Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
He let it return.
As the man was about to disappear, he looked at Eric—and smiled. Within his beard—shiny under the ceiling lights—his upper gum was all gap, teeth either side, like Frack’s. The man reached down and gave his jeans not a scratch, but a…thick-fingered squeeze! Then, glancing down at himself, he lifted his crotch, pushing his hips forward.
Eric swallowed.
And started after him. His heart was beating hard enough to feel.
As Eric fell in beside him, big-armed, bare-bellied—no tattoos on stomach or chest—the man smiled again. “Where you runnin’ off to, li’l feller?” In broad-toed work shoes, once orange, now scuffed to gray-brown, the man swaggered, thick, tall, and relaxed. “You’re pretty pumped up there for a li’l guy.” (Grinning, embarrassed, but pleased, Eric, though not six feet, didn’t think of himself as short.) “Damn—” the bronze Goliath went on—“I gotta take me a wicked piss. It’s backed up so far I can taste it.” (But this guy was tall.) “See, the old head’s in the rear.” He nodded along the hall, the grip on his worn crotch become perfunctory scratching. “The one all the guys use who been comin’ to Turpens since ’fore they built the single-room motel and peepshow stalls. Once this was the last place on the highway with dormitory-style sleepin’. Used to be down at the end, here. They closed that up twenty-five, thirty-five years ago, in seventy or eighty.” He shook his head, chuckling. “It’s still the last place you’ll get a real key to your room, though, ’stead of them plastic rectangle do-hickeys. Guys used to bring me in here when I was a kid tom-cattin’ around—a puppy like you—eighteen, nineteen.” The smile widened into a grin. “Didn’t have no front teeth then, neither. When I was twelve, eleven maybe, my Uncle Shad caught me suckin’ off the neighbors’ damned dog under my porch and punched the fuckers out on me—ol’ bastard! Then he laughed and said since I was a cocksucker anyway, what the fuck did I need ’em for? Three years later, when I was fifteen and a head-and-half taller, I punched his lights out—at least I cracked his damned dentures. And told him I’d do a lot worse if I ever heard about him beatin’ on no more kids—gay or straight!” He grunted. “Gay liberation, Georgia coastal style.”
Eric’s throat felt blocked. The man stopped walking—and Eric stepped nearer the colorful arm. With one hand he gripped between his own legs. They stood just beyond the inner door to Parts & Notions.
For the last five years such imitation was how Eric had learned pretty much everything he knew about sex.
No one else was in the hall.
“See—” the man glanced around—“I’m big enough now so that I can tell you anything I want about me—I’ll fuck your face, lick out your asshole, or piss in your ear—and all you can do is say, ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ and hope I’m in a good mood. Suppose I told you, when I was a real little kid, what I liked to do more than anything was sit there in the school room, look out the window, and piss my jeans. First, it was all warm comin’ out—then, in the summer there, it’d get nice and cool. And it always gimme a hard-on. By the time I was thirteen, that’d make me shoot my load without even touchin’ myself. Course, half the time I smelled like a’ ol’ outhouse piss hole. When I was nine, they already done kicked me out three times—of school, I mean. Now, what you gonna do with that? Tell on me? Around here, anybody who could care already knows—and most of ’em don’t. Care, that is. And if I ain’t happy with the tone of voice you tellin’ it in, I’ll shove your head up your ass.” Again, the man grinned. “Damn, boy.” He glanced down. “Looks like your nuts is as itchy as mine.”
Eric got his breath. “We can…do stuff in there?” though he wasn’t sure where “there” was. “Somebody told me about this place.”
Mockingly, the man blinked at Eric. “Yeah, we got a good reputation around here. Hey, they got a stainless steel pee trough where we can spring us a leak. Or, if you can find one that still flushes, you can climb up on the rim, squat on one of them shitters—none of ’em got doors no more—and drop a big ol’ turd. That what you mean?” Between beard and hair, both curly, he winked an amber eye. “My partner’s in there now. Probably that’s what he’s doin’…if he ain’t suckin’ off some nigger what come in to relieve hisself whatever way he can. My partner, he’s a Mex—he don’t talk. Spanish or English. He signs.” The man made a gesture with his big hand: first a fist with the thumb on the side—which slid around to the front; then thumb and forefinger jutting. “ASL—good ol’ ’Merican Sign Language; and from a natural-born wet-back, too. We been comin’ down here together every couple a’ weeks for…well, close to fifteen years. And me a lot longer. It’s a nice place. We get a lot of black fellas, Injins, plain ol’ redneck trash…like me. Truckers and boat fellas—me and Mex work the scow out to Gilead Island.” With a thick forefinger, he reached up to dig deep in a nostril, scratching inside. “Everybody gets along, tries to be sociable. Understand what I’m sayin’?”
Eric asked, “Can I suck your…dick?” He blinked at the man’s thick grubby hand. “I do it good.”
“Damn…” Stepping closer, the boatman laughed. His hand fell from his face to Eric’s far shoulder, over the tanktop’s blue shoulder strap. Now he turned and began to walk the worn carpet again, squeezing Eric’s shoulder repeatedly. His smell had old sweat in it, diesel fuel, and underarm funk. “You sound pretty hot to trot.” Raising his foreknuckle against Eric’s far jaw, he rubbed.
Surprising himself, Eric turned his head to take the broad, blunt forefinger in his mouth.
It was salty.
The boatman glanced at Eric—and raised a yellow eyebrow. Other than that, he gave no sign someone was sucking the finger with which he’d been picking his nose. “We can probably do sumpin’ along them lines. But I got to warn you: ain’t me or Mex got the time—or the inclination—to be what you call clean dudes. When’s the last time you took you a shower?”
“Uh…this…mornin’.” The man’s hand muffled Eric’s voice.
“Yeah? Well, with me—” he moved closer. Without getting stronger, the odor became disorienting, as though, at Eric’s next breath, it penetrated another level—“it’s more like a couple of weeks. And I wouldn’t waste time speculatin’ about Mex.” Then he was closer, hip, thigh, flank pressed into, and moving against, Eric. “Though we got one planned for tonight—if we get back to Gilead in time. I’ll wash him; he’ll wash me; probably piss all over each other. He likes that, and—” he squinted, looking friendly—“I like it, too.” As was the finger in his mouth, the palm on Eric’s shoulder, either side Eric’s blue tank top, was as hard as wood, as rough as rock. “You know, spics and Injins and redneck guys from around here, we ain’t cut and skinned like you fellas up there in the city. We still got everything we come with, and inside that skin, boy, the fuckin’ cheese builds up sumpin’ terrible. Me, I don’t ever hardly remember to run a finger around in there and scrape that stuff out. Most of the time, I don’t have to, though, ’cause Mex’ll do it for me…with his tongue.” He made a face with a grin in it somewhere, behind bronze facial hair.
Eric came off the finger long enough to say, “I like cock cheese. A lot. Sure, with some guys who smoke, it tastes pretty foul—”
“Yeah? That, too, huh?” The man chuckled again. “Well, at six-fifty a pack, that’s one thing with us you don’t got to worry about. It makes you smell funnier than you already do, gives you cancer, and runs all the good cocksuckers off.” The finger was up and waiting for Eric’s mouth when he turned back for it. “Naw—that’s one bad habit me an’ ol’ Mex ain’t even thinkin’ about.” The man’s hand slid further around Eric’s face, pushing two fingers into Eric’s mouth, moving them on Eric’s tongue. “We got enough others already.” He gave another grimace. “Hey, your fuck hole there feels pretty slick.”
Still sucking for traces of salt, Eric looked over at the boatman. Some of it was probably sweat—
Out in front the man held his other hand down, smiling at it—the one with the green and blu
e snake’s head, yellow fangs, red diamonds for eyes, and orange tongue. On bronzed skin, sun-bleached hair blurred the lines across his knuckles, clouded the serpent. Wide nubs bulged before the nails, outlined in black as with a ballpoint and gnawed well back of the quick. On the massive fingers, what was left of the nails were as wide as quarters (except the little, a nickel across) but, front to back, as narrow as half a dime. Thickened cuticle swallowed them. “Bitin’ on ’em the way we do, Mex and me—the both of us—is bad enough.” He turned his hand over, lifted his fist to his mouth, and began to chip at what remained on the broad flesh with his lower teeth. “That’s why I first got to be friends with Dynamite—when we was kids. ’Cause he did it even worse than me. So does Shit—but then, the boy comes by it honestly.”
Without taking his fingers from Eric’s mouth, he turned, and together they walked again—while Eric felt some ineffable understanding of the hardness and history his tongue moved on.
Along both walls, within glass cases hung posters for a multiplex in some mall or a triple-X movie palace. (“The Opera House, Runcible’s Oldest and Only 24-Hour Seven Days a Week Adult Theater!”) Others displayed T-shirts, red, black, and blue, Turpens Truck Stop across the pockets. More and more cases were empty, though.
The long hall turned right.
The cases stopped.
Here the wall was weathered board, as though once the outside of an older building. “This used to be the dormitory. Now it’s for storage. But they keep the old john open.”
In a doorframe’s upper corner, green joists had pulled apart an inch.
Saloon-style doors hung on cylindrical hinges, eighteen inches from lintel above and limen below. Under them, Eric could see, behind the entrance plank, patches of broken white-and-black tiles, surrounded by concrete, as though two layers of history contested for the men’s room floor. Above the slatted doors, he saw an uneven green wall, run with pipes and cracks. Inside was a replastered patch, crossed with trowel lines and, still unpainted, white on industrial gray.
Finally, Eric pulled his mouth from the fingers.
The bearded man had dropped his other hand, opened his jeans’ zipper, and tugged loose his genitals. His cock’s base was thick. He arched forward, webbed with veins like wax cords a-wriggle on his skin. Bronze hair grew a third of the way along it. In front of his furry bag—one nut bigger than a fuckin’ Spalding, the other as small as a goddam jack ball—his cuff shook each step. “Hey—ain’t nothin’ wrong with my nuts. They may look a little strange ’cause the one’s so big. But they won’t hurt you—you can’t catch it. Sometimes guys worry about that, but most of ’em get into it. Doctors even got a fancy big word for it: orchitis. Fortunately, I got the kind that don’t hurt. Itches sometimes, but that’s all. I admit it: I lose a few guys right here—another reason I like to let you get a look before we go in. It feels a little funny if you decide to bolt once we get inside with the fellas. But that ol’ ostrich egg has made more than one cocksucker fall down on his knees and shoot right there in his skivvies. Hey, you know, that’s a genuine cocksuckers’ dick you’re lookin’ at—’cause it curves down ’stead o’ up. You get on your knees and that thing slides right down into your face. Dynamite’s is longer, but him and that boy, Shit, both got the same cocksucker’s curve. We’re probably fourth or fifth cousins anyway. Down here, ever’body is—I never traced it through.”
Eric asked, “Who’s…Dynamite?” The big testicle oscillated in his mind between sexy and…well, weird. He asked, “You’re goin’ in there like…that?” But obviously he was. Eric grew even harder.
“This is one of them places where it’s better to go on in with it all hangin’ out. Besides, ain’t you got someone waitin’ in the car? I figured you didn’t have all day. And you asked for it.” Beside him, the big guy pushed the door with one hand and guided Eric in with the other. “Gotta get you a taste of Shit and Dynamite ’fore you leave. Come on, puppy. Learn a little of what’s goin’ on down here,” as Eric pulled down his zipper—
* * *
[0] —AND LEVERED OUT his own cock (I hope it ain’t too small for these guys…), full hard when Eric saw the men inside.
Some looked.
A couple of years older than Eric, one in a green workshirt with the sleeves torn off—like the boatman’s plaid—grinned over the shoulder of a rangy older man—the boatman’s age…?—whose pants were down around his hirsute thighs. (That’s a nice cock, Eric thought.) The kid had close-set green eyes, a sparse beard you could see through to his face, broad bare feet, a tan mat of kinky hair, and a wide Negroid nose. He’s black, Eric realized, though his skin was the same burned bronze as the boatman’s, as Eric’s. He shared a mouth with the older white guy. A smile deflected its line.
(Except for irregular patches of black and white tiling, cement had taken over the floor.)
Behind them were four others, three standing, one seated inside a doorless stall. All were looking at him.
In his dropped overalls, the older guy wore the same kind of shirt as the younger, its sleeves pushed up hard, heavy forearms, the front open over a black T-shirt.
The bearded boatman said: “That there is Shit—” the kid smiled—“and this here’s Dynamite.” The older man nodded.
The barefoot kid’s nondescript pants were open, too—they weren’t jeans—and, as he moved, his cock slipped from the older man’s cheeks and, still hard, fell to a downward slant. Turning, the kid stepped over, reached out, caught Eric’s cock in his fist, and—more surprisingly—wrapped his other arm around Eric’s shoulders. “My hand’s kinda rough,” he said, with embarrassment. “I don’t wanna hurt you.”
“That’s okay,” Eric said. “So’s my cock.”
“No, it ain’t.” Looking down, the kid chuckled. “It’s a nice one.” With his other arm he hugged Eric—and (Eric was about to say, It feels good…) thrust his tongue as far down Eric’s throat as he could!
Eric hugged him back—surprised. The kid’s clothes were old, and he’d been wearing them a long time. Under their general funk was a smell like sweaty leather, which Eric realized was the kid himself.
The boatman had called him…Shit?
While their tongues rolled together and around one another’s, Eric saw over the kid’s shoulder that the doors on the three stalls were gone.
So were the seats on the commodes.
The partitions were enameled blue, grooved and gouged, inside and out. Even from within the embrace Eric could see, beyond Shit’s bearded jaw, holes drilled through the stall walls, some half-an-inch, some two inches. Some were patched with tin squares; other holes had been drilled beside the patches. (Eric’s tongue searched in Shit’s mouth, and found no teeth at all—at least on the upper left. The surprise made Eric harder.) Among the eight men in the small room, Eric could see, a stocky Mexican sat on the last commode, barefoot like the kid with him now. (Eric pushed his tongue right. Gaps interrupted the teeth there, with—above and below—saddles of gum between.) The Mexican wore no shirt at all under a black denim jacket with frayed edges, open over belly and chest; nor any underpants: black jeans pushed to his ankles, he smiled with a wide, pockmarked face.
Eric thought: That’s fuckin’ sexy.
Along the trough urinal, a pipe began to hum till, from its perforations, like tongues of glass, with small floshes, flaps, flops, and fluffles, water flushed the steel backing, to rush along the bottom.
By the urinal’s end Eric glimpsed a tall black man with a shaved head. (For an instant, he thought Mike was at the urinal. His heart gave a single astonished thump, before he recognized a different ear, a different head, a different shoulder, thinner arm, rounder back…! On the arm below the short sleeve were black tattoos he could not make out, since the man also shared Mike’s coloring. In three beats, though, Eric’s heart stilled.) Along with his stained dungarees he wore an orange and white road-worker’s vest strapped over a gray T-shirt. He held his hands in front of himself, but was turned away so Er
ic couldn’t see his cock.
Across the fifteen feet of cracked concrete by the Mexican’s stall, two other black guys—one notably stockier than the other—were laughing over something. Their flies bowed open—which made Eric think one, the other, or both had been fooling with the Mexican. The bigger one had a fist inside his and, as Eric blinked over the kid’s shoulder, pulled out a thick cock, not as long as the boatman’s. Probably he’d put it away at the boatman’s and Eric’s entrance, and only now loosed it again.
The kid hugged Eric tighter, drew in his tongue, then rubbed Eric’s neck with his face. His beard was softer than it looked.
Beyond the kid’s smell was the odor of wet stone and moist cinderblock and what seeped through cracked cellar walls from the damp—a smell that, at sixteen, already Eric associated with a half hour here or an hour there, sitting in some basement john stall, at a library or in a truck garage or at a bus station, because some guy finishing at the urinal had flashed him, then hurried out, and he’d waited to see if anyone else would come—
Waiting for men…
Waiting for men like these…?
The kid was strong, as strong as Eric, and—both arms around Eric’s chest—his grip was tight with bone and a desperation Eric recognized…
Eric slid one hand between the boy’s and his own belly, to grip his cock, which had just been up the older guy’s ass. It was about three-quarters of an inch longer than Eric’s—a little thicker. Holding it, Eric realized, made his own feel bigger—as, between them, the boy squeezed Eric’s with his rough hand. Eric thought: I wonder why he likes holding mine?
Beside them, the white guy bent to tug up his bib overalls. As he stood, on his once black T-shirt Eric saw a foreshortened dump truck, in gray, green, and more gray, before the denim rose over it. The john space was small enough for Eric to hear the suspender’s wide wire snap catch a steel button.