with their red, segmented bodies and feathery gills, green-black, along their sides. Between his fingers, bits of dirt and seaweed mulch fell back into the rim or on the rain-slick deck.
At the sight, Eddie, in his tie and white shirt, grew mute, if not paralyzed.
“That’s what they use for bait,” Shit said to Eric. “That’s probably left over from the fishin’ party he had out yesterday.”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “I know.”
“They real good,” Billy said. “I eat these things for breakfast all the time.” With its wriggling and unwriggling load, Billy raised his fist, opened his mouth, and strung half a dozen of the very live creatures over teeth and tongue, closed his mouth, and, with his lips sealed over them, began to make exaggerated chewing motions with his jaws, while the hanging worms curled and uncurled over the Billy’s blond stubble: “Mmmmmm, mmmm, mmmm.” Again he raised his hand, covered his mouth, spit the worms out into his palm, so that they dangled and twisted from both sides. “Wow, them things is real good. They’re salty.” Tad, Shit, Dynamite—and Eric—were laughing now. “Them suckers make a real good breakfast.” Billy held out his fist to Eddie. “Don’t even need no salt and pepper. You want some?”