Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

“Certainly. Hugh, Jay, Mex—it was nice to see yall.” Her plate clinked on the pile. “This was very nice. You know if there’s anything we can do, we’re just up the road.”

  “I wanna go home…” Eddie wailed.

  “Come on, now,” Captain Miller said. “We’re goin’ home. But we gotta get to the boat first. Be a little quiet now…”

  Billy said, “It was probably wakin’ up in this big old house all alone that scared him. I bet he ain’t never even been in a place this big before. Hey, Eddie, you have a bad dream while you was nappin’?”

  Eddie turned his face away from barefoot Billy, against his barefoot father’s chest. “I dunno. I wanna go home…”

  “Well, we’re goin’,” Captain Miller said. “Now, you gotta hush up, and let us get you there. I guess your mama was right—I shouldn’t’ve brought you out to this thing.”

  “I’m scared,” Eddie repeated.

  “You done told me that,” Captain Miller said, with his hand on Eddie’s back. “But there ain’t nothin’ to be scared of now. I’m here. Come on—you wanna go to the bathroom?”

  “Naw,” Eddie said. “I wanna go…”

  “Well, I do,” Captain Miller said.

  “It’s right through there—down the long hall,” Jay said, “on your left.”

  “Come on with me, then.” And Captain Miller with his arm around Eddie, started across the floor out through the back arch. “Maybe when you get there you’ll change your mind.”

  The minute they’d gone, Dynamite frowned. “Did somethin’ happen to that boy?”

  “Naw,” Jay said. “Naw, he just woke up all by himself and got spooked. That’s all.”

  Then Mex stepped in front of Eric. With his hands, he signed, “Jay wants you guys to stay here—we can put you up. We’ll get you back to the mainland early tomorrow.”

  Eric said, “Sure, Mex.”

  “I asked Dynamite and your brother—they said yes, too.”

  “Oh…Okay.”

  “It’s a shame he’s so scared.” Cassandra’s filmy flowered dress was all but dry. “This is such an interestin’ old place.”

  Although it took three times as long as Eric would have figured, complete with an argument about whether they could all fit comfortably on Captain Miller’s boat or whether Jay should make a special run with the scow (to which Captain Miller made hand-waving protests: “That ain’t necessary. That just ain’t necessary”), eventually everyone was out and—in two trips—back down to the boathouse.

  They filed onto the Doris, which, however crowded, was returning with three fewer people than it had come with. People at the rail waved. The boat pulled from the island dock.

  *

  “What you gonna do with all this food?” Dynamite asked. “If them things could still hatch, you’d have enough deviled eggs left to start a chicken ranch.”

  Standing beside the sideboard, Hugh scratched his head. “I guess we’ll eat ’em.” He took another from the tray and bit into it. “They’re good.”

  “Yeah,” Shit said, “they are.”

  Eric asked, “You think somethin’ happened to him?”

  “He was asleep an awfully long time,” Hugh said. Then he shook his head. “No—he just woke up and didn’t remember where he was. Probably he was afraid to get up and find us, and just lay there gettin’ scareder and scareder. When he came out, I was actually thinking I should go in and check on him. I remember the first few times I visited here when I was a kid. This place can be pretty overwhelmin’.”

  “Hey—” Dynamite sat down at the side of the sofa—“I think the rain put a little damp in here. You got some wood around somewhere? Why don’t we make up a fire to take the chill off?”

  Jay grinned. “If you wanna burn the whole place down and kill us all with smoke poisoning while you’re at it, we could.”

  Laughing, Hugh leaned back against the sideboard, eating his deviled egg. “Wendell, there ain’t been a fire in that thing in ten, fifteen years. They’d have to sweep out the chimney real good before we could have it working. Right now, it’s blocked up about full.”

  “Oh…” Dynamite said. “That’s too bad. I remember some nice fires in here, back when you first came out to stay, Jay.”

  “Maybe you remember them back from when Kyle and his folks lived here,” Jay said. “When we were kids, I mean.”

  “It could be,” Dynamite said. “’Cept for the storm, I ain’t been in here myself for seven or eight years. But I would’ve sworn I’d seen you use that thing since Kyle went to Columbus.”

  Jay pushed up from his own chair to stand before the empty fireplace. “Hey—I got something I want to show these fellows. Mex, where did I put that thing?”

  “You know right where it is,” Mex signed. “It’s back in the bedroom, lyin’ out on the bed where you put it this mornin’. Showin’ these boys that nasty thing is all you been talkin’ about for two days.”

  “That’s right,” Jay said. “It is, ain’t it?” He grinned. “I come across it upstairs and brung it down to our closet six months ago, so when they came out here next, I could break it out and show it to ’em.” He turned and left the room through the arch the led to the kitchen and the bedrooms, where, on his first visit, Eric—and that afternoon Eddie—had slept.

  From his seat on the couch, Dynamite asked. “What the hell is this all about?”

  Finished with the egg, Hugh folded his hands in front of him. “It’s just Jay’s craziness.”

  “About what?” Dynamite asked.

  From his own chair, Shit leaned forward on his knees, looking eager. Eric was smiling, even as he felt wary of the extremity that sometimes dogged Jay’s humor. He wondered if it was anything like the late Shad’s…

  Jay returned, holding a twenty-four inch by eighteen inch framed picture. The back was covered with brown paper—all that showed. A wire cable crossed it—for hanging. “I been wanting to show you guys this for years—me, I think it’s great. It was one of Kyle’s favorite pictures. I thought it was pretty cool, too. It’s one reason I first wanted to be your daddy’s jerk-off buddy—and why I always figured there was hope for at least some of the Turpens. I was thinkin’ after all this time, maybe I should give it to you.”

  Dynamite asked, “What the fuck you got there, Jay?”

  Jay walked over to the empty fireplace. “You ever wonder, Eric, why some people call your old man a pig fucker?”

  Eric laughed. “Mostly, that’s just what Shit calls him.”

  “I used to hear the guys at the Produce Farm call him that.” Shit shrugged. “So I picked it up. I never thought it meant…nothin’.”

  Jay lifted the picture, turned it around, and—

  Hugh said, “Jay, you gonna be sorry about this,” while, grinning, Mex moved behind Shit to put his hand on Shit’s shoulder.

  —leaned the framed color photograph back on the mantel.

  Behind the glass, two inches of matting surrounded the twelve-by-sixteen inch color enlargement: some trees, a cabin’s edge at the side: in the middle stood an orange hand-worked water pump on a concrete pedestal. On the pedestal stood a large pig, it’s head up. Behind the pig, leaning over him—definitely the pig was male—holding it by a leather collar, stood a barefoot, lean-muscled young man with no shirt, his jeans pushed to his knees.

  Looking out at the room, he had a pleased smile. His naked feet were in the grass with denim bunched around them. His knees were slightly bent.

  Watching, eight or nine more men stood around. A few were white; most were black. One of the white guys was a chunky fellow with glasses—and no clothes on at all. He stood with his erect penis in his fist.

  The young man gripping the pig collar was also engorged, most of him, however, sunk in the pig’s fundament.

  Shit began to laugh. “Who the fuck is that?”

  One of the black men also had his pants open, his cock out, and was masturbating. Two others were feeling their crotches.

  “The one na
ked as a jaybird—” Jay explained, stepping back to get a better view—“is Miles Turpens. He’s waitin’ his turn. I think when it come to pigs, that boy had a thing for sloppy seconds. That’s out at Miles’s farm. He had a whole circle of friends who…what can I say, kinda liked that pig.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Dynamite demanded. “Where’d you get this picture, Jay?”

  “I took the damned thing.” Jay looked back over his shoulder, his toothless grin splitting his beard. “You don’t remember? The black guy beatin’ off is our crazy friend, Robert Kyle, the Third,” Jay said to Shit and Eric. “He was never one to let a white feller get the better of ’im in straight out nastiness—especially your dad. I give Kyle that picture, and he made the enlargement.”

  “He never showed it to me,” Dynamite said, “when we was fuckin’ around.”

  Hugh stood smiling by the sideboard. “That’s ’cause my cousin was more civilized than this barbaric contrarian.” He chuckled.

  “Probably it was all that fancy schoolin’ overseas that done it—Kyle’s nastiness, I mean.” Jay laughed. “That’s the only explanation I could offer for it. I guess he figured that picture was for him. The black guy with ’em is one of Kyle’s African friends he’d brought here that summer. I remember, that black boy said he was real impressed with the level of pig fuckin’ we had goin’ on around here.” Jay shook his head. “I wouldn’t’a’ thought they had pig fuckin’ in Africa. I figured that was a Georgia specialty—like boiled peanuts or peach pie—but apparently, in some parts, they do.”

  Somehow, gazin’ at the grinning Georgia boy above the mantel, who looked out at them from nearly thirty years before, Eric began to make out a likeness. “That’s…you—!” He looked back and forth between the photograph and Dynamite.

  Dynamite said, “Jay, now why you wanna go show ’em that for?”

  Still grinning, Shit declared, “I think it’s great!”

  Eric asked, “How old were you when you guys took that?”

  “Seventeen,” Dynamite said. “Maybe eighteen. Kyle still had to be in boardin’ school—then he went to college, I remember, a year ahead of the usual age. He was so fuckin’ smart.”

  “Hey—” Shit settled back in his chair—“you gotta tell me what fuckin’ one of them things feels like.”

  “It feels like fuckin’ a pig—is what it feels like,” Dynamite said.

  “Why didn’t you guys use a sow?” Shit asked. “Wouldn’t that’ve been easier?”

  “Naw,” Dynamite said. “Ol’ Stove Pipe there was raised to it, see—from the first. He wanted it. You’d walk around on Miles’s little piss-anty farm, and that old pig’d run up to you and back up against you and rub his nuts all over your knees. Miles Turpens had about four or five niggers workin’ for ’im, and about half their job was keepin’ that pig satisfied. I’d just come by to get mine. He was gonna gimme a job out there, too, but we never got around to it. Mostly I was just a drop-in.”

  “It’s the truth,” Jay said. “There ain’t nothin’ like a lecherous pig to turn a farm like that into an equal opportunity employer. You gotta take who you can get—probably it sounds prejudiced, but you can start out as white as Miles Turpens there, and if pig fuckin is the skill you need to have around, you probably gonna end up with more black fellas workin’ for you than white ones. I seen it happen more’n once. Probably don’t mean nothin’. If he was here, Kyle would explain how there was other social forces involved. But that’s still the way it works.”

  Dynamite mused. “There was another black feller workin there for Miles—big feller, too, named Tooker—who was tryin’ like hell to break in another of Miles’s hogs. But he couldn’t do it. He wanted me to help, but after a couple of times, I told him, ‘No. If a pig don’t wanna get fucked, you don’t fuck it.’ Tooker ain’t in the picture. Must have been his day off, or somethin’. But—damn!—the squealin’ and cussin’ that used to come out that barn when the two of ’em was in there! He musta got himself pig-bit fifteen or twenty times. I’m surprised that nigger still had a dick. I think once he told me he bit the damn pig back, he was so mad! But he still couldn’t make it happen. Stove Pipe didn’t give you those problems.”

  “Maybe gettin’ bit was what Tooker was into,” Shit suggested.

  “Could be,” Dynamite said. “But he could also’ve been a big dumb nigger who didn’t know no better. Tooker took his turns with Stove Pipe, like the rest of us, though. But he wanted to break one in all for hisself.”

  “That pump looks like the one they got on the Dump Produce Farm today,” Shit said.

  “That is the pump they got at Dump Produce today,” Dynamite said. “The one whose picture’s on your credit union card. Look at that buck naked little cocksucker—Miles, I mean. Sometimes I fucked him, and sometimes I fucked his pig. It was the same with the niggers who worked there, too. Miles’s butt went with the job. He had the land, but it was just a little shit-ass farm, with six pigs, three cows, and a chicken coop out behind his cabin. And one of the pigs was Stove Pipe.”

  “Kyle brought that place from him ’bout three or four months after we was out there takin’ those pictures,” Jay said, thoughtfully, “and started turnin’ it into a real farm. Only thing wrong with it was Dynamite didn’t get no more pork butt.”

  Hugh humphed and stood up from the sideboard against which he’d been leaning.

  “Now see, Hugh?” Jay said. “They ain’t upset—are yall?”

  “I ain’t,” Shit declared.

  “I don’t think so,” Eric said. “I’m fine with it,” though he didn’t know how he’d feel about it had Dynamite and Shit felt differently.

  In his visits to the Kyle mansion, because of Shad most of Eric’s explorations had been confined to the part he had seen on that first night. Once Hugh had sent him to get something, and he’d walked down halls he had not yet explored and realized that there were rooms—many rooms—in the building he was not privy to. But tonight Jay said that, if it didn’t bother them, they’d sleep in Shad’s old bedroom.

  ’Cause it was already made up.

  “It don’t bother me,” Dynamite said.

  *

  Eric went to look at the room in which he’d first stayed at the mansion. On the bed by the back wall, the spread was rumpled—probably from when Eddie had been napping. Eric left, walked down the dark green hall—near the ceiling there was water damage—and into the bathroom. Gray-green paint had been put over the wall where the pipes had been replaced. It still looked new, which gave him a sense of how long the rest must have gone without painting.

  By now he knew there was a back stair, which he found. It was paneled, waist high, with dark wood and narrow. A hand on either wall, he walked up and came out in an alcove on the second floor. Stepping out, he stood in the great upstairs sitting room, with its orange and brown sofas and mustard armchairs.

  In the corner, by the window, Dynamite was standing in front of the statue, whose head was half-again higher than his. Horned, tusked, and winged, the black creature kneeled on its immense bronze knee. Evening light through the undraped panes turned parts of the hulking sculpture a gray-violet that seemed sourceless.

  As Eric walked between the chairs, Dynamite glanced at him and smiled.

  Eric got nearer; Dynamite said, “Kyle’s grandmamma made this thing—I only met her the once—first time I was here, when I was twelve. She was a real old lady then. That was Christmas, too. I guess by the second time I came back, she’d passed. You know, she’s buried out there, probably not that far from Shad. They used to have a lot of her things around, but they give ’em all away. I think this one was just too big. You ever really look at it before?”

  “First time I was over here—” as he neared, Eric slowed—“I was walkin’ around up here, at night, in the dark—I almost bumped into it. Damn, it scared me.”

  Dynamite chuckled.

  Eric said, “I was wonderin’ if that’s what scared Eddie.”

  “Could
be—but he probably would’a said something.” Dynamite rocked on to his other hip. “But maybe not—if he thought he wasn’t supposed to be up here, anyway.” He chuckled again.

  “Hey—” Eric looked back into the arch with the stairway mounting to the next floor—“you know what that room is, up there?”

  “Sure,” Dynamite said.

  “What is it?” Eric asked.

  “Come on. I’ll show you.” Dynamite turned on his worn-down work shoes and started, with his listing gait, back to the stairs’ foot.

  Eric followed.

  They started up the carpeted steps, Dynamite ahead. “This tower room, here, used to be Kyle’s—the first time I come over here, it was kind of like his old nursery room. A playroom, with all his toys. That was when we was twelve. He brought me up to see it—at that first Christmas party he had, with all the kids from around here—black and white, rich and poor. And I was about the poorest. Then, later, when he was older, it was his study—his library, he used to call it.”

  Dynamite, then Eric, came out at the head, into the octagonal space, with its bookshelves between the windows.

  Eric walked forward—and after a few steps, glanced back. The lanky, unshaven man in his big collapsing work shoes, jeans bunched under his belt at the waist, and the ropey arms coming from the green short sleeved work shirt, looked like someone he had never seen before, as though the unfamiliar setting drained him of all familiarity. A bit wildly, Eric thought: But this is the man Robert Kyle the Third loved…and probably belongs here more than Hugh and Mex and Jay and me and Shit. Dynamite frowned. “What…?”

  “Nothin’. I was thinkin’. That’s all.”

  Dove gray walls rose to an intricately vaulted ceiling, crossed with beams that Eric had no memory of at all. Perhaps he’d never looked up…

  “Yeah, I was rememberin’…something.” Dynamite looked around at them—“that I swear, I ain’t thought about it in a million years.”

  “What…?” Eric asked.

  “Well, you know, I told you Kyle and me used to fool around when we was kids—in the boathouse and behind the fillin’ station and out in the woods on the mainland and the island woods.”