Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “I did? Well, that is my general philosophy of life. But I said it to you?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Not very clearly—”

  “Just before you was goin’ into work. You made some hot chocolate for us, and we sat out and you told me all about some nigger—a black guy in the park in New York, who took a piss in your mouth, and then wanted you to stick around so he could pimp you out—”

  “I remember…the chocolate. But I told…you about that?”

  “Yeah. A nigger pissed in my mouth about an hour ago—but that was downstairs. It was nice, too. He’s real friendly. One of my…friends likes to watch him do it.”

  “I remember the man—certainly,” Bill said, frowning. “I just don’t remember telling you about it.”

  Eric frowned. “Damn…” He looked at the screen, then back at Bottom. “You don’t remember? After you told me, you wrote out something else for me and made me put it in my pocket and only read it when I got down here…”

  “I did?” Bill smiled. “I don’t remember that, either.”

  “You don’t?” Eric was surprised.

  Bill shook his head.

  “Well, that was some good advice, too—I mean, it took me a while to figure out what you were saying. But…”

  “What was it?”

  “Hey, if you don’t remember—” Eric laughed—“I ain’t gonna tell you.”

  “Oh, come on. I told you what the palindrome was. You got my curiosity up. I was always comin’ up with funny little things for people. Who knows—I may even have a second installment for you.”

  “Nope.” Eric laughed. “If you don’t remember, it couldn’t have been that important…to you. I’ll keep it for myself.”

  Bill smiled and gave a laugh with little sound. “Okay, then.” He sucked his teeth. “I won’t bug you about it. Although I want you to know, this isn’t easy.”

  “You still in the basement at Condotti’s? Over by the highway?”

  Bill frowned—then shook his head again, this time clearly meaning ‘No.’ “Oh—uh-un. I haven’t been there for years. Things have really changed in Little Five Points. You wouldn’t recognize Montoya Street. It’s like a different neighborhood now—since they tore down the causeway and put it underground. That was almost two years of digging. You read about that, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah—was that our highway they turned into a tunnel?”

  “Sure was. Anyway, after your dad left, actually I had another place in the same building for a while. In fact, I moved into you guys’ old place, on the second floor—”

  “You did?” Eric grinned. “Wow!”

  “But that was three, four years back…Then, for a year, I was working up in Chicago, before I got lonesome for the south again, spread my wide mysterious wings, and flew back to Atlanta. I don’t even know if the building is still there—they built apartment towers all around there. You knew Condotti died, didn’t you?”

  “No…” Eric said. “I didn’t. Naw, Mike never told me that. Maybe he didn’t know…Hey, downstairs—” Eric lifted one foot up to the wooden seat (the chairs in Nigger Heaven were wood, without cushions)—“there’s a guy who’s probably just what you’re looking for…in the balcony under this one—off on the right. Nice lookin’ black fella—about your age, I guess.”

  “Really…?” Bill asked, with falling inflection.

  Turning, Eric pointed at an exit above them to the back and left. “Go down them stairs, up there. You’ll see ’im. As soon as you come out, you gonna see him sittin’ right there. Least, that’s where he usually parks himself—hey, don’t fool around checkin’ him out. Just go and sit next to him, get in there between his legs and take it out—he don’t got no zipper on his fly, anyway—and start suckin’. He won’t be asleep, neither. But that’s what he likes—a white guy like you who knows what he wants. He don’t take a long time, neither. And if you want his piss, after he shoots, tell him. He’ll give it to you—but you’ll probably smell it on ’im, anyway. He leaks like a motherfucker.”

  Bottom laughed. “Be still my heart.” He looked around, then stood up. “I’m going to check that one out right now!”

  “See,” Eric said, “most of the guys in here ain’t into courtin’—they’re into corkin’ any hungry cocksucker what comes around.”

  “A good description of yours truly—well, that’s what it said in the article I read. Still, I was a little wary of…well, plunging in.”

  “Plunge, motherfucker. Plunge.” Laughing, Eric got up and stepped out into the aisle, so that Bill could get by him. “A lot of these guys practically live in here. They can sleep when they want. Guys bring in food—Dusty and Hammond let them in and out for free, if they’ll put out for the payin’ customers that come around from—well, from all over Georgia, I guess. Like you. People come down from Atlanta, even over from Tallahassee.”

  “I’m in Alabama now,” Bottom said, “actually. But, like I told you, I’m on my way to Florida for a while.” Stepping around Eric, he glanced back. “Hey—come on. Tell me what it was I told you that you still remember.”

  Eric just laughed. “You better get on downstairs, before Coal Car decides to go and sit somewhere else. It don’t get real busy till after four- thirty or five—so you’ll get ’im. If it’s his first one of the day, it’s gonna be a big load, too.”

  “Coal Car? Oh, come on—be still my racist heart! My mind is not racist, but God knows—and you are talking to an atheist here—my dick is, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, so’s his, white boy.”

  “Hey, Eric—I’m gone!” Bill chuckled. “I hope I run into you again, soon.”

  “If you come around here on weekends, you got a good chance of it.”

  Eric watched Bill hurry up the aisle toward the entrance he’d pointed to. Then, shaking his head, he turned back and sat down on the aisle seat. He wanted to rest awhile—since he’d gotten his dozen. He thought: In girum…But again the rest of the Latin had fled his memory. “We spin through the fire and are consumed by night…”? No, it was the other way around. So he said out loud, “Peace and truth are the foundation of the world…”

  The older black fellow he’d sucked off earlier, Rudy, who sat three rows down from him, dozing, lifted his head, turned, and frowned back at Eric. Eric nodded to him, smiling. Rudy put his head back down and closed his eyes. The light from the screen played over the bald spot in the horseshoe of crinkly gray.

  *

  Later, when, down in the front of the orchestra, he reconnoitered with Shit and Dynamite, Eric said, “Hey, I ran into a guy I knew up in Nigger Heaven—from Atlanta. I mean, he’s in Alabama now. But he used to live in Atlanta.”

  “Who?” Shit asked. “The nigger with the two foot long dick? Or was it the Greek fella who used to jerk off thirty-five times a day?”

  Eric laughed. “It wasn’t neither of them—he was just a friend of mine. Somebody I knew.” A phoenix, an ape, a cockatrice…

  …with wide mysterious wings.

  As they walked into the sunny lobby, Dynamite fastened his coveralls. Through the glass doors, sunlight put back the lines and angles into Shit’s and Dynamite’s faces, marking their shared heredity. Shit took a breath. “Nigger, you talk more bullshit than any white fella I ever knowed.” Absently, he reached between Eric’s legs—Eric flinched a little. “Look. He got a hard-on—’cause I called him a nigger.”

  Eric didn’t—but began to get one now. But he said, “Naw. That’s ’cause before I come down, and was gonna look for my friend again, I ran into Al. He was just finishin’up and gimme his full-up raincoat. I got it on now.”

  “Oh, goddam—” and Shit began to grin. “We gonna have some fun tonight, ain’t we? I get it next? Or are you gonna give it to the pig fucker, here?”

  Not looking, Dynamite pushed open the theater door and glanced at Eric. “Sure, he gonna give it to me. Eric’s a good boy—he knows his ol’ man needs a little latex to keep his peck
er warm, and some of that nigger lubrication to go along with it.”

  “But he wants to see me jerk off in it first, don’t you?” Shit put his arm around Eric’s shoulder. “That way, you got something to suck, ain’t that right—while he’s getting’ it on.”

  “Oh, you two are crazy,” Eric said. “Come on, now—”

  Shit kept on grinning as they headed toward the pickup. “Well, you’re the one wearin’ that big nigger’s scumbag—”

  “I know,” Eric said. “I just gotta see who treats me the nicest, when we get back to the cabin, ’fore I make up my mind.”

  Behind them, the theater door swung closed.

  “Oh, you gonna give it to me.” Shit slid his arm further around Eric’s neck to hook him closer.

  “Hey, watch it—”

  But Shit got Eric in a headlock, while three people came down the street, passed them, to stop at the Opera’s ticket booth—while a grinning Dynamite opened the truck’s left hand door.

  * * *

  [47] SHORTLY BEFORE HIS twenty-fifth birthday, during Mike’s fifth visit to Diamond Harbor since he’d brought Eric to the town eight years ago (none had lasted more than a couple of hours), Eric told his dad.

  Later, he tried to figure out why he’d chosen then to do it. But it seemed, if anything, his stepfather might soon be too old to understand.

  Recently Mike had been paroled after another year-and-a-half in jail. (More coke.) Arrested along with him, Doneesha had lost her nursing job over that. They were no longer together.

  In the shadowy cabin at the Dump’s edge with no light in the front room and a screen but no glass in one window, junk piled all through (the Bowflex was in there, somewhere, unused for the last years and buried under cushions and folded canvas tarpaulins and lawnmower parts and behind half a fiberglass rowboat and cases of tools and cartons of outdated carburetor components), Mike said, “How you mean you been together with this barefoot retard since you was sixteen? I didn’t bring you down here till you was seventeen.”

  Eric looked serious and didn’t correct him.

  Mike said, “I think you’re crazy. I think you’re an asshole—but, then, it’s your ass. Yeah, I got my dick sucked a couple a times when I was in the pokey—my first stretch.” (That surprised Eric.) “Not this last one, though. But you, well, I guess they ain’t put you in jail…yet.” At which point Dog-Dog, the year-old half-Rottweiler, half-mutt and the scrappiest boy-pup in the litter Sam Quasha’s bitch had thrown a couple of years back (Shit was standing, in the corner, shirtless, quiet, and curious, digging a thick forefinger in a broad nostril), chose then to hoist his hind leg beside the right ankle of Mike’s slacks. “Aw, fuck…! You guys is nuts!” Looking down—“Aw, Jesus…!” —Mike stepped about unhappily, tracking the puddle over the cabin’s sand-colored floorboards. (Shit used the distraction to eat his pickings, which Eric saw but Mike didn’t—or, anyway, gave no more response to it than when he used to catch Eric at it.) “And you don’t got nothin’ to say about any of this—sleepin’ in the same room with ’em?”

  Standing by the always wide-open door (mostly for light), Dynamite said, “Dog-Dog’s a good li’l sonofabitch, only he ain’t a real house dog yet.”

  Shit said, “I almost got him trained where he’ll do like my old dog Tom used to do—drop a turd right on my bare foot, outside in the grass, turn around, and lick it right up off my toes. Mex’ll do that, too, sometimes. He’s Jay’s—”

  “Come on, now,” Eric said, softly and firmly; so, blinking around, Shit shut up and began to gnaw at the stub of the nail on his thumb.

  Mike said, “I don’t mean that!” He was responding to Dynamite’s achieved apology, not Shit’s broached enormity—which hadn’t registered, since Mike had never met Mex or Jay. “Jesus—you and these guys and the fuckin’ dog is all takin’ your turns with each other? God damn, Eric…!”

  Standing by the opened back-kitchen door, in his overalls and buttonless shirt, biting at the wreck of his own thumbnail, Dynamite repeated over a callused knuckle what, seven years back, he’d said to Barbara: “They’re good boys. They work hard—and they don’t get in no trouble.”

  Shaking his head, Mike stepped out of the garbage men’s cabin, onto the sagging porch boards under evening’s pale, pale gold. Above, gulls floated on long arcs. Their whines came up the slope, over the day. “Hey—I’m runnin’ up to Runcible to see Barbara and Ron, anyway.” The permanence of Barb and Ron’s relation had eventually let Mike, in his intermittent visits, enjoy them socially—at least for a brief hour or two; though this would be his first without Doneesha. Going to see them now, Eric realized, Mike felt vaguely unprotected: where, Eric wondered, had he learned that? Mike turned back to call in through the door: “And I ain’t saying nothin’ about none of this to your mama. You can do that when you’re ready. Jesus Christ…!” Frowning down, again Mike shook his pants cuff.

  “I already told her.” Eric’s voice came out after him. “She knows.” Inside, someone was blowing his nose, either out on the floor or into his hand.

  (Whether it was Dynamite, Shit, or Eric, Mike couldn’t tell.)

  Starting back for the pickup in which he’d driven down, Mike shook his head. Borrowed for the visit, it had no AC. By now, both of Dynamite’s trucks, the ethyl alcohol pickup and the full solar powered ten-wheeler, did. Last Spring the Chamber of Commerce had given Dynamite a grant toward four-fifths of the big truck’s (used) price.

  On the slope behind the cabin, grasses and squat bushes passed their wutherings up the Dump’s bluff.

  * * *

  [48] A CHRISTMAS OR so following, Big Man Markum had them down to his dad’s place for a party with some friends from the Opera and The Slide. Before going off to a visit with an ex-wife, Joe Markum had turned the house over to his son with a exhortation not make too much of a mess.

  When they came in the front door, Shit said, “Hey, Big Man. How you doin’? You’re lookin’ good.”

  Eric and Dynamite came in behind him.

  Big Man wore a maroon denim suit, one leg pinned up and sewed closed, and a white shirt of some shiny cloth under a deep red sports jacket. “Hey, Shit,” Big Man returned, looking up with his wide-spaced eyes and broadly spaced teeth. “Eric—Mr. Haskell. Good yall got here. Come on in.”

  Shit stepped inside. “Can I carry you around a little?”

  Eric said: “I can carry him, some, if you want—”

  Beyond the arch into the living room, they could see half a dozen men stood or sat. Two were in wheelchairs.

  “I’ll do it first,” Shit said. “If I get tired, you can have ’im.”

  “Just for a few minutes.” Balancing on his one foot—the smaller otiose leg hung inside his pants—Big Man held up both his arms, his single crutch in one hand. “But I’m gonna walk mostly tonight. Don’t worry. I got lots of places to sit.”

  “I know.” Shit, who was in his usual worn short-sleeve shirt, ragged work pants, and falling apart sneakers, bent down and lifted him in both arms. “But we just like carryin’ you.”

  “And I like ’em carryin’ me.” Big Man said to Dynamite. In a practiced move, the forty-eight pound dwarf turned himself so that his butt was back on Shit’s strong forearm. “But sometimes you kinda forget I get around okay by myself. You’re gonna have to put me down, real soon.” He spoke to Shit. “We got people here, and I have to be sociable. Come on—watch out for my pee sack. It’ll be a mess if it comes loose.”

  “Don’t I know it?” Shit laughed.

  So did Eric.

  The polyethylene bag was strapped to the outside of Big Man’s working hip. Though often, when he went out, he wore it inside his pants, he’d explained it was more comfortable outside. The tube snaked in through an opening beside his fly.

  As they went through the arch, several of the men—all black, Eric saw—said hello. Others of them smiled. Big Man said, “That’s Pike. And that’s Kelly—you probably know him already.” That was a guy in a moto
rized wheelchair. “He lives up there with you guys in the Dump. Hey, what you wigglin’ you hand back there for, Shit? This is a goddam dinner party—not a fuck fest.” He grinned.

  “I know, I know,” Shit said. “It’s a Christmas party.”

  “It ain’t no Christmas party,” Big Man said. “That’s one of the things me and my dad differ on. I told you on the phone when I invited yall, this is a celebration of the fact that on January second, they gonna officially restart the space program. That’s what it is. It ain’t got nothin’ to do with nothin’ Christian. I don’t think them religion things is no good for nobody—none of ’em. Especially me.”

  A few men laughed.

  There was a Christmas tree, however, though its decorations were stars and ringed planets and spaceships—at least half a dozen various-sized versions of the Millennium Falcon, the Enterprise, the Roq, and Avatar dragons—along with comets and meteors, and even plastic rayguns. (Those were Big Man’s, who was a committed science fiction fan.) Probably because it was Mr. Markum’s floor of the house, though, red ropes of Christmas cards—oversized colorful ones from his construction clients—hung under the mantel and on the upper edges of the glassed-in china cases around the living room walls, behind overstuffed chairs.

  “Hey—” Big Man said. “I’m serious now.” (Perhaps Shit’s fingers had started “wiggling” again.) “Don’t try to carry me off and fuck me in some other room—much as I would enjoy it. I wanna stay in here and talk with people.”

  “What about Eric?” Shit grinned at the fellow in his arms. “He could probably take you off on the back porch or somethin’ and bone you even quicker than I could. He’ll have you back here in five minutes. Neither one of us takes long when we gotta hurry.”

  Dynamite grinned—but Pike, about twenty (who wore orange, black, and green plaid slacks), Eric saw, looked surprised, if not appalled, by the banter.

  “Come on. I’m serious, now. Between Danny outside and you two in here, I don’t want this to turn into no fuckin’ animal house.”