Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “How come you never told me you was into that?” Dynamite asked.

  “Well, I knew you was okay about niggers. I just didn’t know how you felt about no livestock.”

  “Oh…” Dynamite chuckled. “You know, you’re more like I am than I realized, Shit.”

  “Hey, Eric’s hard,” Shit said. “I guess this stuff turns ’im on.”

  “Yeah…” Dynamite rolled to the side; against Eric’s hip, Dynamite’s own cock had hardened.

  “Then, come on.” Dynamite’s hands moved over Eric’s chest and under Eric’s shoulder. “Bring yourself on over here…”

  Eric breathed in deeply.

  Still later, Dynamite lay on his back, arms folded on the pillow under his head. “Hugh was wonderin’ about Jay showin’ yall that thing, but I think Jay just put another couple of years extension on my love life. How’d a fuckin’ picture like that get you two so excited?”

  “I dunno,” Shit said. “Probably it’s just the bed—”

  “Like hell it is. You two ain’t been that turned on by this old man since Eric first got down here—” Dynamite stretched—“Course, I always did have a good time comin’ out here around Christmas.”

  “Thinkin’ about the same dick I got in my hand now—” (Dynamite’s shoulder was warm under Eric’s head; he held the firming cock)—“up some goddamn pig’s ass, it just got me all excited. I couldn’t help it.”

  “Well, you just cuddle up here, and keep this old pig fucker warm.”

  And later Eric whispered, “Shit’s asleep…”

  Dynamite looked down. “He is? How you know?”

  “’Cause his dick’s up my ass—and it’s soft.” (Dynamite gave a sort of soundless laugh.) Then Eric said, “I know Shit don’t think fuckin’ with grown ups ever bothered him. What about you? Do you think it did you any hurt? I mean when you were a kid?”

  Eric felt Dynamite tense beside him; Dynamite’s fingers tightened on Eric’s shoulder. “Well, I had my daddy, Red, and Bulldog to pull ’im off me if he got too rough. Which he did regularly. But I sure could’a done without goddam Mikey beatin’ on me every time he a stuck his goddam dick in me.” He humphed. “And he did, a lot.”

  “Oh…” Eric said. Because of the anger in Dynamite’s voice, he was surprised to see the smile on his face:

  “You know, you make a pretty good pig yourself, son.”

  “Well.” Eric shrugged. “I figure, there ain’t no use to doin’ nothin’ if you don’t really do it.”

  “Yeah, that’s sounds right. You know, I always did have a good time sleepin’ in this room.” Dynamite yawned. “Probably it was wasted on Shad.”

  * * *

  [45] ERIC HAD SEEN the posters around Runcible and even one on the blackboard in the Diamond Harbor Post Office, across from the wanted fliers: Father Goldridge Hanover’s New Order of Holy Luminescence Rally at St. Martins in Hemmings, the Baptist Interdenominational. Under a picture of a white-haired man wearing a black coat and a white clerical collar, gazing benevolently upward, against a deep blue background over which floated heavenly clouds, red letters quivered:

  ABORTION!

  PERVERSION!

  AIDS! SIN!

  SCIENCE!

  LIBERAL LIES!

  DINNER WITH

  $35.00 JESUS $35.00

  When Eric read it out, Shit looked puzzled and asked, “Are they for ’em, or again’ ’em? I like that perversion. We got a lot of that down here—but we could always use some more.”

  “Yeah, well…” Eric said, “The Dump’s pretty good about keepin’ out the AIDS. ’Course sometimes I’d feel more comfortable if I could hear a few more liberal lies—just to balance off the conservative ones. Not to mention the science.”

  *

  Back at the cabin, Dynamite put his cell phone away in the leg pouch of his overalls. Streaked with sunset, the window above the sink looked out on cabins further west.

  “Tad can’t work tomorrow, and tonight’s the rally at the Interdenominational in Hemmings. The Chamber of Commerce wants us to make a special run to pick up the refuse from the church tomorrow mornin’. Gonna be a lot of it—’cause they’re havin’ their Holy Luminescence Dinner with Jesus in the basement.”

  “They gonna talk about science stuff? That’s too complicated,” Shit said. “It just makes me feel stupid. That’s why I don’t like it.”

  “Probably,” Eric said, “that’s gonna be the point of the sermon. That’s how they work, Shit. They tell you anything that’s different from what you been hearin’ all your life or makes you feel uncomfortable ’cause you don’t know it already, has gotta be bad for you and you should stay away from it and vote against it.” From time to time one or another religious talk show played over the Lighthouse radio, and Eric had found himself listening to them over coffee with bemused fascination. (Well, since I don’t never vote anyway, that shouldn’t make no nevermind, Shit had said.) Sometimes it even made a kind of odd sense, till they’d get on homosexuals and Eric would remember they were talking about him and Dynamite and Shit and Chef Ron and Lurrie and Mr. Potts and the guys at the Produce Farm and Mama Grace…

  And Jay and Mex.

  “You better be glad for that science stuff,” Dynamite said. “It makes your lights go on when you flip the switch, and your cell phone connect up when I press the buttons, and your teeth fit in your head so your smile can look pretty—not to mention makes the aspirin take your headache away when you swallow a couple of them things with a glass a water.”

  “Well, when people talk about it, it makes me feel stupid,” Shit said, punching his fists in the bottom of his pockets and leaning back on the cluttered table’s edge.

  At the sink, Dynamite turned on the water, bent down, and splashed his face. He stood up, rubbing the side of his hand across his mouth. “You sound like them people what get all upset when they hear we all come down from them hominids. When we was kids, Kyle showed it to me in a big book he had, out in his library on Gilead—you’d’a liked it, too, ’cause you didn’t have to read nothin’. It was all pictures of fossils and how they all related to each other, in like a big, big tree, that went on for seven or eight pages. You used to like pictures of animals. He showed me how to follow right along with that thing. I wonder if Jay and Mex and Hugh still have that book—Kyle had books about pretty much everything. And could get ’em about anything he wanted. But all of ’em wasn’t pictures like that. It would be nice if they still had it. I wouldn’t mind takin’ a look at it again.”

  “I don’t like books,” Shit said. “’Cause most of ’em is readin’.”

  “Well, not this one,” Dynamite said. “There was some words in it—but Kyle just let us look at it and see.”

  “I think most of the people who don’t want to be related to monkeys,” Shit said, “just don’t want to be related to each other. That’s what it’s really about.”

  “The point is,” Eric said, “everybody’s related to everybody and everything—even trees and mosquitoes and minnows flickin’ around in Runcible Creek. That’s kinda reassurin’, I think.”

  Shit asked, “I wonder if Jay felt that way about bein’ related to Shad?” which got them laughing, as Eric went to the refrigerator and took out the roasted pork loin he’d cooked over the weekend.

  *

  The motor that had more hum to it than a regular internal combustion engine revved down. Eric got out the truck, while Shit dropped to the night grass behind him.

  In the three-quarter dark, black plastic sacks went more than halfway up the church’s side wall—they weren’t that far from Shells, where some lights still shone from the back windows, though it was past three. Because of the Rally refuse, they’d started an hour early.

  A story-and-a-half high, the pile ran the length of the church.

  “Damn,” Shit said. “How many people come to one of these things?”

  “Randal said they get as many as five or six thousand drivin’ in from everywhere all ov
er the south. But they only do the dinner for about two or three hundred, in two shifts, in the basement. The mall does great on these weekend rallies.” Dynamite wandered forward, looking around. “They put speakers all over the commons out there, so people can hear the sermon. They do the dinner for the ones who’ll pay out thirty-five dollars for a plate of potato salad with no celery or onions or hard-boiled egg in it, a couple o’ pieces of dried out chicken, and a biscuit. But you figure, three hundred times thirty-five, for what can’t cost more than a couple of bucks a piece—that Dinner with Jesus brings in some money. And they’re sellin’ Jesus flags and Jesus dolls and Jesus CDs and Jesus fishin’ poles and pretty much Jesus everything. They do all right.”

  “Seems to me,” Eric said, “they should feed the couple of hundred poorest folk who come to this thing, not the hundred with money—”

  “Well—” Dynamite (he’d already pulled on his canvas gloves) rubbed his fists on his overall sides—“people get them ideas turned around all crazy backwards real easy.” Stepping forward, he gripped three bags with one hand, then three with the other, pulled them loose—above, two sacks slipped down four and ten feet—and carried them back to toss into the truck hopper, while, lugging four more apiece, Shit, then Eric, followed.

  It took twenty minutes to load up the big truck, and forty to drive to the Bottom, dump them, come back for a second load, and fill the truck again. Two trips and they’d taken maybe half the stuff.

  The big truck, as Dynamite never got tired of saying, could hold some damned garbage.

  Then they started in on the third. In the middle of it, when Shit had just thrown in some bags and was passing Eric on his way back to the church wall, he swung his arm around, bent over, and swiped up something from the grass. “What the fuck is this…?” He looked at what he held.

  Eric stepped into the headlight.

  In blue and gray, between Shit’s gloved fingers, the tube was about two inches long and half an inch across. Foil gleamed at both ends.

  “It looks like…” Frowning, Eric moved back so that the light fell again on Shit’s grimy glove—“breath mints.”

  “But why’s it got that picture on it?” Shit asked.

  Eric pulled off one of his own gloves to lift it from Shit’s hand.

  “‘Jesus is Coming Breath Mints,’” he read, from beside the picture of the holy face, with its downcast eyes, its beard—which a teacher had once told his class couldn’t be what Jesus looked like because he was a native of the middle east and probably was more like a particularly dark Arab. “It says ‘Breathe Easy’.”

  “Damn,” Shit said. “I seen about half a dozen of these, lyin’ all over.” He took the mints back and pushed them at the pocket of his shirt, which was somehow still intact.

  “Probably they were givin’ ’em away at the rally.” Eric glanced up. “Or sellin’ ’em for three dollars a pack.”

  They went back over where, in the truck light, Dynamite was tugging loose black gleaming sacks.

  When they came back to start loading for the fourth trip, all but one of the lights was out at Shells.

  Eric picked up two sacks that had rolled away from the wall, tossed them, and instead of going back—it looked like Shit and Dynamite both had gotten most of them—walked around the church corner.

  Yellow light slid from the crevice between the high front doors, to slant down the stone steps.

  Did the same urge that had, how many years back, propelled him through Jay’s home on Gilead, make Eric climb the porch, grasp the metal ring, and tug?

  The door swung out, heavily but with no resistance, and not far. Wondering if its being left open was an oversight, Eric pushed sideways through. The parallel backs of blond-wood pews scored the great space, suggesting the seats in the Opera’s orchestra.

  Eric remembered the retreat of the dark the first time he had entered the Opera House. But here, as he looked up and around, everything seemed the Opera House’s opposite. The three internal stories—a balcony was, yes, more or less flush with the gray wall—were beige, gray, and natural wood, as if it was some immense office, instead of the Opera’s faux castle or ballroom, ornate with murals and molding. Yet, in the last century’s sixties or seventies, the architect who’d designed it clearly had a sense of how beautiful the functionality of an office might be, and had cleared it of all excess to create a holy space, a modern bourse, with the austere effect of a Japanese temple or sand garden. Devoid of distracting symmetries, left and right or back and front, what held the rising space stable, with cathedral clarity, were three tall triangular windows on one wall and four on the other, each a different height. All leaned their apexes toward a spot, even higher, above the altar, where a glittering metal star (of Bethlehem…?) hung, abstract and sparkling with rays and points. Several feet below it, the simplest cross hung above the altar, even as a smaller cross of silver stood at one end—a silver chalice at the other—on the altar table’s white cloth, declaring Christ’s certitude.

  Black tessellations told that the windows were stained glass.

  For the night, though, the color was black—

  —save low on two at the east wall, where a flush of gold, orange, green, and scarlet betrayed sunrise. On the wall, up near the balcony, hung six metal boxes with double cleaning lights—the same as in the Opera. Their beams fanned down the pigeon-colored plaster.

  Three hefty candles flickered at different heights in tall glass tubes, inches around, in a floor-standing holder beside the organ console’s ivory bulk. A white bench stood before it. The keyboard was covered.

  Eric walked down the side aisle over polyurethaned wood. On the other side, at the front, he could see the pulpit, tall and unornamented. Behind it, three rows of high-backed chairs with wooden canopies awaited a choir.

  As he slowed in the internal tower, Eric heard Shit call from the doors, “Hey…Eric?”

  Eric looked back, to see Shit half in and half out of the door.

  “Wow…!” Shit came all the way in, without letting the door go, eyes raised to the vaulted roof. His gloves hung from his hip pocket. His work shoes echoed. “This is…pretty!” Suddenly Shit leaned back out, and—his voice quieted by braced wood—Eric heard him. “Hey, dad? Dynamite—come on. Come on in and see this—”

  As Shit let go of the door and stepped forward, Dynamite slipped in behind him, following him down the side, toward Eric.

  Shit said, “Hey, I don’t think I ever was inside one of these.” He looked back at Dynamite. “Was you?”

  “Not one like this.” Dynamite looked up into the rising wood, the curved beige.

  “What do…they do in here?” Eric asked.

  “Get married,” Dynamite said. “Mostly—I think. Or come around on Sundays to hear some preacher talk a whole lotta nonsense. Like all them people last night. I know they got a big kitchen and a big meetin’ room in the basement what holds as many people as this does up here. Or more. That’s where they had the dinner—probably.”

  “They sure put out a lotta garbage.” Then Shit asked, “What they wanna get married for?”

  “Well,” Dynamite said (he didn’t sound sure), “when people love each other, and have—you know—a special relationship, sometimes they want to make that…I guess, official—”

  “—in a beautiful place,” Eric added. “Like this. With all their friends together, I guess. That’s how I figure.”

  The three moved a step, a step and a half closer.

  Dynamite looked around.

  Shit said, “We got a special relationship, too, don’t we?”

  “Sure,” Eric said.

  “Um-hm.” Dynamite nodded.

  Eric was not surprised when, from behind, he felt Shit’s hands on his shoulders (Shit had taken off his gloves), but when they slid forward, one on each, over his chest and Shit’s chest and belly moved up against his back, and Shit’s arms enclosed him, more and more firmly, and he felt Shit pressing himself against his butt, now again and agai
n—

  “What the fuck you doin’?” Dynamite asked, though Eric was surprised he was less than half as far away as he’d been moments back.

  Shit’s cheek was against Eric’s, and his face lowered into Eric’s neck. Shit whispered, “I thought it would be nice to have our…you know, special relationship here. In a real nice place.”

  “Come on,” Eric said. “Cut it out, Shit. I ain’t gonna let you fuck me—here! I don’t got no lube in me. I left it back at home.”

  “Hell, I could use spit.” One of his hands reached down as far as Eric’s groin. “Ain’t nobody here but us. Lemme pull your jeans down your butt. I’ll lick out ya’ asshole now and get it all nice and—”

  “No!” Eric said. “Not…” He could feel Shit was hard and was hardening himself in response.

  “What about—” Shit released him, stepped in front of him, and was up the three altar steps, to turn himself, put his hands behind his hips on the altar’s cloth. He jumped up to sit back on the table, taking some cloth to the side, so that it wrinkled under his thigh—“you suck on my big black nigger dick, then? Okay…?” Shit leered around the space, eyes returning to Eric with his biggest smile. “Come on!” It was mostly gum. “Suck me off.” (Neither father nor son had brought their teeth that morning.) Leaning forward in his sleeveless shirt, Shit pulled one hand back between his knees to rub his crotch. “Come on. You wanna do it. I can tell. You was hard there just a second ago—I felt you. I wanna do it, too—now!”

  Dynamite turned and walked to the front pew, sat down, and stuck both feet out to rest his work shoes on their heels. He stretched his wiry arms along the pew’s back. “I think yall both fuckin’ crazy.” Sighing, he dropped one hand, which found its way between his legs. “But I’ll sit here and watch.”

  “Come on! Look, Shit…” though Eric was starting to smile.

  “See, he don’t mind.” Shit raised his shoulders enough to get both hands between his legs, pulled down his zipper, pushed a hand inside, and levered out his cock. He began to run his left fist up and down it, at increasing speed. “We ain’t hurtin’ nothin’. Come on—it’s real pretty here. Suck my goddam dick!”