Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Yeah,” Hannibal said. “But I ain’t supposed to.”

  “See, there?” Shit turned to Eric. “He says he does I, too.”

  “I hope he don’t do that!” Ed hefted his younger brother higher on his shoulder. “That’s disgusting—why you wanna ask him if he do stuff like that?”

  There was a noise behind them, and Eric glanced back. Mama Grace was finally coming up the steps, with a great pile of something in his arms. About a meter square, it was wrapped in brown paper with a few rips.

  Eric turned back to see Shit, looking all excited and grinning back and forth between him and Hannibal. “If your big brother thinks that’s disgustin’, I’m gonna show you guys somethin’ that’ll really gross you out. Now, see—Eric here is my partner. That’s why we can do somethin’ like this, an’ it’s okay. And by the way, I don’t think he’d do this with no white feller. I sure wouldn’t. Come on, we gonna show Hannibal what we can do.”

  Knowing where it was going, doubtfully Eric said, “Okay—go on.”

  Shit reached over and pushed his forefinger into Eric’s nearer nostril. When Shit did it straight out like that, because his fingers were so thick, it stretched enough to hurt. But Eric let him.

  Ed asked, “What the fuck you doin’—?”

  “Now, watch it here, Hannibal. Watch it, now. Come on, Eric. Snort somethin’ out—gimme a nice big crusty piece. Eric, see, is like my little brother.”

  Eric gave a sharp snort to loosen anything further up, while Shit turned his finger one way, then the other. Eric felt the wreckage of Shit’s fore nail against the inner flesh.

  Ed said, “What the…?”

  “Okay, now let’s see what I got.” Faintly hooking his finger, Shit pulled his hand down and free. Something dry peeled loose inside Eric’s nose and dragged something softer after it.

  “Now, look at that!” Shit said. “Ain’t that a real nice piece? All crusty and yelller and got a big blob of wet stuff hanging off it—”

  Ed breathed, “Goddam…” through a scowl.

  “Hey—! That’s the nicest piece I seen in a real long time.” Then Shit put his ladened forefinger in his mouth—and pulled it out…clean. After making exaggerated chewing motions with his jaw, he swallowed and said, “See, now—all gone. Wow, that was a good one! Real tasty.”

  “Jesus!” Ed stepped back. “Why you gonna show ’im somethin’ like that for? Yall are crazy.”

  But it was Eric who laughed. “Hey, it don’t mean nothin’. You know how the boat guys is always doin’ that stuff with the night crawlers, hangin’ ’em out their mouths? Pretending to eat ’em up?”

  “Or that wrestler they used to have on television a hundred years ago,” Shit added, “who ate the worms. I don’t think he’s been on for a while now.”

  “Yeah. But Billy—” whose own boat went out pretty infrequently these days to take the parties of summer people—“didn’t actually eat the fuckin’ things!”

  “Huh?” Shit asked. “Come on, Eddie. You don’t think I actually ate a finger full of Eric’s goddam motherfuckin’ snot, do you? Hey—it’s a trick!”

  Frowning, Ed asked back, “Huh?”

  “It’s a trick, I said.” Shit grinned.

  Ed asked, “How’s it a trick…?”

  Shit said, “I can’t tell you that. Then it wouldn’t be a trick no more.”

  “But you gotta have two people in on it,” Eric said. “Just one can’t do it by himself.”

  “Come on,” Shit said. “Don’t go tellin’ him how we do it. Shut up, now. But it’s a good one, ain’t it? Betcha Hannibal ain’t never seen one like that before.”

  Ed said, “Well, I know people always talked about how, when you was a kid, sometimes they’d catch you eatin’ your own.”

  In delayed response, Hannibal scowled. “Oooooh—that’s dirty!”

  “Yeah, just like Hannibal, here.” Shit grinned at the kid, who did not grin back. “But, see, that’s why I went and learned how to do the trick,” Shit said, stepping to the side. “So I could gross people out who’d think I was really doing it.”

  “Oh…” Ed did not sound convinced. “Yeah…”

  Then, from behind them, Mama Grace called, “Success!”

  Eric and Shit turned to see where Mama had come up, stepping carefully over the ragged flooring, holding the great package of folded cloth. “Now Scarlet will be able to have her very own ball gown. You know I gave these to Saul to put up, twenty years ago. They were my aunt’s drapes, and Saul was going to decorate the whole downstairs. A dungeon—with drapes? I think that’s so cunning. Only he never got to it. These things have been sitting there in that closet, right where we put them, all this time. Well, I am going to eventually take them with me to Savannah, when I get around to movin’.” Then he frowned back and forth. “What yall standing around lookin’ so funny about?” (Mama Grace’s potential move had been talked and anticipated and prepared for more than a year.)

  Ed said, “Shit here—um, Mr. Haskell just ate a finger-full of Mr. Jeffers’ boogers to show Hannibal. He said it was a trick.”

  There was something about Ed’s seriousness that started Shit laughing; then Eric started, too, because it really was funny—to see the bemusement on Ed’s dark face.

  Mama Grace said, “Really, Morgan…” and shook his head. “You know, I think the time you two very nice young fellows have spent over in that movie house has…well, coarsened you. I’m not saying anything against it. I’ve been known to drop in there myself, and occasionally have a very pleasant time. But that is, well…still a little crude.”

  “Yeah, why don’t you come over there and say hello? You know we’ll always let you in for nothin’—”

  “Oh, I don’t mind payin’ my own way,” Mama Grace said over the package’s top.

  “You, too, Eddie. You can’t bring the little guy in.” Shit reached over and pushed Hannibal’s chin with his foreknuckle. “It ain’t like it’s gay stuff. The movies is all straight—except when we run them ‘queer classics,’ like Kansas City Trucking, or Boys in the Sand, or L. A. Tool and Dye. But we always put up an announcement outside for them, so folks don’t wander in by mistake ’cause they’re expectin’ women with big titties gettin’ their cunts all fucked.”

  Hannibal looked over at his brother: “You gonna go see them pitchurs?”

  Ed just set his jaw and stepped back again. “Come on—don’t talk like that.”

  Mama Grace said, “Ed, you want us to run you into town? There’s room.”

  “We walked out here,” Ed said. “We can walk back. Thank you, though, I guess.”

  “Suit yourself.” Mama Grace blinked his artificial lashes. “Morgan, you look like you’re about to fall down and roll around on the ground there. Ain’t nothin’ that funny. Come on, now. Get yourself together, and take these back to the car…”

  But Shit was laughing so hard Eric took the package from Mama Grace instead.

  *

  In the van, when they were driving back, Shit pulled his work shoe up on the seat and started to unlace it. At the wheel, Mama Grace said, “Morgan Haskell, if you take that shoe off in here, I will stop this car and put you out in the woods, and you can walk back to the Dump. I am not kidding! A couple of times I walked in on your father at your place when he’d just taken his off—I know yours can’t be much better, and I do not want that smell in here!”

  “Okay, Mama.” Shit’s voice held as much humor as resignation. He slid his shoe to the floor.

  “I wanna get back and make sure Dynamite gets somethin’ to eat,” Eric said. “There’s a whole refrigerator full of food I run up for ’im—stuff he likes, too—but he’ll get up and walk all the way down to Hurter’s and get a candy bar or a stick of jerky ’stead of takin’ food out the refrigerator and heatin’ it up.”

  Shit grunted.

  “And you ain’t too much better,” Eric said, over the seat back. “Hey, Mama?”

  Mama Grace pushed the gearshift an
d they swung to the left. “What…?”

  “You really think we’re coarse?”

  “As a persimmon against its growth, a week before it’s ripe.”

  “And you think that’s from workin’ over at the Opera?”

  They bounced through the woods a few seconds more. “Now, that’s an interestin’ question.” Mama sounded thoughtful.

  Eric bounced along in the back seat, waiting.

  “You know pleasure is a funny thing. It always comes on the other side of some barrier or other. I mean, sometimes it’s just payin’ a man at the ticket booth, so you can get in to see the picture show. Sometimes, it’s havin’ to climb up a hill, so you can see the view—or even turn around and stand there long enough to look out at something that you enjoy. Some of them barriers are a lot stronger than others. But even the most ordinary little boy and little girl that go slippin’ off and start kissin’ and makin’ out, if their mama or their daddy catches them, then it’s, ‘Get outa there and stop that! Get on back to your house, now.’ That’s the one they gotta get through. It may not be a big one. But if it’s two little boys, say, and they catch ’em carryin’ on like that, instead of just tellin’ ’em to get on home, they might go in, beat on ’em, maybe break their arms—that’s what happened to some kids I heard about back where I was brung up. And if it was your older brother and his friends what caught you, sometimes they’d take you in the barn and brand you on your ass or your belly, like a damned cow. But to find that pleasure, you got to remember that barrier you had to get through, whatever it was.”

  “That’s what folks like Shad wanted to do,” Shit said. “But he can’t do that no more—’cause he’s fuckin’ dead. Besides, Jay and Mex wouldn’t let him. That’s why Mr. Kyle set up the Dump.”

  “Oh, but there are still barriers. Even around here—with Jay lookin’ out for us and Mr. Kyle puttin’ some of his considerable moneys into Dump Produce Farms, and the Dump bein’ a haven for people who, most of ’em, have had some bad times, and wanna be left alone to do like they want, now.”

  “What’s that got to do with bein’ crude?”

  “Well, I was thinking, right when you were askin’, that you two had a different set of barriers to cross to find your pleasure—to find each other, maybe. See, you learned to get through yours—or over yours, or around yours—up there in the city. Your father’s disapproval, if not your mama’s. And you, Shit, learned to get over yours down here—”

  “Hey, I didn’t have no barriers to nothin’,” Shit said.

  “Oh, yes, you did.” Mama Grace nodded. “They were easier than Eric’s. That’s all.” Mama Grace pulled around on the wheel. “I think learnin’ how to get over the barriers that Eric done got over—’cause those were closer to the kind that I had to get over, too—gives you a certain sort of…well, moral strength. But, by the same token, living pretty much your whole life with that pleasure, like you done, because the barriers were so easy to cross that you didn’t even think of them as barriers, that teaches you somethin’, too—somethin’ else, though. A kind of fineness of perception, a delicacy and an ability to know the details.”

  “But that’s the opposite of coarseness—of crudeness,” Eric said.

  “Yes,” Mama Grace said. “It is. But, you see, each of you knows something the other doesn’t—and I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes you both a whole lifetime to teach it to the other, if you ever do. If you’re coarse, you’re each coarse only relative to the other. That’s all.”

  “Hey, Mama,” Shit said—they were still not out of the woods—“you was gonna be some kind of priest, once—wasn’t you?”

  “A minister, dear. I was at the Baptist Theological Seminary, in New Orleans. A very serious seminary student I was, too.”

  “That would have been interesting—I don’t think there are a lot of priests…ministers who look like you.”

  “Why didn’t you keep on?” Eric asked from the back seat. “What happened?”

  “Well, one day I was reading Spinoza—working my way carefully through the Ethics, perfectly charmed by the broad and generous vision of a universe constituted entirely of and by its god that underlay that intricate imbrication of definitions and axioms and theorems and scolia and demonstrations, when suddenly it hit me: there could be no God. Spinoza says as much: God cannot be a being apart from the rest of the universe who looks in on it and thinks about it and wishes it to be one way rather than the other. If God wanted anything, then he would be lacking something and thus could not be all-powerful and perfect—and therefore would not be God. It struck me with the force that the insight behind the second definition in chapter one must have at one time struck Spinoza himself—that mind could not effect matter directly, without the intervention of a living organic body—”

  From the back seat, Eric said, “Emet yeshalom yasoud ha’ollam…”

  Mama Grace glanced back. “What did you say?”

  “Emet yeshalom. . .” Eric repeated, then shrugged. “I don’t know, really…”

  Mama Grace stopped the car, then turned in the seat, frowning. “I never knew you were Jewish, honey…”

  Eric said, “I ain’t.”

  “Well, then how come you can speak Hebrew?”

  “I can’t,” Eric said. “That’s all I remember. This guy had it on his door. I remember he said it had something to do with Spinoza.”

  “What’s this Spinoza?” Shit asked.

  “He was a seventeenth century Dutch philosopher, my dear—his parents had come from Portugal, and he lived in Amsterdam, right around the corner from the painter Rembrandt,” Mama Grace said. “At least when he was a boy. Eventually, he moved to a suburb, called the Hague. Do you know what it means—what you just said?”

  “You said Hebrew,” Shit said. “That’s—Jew talk, huh?”

  Eric said, “Something about Peace and Truth—”

  “—form the Foundation of the World,” Mama Grace concluded. “Oh, yes, I had to study Hebrew at the school…”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Shit asked.

  “A…friend of mine had it on his door,” Eric said. “I guess I learned it—you know how you remember things from when you were a kid?”

  Mama Grace said, “It was written over another doorway, too, of a house that Spinoza’s father would take his son to visit often, when he was a young boy in Amsterdam. And he saw it again and again—and read it over and over. Scholars have speculated that it influenced him, in his own pursuit of pleasure and knowledge.”

  “Now, see,” Eric said, “I never knew that. What were his own ideas all about?”

  “I think I actually have an old copy of the Ethics—that’s his major work—somewhere on a bookshelf. That’ll be my going away present to you, if you’ll promise me you’ll actually read it.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “I’ll give it a try.” He wondered if he’d seen the title somewhere before, and if so, where…

  “Ah,” Mama Grace said, turning back to the wheel and slipping the clutch into gear. “But will you give it ten tries—cover to cover? Or even three? It’s not a very long book. But I’ll warn you, it’s not easy.” The roomy van lurched forward. “Spinoza could believe in his universal godhead because he knew nothing of Daltonian chemistry—not to mention the organic chemistry that actually solves the intermediary problems in some ways we are still not sure of. Consciousness, at least as we know it, has to be a molecular phenomenon—not atomic, not mechanical—and is certainly restricted to the heat window in which proteins can survive. If its components had any existence at a greater or lesser granularity, consciousness would not be what its components form, any more than a bar of calcium, a gallon or so of water, and a bag of various minerals constitute a human or even an animal body.” (Shit was looking out the window.) “And at the same moment—indeed, for me it was part of the same revelation—I realized that I did not have to take off my Maroon Passion nail polish every Sunday night with cotton balls and nail polish remover so
that I could to go to class on Monday morning and not scandalize my fellow seminary students and teachers. What’s more, I was free to do anything that did not hurt others that strengthened me and helped me in the one thing that we are all put on this earth to do: help one another—because it is the only thing that, in the long run, gives us pleasure, as receiving love and friendship and affection is the only thing that gives us joy and ameliorates the dread of our inevitable extinction.” At the wheel, Mama Grace took in a long breath. “That very same summer, I came down here to Diamond Harbor for the first time. (You were about eleven years old and a perfect terror, Morgan—I’m sorry, I mean Shit—as I recall. My heart really went out to your father.) Six months later, they discontinued Maroon Passion—the cosmetics industry is fickle, fickle, fickle! With my complexion, I always thought that color did so much for me. It was elegant, understated, and hot as hell. There’re colors that I make due with today, but—” he sighed—“they are not Maroon Passion.”

  “You know,” Shit said, back over his shoulder to Eric, “I fucked Mama here the first time when I was twelve.” He looked back. “Remember you had that outhouse behind your place? You didn’t have no indoor plumbin’ back then. I went and sat in that thing, all mornin’, beatin’ off, waitin’ for you to come in there. And when you opened the door and looked down and seen me, you was so surprised…I still remember it.” He laughed.

  “And that,” Mama Grace said, “is what I mean by crude.”

  The car bounced through the underbrush.

  “I wonder if Ed was over there to see the murals,” Mama Grace mused. They had hit a small macadam road, and down a slope they could now see the water.

  Eric said, “What murals?”

  Shit said, “What’s a mural?”

  “A mural is a big painting on a wall. When Saul first opened that place, he had really big plans for it.”

  “There ain’t any walls left in it,” Shit said, “and I sure didn’t see no paintin’s on the ones left.”

  “Downstairs,” Mama Grace said. “In the cellar. You should have come on down with me and looked around. On the walls, there. Those are some of the wildest imaginings I’ve ever seen.”