Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “You mean with all them whips and chains and slings and stuff?” Shit sounded interested.

  “Yes—with all of them! But finally, it was easier to keep the top part of the bar opened and close off the cellar. Whenever I talked to him, Saul was always sayin’ how in a year or two, he was gonna open the cellar back up and once people knew he had a real dungeon goin’. He was always talkin’ about gettin’ Bull to run a regular session down there. People would start comin’ from all over.

  “And then he’d put up my drapes.

  “But he could never get it together enough to do either one—or open up the underground rooms. I hope somebody took a camera down there and least took pictures of the damned things—and truly damned, some of them were, I’ll tell you. Though they ranged from visions of hell to paradise.”

  *

  Later that evening, in their own pickup, driving back to the Opera, while the sky darkened to deep teal and clouds lost detail, sheeting above the sea, Eric said, “You remember a year or two back, when I sucked you and Dynamite off out in the Hemmings Interdenominational Baptist?”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “It was beautiful in there.” Tonight was beautiful, too.

  “I was just wonderin’ whether we should’a done that.”

  “Why? We didn’t bother nobody. We didn’t hurt nothin’.”

  “I was thinkin’ that maybe it was—you know, a little…crude.”

  “Fuck you…!” Shit said. He looked disgusted.

  Eric laughed. “Is that a promise?”

  “You know,” Shit said, “you are real funny, sometimes,” with no smile at all. “Hey, I get all my crude real honest like, right from my daddy. Don’t forget, that man was a first grade pig fucker ’fore he even got to work on you and me.”

  “Hey, I don’t never suck his dick without thinkin’ about that one.”

  “Oh, so that’s why you’re leakin’ all in my hand when I play with your pecker while you’re blowin’ ’im.”

  “Probably,” Eric said. “So you don’t have to blame it on the movies. Hey, come on.” He turned off toward the water front. “I’m just funnin’ you.”

  “Oh,” Shit said. “That’s what you call it!”

  * * *

  [57] FALLEN DOWN ON the right front corner, propped up with cinder blocks, fallen again, then propped again by the owner, Johnston Realty, with squat pneumatic tubes, the trailer where he and his mother had once lived still stood on the slope among the scrub pines. (Today the screening was gone from the porch; so was the iron bed frame.) For some four years, Billy had lived there, with his five dogs and his sometimes girlfriend, Matty, who’d worked for Serena during the three years she’d owned the Lighthouse. Eric wasn’t even sure where Billy and Matty—if they were still together—were living. To his clients, Billy had styled himself “Cap’n Billy,” though no one but the occasional summer visitors had ever called him that. His name—William Cox—was not even on Randal’s garbage route roster.

  Today, though, the house was padlocked and unrented.

  Alone, Eric sat on the needles among the trees. He had started out on a log, but after ten uncomfortable minutes, he’d moved over to some cardboard lying on the ground.

  The paperback was open on his knees. (Mama Grace had given him three books, actually, all by Spinoza, but had told him to start with this one.) For the thirtieth or fortieth time he closed it, to look at the worn corners—they had not been worn a week ago—at the unevenness in the spine, at the curve in it from twice making the mistake of folding it to carry it in his back pocket. Still, it wasn’t a thick book. The Renaissance painting on its cover had flaked. Here and there among its margins were Mama’s pale notes, in a handwriting that, for all its neatness, Eric found illegible.

  In a week of trying, he hadn’t read any of it.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true…

  Yes, he’d promised to read it through three times, in fact. He’d read the first few pages a hundred times. No, he thought. Not a hundred—eight, nine maybe; maybe twelve. He hadn’t understood a word. Only that wasn’t true, either. He’d understood lots of words—“the,” “and,” “of,” “God” (he was pretty sure he understood what people meant by God, however uninteresting he’d always found the notion, too small beneath the blue and silver immensity whenever he walked out of the long grass onto the rocks beside the sea), “cause,” “itself,” “understand,” even “existing.”

  He understood the words as much as he did not understand the sentence: “By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.” Now when he read it, he found himself mumbling at the page, “Well, that’s what you may understand, but I sure the fuck don’t!” But that didn’t count, because, for one thing, Mama had told him he wouldn’t understand much of it. He should be ready for that. And he was supposed to read the whole thing before he started over.

  But maybe you couldn’t do that—

  Which was when he took a deep breath and decided he was going to do it anyway.

  The day he’d got it, he’d asked Mama Grace, “Is that supposed to be a painting by Rembrandt or someone…?” He meant the cover.

  “Actually,” Mama Grace had told him, looking over his shoulder, “that’s a painting by somebody who very much wanted to paint like Rembrandt. For many years, Rembrandt lived in the same neighborhood as Spinoza—right down the street from him, in fact. Though nobody knows if they actually knew each other. They could have met, however—and probably did know each other, at least by sight.”

  Bats flicked through the upper branches. Eric had made a try at the “Introduction,” but given up after three pages, because it all seemed to be about other philosophers whom he didn’t know anything about and wasn’t interested in. And Mama Grace had said that he should read the introduction only after he finished the text proper, anyway.

  As far as Eric could tell from that initial encounter, Mama had known what he was talking about.

  Eric, who had read one Shakespeare play in high school back in Atlanta (Macbeth), turned over pages till, once more, he reached the first of the text:

  The Ethics

  DEMONSTRATED IN GEOMETRIC ORDER

  AND DIVIDED INTO FIVE PARTS,

  WHICH TREAT

  Of God

  Of the Nature and Origin of the Mind

  Of the Origin and Nature of the Affects…

  First off, he wasn’t sure what “treat” meant. (And he was sure “affects” weren’t the same as “effects.”) You gave somebody a treat, or kids went trick or treatin’ on Halloween. Or a doctor treated a disease—cured it with medicine. But that didn’t seem to be it. Probably he would need a dictionary for this thing. He had a paperback one, which he’d brought from Atlanta, among his boxes when he’d first come down, but it was in the box with his other books he hadn’t cracked since he’d been in the Harbor, stored somewhere with Barb—if she still had it. Maybe he’d have to go get it, soon. But couldn’t he make some progress without it…?

  He skipped a few lines and started at the top of the text itself, reading the words and frowning, more and more. (Deffinitions, D.1…D. 2…D. 3…) On the second page, he got halfway down and—at Axioms—looked up. The frown had become a look of pain; more, an actual pain across his forehead.

  Eric took a breath; the pain lessened…some. He turned back to the first page but hesitated before beginning again. He’d begun the thing with the expectation of not understanding it the first time through. Only he hadn’t realized his “not understanding” would be so total, so absolute, the way you might not understand something written in a foreign tongue.

  “Cause,” “essence,” “substance,” “finite,” “infinite”…those were words he understood, or, at any rate, thought he’d understood. Well, I said I was going to read it three times.

  So I am.

  That’s all.

  He began again, making himself move his eyes across words that were me
aningful, but had fallen into phrases, sentences, paragraphs that were not, on and on, and on…

  After what seemed a very long time, Eric stopped—and glanced at the page’s upper corner. It was page seven. Whatever he was getting out of it, it wasn’t worth it. That—he was convinced—was certain. But what about keeping his promise to Mama Grace? Maybe, he thought, easing back on the steps, he could pretend that was the beginning of his first reading. And just go on. No. He had to read it through. (That was a gift to him from Diamond Harbor’s boredom.) Go back, start your first reading now, and make sure you keep going.

  Wouldn’t it be interesting, he thought, if he could understand finite causes and infinite essences? As he looked through the leaves at the sky, clouds moved with stunning slowness across it. A black check mark suspended in air, a bird soared—which suddenly broke, flapping, and turned. Were there such causes, such essences out in the world? Right now, he doubted it.

  Yes, on the second time through, the first six pages were easier to— well, not read, because there was still no comprehension. But the words were easier to get through, because, surprisingly, he remembered lots of them from the first meaningless encounter.

  This time he made it through to page nineteen.

  Then started again—but stopped after three pages.

  It’s going to be meaningless, this first reading.

  You know that!

  Mama Grace had already told him that.

  Get that through your head and stop hoping for something else. Just do the first reading. He realized he was almost in tears. No, he mustn’t tell Shit or Barbara or Dynamite or Jay about this, he realized. They ain’t never gonna understand this thing I’m doing.

  He wasn’t sure he understood it himself.

  One part of why Eric was doing this, of course, was that he’d promised Mama Grace. But—Eric realized vaguely—an even larger part of that was because he was in Diamond Harbor. (Had he still been in Atlanta, promise or no promise, he’d have given up the entire project after half an hour.) Winters in the Harbor were dull. When all the garbage work or theater sweeping with Shit was done, when you’d gotten all the affection and pleasure you wanted from the two of them and given them all you could, if you didn’t get off and do something by yourself about which you were obsessive, the boredom could be nightmarish. (Shit regularly disappeared to study the minutia of the shore, the streams, the rocks.) So, again—Eric turned back to the first page of the text—he took a breath and decided that, now, he would begin his actual first reading of the whole text, whether he understood it or not—

  He looked up, then back down at the page.

  It had become too dark to read.

  * * *

  [58] ANOTHER THING THAT made the time confusing was that Shit remembered —and Eric didn’t—when Dynamite had driven them over but didn’t go into the Opera. “I’m goin’ back home. I just wanna take it easy and sit on the porch and look at some of Eric’s comic books this afternoon. Somebody’ll give you a ride home.”

  When Jay explained that, since the doctor had again told Dynamite to take some time off—and had (again) wrangled to get him medical compensation pay from the CC—they could get on salary at the theater, if they wanted to make some extra for themselves sweeping up. And Dusty said they could use the apartment over the projection room again this year, till Dynamite felt better and they could go on back to the garbage run. “You mind us stayin’ upstairs over here—to help out Hammond and Dusty?” Shit said into Hammond’s cell phone after Eric punched the numbers and handed it to him.

  “No—go on. It’ll be a blessin’ to have the bed to myself. Be that much nicer to see you, when you get back. The refrigerator’s full of food.”

  “Well,” Eric said, moving his head next to Shit’s, “if you’ll eat some of it…”

  What Eric remembered and Shit didn’t, however, was late on one of those nights, when they were still sleeping just on the ticking, and, in the dark, Eric reached over to jog Shit’s shoulder.

  “Wha…”

  “Hey, Shit…!”

  “What? I’m sleepin’.” Shit’s long, hard arms took Eric in and pulled him over as if to warm and calm and mollify him in a gesture. “I gotcha here. You’re all safe. Go on back to sleep.” It was Shit’s regular response to any nighttime waking that wasn’t a sexual advance.

  Often it made Eric wonder what terrors the coastal calm had held for Shit in his own childhood. Shit’s automatic sharing of the safety that—certainly—his father had first imparted to him, was something Eric loved. But this time he said, “Shit—Did we go down in the basement of that place?”

  “What place…?” Outside the window, moonlight was absolute and silver. But not much of it made it in through the window screening.

  “I don’t remember. I think I was…dreamin’ maybe? No, we went down in the basement, didn’t we—with a flashlight, looking at these paintings on the walls…they were really amazing.”

  “Shhhhhh…no. It was too high for me. Now go back to sleep.”

  “Oh…yeah. But I thought there, for a minute, that we…”

  Shit’s body began to squeeze against Eric’s and relax and squeeze again. And relax…and squeeze. “Come on, stick your fuckin’ tongue in my mouth and lemme suck on it…” Shit’s hand cupped the back of Eric’s head. Eric held him around his hard, flaring flanks. But after three, four, five more hunches, Shit’s hardened genitals softened, his breathing slowed. Their mouths pulled apart and Shit’s head fell back in the moonlight—eyes closed, mouth half opened, lower lip wet—and Eric turned his face down against the rough hair over Shit’s jaw, their ankles, toes, arms, and knees enmeshed.

  On the windowsill sat the three books that Mama Grace had dug out of a carton and given Eric three weeks ago.

  * * *

  [59] BEFORE SUNRISE, RAIN wrapped the Harbor’s Front Street, its one and two story buildings, with dark foil. At midday, sunlight blanched the blues, pinks, greens and even black tar paper to the rattiest ghosts of themselves, which you could not look at directly without squinting. (Ghosts, risen in light…) Nets and ropes wound through chalk-white lifesavers in store windows. Oars leaned against the buildings’ water-ward walls. Beyond all, the sea flamed.

  * * *

  [60] BECAUSE IT REPRESENTED such a change, Eric could never fill in with certainty all the things that had happened in the six months before the evening he and Shit got back from Runcible together to find Dynamite, sprawled on the cabin kitchen’s floor, mute, blind, and paralyzed—and, twenty minutes later, in the truck on the way to Runcible Memorial—where he sat between them, Dynamite’s head sagged forward. Overlong brown hair blew about his forehead—

  Simultaneously they realized he was dead.

  “It’s a stroke. He’s caught a stroke…”

  “Shut the fuck up!” Eric heart pounded as he drove. “You done told me that, ten times now…!”

  Then they turned around and drove his body back in the dark to the cabin, since they knew he’d wanted to be buried out on the island—and both of them knew enough local lore to understand that, if Runcible Memorial took him, almost certainly that would not happen.

  Through the night, it was Eric now, who did the long holding and reassuring. With Shit, that meant several bouts of sex during the morning hours. “You really want to?”

  “Yeah, I want to. Will you stop jawin’ and lemme get off?”

  “Hey, it’s okay. That’s fine. Lemme get on down there and you grab a-hold my head, the way you like.”

  Later, Eric woke to a haze of purple light, flooding from the open door to the side porch and through the windows open toward the sea.

  Naked, Shit stood by the bed, as if unsure whether or not to climb in. Behind him the sheet lightning flickered, faded, flared again, and was gone.

  Shit held something—small—in both hands up near his chest.

  Eric pushed up from the pillow on an elbow. “Hey, what is it?”

  “I got…my money c
ard.” Shit sounded wholly lost. “I just remembered…that I should probably have it.”

  “What you mean…?”

  “You know. That he keeps for me. When he gets my money…at the Union. How he said I should have it…”

  Twisting up his face, Eric realized Shit meant his ATM card that Dynamite had kept in his own wallet. “Oh, yeah…that’s good. Did you get his?” He took it from Shit’s fingers. It bore the picture of the orange water pump before the Dump Produce fields that had once been Miles Turpens’s.

  On the bedroom wall, four feet from the door, hung Jay’s framed enlargement of the same pump, smiling Dynamite, ol’ Stove Pipe, and trees instead of fields that Dynamite had hung there at Shit’s urging.

  “You should take his whole wallet. That stuff is yours now.”

  “That’s stealin’…”

  “No, it ain’t, Shit,” Eric said. “At least I don’t think so. Go on. Bring the whole wallet in. We’ll put it in the drawer by the bed here—probably we’re gonna need that stuff later. You know—his cards and things.”

  “The money and everything?”

  “Yeah. Really. It’s yours now.”

  “I just thought I’d take the card, and you could hold it for me—like, you know, he did.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “I’ll do that. But we gonna need his other stuff, too…”

  Shit turned and went outside—and Eric thought, I should have gone and got that for him! What am I makin’ him do that for? I ain’t thinkin’ clear! On the porch, the tarp rustled and crackled. Again, summer lightning bleached the sky pale purple.

  Shit walked back in, slowly. “He’s really dead. I thought before, maybe I’d go out there and he’d be breathin’ again. But he ain’t. Damn, takin’ his wallet like that—that felt funny.” He thrust it forward over the bed. “Here—you put it away, now. It got sixty-two dollars in it.”