Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  That’s when Eric realized that Shit blocked his view of a second person in the doorway. Eric stepped to the side to see the small fellow, with his broad, high forehead down at his dad’s waist, his wide shoulders in an oversized tweed jacket, supporting himself on two half-sized crutches today, his crooked half-length leg between in a cut down trouser leg. He smiled up at Shit.

  “Hey,” Eric said, for the other people in the room, “it’s Big Man, and his dad, Mr. Markum.” And maybe for Shit, too, who looked as if he hadn’t recognized them. “Hello, Sir. Hey, Big Man.”

  “I mean,” Joe Markum said, “I hope it’s okay we come—that we come by, I mean. If we ain’t in the way—”

  Then Shit did something kind of…strange. He squatted down, and, in his short-sleeve green shirt—there was a rip, Eric saw, for the first time, under one arm—flung his arms around the little guy and buried his sparse beard in Big Man’s neck. One of Big Man’s crutches got knocked from under his arm, to clatter across the sill.

  Big Man laughed. “Hey—wait up, there! Come on, Shit—don’t knock me over!”

  Even with Shit in a squat, Big Man had to strain upward on his single leg to get his chin over Shit’s shoulder.

  “Come on, now, I said. Don’t hug me so tight. You gonna bus’ loose my hose pipe and wet us both down!” Big Man’s thick, short fingers barely got around Shit’s green shoulders.

  The shirt wasn’t tucked in and Shit’s beltless jeans pulled three inches down his butt crack. (As usual, he wore no underpants.)

  Finally, Big Man moved one hand up around the back of Shit’s head, to pat him there. And grunted.

  From the way Shit’s back was shaking, for moments Eric thought he was laughing. Big Man must have realized, first, though, that it wasn’t laughter.

  “Hey, come on now—it’s gonna be all right. It’s okay. It’s okay, now. Don’t worry, it’s gonna be okay. Believe me, it’ll be fine.” Big Man’s wide stubby hand patted Shit neck. “You ain’t feelin’ too hot, now. But you’ll be okay.”

  The shaking continued. At the same time, Shit’s body began to contract and relax against the little fellow.

  “Hey, come on, now. Come on—you relax, now.”

  It was neither surprise nor disbelief—more ironic recognition: Aw, Jesus, Eric thought. He’s gonna try and fuck the little guy right here…?

  “Come on,” Big Man repeated and, with his arm on Shit’s shoulder, began to push him away.

  Finally, Shit raised his head to rasp in a breath. “I’m sorry…” His voice sounded like any lost alcoholic’s among the homeless crashing at the Opera. “It just feels better when I…hold somebody.”

  “Sure,” Big Man said. “Sure. I know.”

  Eric stepped over, put one hand on Shit’s shoulder, then bent to lift the fallen crutch and handed it to the black dwarf, who pulled it under his arm and hopped a step back, while Shit pushed upright, his face smeared with tears.

  “See,” Joe Markum said, “we just wanted to come by, ’cause we wanted you to know we was feelin’ for you.”

  “Un-huh,” Shit managed to say. “Thank you. Yeah, thank you.”

  “I mean, if we won’t be in the way.”

  Eric felt a sudden weight against his shoulder, a hard arm around him. Something blocked his vision—and almost pulled him down.

  Shit was hugging him.

  So Eric held Shit awkwardly, rubbing his back, while Shit cried against his neck. “There, you’re gonna be fine. You go on and cry,” Eric said. “Nothin’s wrong with that.”

  Over Shit’s shoulder, Eric watched Big Man get his balance on his crutches and smile again, though his expression was uncertain.

  So was Joe Markum’s.

  *

  At the Gilead dock, they got the plain pine coffin from the hearse and slanted it over a two-wheel hand wagon. Shit kept saying, “Hey—I got it. I got it. Lemme have it—” so they stepped back for him. With great care, looking over this way, looking over the other, he wheeled his father’s coffin up the plank Jay had thought to bring, and onto the scow.

  Or, maybe, he always kept it in there.

  * * *

  [63] ON GILEAD, BESIDE the boathouse dock, Jay had parked his pickup. Taciturn Al climbed into the truck bed and said nothing. They made two trips, with the guys—including Shit and Eric—in the back, sitting on the casket’s edge.

  Eddie stood, leaning his butt against the pickup’s cab to ride, standing, because (he said) sitting on a casket made him feel funny: twice he nearly fell out the truck.

  Tad said, “You better sit down, fool—I don’t wanna be the one to have to scrape you up off the goddam road.” Ed grinned but still stood.

  Eric watched him, smiled, and thought: Jesus, he’s probably half a dozen years older than I was when I fell into bed with Dynamite, Mex, and Jay the first time—not to mention Shit. Yeah, I’d been working out six times a week on that damned machine, trying to keep up with my dad, trying to make sure nobody would mistake me for the scrawny little kid I knew I really was, trying to make myself look like a grown-up muscle man. Could I have been that naïve? But I’m alive. Does that mean those men were simply very, very good people? Some—like Mex—are here, helpin’ us, today. I don’t know. If you needed a reason why someone that age—much less six years younger—shouldn’t get sexually involved with grown-ups, who might accidentally expect them to know something, Ed’s your example walkin’ around on two legs.

  (But then, Jay and Mex never done nothin’ with Ed. He guessed the others knew it, too…)

  Were we just different kinds of kids…?

  Eric kept wanting to say to Shit, Ain’t it odd, how the last time we come out to a burial, Ruth and Walter Holota were here. But now they’re gone…But there didn’t seem any easy way to interject it.

  They left Barbara and Mama Grace at the Kyle place with Hugh. Big Man in Eric’s lap and Mr. Markum’s black jeans and jacket already blotched with dust, everyone else rode on to the graveyard.

  Only three dug at any one time…

  Every twenty minutes, Jay made them spell each other digging, so that nobody got too tired.

  “You didn’t come to dig none,” Jay told Mr. Markum, when Big Man’s dad picked up a shovel. “That ain’t what you come here to do.”

  “No,” Mr. Markum said. “That’s okay. Diggin’ out is my damned business. Come on. I’m gonna dig.”

  “I guess you gonna dig, too, huh?” Jay grinned down at Big Man.

  “Hey,” Shit said, sharply. “Don’t make no fun of him.”

  Big Man said, “You wanna hold one of these for me? I damned well will dig for you.” Turning on one crutch, he waved a stubby hand at Morgan. “Come on, now, Shit. He ain’t makin’ no fun. That’s just his idea of a joke. See, I pulled loose my pee tube and squirted it in his damned face at the Opera enough times. After somebody do that to you, you can’t make fun of ’im!”

  Jay actually glanced over at Joe Markum, who didn’t seem to be really listening—for which Jay actually looked grateful.

  The eleven men took two-and-a-half hours to dig a hole that went down five feet.

  “It should be six, but I ain’t gonna say nothing,” the man from Hemmings said, a hand on the side of his black suit jacket.

  While Tad and Al were in the midst of digging, a few feet away among the wooden grave markers, Ed—who’d finished his turn fifteen minutes ago—was rubbing at the ground with his sneaker toe, when he started laughing. “It says ‘Poppinjay’ here—on this plaque! Jay—that ain’t the bird—that parrot—yall used to have, is it?”

  “Yep.” Jay looked over. “It was Hugh’s—been there longer than I was.”

  “You got that bird buried in here?” Ed looked like it was going to break him up.

  “Sure—lived in his room for about forty years.”

  “Aw, come on, Jay. You can’t have a bird buried in a people graveyard! Can you?”

  “Why the fuck not? When he passed, Mex and me made up a box
for him. That bird acted like more like a part of my family than—say—Shad ever done.”

  Ed began laughing—and suddenly coughing—as if he were gonna be sick on himself; still, it looked as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  Then, as they were finishing, Hugh, Barbara, and Mama Grace walked up among the trees and graves. (“He got a bird buried in here—in its own grave!” Ed was saying. “Hey. A parrot? You guys around here is all crazy.” Ed’s rough hair was a little long and kind of uneven. Eric was used to it on Shit, but on Ed it looked strange.) In the dappled forest light, under the funeral manager’s direction, Jay and Al got the coffin positioned in the hole.

  By now, it was minutes past ten. Through the humid morning, birds chirped, lazily, insistently.

  As he was standing by Mama Grace, Eric looked down where Mama had his hand in the pocket of his jacket. Something gleamed, and Mama looked over to see Eric frowning.

  Eric looked around for Uncle Tom’s marker, but they didn’t seem to be in that part of the graveyard.

  Mama took out a stubby steel cylinder. “Oh, this…?” He reached around with his other hand and pulled a small tab, and a length of metal ribbon, bright yellow and scored with black measuring lines, extended three, six, eight inches. “Long time ago, I learned if you gonna go to a country funeral, it ain’t never a bad idea to bring your own tape measurer, for when they start diggin’.” He pressed a button. With a quick whirrrr the measuring ribbon rewound.

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Yeah…sure.”

  “I just mean,” Mama Grace said, “if anybody wants to check for certain. I’m sure they don’t need it, but I been to at least two where they didn’t have one and could’a used it. You just never know.”

  Unsure what he was supposed to do, Eric wandered a few steps away. Once he asked Ed, “How’s your little brother?”

  Drawing himself up, Ed looked surprised. “Hey, I wouldn’t never bring him out here,” he said—though Eric wasn’t sure what Ed thought he’d asked him.

  Underarms and the small of his back still damp from his own twenty minutes with the shovel, Eric moved over to stand beside Whiteboy, who looked around and whispered, “This is so fuckin’ pretty out here…!” His turn at digging had exacerbated Whiteboy’s body odor. In the cup of his ear, Eric saw a crust, the color—and nearly the size of—a penny. Blackheads scattered the cartilage’s curves and ridges.

  In the leafy breeze, Eric thought, I know I smell strong, but…while Whiteboy reached down to maul his crotch with a knuckly gray fist. Eric said, “Yeah, it is nice.” Whiteboy’s smell was not the odor of someone who had worked a week without washing, but of someone who had slept in shit—old shit and old piss, repeatedly…old enough so that it no longer smelled like either excrement or even ammonia. The way our bodies’ smells bind us, Shit’s and mine, Eric wondered, could that odor have bound that man to Bull…?

  Whiteboy glanced over with eyes as blue as Eric’s and a questioning look. Then he ducked behind to step forward up on the other side. “Wha’dya say? Huh? That’s my dead ear. I don’t hear nothin’ outta that one.”

  Eric grinned. “I said, ‘Yeah. It’s nice.’”

  “Oh,” Whiteboy said. “Un-huh. It is.”

  For the last five seconds, Eric had let Shit drift from his thoughts. Looking around now, Eric saw Shit, standing about ten feet away, absently hitting at one leg of his jeans with a piece of branch and frowning. He’d been thinking a lot about Shit all morning…

  Leaning on his crutches beside his dad, Big Man stood across the grave.

  The man from Hemmings said, “Would anyone like to say something over the deceased? I understand this is a nonsectarian funeral.”

  Jay pulled off his orange cap and took a lumbering step across the dirt.

  Beside the mound sat—in the hole, off center—the pine box, with six, seven, eight brass wing nuts around the edge. “Yeah…I wanna say, um…Dynamite Haskell…um, Wendell Haskell was my best friend, pretty much my whole fuckin’…I mean, you know, all my whole life. I’m gonna miss ’im. Mex gonna miss ’im, too.” Mex looked up, raised his hands, and said something hurriedly in sign language, which Eric was at the wrong angle to follow. He looked for Shit, and realized he probably couldn’t see it, either—though Shit wasn’t even looking at the stocky, pockmarked Mexican.

  A mumble of assent moved through the garbage drivers. Jay looked around, swallowed, then stepped back from the grave.

  Eric found himself thinking that, with the exception of Tad, Barbara, and twenty-four-year-old Ed, this could be a gathering in Turpens’ rear john.

  Jay looked over at Shit. “Hey, Morgan. What about you? You wanna say somethin’ about Dynamite? Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Un-huh…” Shit glanced up, with the look that, since Dynamite’s death, kept making his features seem as if they didn’t all belong to one face. “Yeah, he was…he was my frien’, too.” Shit nodded and stepped forward. Then he seemed to think better and stepped back again. “My dad…you know—” he looked from side to side—“Dynamite…”

  Eric would not have been surprised if Shit dropped to his knees and howled. But Shit just stepped back.

  “Does anybody else want to speak?” The man in the black suit looked around. Was it because of the digging—and the dirt that had been in the air—that his hair seemed colorless? Before, on the scow, Eric remembered it as light brown. A scatter of dust occluded half of one lens in his glasses. “If that’s all, could you men, who have been so generous with your help so far—”

  Joe Markum said, “He was a good fren’ to me and my boy, here, too. We gonna miss him at Christmas.” He looked from Shit to Eric. “I hope you boys still keep comin’ out to see us. You always welcome—and pretty much any other time, too. But you know that.”

  “Thank you,” Eric said. “Sure. Yeah.”

  Bull’s voice was too loud, hoarse, and clumsy. “He was my frien’, too—all the time I been at the motherfuckin’ Dump!”

  “—give us just a little more of your—yes…?” Quizzically, the man from Hemmings looked up. “Oh. Yes, you wanted to talk—?”

  Bull went on. “Yeah. That Haskell was my real good frien’, a frien’ to me an’ this dumb shit Whiteboy, too. Weren’t he?”

  “Yeah.” Whiteboy nodded. “Un-huh…Bull’d let ol’ Dynamite mess wi’ me—” He was grinning at Shit, who still wasn’t paying anyone much attention. “Yeah, he’d let ’im yank my pants—”

  Eric started to frown.

  Bull interrupted his partner, “Shut de fuck up—fool! Don’t talk about dat heah. Dis a funeral!”

  It didn’t stop Whiteboy’s grin, but Whiteboy ceased speaking.

  “Of course,” the man from Hemmings said. “Mr. Haskell was a good friend—to many people here. To many of us. Yes. Thank you.” He looked around again, to make sure of no more interruptions. “But we’ll need some more help to fill this in…I mean, anyone who wants can return to the house, but…” He looked as if he wasn’t sure that was the right suggestion.

  Shit said, “I’m gonna stay. I’m gonna bury him.”

  Stepping forward, Eric said, “Me, too…”

  Jay said, “Aw, come on. You guys done enough. You already dug half the grave. That was the work. We’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Yeah,” Ed cajoled; to Eric, Eddie seemed a boy trying to sound like a man.

  Jay said, “Go on back and have some coffee—Hugh made cookies. We’ll take care of it. Coverin’ ’im up don’t take half as long as diggin’ out the hole.”

  “Naw,” Shit said, looking around for a shovel. “Naw. I’m fillin’ it in.”

  “All right, then.” (Eric could see Jay was figuring.)

  Basically, Eric realized, Jay had decided to let Shit—and Eric, too, probably—do whatever they wanted.

  “Well, then. Good. Let’s get to work.”

  Eric turned to look for Barbara. Stepping nearer to her, he said, “We’ll be back at Jay’s soon
,” and she turned to him, face sliding from beneath the hat brim’s shadow.

  Putting her hand on her son’s hard forearm, from which his shirt sleeve, missing its buttons, was rolled up, Barbara said, “Sure, sweetheart. And you bring Morgan—when he’s ready. I know how he feels. He wants to say his good byes to his uncle. I can understand that. Mr. Markum?” She looked diagonally across the grave’s corner. “You’re comin’ back to the house with us, with your son, for some coffee?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’d be nice.” Mr. Markum looked down at broad headed Big Man. “Come on, fella.”

  Somehow Eric was the last to go, along with Bull and Whiteboy. The others moved ahead, and since Bull and Whiteboy were almost uncomfortably silent, Eric decided to leave them and move on up toward the others.

  He had wandered a few steps ahead. So he heard the blow—though he didn’t see it.

  Eric turned back to see Whiteboy rubbing his jaw. He had staggered a few steps ahead of Bull, who had stopped, his fist out from his side. “That’s what I think of you, you piece of fuckin’ rat shit…!” Then Bull strode forward, on past Eric.

  Whiteboy moved unsteadily on.

  Eric frowned at the grubby man. “You okay…?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Whiteboy said thickly. He rubbed his jaw some more. Finally he straightened up. “See, I didn’t wear my leash today. ’Cause it was a funeral. Besides, at a funeral he can’t go callin’ me names like he do, regularly—I mean in front of other people. But when he don’t do enough of that, it’s like I stop believin’ ’im, and I start feelin’ like he don’t care about me no more. But neither of us thought it was right. For the occasion, I mean. But, see, I wasn’t feelin’ as safe as I usually do.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “But you’re…okay now?”

  “Yeah,” Whiteboy said. “Now I’m feelin’ real good. ’Cause he really hit me.” The two of them went on through the sunny green growth. “He thinks I’m a piece of rat shit now—so I’m okay.” Whiteboy smiled uncertainly. A red welt crossed his jaw. “I’m gettin’ those chills and everything. I’ll be okay.”