Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“You counted it already…?”
“Yeah…before. The first time. When I got my card. I thought somebody might wanna know. So I could tell ’em how much was there. And that…nobody had taken none.”
Eric sat up and took the dark leather rectangle with its rounded corners and its curve from Dynamite’s hip. Against it was Shit’s ATM card. He put them on the table.
“You gonna leave ’em there?”
“Just till we get up tomorrow.
“Oh…”
Eric could not imagine Shit sounding more desolate. “You know your card number?” Or…any younger.
“It’s got it, right there—across the plastic.”
“No,” Eric said. “I mean your…code number—your PIN number, that you have to enter to get your cash.”
“Oh, yeah.” Turning, Shit sat on the bed, one knee up on the mattress. “It’s my birthday. I remember when we was gettin’ ’em, they told us we shouldn’t use no birthdays, ’cause that was too easy for people to figure out. Or your license plate or stuff like that. So he decided since nobody would be usin’ that, ’cause they’d told ’em not to, I’d use that for mine anyway—that way I could remember it. And nobody would figure on it, ’cause they already said we shouldn’t. The ninth of May, nineteen eighty-eight.”
“Oh, yeah…” Eric took in a breath. “Sure. Come over here with me, now.” Shit turned and pushed over the bed toward him. For moments Eric thought, with hands and feet and knees and chin all together, Shit was trying to climb into him or through him. He was making whimpering noises, not quite crying, even as his dick hardened against Eric’s belly.
“God, I wanna fuck him. I wanna fuck ’im again. At least once more. I wanna fuck him—so bad…” He hugged Eric tight enough to hurt Eric’s neck. Then he whispered, “When I was goin’ into his pants, for the wallet…I got a hard-on. You think I could go out there and just stick it in him, somewhere? Up his asshole or something—”
“No!” Eric said, and held him back. “No, you can’t! I don’t think that’s healthy, Shit. Besides, he’s probably too stiff—you know, with rigor mortis.”
“Maybe it might wake ’im up. Or jar his heart, or somethin’.”
Lightning again washed the sky with purple. The expression on Shit’s face hung—surprising Eric—between frustration and terror.
“No, Shit. He’s really dead. I wish he wasn’t, too…”
“Then I’m gonna fuck you!”
“Fine! Go on…”
In a light drizzle, Dynamite lay on the porch outside. Newspaper under him, the tarpaulin above him, through the night he stiffened. Bone and muscle wrapped Eric’s chest. Shit’s hips hammered Eric’s buttocks—as he felt tears slide between Shit’s jaw and across the back of his own shoulder.
Closer to morning, when the rain became heavy, and their feet tangled in the blue quilt at the big bed’s bottom, Eric sat up, leaned to the side, and pulled the lamp chain so that the light came on through the reddish-yellow shade. The wallet and the Credit Union ATM card lay beside him. Shit was already sitting up, hugging his knees, while the pock-pock-pock of big drops on the roof beckoned Eric toward sleep. He glanced to see Shit looking at him with an intensity that, for moments, along with the exhaustion, made Eric feel he didn’t recognize the bearded face of the coffee-skinned black man in bed with him. As Eric leaned forward to tug the sheet loose from the quilt, Shit hooked an arm around Eric and pulled him back against him with a firmness that convinced Eric that Shit had been searching Eric’s body—Eric’s mouth, his rectum, under his arms, his body’s entire surface—with his tongue, his penis, his rough thumbs and fingers, for something sex simply would not yield.
Sitting up once more, Eric managed to pull the lamp cord again, and, in the dark, turn and return Shit’s embrace, astounded and excited enough to overcome his exhaustion, in the grip of Shit’s toes, his fingers, his knees. In the cabin, natural and adopted sons, the two grasped each other, while outside, above the Dump, purple lightning shocked the summer sea—
Did Shit think sex would release him from mourning?
But that’s how Shit was made. Though Eric wondered about it, it didn’t actually bother him…
The Asian—Philip—had been in winter. The summer lightning the night of Dynamite’s death meant…well, Dynamite had died in summer. Yet the fact that Dynamite’s comment, from that night with the three of them, “…Hell, I’m so tired, anyway,” came back to Eric, as he lay with Shit, made it seem it was only a few weeks, even days before. And that, both knew, was impossible.
* * *
[61] AT THE OPERA, Myron—the projectionist—came through, though. “I know Mr. Haskell is real upset about his daddy. Don’t blame ’im. Them two was close. Real close. Dynamite did ever’thin’ for that boy—probably gonna take him a while to settle into the idea he’s gone.” Flatly, Myron refused to call either of his erstwhile bosses other than “mister,” though both were his junior by more than a decade. “I could say somethin’ about that’s what happens if you get too close with your own kin. But I don’t need to. That ain’t no part of my business.”
Eric sighed. “Yeah, Shit’s pretty upset.” He tugged his hands from his jeans pockets. “It’s like he’s really depressed. I’m sorry this has all happened right now, Myron.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about his and Shit’s sex life. Still, he said, “I guess everybody around here knows about Shit and Dynamite, huh?”
Myron took off his glasses. “Your mama don’t.” He pulled his handkerchief from the watch pocket in his vest to polish the lenses. “And it sure ain’t my place to tell her.” Despite the black rims, his lenses were the kind that darkened in the sun. Myron was proud of them. Shit and Eric had chuckled about them together, since Myron spent days at a time in the theater without going out into the light.
“I wish I could tell Barbara—she really likes Shit. I know she’d want to help him. But you’re right, she don’t know about that—about what he’s really grievin’ over.”
Myron blinked at Eric, and Eric wondered: Is he thinkin’ about me…?
Myron said, “Your mama’s a good lady. If she sees Mr. Haskell, she’ll know he’s hurtin’. She’ll do the right thing by him. You gotta trust that one.”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “Maybe.” Though he wasn’t sure.
“My second cousin, Obeline,” Myron said, “was that way about her brother—and I tell you, nobody in my family had a decent word to say to either of ’em, ’cause Hector was a nasty drunk and beat Obeline and wouldn’t work, and all he wanted to do was lay up with her and live that nasty life they had, in that old fallin’ down trailer of theirs. But you couldn’t say a word against him to her, or she’d take a skillet to your head.
“‘Nobody understands me like Hector.’ That’s all she had to say.
“Then he died. Drunk himself to death—probably out of guilt for gettin’ five kids off his own blood kin—the two boys that lived, anyway.
“It took Obeline three years ’afore she could talk civil to people who were only trying to pass the time o’ day with her and be respectful of her loss. I felt sorry for her—mean ol’ bitch. The kids run off and don’t nobody know where they are, ceptin’ they run in opposite directions. People go the way they go; and grieve the way they grieve.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” In the darkness of the upper balcony aisle, beside the projection room door, the theater had a smell that Eric had wondered about recently. “You don’t think Shit’s gonna take three years to get it back together, do you? Or maybe ever…I mean, losin’ a parent should be natural—” What interrupted him were some thoughts about why losing a parent like Dynamite might not be.
“You was pretty close to that man, too…”
A wave of sadness welled in Eric and made him sway, with burning eyes. “Yeah…I guess I was.”
Myron put on his glasses, looked up, and blinked at the ceiling—only ten inches overhead here—with its pastel gods and chariots and swans and g
iant butterflies, far enough away to be invisible from the orchestra (unless the cleaning lights were on), but so low that, here behind the waist-high wall along the back of Nigger Heaven—Eric was gripping it now—with many of its original hardwood seats down toward the top balcony rail, some two dozen black men and that big retarded homeless white guy from Tennessee, Haystack, sitting or sleeping among them. When he came to the Opera, Al Havers couldn’t even walk upright here.
In the three-quarter dark, you could raise your hand and touch the dim paint.
“Far as I’m concerned,” Myron said, “this here is an act of God. Take a couple more days—a week if you want. I’ll get Josh to come in and lend a hand with the cleanin’. When you come on by, give me a twenty for ’im and I’ll slip it to him. But I don’t want ’im to have no fifties—not enough for a full bottle of the hard stuff. You do that, and he gonna get hisself sick.”
“Sure.” Though Eric was not enthusiastic about giving Josh the run of the Opera, Hammond and Dusty still had a week before they were expected back, and stuff remained to do at the Dump—cleaning out the cabin, going through bags of bedding and clothing that never had made it into the wash, getting ready for the burial, over on Gilead, which—somehow—Jay had arranged.
Eric had already been back and forth twice that day.
* * *
[62] WHEN, FOR THE third time, Eric got back to the Dump in the pickup, Bull was there, pulling together a load of junk from in and around the cabin. Out on the deck, Eric asked Shit quietly, “Did he ask if he could have that stuff?”
“I told him he could take anything he wanted—long as it wasn’t yours. I don’t wanna see none of it no more,” while, in his great boots and no shirt, the waist of his pants halfway down the crack between buttocks black as two cannon balls and, when he turned, his snarled pubic hair above the sagging steel button on his jeans, Black Bull tramped in and out, choosing this piece of an outboard and that wheelless barrow and fifty other things—rusted tools, an old amp meter, a box of screws, a roll of electrical tape.
“Where’s Whiteboy?” Eric asked. “Ain’t he gonna give you a hand with this stuff?” Sometimes Eric felt odd referring to the scrawny man, now in his middle or late-forties, who moved so awkwardly and smelled bad, as a boy. But that’s how it had settled.
“He’s kinda busy.” Bull frowned at a length of chain he’d picked up. “Don’t worry. He’ll be dere for de funeral, tomorrow.”
Eric looked at Bull’s pile and wondered if this wasn’t how junk circulated eternally through the Dump. Askew on it was an open shoe carton—probably it had been sitting on some shelf—full of old-fashioned ovoid incandescent bulbs—that, vaguely, he remembered Dynamite replacing, years ago, with the spiral, low-wattage florescent ones you saw everywhere now, even in the back john at Turpens, so that you no longer noticed them. In the box, the round milky ones—each with a cap of dust—though, today two decades old, looked ancient.
Mama Grace brought over a casserole—which they heated in the oven and generally picked at—and hauled junk in the garbage truck off from the cabin to the dumpster.
Shit himself hadn’t done much—and only what Eric had asked of him —to hold a box, to move some stuff from the porch.
Eric, Jay, and Mex did most of it. (They’d come by, half an hour after Bull.) Basically Shit sat and stared over the deck rail and rocked on the back legs of his chair.
Jay had gotten the internment sanctioned with the help of a funeral home in Hemmings.
“’Cause I know neither of you know how to get a man buried around here—these people helped me with Shad.” The previous morning, they had taken the body away so quickly, Eric had begun to wonder if he’d ever see it again. “They’re pretty oblign’.”
Apparently, Jay—or the Chamber of Commerce by way of Jay—was paying for that, too.
“Oh, wow!” Eric stood in front of the cabin with Jay and Mex and the dark-suited funeral manager. (Up on the porch, Shit looked as if his grayed jeans were going to fall off him any moment, while he stood watching.) “Thank you! I don’t…don’t know what to say.”
Eric looked up at Shit again, who was clenching his jaw. Two tears crawled from Shit’s right eye. So Mex turned, went up to the cabin, then hugged Shit, who clumsily hugged him back and made a sound, deep in his throat, as though he were the one who couldn’t speak.
“Or at least,” Jay said, “I got Kyle wrangling with the Chamber of Commerce from Columbus to make them foot some of the bills for a goddam public servant of thirty-seven years. At least I think it’s been that long—he was the Dump’s garbage man since he was nineteen. For a couple of years on and off, I remember, he was ol’ Hank’s assistant, before Hank retired and went to live with his mother-in-law in Tallahassee. Hey, Shit? That goes for you, too, son.” He nodded at Eric. “Kyle, he really thought your dad was somethin’ special.” Jay sighed. “Hell, so did I.”
Shit just looked bewildered.
Eric had never heard of Hank before—but assumed he was someone who had hauled garbage for the county. It was interesting to think of the two or three years of Dynamite’s life as a garbage man, even before Shit became his helper, that he’d never mentioned.
For Eric the afternoon was a bunch of strangely disparate details. The man from Hemmings said that, as next of kin, Shit had to sign some papers.
Shit looked toward Eric and said, “He do that.”
In his glasses and dark suit, the Hemmings man looked confused. But Jay nodded at him to go ahead, so the man handed the paper and a red ballpoint pen to Eric, who, using the cabin rail for backing, wrote down “Eric Linden Jeffers for Morgan Haskell,” and Shit put an “X” beside it.
As easy as it was for Eric to say, well, Shit’s father, workmate, and major sex partner since his, well…infancy, had just died, along with the disorientation from having the major adult in Shit’s life vanish, Shit’s lassitude worried—no, scared Eric. Was it the same disorientation Eric himself felt, only at a greater intensity? And, if so, how much greater? Shit had two ways of describing his feelings: he felt fine—or he felt poorly. Nuances of poorly—or nuances of fine, for that matter—were not easy for Eric to get, apart from what Eric could figure for himself from the situation. In the three days since Dynamite’s death, Eric’s quiet inquiries, “How you feelin’?” had all gotten curt “poorlys.”
Remembering the marathon sex from the night of Dynamite’s death, that evening Eric tried to involve Shit in sex again: Shit had done it—but about as half-heartedly as Eric could imagine someone doing it who actually dropped a load.
*
At the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg, five-thirty the next morning, Barbara arrived two minutes after Shit and Eric and Mama Grace, to let them in. (Izaak had loaned her a key.) She wore a white dress, black and white shoes, and, as far as Eric could tell, no more lipstick than the one-time-seminarian. Looking out as the car turned away, Eric asked her, “Ron ain’t comin’?”
“No, honey. He’s gonna come back up here later and get me, when the burial’s over.”
“Oh.”
Then Black Bull and Whiteboy’s pickup coughed outside. Both climbed out and, seconds later, shouldered into the place, in black jeans and black denim jackets (now, at least, Bull wore a belt) buttoned up to the collar, and their scuffed engineers boots. Black Bull looked massive and uncomfortable and sat down in the corner, crossing an ankle over his thigh.
Eric glanced over.
No sole covered Bull’s cracked and blackened foot bottom. Within the oval, cut (or worn) away in the leather, from the immense pads of his toes to the broad heel, the rough, broken skin was dead black and bare. Bony, gawky, Whiteboy stood behind him, smiling, grubby, and nervous. Under his jacket Whiteboy’s dog collar sat below a ring of grime around his neck. Above it was a lighter streak where it seemed to have rubbed away some dirt.
Eventually, Bull switched ankles:
The other boot sole too was gone. Did anyone else see—or know, Eric wondered—or
remember?
The ceiling fans were gone. Three years back Izaak had put in air conditioning.
Al Havers and Eddie Miller and Tad showed up in work clothes, as had Eric—and Shit, who kind of wandered between the Lighthouse chairs and tables without really focusing on anything. Ed’s hands and green T-shirt were clean—and he wore new black and white basketball sneakers. The others looked as if they were getting off work, not starting in. Having gone on at four, though, probably the garbage drivers were getting some of the day off for the burial.
Mama Grace entered in drab fatigues, with a black scarf around his neck and his hair pulled back in a rough ponytail. Though they’d never met till now, Barbara and Mama Grace fell to discussing how nice mornings were this time of year. Then Jay and Mex came in—Mex in work shoes and socks—with the man from the Hemmings funeral parlor.
Jay told Eric he’d already asked the garbage drivers if they would dig.
Two minutes later, outside Eric heard a car. Through the scallops of the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg’s café curtains, Eric saw the top of a gray vehicle slow, then stop. He wasn’t really paying attention to it—or he would have realized who it was. To the extent he was thinking about it, he thought it was an early customer who expected them to be open. Or maybe it was Izaak, who’d stopped by to see how things were going but wasn’t going to the island.
Seconds later, someone knocked—an odd way to come into a coffee shop. Though, of course, it was still before seven.
Because he was standing near it, Shit turned to pull back the door.
Standing with a hand on the jamb was a broad black man, balding, in black jeans, a black denim jacket and a blue denim shirt beneath, like a neater version of Whiteboy or Bull.
It made Eric aware of how worn, frayed, and ragged Bull and his partner were.
The top three jacket buttons were open; so were the top two shirt buttons. A gold chain hugged his dark neck. “Hey, Shit—me and Big Man came up ’cause—you know—we wanted to pay our respects. To your dad…? And to you and…” Joe Markum nodded over Shit’s shoulder—“well, Eric, here.”