Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“Well, yeah, that right considerate of you.” Joe Markum looked around, and seeing that it was down to Eric, Shit, and Dynamite, he seemed to relax. “The truth is, I am pretty tired. I went over to Jordan’s—that’s my second ex-wife—she invites me every year, and every year I say I ain’t goin’ again. Then I do—and after three hours there, I’m so uncomfortable I wanna scream sometimes. That’s why I come home so early. I’m really sorry, son—especially if I broke up your party.”
“Naw,” Big Man said. “Maybe if it was the first time you done it, but the truth is I was kinda ready for it. Hey, thank yall for comin’. Maybe we’ll see each other at the Opera or somethin’ like that. I gotta get that drunken skunk up to my place before he makes a real mess. I really like him—he can be lots of fun.” Leaving Mr. Markum at the door to the kitchen, Big Man walked across the living room to the front door with Shit and Eric, Dynamite ambling behind him. “Hey, you know what that crazy drunk told me the other day?” Big Man asked, under his breath, grinning now at one, now at the other. “He told me there ain’t really no black folk in the world at all, there’re nothin’ but niggers. And he said that’s was ’cause niggers was a lot more powerful. Call somebody a nigger,” he said, “and you make ’em angry, or you make ’em laugh, or sometimes you can even make ’em cry—and sometimes you can even give ’em a woodie. But when you call somebody black, he said, it don’t do nothin’!” He laughed. “Danny really tickles me sometimes. He got a real interestin’ way of lookin’ at things. But he can be more of a slob than I am. And that’s sayin’ somethin’. Good-night, Shit, Eric—Mr. Haskell.”
*
In the pickup, Shit drove them back up toward Diamond Harbor. Dynamite sat in the middle.
“You have a good time?” Eric asked.
“Huh?” Dynamite said. “Yeah. Sure. Them yams were good. So were them greens. The slaw was nice, but your potato salad’s better.”
“Thanks,” Eric said. “You just didn’t say very much.”
“Well,” Dynamite said. “I like listenin’.”
“He slept for half the party.” Shit looked alertly over the wheel, out the windshield onto the dark road.
Dynamite laughed. “I don’t know. I guess I’m kinda like Danny.”
“What you mean?” Eric asked.
“Danny really likes bein’ out there in the back,” Shit explained, “when there’s party goin’ on. He likes listenin’ to it, and that makes him feel good. But he don’t really wanna be inside with the people. Havin’ to talk, and what all, that’s worrisome to him. I think Dynamite’s like that.” Looking out at the oncoming lights, he made a face. “White guys.”
“Yeah.” Dynamite laughed. “I guess that’s kinda the way it was.”
“He just wants to be there and get drunk and play with his dog.” Shit looked across his father at Eric. “By the way, I knew damned well that wasn’t beer in them beer cans you was drinkin’. I just was lookin’ for an excuse to drive. I thought that was a pretty good one.”
Eric laughed.
Dynamite said, “I knew it wasn’t no beer, neither. Whyn’t you ask me to come out there with you—I was gettin’ a little jealous of that boy, son. Once when you was out there with ’im, Big Man told us he was a Turpens, you know. I don’t know about that one—but you seen all the jailhouse work all over ’im. Most of them fellas ain’t very nice people.”
Maybe Dynamite didn’t remember Danny from Hammond’s tale, Eric thought, all those years back.
After a moment, Shit leered across at Eric. “You fuck ’im?”
“Once,” Eric admitted.
“I boned his butt out there on the back porch three goddam fuckin’ times. Left a load in ’im, with every one, too!” Shit laughed, and hauled on the wheel. “You know, seein’ that wasn’t no orgy or no fuck fest, but just a regular…Space Program dinner, I think I had me a pretty good time, even with all the bullshit they was talkin’ in there.”
The pickup pulled through the darkness, sea visible, when outside Eric’s window, trees lowered to the right.
After a while, Dynamite said, “Hey, let’s go home, get in bed, hold onto each other real tight, and get some sleep—so we can do some fuckin’ work tomorrow.”
*
After New Years, winter lingered even past Shit’s birthday into the months usually marked as spring. On a late May night, Eric lifted up the quilt to slide under, as Shit rolled against him, heating him with shoulder pushing shoulder, toes gripping ankle. Eric grunted, “Don’t knock me out the fuckin’ bed—!”
“I ain’t. I’m just tryin’ to get you warm. What happened tonight?”
“The debate was kinda in’erestin’. Kyle—on that computer screen they had in there—said what Kyle says—and Johnston said his usual thing—about how, because of the depression, we have to knuckle under to outside economic forces. He called it adjustin’. I’m glad Kyle’s the one with more money.”
Shit chuckled. “You sound like Dynamite,” who snored over on his side.
“Mr. Potts was there—I said hello to him, too.”
“Good,” Shit grunted. “He say anything back?”
“Nodded—kinda grunted. Lurrie was down—he said to tell you hello.”
“Yeah?”
“You know that boy’s twenty-four years old now? He’s wants us to come over to his new place, he says, and look at his yard—maybe do some levelin’.”
“We could do that. Did he have his…what did he used to call it, his inner consciousness out there, floppin’ around?”
“Naw.” Eric chuckled. “Naw, but he had his cute Haitian boyfriend with him.”
“The one I fucked down at Turpens last month?” The cabin bedroom at night was a geometry of shadow.
“Probably.” Eric moved his elbow up under him. “You know, it occurred to me, listenin’ to them talking in the Social Services Meetin’ Room tonight, how Johnston ain’t nothin’ but another rich white boy who didn’t want niggers to have nothin’. And he ain’t even interested in white folks havin’ too much either, unless they already got a whole lot of money and want to give him some. And that’s gay or straight.”
“Yeah, that’s what Dynamite always says.” Shit put his hand, rough as stone, on the side of Eric’s face.
“And what’d Dynamite used to say about Kyle?”
Shit laughed. “That he was a crazy nigger whose parents had more money than God. His great-grandmamma—Mr. Kyle’s that is—was some kind of artist—a white woman. She inherited all these millions of dollars—back when a million dollars meant somethin’, I guess. She was kinda like your mama. I mean, she really liked black men. When she was twenty-nine, she married one of ’em, even though it was against the law. I mean, she’d been livin’ with ’im for six years, already. The story everybody used to tell was that he couldn’t read or write when she met him—like me—but five or six years later, he become this lawyer; and four years after that, he was a millionaire on his own. He was one of the guys who made them little radios—that went from tubes to those little things…”
“Chips?” Eric said. “Now, I didn’t know that before. Or do you mean transistors—?”
“Yeah. I think the second one you said. And you know those doors that open when you walk up to them, like in the supermarket or the bus depot, in Runcible? He invented those, too, or backed ’em, or manufactured ’em—or, anyway, made a whole lot of money off ’em. Course Kyle used to tell my daddy that people sayin’ Mr. Kyle, her nigger husband, couldn’t read and write when she married him was crazy. She used to tell her grandkids that it was a lot closer to the truth that he taught her! Eventually, when Kyle was eighteen, nineteen, all that money went to him—for a while he was the richest nigger in Georgia. Maybe in the country. And he got the idea that he wanted to put a lot of that money back into the community—the black gay community—so he put about ten million dollars into the Dump, at the end of the seventies. I mean, that’s all. It wasn’t even that much—just a pip on his f
ortune. But ’cause he was a black faggot, it was the black faggot part he put his money in. He put Jay in charge—he was gonna make Dynamite in charge of part of it, too, but Dynamite said that wasn’t what he was good at, and he didn’t wanna do it. Besides, they figured Jay was already one too many white men in the organization. And Jay said he’d only do it if he could do it while he ran the scow back and forth.”
“If he wanted a black guy, why didn’t he get his cousin Hugh to do it?”
“’Cause Hugh don’t got the personality for it. Hugh helps Jay do all the paperwork—that’s his part. And he took care of Shad. Anyway, when we fell on hard times and was livin’ between the truck, the boathouse, and Jay’s, Kyle asked my daddy what he wanted to do. He said he’d be the garbage man, if he could have a place to live. So…” Shit shrugged. “Kyle said sure.” Eric felt and heard, rather than saw, Shit grin. “My daddy said as long as there was niggers around who wanted to fuck and suck with him, and nigger garbage to haul away, he’d be happy.”
The snoring had stopped some seconds ago. From the bed’s edge, Dynamite said, “Shit…will you shut the fuck up? You gonna have this white boy thinkin’ I’m more of a redneck racist than I am. You got to remember, Eric was raised mostly black—that stuff’s important to him. Like it should be to you!”
“It’s important to me,” Shit said. “The niggers around here won’t let it not be important to me. And you drum more of that stuff into my head than most of them do. You been boned by so much damned nigger dick, it’s got you blacker than me.”
“Good.” The spring groaned as Dynamite turned.
“Hey,” Eric said, “I don’t think you’re no redneck racist!”
“Well, I am.” He could hear Dynamite’s smile.
“Why?” Eric asked. “You raised Shit and—”
“’Cause I was born down here and grew up down here and the richest nigger in Georgia was me and Jay’s best friend and fuck buddy from the time we was eleven years old till we was almost twenty. No—Kyle showed me that.”
“How?” Eric put his arm over Dynamite’s shoulder, at the same time Shit’s arm fell over his, and he felt the older boy pull himself closer.
“By givin’ me all the niggers I could want to suck my dick, to fuck my ass, and all the nigger garbage on this part of the coast to haul off to the Bottom.” He chuckled—and Eric realized, though Dynamite’s arm had fallen over Eric, his hand was back further, holding his son. “He did it by makin’ me fuckin’ happy. That’s how.” And as Eric’s naked belly and front pushed against Dynamite’s, Shit’s pushed against Eric’s back.
Wedged between them, Eric said, “Shit, you should come to the town meetin’s. You live here. We vote on things that affect all of us. That’s how they keep the Dump a good place to live, where you, me, and people like Potts can all get along.”
“Naw.” Shit’s voice was soft and rough over his own shoulder. “I ain’t goin’. Stop it, now. I been to ’em—”
Dynamite said, “When you was a kid—”
“Look. I can’t read.” (He knew Shit was pressing the side of his face ever more firmly into the pillow.) “And I can’t understand that stuff. Tryin’ to makes me feel fuckin’ awful. You goin’ for me—you know that! I get in some place like that where people gonna expect me to understand somethin’ that I can’t, and it makes feel like I’m on the top of a big tall cliff and there ain’t go rail and I’m gonna fall off and—”
“Yeah, I know. Come here, now. I know.” Between them Eric twisted himself over, onto his back. Both their arms moved around him, their cocks bars on either hip. Dynamite’s sleepy tasting mouth found his, to pour his tongue into him—until Shit’s face displaced his father’s. Shit’s tongue pushed aside Dynamite’s, falling and troweling around Eric’s.
How, Eric wondered, would you describe the difference in tastes? Or was it more a difference in energies?
While Dynamite rubbed his engorged groin regularly, lazily on Eric’s hip, Shit took a deep breath and said, “Look. We get into this argument almost once every three months—in one way or another. And it makes me feel like hell for the next three days. Could we…just not do it no more?”
Actually surprised, Eric said, “Sure…!” Although he hadn’t realized he’d been arguing. And then, “I won’t.”
“Okay,” Shit said. “Now let’s get warm!”
“Hey…” Dynamite said. “Thanks for goin’ to that thing for me. You can tell me about it tomorrow…” and, as Eric turned toward him now, so that the curve of Dynamite’s body grew more protective, and probably, again, the lanky man slept, while Shit began to push harder, rhythmically, finally to reach down and position his cockhead in Eric’s butthole.
* * *
[49] YEARS LATER, BECAUSE Shad’s death and Big Man’s Space Program celebration were both within days of Christmas, memory squeezed out the years between. Several times Eric talked of the Christmas when Shad had died and Big Man had given his Space Program Celebration Party, where they’d run into Danny Turpens doing his slave bit on the back porch, while memories were displaced before or after this—now—singularized point…
But, thus, the middle years of many not committed to chronicling their own lives’ folds and foreshortenings produce the effect by which the recent past rushes by far faster than the past of our childhoods.
Over time, Shit and Eric were no more exempt from this than anyone else.
Eric kept the garbage collecting job—and enjoyed it; and enjoyed living in Dynamite’s cluttered cabin with him and Shit, while, day following day, year following year, his heart sped up on entering the acceptance within it and, finally, stilled so that he could participate in it comfortably and enjoy it as much as Shit did, as he enjoyed the time around it with its labor and its looseness—for twenty-one fairly complicated years.
* * *
[50] ONE AUTUMN AFTERNOON, Shit and Eric dropped into the Harbor and wandered into the Lighthouse. They slid into a side booth—and Eric felt Shit’s foot settle over his, under the table beside the wall.
(Barbara had not worked there for more than six years…)
Two tables away sat Darrell, a retired black state trooper with a wide brown leather belt and a cowboy-style leather hat, who had been married and had five adult children, and who, a year after his wife died of diverticular complications, had announced he was gay and moved into the Dump—with a black, unmarried carpenter, Renfrew, a year his senior. Wife or no wife, both men claimed they’d had a twenty-nine year relationship, though Darrell still preferred Diamond Harbor proper to the Dump for socializing; his friends were here.
He had been in the Lighthouse the afternoon Eric had arrived at the Harbor with Mike.
There today, Darrell was explaining something to a white lady who worked in the Post Office, and whose name, Emma Cready, Eric had only known for three years, though he had seen her forever. Two days before, five women, between twenty-one and thirty-two, among the last of the summer folk, who—with a number of others—had been using the old South End of Diamond Harbor Beach for nude swimming and sun bathing, and had, after being out on the sand, walked through town—topless—to come into the Lighthouse, sit down, and ask for coffee, “Just like in one of them big cities what you see on television, where the women go swimming and walking around the boardwalks like that all the time! To be honest, I thought it was nice, for once, to see us lookin’ like we wasn’t the armpit of the universe, twenty years behind everybody else, gettin’ all upset and askin’ ’em to leave and stuff. And Jane, who is a perfectly modern and intelligent woman, went right over, took their order and smiled—then brought them their pastry and coffee. The only thing about it all was when one of them dropped a piece of pecan pie off her fork, right down between her, you…know what I’m talkin’ about. She had to wipe herself—the sides of her titties, there—with a napkin. But I guess she was as nervous as they were makin’ everybody else in here, at least at first. I wanted to kinda laugh. But I was laughin’ with ’e
m. Not at ’em.”
To Darrell’s tale, Emma said repeatedly, “Well, I don’t know…I just don’t know…I mean, that’s certainly not the way we do things here…So I really don’t know.”
And Darrell said, “Well, maybe we got to start doin’ things differently. Look at the Dump. I bet you remember when people used to talk about Kyle like he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon or somethin’, settin’ up a Temple to the Antichrist hisself—when all he was, was a man puttin’ up some houses where people like me and Renfew could live a comfortable life.”
And Emma—who, yes, drank tea with lemon—sipped and said, “Well, I just don’t know.”
In their side booth, Eric leaned across the table said quietly, “You interested in seein’ that?”
“Seein’ what?” Shit answered. “They been swimmin’ around here nekid since I was a kid—at the South End, I mean. Topless, bottomless, any other kind of ‘less.’ People who wanted to do that, that’s’ why they come to the Harbor, instead of goin’ over to Runcible and Hemmings and them beaches there. Naw—I already seen it. A bunch a topless women sittin’ here in the Lighthouse drinkin’ coffee? That ain’t gonna look too different from a bunch of topless women sittin’ on towels and beach chairs drinkin’ pop out the cooler. It’s the same thing like in the Opera, ain’t it? I mean in them movies.” Topless beach scenes were a staple of the pornographic features at the Opera House—often in the sunset settings before the obligatory lesbian love scene.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “Well, I guess so.”
“On the way home,” Shit asked, “you wanna stop by and sneak a peek through the bushes? Kids used to do that on the way home from school, when I was comin’ up. You can still do it—it’s easy. If they’re any of them out there, you’ll see ’em.”
“I already done that,” Eric said—some half a dozen times in his early years.
Another day, they came in and caught Izaak, the current owner—he was leaving later that afternoon—saying, “But I don’t interfere. The TV says that’s what they’re doin’ all over these days. Though, I swear, it was all I could do, the first time, not to go up to those women, and tell them, ‘That’s just not the way we do it here.’ But, I guess now we…do. It was comical. I mean, I walked up to that table, all big and brave, ready to make my announcement. Then, when I got there, all I could say was, ‘Would you ladies like some more coffee?’ Probably that’s because Jane had been servin’ ’em for a week already. I mean, it would look too funny, after all this time, makin’ a big thing out of it now. Jane had already made it clear she didn’t mind. And she’s the one whose got to serve ’em. But, before, they always came in when I was in the back or out.”