Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Yeah…?”

  “So when he invited me out here with all those other kids around here to his Christmas party, I figured we was probably gonna do somethin’—only I wasn’t sure what. So I was just kickin’ back and lettin’ him show me around and stuff—and when he suddenly took me away from where everybody was, downstairs, I figured something was up. I was just a kid what till that day had lived in a two-room cabin and hadn’t never been in more than a four-room one—I mean, the biggest house I’d ever been in, where anybody lived; I don’t mean no office nor a store—was half the size of what we live in today in the Dump. So this was all pretty impressive.”

  Eric nodded.

  “Anyway, Kyle got me up these stairs here, and as soon as he got to the top, right where you’re standin’, he turned around and reached between my legs—he used to have all these toys in here. Puppets and science sets and blocks and trains and books and stuff—and damned if the nigger don’t take my dick out and hunkers down, right and front of me—and I’m lookin’ around at all his fuckin’ stuff! He squats right in front of me and sucked me off. After I shot, he grinned like he did, and I asked, ‘Can we play with some of this stuff, now?’

  “And he said, ‘Are you all relaxed?’

  “I said, ‘Huh? Yeah.’

  “So he stood up and said, ‘Then come on around here—and lean over the rail.’

  “I knew what he was gonna do. So I said, ‘Okay.’ And I stepped around there—” Dynamite moved behind the railing along the stairwell’s edge and leaned over it—“and I didn’t close my pants. He got behind me, and I leaned on that thing and he put his arms around me and his face next to mine. And with a handful of spit he stuck his dick right on up my ass. And I remember, he asks me, ‘How come after you shoot, it’s so easy to stick a dick in your asshole?’ and I said, ‘I dunno,’ which wasn’t exactly true—’cause I had three married cousins, Mikey, Red, and Bulldog, what been fuckin’ my butt a couple of times a day, one, the other or all three, since I was four years old—not to mention my daddy; who got on me about once a month.” Again Dynamite chuckled. “It just meant I always been able to take it pretty easy. And ol’ Mikey had some real meat on ’im, too. But I didn’t want nobody to know—so I hardly never told nobody, until later, when me and Jay got to be fuck buddies. That was when I was fifteen or sixteen. And we bought Kyle on in with us.” Dynamite took a big breath and pushed out his shoulders. “After Kyle fucked me, I asked him, ‘Can we play, now?’

  “And he said, ‘Sure.’” Dynamite shook his head. “And I remember, I thought, Damn, that was worth it. His daddy came up later and found us lyin’ out on the floor, both of us asleep. When I woke up, with him standin’ over us, I thought he was gonna think we’d been doin’ somethin’ bad, ’cause my pants was still unbuttoned—Kyle had closed up his. But mine were gapin’. Only he just run us downstairs to the others and some dinner. I don’t think we got to do much playin’, though. It’s funny—I think about Kyle and Jay and all the shit we got into together, like Myles’s goddam Stove Pipe and them pig-fuckin’ niggers—but I hardly never remember the first time out here, with Kyle.” Dynamite stepped around the newel and started down. “Back then, that first time I come up here, this room had a big blue rug in it, with little gold stars all over. But I just remember all them toys.”

  Eric looked around at the dark red carpet, then followed Dynamite down. And realized he hadn’t remembered to look for the photographs…

  “It’s funny—” Dynamite paused to let Eric catch up and raised his hand to his mouth to gnaw the nails on his spatulate fingers—“how you remember some things and don’t hardly never think about the others. I never liked Mikey too much—he always used to slap me around, while he was fuckin’ me. But Red and Bulldog was nice. So was my daddy, and they’d keep Mikey from messin’ me up too much. When they’d get drunk, they’d all fuck each other’s wives, too—except my daddy. Mama maybe suspected, but she didn’t really know nothin’ about how them boys used to do me.” They started down again. “And I learned to keep my mouth shut—and pretty much how to take anybody. After a few years of Mikey and Bulldog, didn’t nothin’ really bother me goin’ in back there. I can get comfortable under anybody.”

  Eric grinned. “That’s why you’re always ready for Shit and me to jump on you?”

  “Probably. By the time I was messin’ with Jay, them boys had all left Diamond Harbor, anyway. None of ’em got to eighteen without bein’ married at least once. And besides his wife, Mikey always had at least two girls on the side he’d take down and sell on Friday nights in Turpens’ back lot—that retarded one, Betsy-Ann. She had red hair, and the truckers in Turpens’ all thought he was pimpin’ out Red’s simple-minded sister and would really get into that; Red’d go right along with it and they’d always pay a little more—like they’d do with a knocked-up whore.” Dynamite was silent, three, four breaths. Eric watched—and thought about Shit’s mother. “Finally, Betsy-Ann’s aunt took her to Valdosta, and later I heard she died there. Then there was Merilee—she was real pretty. But she run off with some driver she met in the lot. Mikey was real mad about that for three goddam weeks. Somebody told me once they thought they seen her working in a flower shop, but I don’t even remember where. I figured eventually Bulldog, Red, and Mikey would all go away together, but they didn’t. They went to different places—different times, too. Maybe they’d got tired of each other, after all that. But my daddy stayed here. And had his heart attack…”

  From the bottom of the tower steps, they walked back out into the sitting room.

  Halfway across, Eric realized that, coming down, he hadn’t even noticed the creature. He glanced back at the big metal shape. (Dynamite paused to put his hand on Eric’s shoulder—and began to bite at the nails on his other hand.) Outside it was getting dimmer. Eric had been imagining Dynamite’s story and his cousins and his dad and what it was like to be a twelve-year-old guest at this labyrinthine palace.

  “Are your people out in the Indian graveyard?” Eric asked, as they walked between the couches and the armchairs.

  “My daddy is.” Dynamite rubbed the back of his neck.

  For a moment, Eric thought that sunlight was falling through the roof. He looked up. One wall of the great room was notably higher than the other. The ceiling went halfway across the room, then slanted sharply up. Along the taller wall, between molding shaped like white amphoras with white bunting draped between them, rectangular windows in ornate frames with shells at the corners let in slabs of sunlight that fell into the room, cutting it into slices—the first time he’d ever seen that effect. “Not your mama…?” Eric squinted.

  “Naw.” Dynamite turned away from the falls of sunlight that cut up the great room. “After my daddy died, she went back to her own people in Tennessee. She’s buried over there somewhere.”

  Looking at the floor, Eric could see what was probably years of dust on the carpet. Dynamite’s shoes looked all spread out and flattened, like a few toes were ready to bust free, there or here.

  “My granddaddy’s here, too. He was a half-breed Injun and pretty much a drunk—least that’s what my daddy tol’ me.”

  Eric looked up at him. “You mean you’re a quarter…no, I mean an eighth Injun?”

  “Yep. That’d be enough to make me a full-out nigger, if he’d been a mullotter. But then every body in this neck of Georgia is got some Injun in ’em from someplace.” He chuckled. “And the tar brush been splashin’ around these parts pretty liberally, too, since I don’t know what-all. You can’t get away from it—unless you’re Aye-talian or Portugee.” Dynamite grinned. “Probably that’s why I’m so good-lookin’.”

  They had stopped walking now—Dynamite in shadow, Eric in sun. “Did you see their graves,” Eric asked, “when you were out there today in the graveyard?”

  “Naw,” Dynamite said. “I saw ’em once when I was a kid. But I come back a couple of years later, with Kyle, and we couldn’t find none of ’em, ’cause the
markers were all gone or washed away or somepin’. Not to his people or mine. Besides, just knowin’ they’re out there, not too far way—that’s enough. And Kyle says, if I want, I can be buried there too—though, to be honest, I don’t really give two shits. Though, I guess it’s kinda nice to be with your friends.” Dynamite snorted out a laugh. “In a way, it’s too bad about Shad. I think he really thought they was gonna put ’im over in the Hemmings Interdenominational plot, what used to be the hardcore Baptist graveyard, where he would be shut of all these nigger lovers and sinners and perverts. But I’m kinda with Kyle on that one—once you go, I just don’t think it matters no more.” He stepped forward into the band of light. “Come on, son—let’s go downstairs.” With Eric, he moved around another sofa, and they started down the steps to the ground floor.

  *

  In the large room, with four windows on one wall and a worn carpet over the floor, Jay, Mex, Hugh, and Shit turned over the mattress on the sprawling, oversized four-poster—larger than a king.

  “You ever been in here before?” Eric asked, when Hugh was out getting sheets.

  “Sure,” Dynamite said. “This used to be Kyle’s daddy’s bedroom. After he died, Kyle slept in here. So I slept in here with him. Hugh has the one next door, where Kyle’s mama slept, when she was alive. I got some good memories of this place,” and Eric thought: this was many houses to the many people who’d spent time there.

  Dynamite’s voice grew thoughtful. “But I’m sure I remember when Kyle used to make a fire in the fireplace…”

  Holding sheets, Hugh came in. “Now it don’t bother yall sleepin’ in a dead man’s room…? Yall ain’t afraid of spooks or nothin’.” He looked playful.

  Shit said, “Nope.”

  “What?” Hugh said. “You don’t believe in no spooks?”

  “Naw,” Shit said. “I believe in ’em—but all the spooks and me is friends, see? They protect me, run interference, make sure nothin’ gonna happen to me. I never wished Shad no harm. I know he shot a couple of niggers just for the fun of it—which probably means he would’a shot you and me, if he had a chance. But he didn’t. So I figure if his spook is still hangin’ around, it’s gonna be friendly like all the others.”

  “Well, that’s a good attitude.” Hugh unfolded the sheet, then unfolded it again—then again, as the edge swept the floor. “So you don’t mind his chair, sittin’ there in the corner?” It was the old wooden wheelchair. (Shit had already dropped his jeans over the arm and was walking around bare-assed in just his shirt.) “If you want, I can take it into another room.”

  “Well, don’t do it on my account,” Shit said.

  Eric was thinking of the moment, on his first visit, when he’d thought he’d seen giant Shad in a giant chair, in the corner of the upstairs hall…but he was still wondering how it had been so easily and silently decided that the three of them would sleep in one bed.

  Dark wooden steps led up to it.

  They spread the sheets over the mattress, tucked in the bottom one—Eric skinned his knuckles on the wooden rim around the side, tugging down the upper. Over it all they unfolded a worn but warm-looking quilt.

  Hugh left. Outside, rain hissed on the windows behind the long curtains, once white, now gray and yellow with time.

  Dynamite said, “You gonna let me sleep on the outside? I’m the one who’s gonna have to get up in the middle of the night to take a piss.”

  “No you won’t,” Eric said. “You can sleep in the middle. I wanna cuddle up to you and play with that big ol’ pig fucker of yours. I look at you now and think about that pig, and I get all…you know. Excited. Christ, that’s thing’s amazin’!”

  Shit laughed. “Hey, ol’ Dynamite here wasn’t gonna let none of them niggers out-do the white boy in prime nasty.”

  Dynamite chuckled too. “Yeah…somethin’ like that.”

  Forty minutes later, when the lamp was out, and they all lay together, Eric said, “What you thinkin’ about?”

  “Kyle, I guess.” Dynamite folded his hands under the back of his head. “I remember how he told me once, right here in this bed, one night, if he didn’t happen to have a thing for bony red-necked white boys with bad teeth, everything about his life, includin’ the Dump, would’ve been a lot simpler.” Dynamite chuckled.

  “How you mean?” Shit asked.

  “Well,” Dynamite said, “he wouldn’t’av ever got involved with me, for one thing. You know, it’s funny, just last week, Fred Hurter was sayin’ since Joe and Ron went up to New Jersey, got married there, and come back, somethin’ like thirty-one percent of the guys in the Dump are either married to each other or got some kind of official domestic partnership relation. You see, that’s what the Dump would’ve been—just black guys with other black guys. But ’cause Kyle liked fellas like me, along with the seventy-two black guys livin there now, they got fifteen white fellas, too—includin’ you, Whiteboy, and red-neck pig-fuckin’ me. But you figure, if Kyle hadn’t been like he was, Shit and me wouldn’t’ve been there. That probably means you wouldn’t’ve ended up there, neither. You know, after talkin’ with Fred, I was wonderin’ if maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea for Shit and me to go somewhere where we could get married. Course, that would be incest.” (Behind Eric, Shit grunted.) “And I suppose if I tried to marry the both of you, that would be bigamy.”

  “And incest, too.” Eric closed his fingers around Dynamite’s flaccid penis, hefting it under the covers. “All I know is that what you were doin’ in that picture was a fuckin’ turn-on.”

  Across the room, in the three-quarters dark, they could see its top over the foot of the bed. The glassed frame stood on the floor, propped against water-stained wallpaper.

  “Yeah, Kyle thought so, too. That’s one of the things he liked about his local white fellas—that we fucked cows and niggers and horses and pigs and goats and dogs.”

  “How many of you were there?” Eric asked.

  “More than one of us,” Dynamite said, “fuckin’ ’im—probably in this same bed here—that was the only way he got Miles to sell ’im his farm.” (Behind Eric, his arms around Eric’s chest and his bearded chin nuzzling Eric’s neck, Shit chuckled.) “But I always figured—” Dynamite put his arms around both boys and hugged—“I was the one he liked best—but he had black fuck buddies, too. And a couple of Chinese ones. I mean, that’s how I learned they was all good.”

  “He’s right about that picture,” Shit said. “When I was down suckin’ on your dick, I swear, I could taste the barbecue sauce left on that damned pig prod, after all these years, too—”

  “Oh, shut up, Shit!” Dynamite gave his son a push.

  “Unless that was just some old cheese you left in there for Eric.” Shit crawled over to the other side, laughing. “It’s funny; I fucked a lotta people I didn’t know too well in our own bed. But this is the first time I fucked both my favorite people who I know the best in the world in a strange one. Hey, how come you ain’t never taught me to fuck no pig? I fucked a goddam cow a bunch a times—that’s fun, but it’s a mess. You gotta pull back the tail and stick your damn hand up her ass past your goddam elbow and pull out a handful of cow shit every ten seconds or so, or they’ll crap all over your belly—I mean, right while you’re fuckin’ ’em. They really like it when you hand fuck ’em in the ass, too.” He raised his fist to make rapid punching motions. “Like that. Even so, they always gonna move around. Then you rub up their pussies with your knuckles for a few minutes. And they leak all that cow pussy juice over your belly and your balls, while you’re humpin’ ’em. Mostly that’s what turns you on, anyway—at least it did me, so that half the time I’d end up jerkin’ off all over their damn ass with a shitty hand. So did Big John.”

  Dynamite frowned. “I never showed you how to fuck no cow—” he over looked at Shit questioningly—“either. Where’d you learn?”

  “Yeah, ’cause you was white, I had to show all those niggers out at the Produce Farm I could be as nasty as they was.
” Shit grinned. “Otherwise they wouldn’t believe I was black. Or they pretended they didn’t. Hank was the one who would let us in and then sit on the rail and watch. He sucked dick pretty good, too—me, John, and a couple of the horses. Stickin’ my dick in his hairy face when he’d just took a mouthful of stallion cum and his beard was soaked with it could always get either one of us off. You have to jerk a horse off with both hands about a foot apart, and getting the head in your mouth is like swallowin’ a goddam toilet plunger, ’cause them things flare out at the head. Still, I seen half a dozen guys who could do it.”

  “Me, too,” Dynamite said. “You just gotta pull it flat and force it all in. I showed Kyle once how I could get one of them things in my mouth—’cause he didn’t believe anyone could. It turned him on for a couple of damned days, just watchin’ me.” Dynamite chuckled. “He was one turned-on nigger—and the horse was happy, too.”

  “Damn,” Shit said. “That’s somethin’ I ain’t ever done. I’m gonna hafta try that.”

  Dynamite said, “Don’t go and kill yourself—”

  “I just mean—” Shit took his hands from under the covers—“every time we go someplace or do somethin’ different, I end up learnin’ somethin’ about you I never knowed. Like my daddy could suck off a horse.”

  “I only got it to come in my mouth two or three times—” Dynamite coughed—as if remembering. “Them things’d put out enough to choke you, if you weren’t ready for it. But Kyle could go crazy over them livestock—and them white boys what was into that.”

  “It turns me on, too,” Eric said.

  “That’s ’cause you’re half nigger,” Dynamite said. “Like Shit—’cept I guess with you it’s the other half.”

  Again, Shit grinned. His hand went under the quilt to join his father’s around Eric’s balls and cock. “At the Produce Farm, it was mostly niggers doin’ all the animal fuckin’.”