Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  In the cabin bedroom’s clutter, Eric dropped his clothes, climbed up on the bed’s foot—the largest space was between Shit’s back and the stranger’s front. The stranger, he realized now, was a tall Asian. Eric put his head down, when the Asian flinched: “What the…fuck—?”

  Shit turned to face the Asian and whispered, “Hey…that’s just Eric. He’s okay. Everything all right at the Opera?”

  “Um-hm.” Eric felt Shit’s arm slip around him, as he put his own arm around the Asian, who, yes, smelled a little strange—like deodorant or toilet water or something…

  “Oh,” the Asian said. “This is all right, then?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “This is all right.”

  From the other side of the bed, Dynamite muttered, “Jesus H. Christ—can’t a man have one night alone with his own goddam boy? I gotta keep all three of you happy now?”

  “I was gettin’ lonely over at the Opera,” Eric whispered. “So I took a wander this way. Myron says he’ll keep the place goin’ through tomorrow. Hey, I’m sorry—” God, he thought, the Asian is a little much. But they both smelled good…

  “Funny thing was,” Dynamite whispered back, “we was gettin’ a little lonely, too. We was just sayin’ that, ’fore we went to bed. Wasn’t we, Shit?”

  “Un-huh,” Shit said sleepily. “Open ya’ damn mouth and lemme get my tongue in’ere ’fore he tries to slip his dick in it.”

  “You talkin’ to me or your daddy?” Eric asked. “Or your new friend, here?” He gave the Asian a little shake, just to be friendly. The Asian patted his forearm back.

  Which made Dynamite mutter again. “Sometimes that boy knows how I operate too damned well. You two go on, then. Hell, I’m tired, anyway.”

  Thirty-five minutes and four orgasms later (two of them Shit’s), all four slept, and since Dynamite wasn’t working right then—which, after all, was why Eric and Shit had taken over for Hammond and Dusty, on their two month vacation from the garbage run (another nicety of Kyle’s Chamber of Commerce organization)—it was a lazy, vigorous morning.

  * * *

  [55] SHIT WAS UP to make coffee for all four. “Least I can do,” he said, a little under his breath to Eric, though Philip (the Asian) could have heard if he was listening, “since I guess I brought a surprise to bed for you.” Apparently, they’d picked up Philip last night when he’d needed a lift into Hemmings, and ended up here. (He’d come down to visit for a long weekend with some vacationing friends.) “Hey, Philip…this is Eric. I told you about him. You remember from last night.”

  “Gee, I hope I didn’t…I mean, sorry if I—”

  “Naw.” Shit got the blue coffee tin from the freezer and scooped four, five, six scoops into the hopper, then turned to the sink. “Eric knows he’s my number one fellow.” He gave Eric a hug—who, though he ignored it, was happy for it. “He keeps me on a loose leash. That ain’t no problem.”

  Swaying in junk and sunlight, sleepy Philip rubbed his forehead, his black spiky hair, fingered his ear, then, smiling shyly, looked around for his glasses, his T-shirt. “Hi…”

  In only his ragged T-shirt, one fist gripping his dick, Shit tugged the glass carafe from under the hopper to pour half a mug for himself. A drop fell, to hiss and bubble on the circular plate, around whose rim a few metallic spots had worn through the black, before he slid the carafe back into place. In the glass, bubbles rocked on the liquid’s rim.

  “Hi.” Eric nodded to where the dark denim legs of some new-looking jeans hung over a chair back. “This what you’re lookin’ for?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Philip stepped towards them, but took his cue from Shit and did not slip them on. “Thanks.”

  When they were sitting on the porch, halfway through coffee, Jay drove up to call out the pickup window, “Hey, guys? Since you’re not haulin’ garbage, whyn’t you go over to the Opera to give Hammond and Dusty a hand sweepin’ out that place.”

  Shit called back, “You’re a little late, motherfucker. We’re already been over there all month,” and it was a big joke. Shit rubbed at his floppy crotch, grinning.

  “Well, if you are, then at least I can start makin’ sure you get paid.” Getting out of the pickup, Jay clumped up the porch steps. “Actually, Dusty done told me. You been doin’ it just to be nice. Might as well let the Chamber of Commerce give you somethin’ for it. It won’t be much—but it’ll be somethin’. Hey, Dynamite—these boys takin’ care of you?” He nodded to the Asian and grinned—“Good mornin’. Well, you look like you done been takin’ care of.” Slowing as he got to the top, Jay stepped in front of the porch rail and leaned back against it.

  In his chair, Philip sat with one hand over his groin, as though he hadn’t been quite ready for company. Clearly, though, it didn’t bother Jay.

  Sitting on the bench, still in just his T-shirt, looking over his coffee cup, Shit said: “I been doin’ it so I can fuck some ass down in the bathroom—to be nice, too, I guess.” Then he drank loudly from his mug. (Shit still eats and drinks like a fuckin’ slob—and after all this time I still think it’s fuckin’ sexy. Eric smiled. I wonder if this guy thinks the same thing?)

  “Yeah,” Jay said. “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know. Well, I guess I’m on my way.” Standing, he turned back to the steps, and started down.

  Philip looked around. “I hope I get a chance to come back here. This was…yeah, fun.” Getting up, finally he put on his jeans, as though Jay’s going had freed him to slip his long, bony legs into them. “Your friend’s pretty nice, too,” he said—and took some more sugar. “Yeah. You guys are fun.”

  “So are you,” Dynamite said—while Jay’s pickup started grumbling, then eased forward.

  “Come on,” Shit said. “Pull your pecker loose from your jeans again. You Chinese fellas is hot. I wanna watch Eric suck your dick some more ’fore you go, so I can come on it later when he’s suckin’ on mine. You don’t even have to shoot, if you don’t wanna. I got that safe in my head from last night when you blasted all over my dad’s face.”

  Smiling sheepishly, looking around, Philip pulled out his (hard) penis.

  * * *

  [56] IT WAS IN one of those three years that they officially took over the Opera, during Hammond and Dusty’s three-week vacation down in the Keys. They would open the window in the musty apartment upstairs over the projection room. (Hammond and Dusty had their own place, two blocks away from the theater.) Barbara even gave them two more sets of sheets, which, between the first year and the second year, they actually left there. Next year, they were unmoved, rumpled over the double bed. Sometimes on his own visits, Dynamite would go up and nap there himself, cap on the chair beside the bed, his jeans unbuttoned and pants unzipped. (Once Eric came in to find Shit sitting on the bed, with faintly snoring Dynamite facing forward on his side. Whacha doin’?

  (Shit shrugged. His hand was in his father’s open pants. He smiled, sheepishly. Holdin’ on to my daddy’s dick, he said, quietly, while he’s sleepin’.

  (Eric asked, Huh?

  (Yeah, Shit whispered. It makes me feel like I was a little kid again. I used to do this sometimes, back when I was still too little to a raise a hard-on.

  (On the bed, Dynamite shifted.

  (Grinning, Eric shook his head. A minute later, Shit came up behind him and encircled him in his arms. I wanna hold yours now.)

  *

  Leaves swatted the van’s roof; branches crackled under the tires. Eric in the back seat, Shit in the front, they bumped along. Out the window a sapling swung away and flopped back through the foliage, rustling and roaring.

  In his iridescent blue, green, and purple headscarf, Mamma Grace drove.

  “Jesus…!” Shit held to the roof handle over the door. “Mama, this is a car-and-a-half! You’re usually such…well—” the car lurched—“kind of a delicate…person. I’m surprised you can handle a big ol’ four-wheel drive like this.”

  “Honey—” Mama swung the wheel to avoid a fallen tree trunk— “when
Mama’s comin’ through, Mama’s comin’ through.” Mama had on his false eyelashes and a lot of rings. At the top of the wheel’s arc on his dark fingers, stones glittered, red, purple, green. “You got to be able to get around, I don’t care how much of a lady a feller is.”

  Pine branches struck the windshield and pulled around the side, dragging shadows through the van. Eric leaned forward, looking over Shit’s shoulder.

  A big bump—Eric’s head touched the roof: but it was a tap, not a bang.

  Mama Grace stopped the car. “Okay—we done got here.” He took a breath and sat back.

  Outside, beyond green saplings, stood a wall.

  Green siding covered part of it. Creosoted slats had fallen loose from cinder blocks. In it were a window’s vertical edge and bottom sill, in blistered white wood.

  Mama Grace opened his door, turned, and slid out the side. Shit opened his door and got out. He had on jeans, even shoes today, and a washed-out blue and black flannel—though he hadn’t buttoned it.

  Eric slid to the back door, opened it, and stepped into the tall growth. In his work shoes, he walked to where Shit had wandered forward of the front fender.

  “What’s that?” Shit turned back. His shirt had slipped down over a red-brown shoulder. Without a belt, his jeans were already down on the left below the blade of his hip. In the front you could see the top of his pubic hair. (How many years we been together, Eric wondered. It’s good to be able to walk around with somebody who looks like that without even thinking—and knowing you can have him pretty much when you want.) But, then, whatever clothes Shit wore always seemed to be falling off him. Most of them were still Dynamite’s, with cuffs or legs cut down (or ripped away), a habit neither father nor son seemed about to break.

  With his thumb, Eric pulled his own jeans up. “I think that’s…probably The Slide. Or what’s left of it.”

  “Damn,” Shit said. “They really done tore that thing down, huh? From what Dynamite said, I just thought they’d closed it up or somethin’. Has this all grown up here since then?”

  “No,” Mama Grace said, fist on the hip of his fatigues. “They were in here with bulldozers. It’s a shame. It was really an interesting building.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I mean, the piss bar and…everything.”

  “Yes, even that.” Mama Grace walked forward. Along with a pair of designer jeans that had sequins up the sides, he wore work shoes, too—like Shit and Eric.

  They went around in front of the headlights, which were blinking—even though it was daylight. Mama Grace had turned them on for the trip through the woods.

  “Which wall is that, anyway?” Eric asked. “Was that the window to Saul’s office in the back?”

  “Jesus,” Shit said. “As many times as I been in that place, I don’t think I ever came around this side. So the road we used to drive up was…over there, right?”

  “No.” Mama Grace pointed as if over invisible obstacles. “It was there.”

  “I’m lost,” Shit said.

  “I ain’t,” Eric said. “I know right where I am. As much piss as I drunk in this place, I ought to know where I—”

  Shit laughed. “As much of Dynamite’s beer and my Coca-Cola as you put down—” He stepped to the low wall’s edge and over. “Oh, fuck—!”

  “What?” Eric said. He hurried up after Shit.

  Mama Grace laughed. “You better watch out, boy, or you gonna break a leg—or an arm. Or both.”

  “What is it?” Eric said again. He put one shoe on the lowest part of the wall.

  “Come on,” Shit said, frowning. “Lemme get back over there. This is too high for me.” He vaulted back over. “I didn’t know there was gonna be places like that.” He moved behind Eric. “You shoulda told me, Mama.”

  Eric looked out over littered flooring. In it, darknesses gaped. One lay a foot-and-a-half before him—which, as he looked into it, he realized went straight through into a cellar.

  Mama walked along the edge, till he reached a place where twenty or thirty feet of flooring was torn away. “What I have to find,” Mama said, “is where Saul put those drapes I gave him twenty years back. He always said he was gonna hang ’em up down there. I know people been lootin’ this place for a month.” He moved further along. “I’m just hoping not too many people been goin’ downstairs.” With his hands out, as though walking some balance beam, Mama Grace turned the corner and continued along the far side of the building. “Oh—there it is. I see it now.” He turned and stepped out on the boards.

  Even though heights did not particularly bother Eric, the thought of walking on that rickety flooring, a third of which, here and there, had already been pulled up made him swallow hard.

  A cloud slid from the sun. Over the foliage droplets began to glitter—from the shower that had ended only twenty minutes before. Eric looked over the edge…and was staring into a basement:

  Down in the dark, chains hung from brick walls.

  From a beam that had once held up the flooring hung three rubber (or fabric) slings. The end of one had broken, so that its chain lapped down on the floor to curl over the brick near a drain. Not far away stood a white enameled operating or examination table, with metal stirrups and all sorts of brown and black stains at one end—all of it fifteen or eighteen feet below them.

  Along the wall, a horizontal beam crossed the stone, where a dozen thick candles, black and red and two more that were the yellow-gray of cut pear were, each of them, stuck in its mound of wax. Each had run over the edge to drip on the floor.

  “Besides their piss bar,” Eric said, “they had a regular dungeon down in the basement. I never knew that—”

  Shit settled one hand on Eric’s shoulder. “I don’t like this place.” His other hand, dry and leathery, joined with Eric’s, who gave it a squeeze. Shit was actually shaking a little.

  “Do those kinds of things upset you?” Mama Grace asked. “Looking at them, I mean?” Standing about twelve feet out on the floor, he held one arm across the chest of his green army jacket. “Things like that always bring to mind the scourging of our Lord—a holdover from the time I was in the seminary.” Mama Grace spread his legs, dropped a hand, bent over, caught a metal ring, and tugged.

  A trap door that Eric hadn’t even seen opened upward, with a swirl of dust in the new sunlight.

  “Hell,” Shit said, still looking straight down, “the chains and stuff don’t bother me. That’s just like Bull’s basement. But it’s too fuckin’ high!”

  Eric glanced aside. “Oh…” He stepped back from the edge, taking Shit with him, whose steely grip relaxed, now that they were out of sight of the cellar’s edge.

  “I’ll take any goddam nigger who wants down in there and fuck and whip his black ass till he can’t walk no more. I don’t mind that. But I do not like no sharp drops or things. Hey, Eddie—” And Shit let go of Eric entirely.

  Eric looked to the side.

  Through the underbrush, which he only realized now was just a slight wall between the building and a clearing, twenty-year-old Ed Miller pushed through with big steps. In one arm, he held his five-year-old half-brother, Hannibal, up on his shoulder.

  Once Captain Miller had died, Doris had sold the boat named after her. She’d remarried six years ago. Hannibal was Motley Anderson’s boy—Motley was no spring chicken, either. The half-brothers were very close.

  Eric said, “What you doin’ out here?”

  Ed stopped and his other arm came around to the support the child.

  Out of what embarrassment he was unsure, Eric offered, “We come with Mama Grace to see if he could find some stuff he gave to Saul. Maybe twenty years ago—before I even got here. He phoned up, too, and Saul said if nobody else had run off with it, it was still in the closet in the basement where he’d first put it.”

  Shit grinned. “Hey, Hannibal. How you doin’? You come out with your big brother, Eddie, to look around?”

  Blinking, Hannibal pulled back against his half-brother
’s shoulder.

  “Hey, there.” Shit grinned. “You know who I am?”

  Ed said, “That’s Mr. Haskell. And that’s his friend, Mr. Jeffers.”

  Eric smiled at the quick answer Ed had given to avoid Shit’s nickname.

  (How many years ago was it, Eric had asked Jay, He your new puppy?

  (Pausing with the rope he was unwrapping from the dock cleat, Jay glanced up scornfully. Nope. That kid is a straight as an arrow. Naw—what’s that guy with the one-to-five scale? Kinsey or somebody? No, he’s the wrong place on the chart. Doin’ anything with him is an idea Mex and me retired a long time ago.)

  Shit smiled, too. He said, though, “Mr. Haskell, sure—and Mr. Jeffers. We’re the garbage men, Hannibal, for Diamond Harbor and Runcible. And Hemmings.”

  “But right now,” Ed said, “they’re managin’ the big old movie theater in Runcible, while the regular managers is on vacation.”

  Hannibal pulled back even further.

  Shit said, “Why you so shy, Hannibal? We ain’t gonna eat you up.”

  Holding on to his brother’s shoulder, Hannibal didn’t say anything. Ed said, “He scared ’cause you guys are white.”

  Shit turned sharply. “Did you go tell this boy we was white? Hell, I ain’t white. I’m as much a nigger as either of you!”

  “Aw, come on,” said very dark Ed. “You know what I mean.”

  “Goddam,” Shit said. “The niggers down here don’t know nothin’—less they live in the Dump.”

  From somewhere, Hannibal located a stash of moral bravado. “They don’t show nice pitchers in that theater.”

  Eric, Shit, and Ed all laughed.

  “That’s right,” Shit said. “They don’t. But you’d be surprised how many people from all over the place, up and down this coast, come there to Runcible to see ’em anyway.”

  Ed was grinning. Above Ed’s shoulder, Hannibal looked serious.

  “Hey, Hannibal,” Shit said, “you ever stuck your finger up your nose, then put it in your mouth?”