Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Shit began to smile. “You’re fuckin’ crazy,” he said. Then he looked around.

  “Naw—it’s just an experiment.”

  “Oh.” Looking back at Eric, Shit frowned. Suddenly he reached down, unzipped his own pants, took out his cock—and his testicles (probably to go Eric one better). Putting his hands on his thighs, he looked down at himself Then he looked at Eric, as if to say: Okay, what next?

  Eric said, “Yeah, that’s probably better.” He reached in his jeans and pulled out his own nuts. He did look around, because he couldn’t help it. He thought he saw somebody look away. “Let’s go look at the dirty magazines, now. Maybe somethin’ll inspire us.”

  Shit grunted, but he turned to walk over, ahead of Eric, to the corner. Like he’s decided to run interference for me, Eric thought, and grinned.

  Basically Eric was curious who would be the first person to say something—that was all. Visual porn had never particularly turned him on, so, as he paged through this magazine and that, while he admired the naked photographs (in the past few years, all the American ones seemed to have vanished and been replaced by German, Dutch, Brazilian, and Danish), nothing seemed particularly arousing.

  Over the same fifteen minutes, Shit, however, as a non-reader, paging through one and another, twice got a full-out hard-on (with its slight downward curve), then lost it, though he hadn’t touched himself. Probably he was responding to Eric.

  Three different older black guys looked at them unabashedly—two of them, who were with one another, laughed. (Summer visitors—lingering into autumn.) Two different men about their own ages just stared. Eric found their interest made his dick drift from one side of his scrotum to the other, but that’s all.

  He started reading a letters to the editor column that appeared in German with an awkward English translation beside it, when someone said, “Hey…?”

  Eric looked up—

  —and repressed a flinch.

  A heavy man in a green sunshade—superfluous with the overcast sky outside—and shirtsleeves stood to the side. “Oh. It’s you two.” He smiled, nodding at Eric, as Shit stepped over. With a gesture of his fist, he said, “What’s this, now? Since half the women are runnin’ around Diamond Harbor with their tits hangin’ out, you think you gotta make a fashion statement in here? Jesus, Shit,” Fred said, “I used to catch you in here, doin’ this kinda stuff when you were twelve or thirteen. What—you’re gettin’ your second childhood early?”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “And you used to run me out of here, when you caught me, too.”

  Eric was surprised.

  Fred said, “Were you aware back then, Shit, that I’d always wait till you was finished—before I’d come up and made you skedaddle?” He looked like a heavier cousin of Jay’s, though closer cropped, with clean hands, and who had not destroyed his nails with gnawing.

  “You did?” Shit looked surprised, now.

  “Un-huh.” Fred shook his head, still smiling. “Anyway, someone stopped me up front to make a comment.”

  Shit said, “Was they complainin’?”

  “Not what I’d call complainin’,” Fred said. He chuckled. “They thought yall was cute, actually. But…well, they did mention it. So I thought I’d come back here and check it out myself.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “You want us to put it away—”

  “That’s entirely up to you. Anyway—” Fred put a thumb under his belt—“since it looks like you’re takin’ up old habits, I just wanted to say the same thing to yall I said to Shit here when he was a kid: don’t get no mess on the damned magazines. Or on the floor, if you can help it. Bring a handkerchief with you and do it in there. I got to sell these things—and nobody wants ’em if the pages is pre-stuck, ’fore they get a chance to look at ’em. Okay?”

  “Um,” Eric said. “Yeah…”

  “But you guys standin’ around in here, stickin’ straight out like that’s good adverisin’ for them magazines. That just lets the other customers know they do what they’re supposed to do.” Fred reached out, bypassed Eric’s proffered hand—lifted Eric’s cock, and shook it. “Nice to see you again, I guess.”

  Eric swallowed—and almost, but did not quite, step back.

  Fred laughed out full. “See, that’s how I shook with him, the first time I had to talk some sense into his crazy head—you remember that? When you was twelve?” He looked over at Shit. Fred released Eric’s penis, reached over, and shook Shit’s—which immediately got hard.

  Shit said, “Sounds reasonable.”

  “And that’s just what yours done when I shook it in here when you was a kid.”

  Shit put one hand over himself now—and, in his loose grip, while his skin slipped forward, his penis retreated within his wide fist.

  “You guys do what you gonna do.” (Shit dropped his fist, to reveal his dick at half-mast.) “But like I say, just don’t mess nothin’ up, now. If you do, I’m gonna make you buy it. That’s all.”

  Fred smiled, then turned and walked toward the front.

  Somehow, the experiment seemed finished.

  Eric zipped his jeans.

  Then, buttoning the waist button on their denims, they looked at one another—Shit shrugged—and walked back to the front of the store after Fred, passing spools of electrical cable, stacks of seed bags, aluminum sheets, brooms and hoes and shovels, cases of nails, the key copying machine, nodded to Fred in the pen beside the register, who nodded back and smiled.

  “Okay,” Shit said dryly. “Now that was just the most fun I done had me in a dog’s age—and you’re a fuckin’ nut! What you wanna do, now?”

  Eric shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe go on home. Roll up against Dynamite and grab a nap.”

  “Good,” Shit said. “’Cause I wanna take that nap so bad I may just bring you down on the side of the road and make you do me right there before we get home.”

  When they stepped outside, it had begun to sprinkle.

  *

  No, this was still 2025, not ’35, nor was Eric any sort of sexually-rebelling university student with patches of transparent vinyl in his pants and shirt, intent on challenging the status quo, as it might have been framed in the newly-remerging “alternative plasma media” (as plasma inductance screens became more common than regular “hard” computers, as they were briefly known: neither Shit nor Eric ever owned one) when, ten years later, such incidents became commonplace.

  In ’27, ’28, ’29, and even ’30 itself, various articles appeared in various magazines, on and off line, looking forward to the “Sexually Uncomfortable Thirties.” After ’31, however, such articles stopped, because people under thirty-five, then under forty, couldn’t understand them.

  Eric read half of one such, which came into Diamond Harbor in a northern print magazine, brought by a tourist—an Atlanta academic—and left on a table in a local eatery called Reba’s Place.

  He didn’t finish it—because he didn’t understand it, either.

  * * *

  [54] SOMETIMES SHIT AND Eric would argue whether this took place in ’27, ’28, or ’29. Doctor Greene had ordered Dynamite to take six weeks off from the garbage run—and had filled out papers for him to get compensation from the Chamber of Commerce. They’d all gone over to the Opera, and Dynamite had gone down to the front row, put his beer under the seat, pulled out his dick, and gone to sleep that way for about three hours. Certainly that was the afternoon that Dusty asked the boys if they wanted to spend a few days working in the theater, sweeping up and bolting down some loose chairs. Hammond had gone to spend his three-week vacation that autumn in Key West and had phoned to say he was taking another week off. Dusty had showed them the little apartment up over the projection room. There were no sheets on the bed, Eric remembered, but there were blankets—and they slept like that the whole time. It was only later when he mentioned it to Barb that she made him take some an extra pair of hers…

  They’d been staying at the Opera, helping Dusty at least a week.

/>   Then Shit had gone back to the cabin to spend a day and night with his dad, when Eric got an urge to see them.

  In the projection booth, he told Myron to tell Dusty he’d be gone for a day, maybe two. Myron, who wore thick glasses and was bald, nodded. Generally at the beginning-of-the-week, business trickled irregularly into the three-balconied theater’s twenty-two hours of darkness.

  (And two hours from four to six with the work lights on…)

  Eric hadn’t planned for it, but, when, back down in the lobby, he glanced outside, a November moon hung, full, high, and small as a quarter, among the clouds striping the night. A couple of hours later, at eleven-thirty or a little after, he left the theater—’27’s had been a warm November (if it wasn’t ’28’s)—to walk down to the service road’s shoulder and turn along the sea.

  Fifteen feet ahead, as it pulled over, he recognized Abbot’s Jeep. (Abbot still worked behind the notions counter at Turpens.) After ten seconds, the passenger window jerked irregularly into the door and, in his denim jacket, Abbot leaned out: “Hey, I thought that might be you. Can I give you a lift?” Beside the steel buttons, the breeze shook his white chest hair.

  “Thanks, Abbot—naw. I’m walkin’. It’s nice out.”

  “It’s a little cool.” Abbot leaned further. “Where you walkin’ to?”

  “I’m goin’ to the Dump, over at the Harbor.”

  Abott frowned. “That’s a-ways, son.” He hadn’t shaved that day. “And it’s cool out,” he repeated. “I don’t mind dropping you off—”

  “Got my hoody on. I’m good.”

  “Okay, then.” Abbot eased back. “Suit yourself. Hell—” Abbot’s chuckle drifted from the car window—“I thought maybe I was gonna get myself a blowjob tonight. But you ain’t in’erested in no geriatric case like me, now, are you?”

  “I don’t know.” Eric shrugged. “Maybe I’d like that—if I hadn’t made up my mind to take a walk and a good look at the water. You’re on for next time, though.”

  “You are such a liar.” Laughter followed the chuckle. “Truth is, though, you don’t gotta gimme none. Someone like you just got to promise me some—and I’m happy.” Rising, the window glass halted, two black inches from the top. “I know you’re thirty somethin’ or close to it. But when I first seen you walkin’, I coulda sworn you was some seventeen-year-old I hadn’t even met yet. You know you still look like a kid?”

  “Yeah, you love that jailbait, don’t you?” Eric was thirty-seven (or thirty-eight) but a thirty-seven year old who’d worked hard. “That’s why you stopped—right?”

  Laughing again, Abbot’s ghost disappeared from behind the glass to slide back across and under the wheel. The Jeep rolled forward.

  “Hey,” Eric shouted. “I ain’t kiddin’ you. At least I’m too old for that. You come around the Opera—I’ll show you what I can do…” and realized, from trying to talk over it, how loud the sea was.

  Because he felt good, Eric passed up three more rides—from Arlene and her aunt, both of whom worked at the Stop & Shop, then from Franklin and Mark, and finally from an old and new guy together in a farm pickup from Dump Produce, neither of whose names he remembered, though he knew the older by sight.

  Eric walked the six miles from Runcible to the Harbor.

  The smell of halides and ozone blew in from moon shot waves.

  He thought about Ms. Louise.

  He thought about Dynamite, in what must have been the middle of the night, with a work gloved hand reaching into his pants, pulling loose his nuts, and waggling them by his pickup’s amber parking light. Eric had been too surprised to laugh.

  He laughed now, though—which meant he’d changed.

  He wondered if some moment from this walk would join the frequently remembered—perhaps the teal around the full moon and across a fifth of the sky, as if the orb had dispersed half the night.

  Would he think of it again and, if so, how often?

  As he reached the Harbor’s ancient docks, where moonlight made the life preservers roped to the boathouse wall look like carved chalk, Eric thought: I’ve been through a wondrous experience, walking back over the Dump’s bluff in the moonlight, with ice chip stars, here and there, balanced on slack cloud ribbons across the sky, uneven land under shoe, and trees and brush coming up now, on one side, then the other, falling away—only it isn’t the words I use to remind myself of it, but the nowness of it, moments, minutes, half an hour ago, that pulls the memories up:

  —that leafless branch really was a foot to the side of my face.

  —that rock, for two steps, actually was under my foot, before the ground again grew loose and squishy.

  —that breeze tugged my hood from my right cheek, so that I stopped and pulled it over. When had I turned it up…?

  (Did I eat any pickings along the crossing? Can’t even remember, which is as close as I’ll get to bein’ normal; forget I’m different—that we’re different. And forgetting we’re different is certainly easier.)

  Above him, the sky was doing something like the eye itself: by revealing only half the night, it suggested a night so much bigger…

  Eric turned to hike the last three-quarters of a mile to the Dump. I’ve finished doing something nobody has ever done exactly with the same steps and the same breezes and the same stubbly grass and the same slog up and the same lope down, though a million, or a million-million folks through three centuries (or forty centuries if you count the Indians) have done something near it, Indians, blacks, whites, so that they’d recognize that wondrous thing from their own memories.

  That’s astonishing.

  And it makes me—or, anyway, makes my life—astonishing

  Fifteen minutes later, Eric circled the railway car, with its glassless windows and no seats, on twenty yards of unattached rail, from how many years back when real operas were sung at the Opera House.

  While grass shivered between the rocks in the breeze and the silver light, he tramped the bluff. He was tired. The moon had gone from an ivory coin above him to an orange drumhead low between the hills.

  Ten minutes more and Eric could see Dynamite’s cabin along the slope. No lights were on.

  The walk had taken three-and-a-half, maybe four hours. Reaching the cabin path, Eric looked back to see, across the road, light from Black Bull’s window edges.

  He turned away to climb Dynamite’s cabin steps, pushed in the door, didn’t turn on the light, but worked off one shoe, then the other. (This place smells like home, he thought.) His feet stung. Sweaty and slightly sore, they felt as if they were expanding on the kitchen’s gritty boards. Here and there, he made out vinyl patches.

  Years ago, Dynamite had turned Shit and Eric loose for a weekend with trowels and screwdrivers to pry up the remaining stuff. But because they’d failed, three years later the new floor covering still hadn’t gone down.

  It was in incredibly dusty boxes under the sink.

  Threading his way around the junk, Eric stepped through the archway into the bedroom.

  Again, he was surprised by the new, blue, crinkly quilt pushed down at the foot of the bed. (He’d gone with Shit to buy it at the mall, to replace the ragged maroon one with the stuffing coming out on three sides, when, at Dr. Greene’s diagnosis of retained liquid and the threat of congestive heart failure, Shit had gotten it in his head that Dynamite needed something warm to sleep under, though most of the time, in the mild winter, it rarely got pulled up.) Eric looked at the two men, naked, asleep—to realize a third lay with them. Taking a breath, he shook his head and grinned.

  A moonlit trapezoid slanted across Shit’s still-boyish butt; part of the light caught Dynamite’s hairy lower legs and turned-in feet. The stranger lay on Shit’s right, the upper part of his back crossed with the blind slats’ shadows. On Dynamite’s right, the top of Shit’s head was pressed into his father’s armpit.

  At various times, years ago, when Eric had gotten up in the night to go to the bathroom, he’d realized Shit tended to sleep
with his head under his dad’s arm. (Usually Dynamite slept on his back, one arm up over his head. Tonight he was on his belly.) Eric had figured it out: when they went to bed, Shit immediately wedged the back of his head there. Six to ten minutes later, while he slept, he’d turn around to face his father, nose and mouth in that pungent cavity, a little too strong for him when he was awake, but irresistible when he slept, an arm across his father’s hirsute chest.

  At the Opera House, in bed in the little upstairs apartment they’d been staying in, Eric had tried (with considerable curiosity) sleeping on his back, stomach up. And, yes, within seconds the back of Shit’s head was under Eric’s own raised arm. Minutes later, in actual sleep, a hundred-eighty-degree roll put Shit’s face there, while his arm slid across Eric’s chest.

  Despite Shit and Dynamite’s lackadaisical approach to hygiene, Eric himself showered every second or third day. Now he’d dropped regularly and rigorously down to once a week—on Mondays: like Dynamite. At the Opera, work grew sweaty, and as he’d push between the rows of seats with the broad broom, smelling of booze or worse, some homeless fellow might comment, “You’re gettin’ a little strong, there, Mr. Jeffers.”

  “Well, Rudy, only one person’s gotta like it. And that ain’t you.” Eric chuckled, raising a seat with the toe of his work shoe to get the broom under. “And he ain’t complainin’—yet.” Fact was, Shit not only didn’t complain, he was generous, even profligate, with grins and big inhalings and underarm nuzzlings and “Ahhhh…!”s and “Christ, you smell real good…”s. Also, more than one person liked it—Abbot for instance, as well as a black professor who’d drive over from Montgomery College, and a rather heavy black insurance actuary, who stuttered a lot and three or four times had asked Eric to come back home with him. Eric had explained, “Naw—if we’re gonna do sumpin’, let’s do it here. I’m workin’.” Though there wasn’t enough skin on Eric’s dick to justify a seat in Gorgonzola Alley, except as an admirer, Eric had his fans.