Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Eric actually began to back the truck up to the cliff’s edge, when he realized he wasn’t there to toss sacks that morning. Jesus, he thought, as he drove the truck back to the cabin in first. I must be gettin’ old. He took a breath and pushed the hand brake. It went easily and silently in. Shaking his head, Eric opened the door (the birds got louder) and jumped down.

  The ground was junkier than usual—probably because there had been a few days’ dumping, at least, when Al hadn’t been there at all to make sure the drivers cleaned up after themselves. Or, maybe it was messier.

  Eric glanced at the sky.

  He wandered to the cliff and looked over. Some twenty feet down the sharply sloped white and yellow earth, garbage bags spread, thousands of them—black and crinkly, like the wrinkled carapaces of beetles, a hundred yards toward the sea’s smoky green, a saddle a quarter of a mile from edge to edge, a black wave rolling up from the ocean to lap over the Bottom and cling, unretreating.

  Gulls and kestrels cawed and mewed, soaring in flocks or peeling in separate flight. Something hypnotic about it all fixed Eric to the rim. Hadn’t he dreamed of this—recently, maybe? Two weeks ago, three weeks? Or had there been several dreams? To the left, a third of a football field away, along the edge stretched a twenty or twenty-five yard ribbon, down to the water, of dirty white, from the years they’d dumped the garbage in white and transparent sacks at the end there.

  Black sacks covered the rest.

  Eric remembered. In the dream, it hadn’t really been a cliff. It was only a slope, though composed not of the land’s customary rust-red earth, but of this same yellowish-white, crumbly, sandy. He’d made his way down (…in the dream), under shrieking kestrels and kingfishers. Instead of lying in a mass, however, bags were scattered, black, white, or transparent. He’d crab-walked his way between. In the dream, the transparent ones sometimes held body parts, heads, arms, and shoulders, hips and legs in foggy plastic. As he glanced around, sometimes a mouth, a nose, a woman’s breast or a man’s open eye flattened against the inside. It never surprised him, as he walked, nor had it frightened him, though he’d wondered why or how they’d gotten in there. What must it feel like to be cut in pieces and bagged like that? A few still seemed…alive. Now and again, he was sure he saw a foot or a jaw or a buttock move. Once, he recalled how he’d watched a hard black penis pressed sideways against vinyl begin to soften and shrink. In another version, he’d walked the same bag-scattered slope, except it was night, under a bright moon. Spaces between the bags had become paths through walls of high-piled plastic. Sometimes the paths became descending steps. Green and luminous, water ran the stairs. Sometimes the liquid burned with lime-green fire. The bags made raddled plastic walls, canyon high. He’d looked up the black sides in the uneven green light, to realize the bags had closed overhead. He wandered in an underground maze, as if through the connected basements of a plastic city.

  Was it only two weeks ago…?

  No, more like two years…!

  Eric had dreamed that, when he’d started to get anxious that he’d never get out, the tunnel had decanted him into a clearing. (Today he was the longest working garbage man on the coast. This was the city in which he was King…) He was outside, in the space, fifteen or twenty feet across, with board walls around it, behind the old Slide—or a place very like it: The Slide’s enclosed outdoor john. In moonlight trees were visible above the board walls. Only, after moments, he realized it wasn’t quite The Slide’s john. For one thing, though trees rose around it, no commode sat on its raised stand in the corner. No aluminum trough was bolted to the wall. Men stood around, most naked, most black, at least one on his knees before another—but Eric recognized none.

  In summer at The Slide, more than half would have been familiar.

  In winter, all.

  Also, one of the walls, he realized now, was not board—he walked over to make sure: It was firmly packed black garbage sacks. Eric prodded the plastic with a forefinger, then with three fingers, and realized, inside, was the articulated joints of a limp hand. He turned sharply to look across the enclosure—and saw that, again unlike the Slide, across from him was no wall at all, only moonlit tree trunks.

  When he’d first come into the place, Eric had been relieved. He’d thought he’d known where he was. But if this wasn’t the outdoor john in back of The Slide, where in hell was it…?

  Eric blinked.

  Looking across the Bottom to the sea, he turned from the cliff to start back for the truck—he should get his gloves and toss over some of the junk lying around, those cartons there, that bed spring propped against them…

  But as he turned, he was assailed by…

  A vision…?

  A memory…?

  Or was it just some cataclysm of the imagination…?

  He was sure that, behind him, across the Bottom, stone towers had just risen up, some half fallen, some with glassed-in balconies. Bridges connected some. Down between them ran cobbled streets. Arched entrances opened on subterranean alleys. In a square (behind him, invisible…) stood a fountain that had once worked but was now dry. Through back streets and avenues, rushing in from a smoky ocean, green fire bathed the city’s foundations. At some point—in what dream or dreams—he had stood in that place and looked out over the Bottom, its fuming ruin, its glimmering air of potential.

  Eric turned back…

  He was standing on a cliff, looking down at a quarter of a mile of black plastic garbage sacks, sloping to a far hill, fading to gray. (Does everyone, he wondered, have not only the individual and eccentric dreams we sometimes remember, but an entire alternative dream world, as filled with frustration and threat as the real one with its ability to isolate, to menace?) If he squinted, the plastic stretching below began to move, to pulse, as though about to swirl.

  Odd, Eric thought. When he’d first started staying with Shit and Dynamite, he used to dream about the two of them all the time. When he’d fuck around with them after work, laying in Dynamite’s big bed with them, he’d drift off to dream he was…in bed with them. Only he’d wake to realize they, also asleep, faced in different directions from the direction they’d faced in his dream. Or he’d dream one had a hand on his arm or his shoulder, only to find, awake, Dynamite had gotten up and was in the bathroom, taking a piss, or Shit’s arms were curled tightly around himself and an inch of heated air separated Shit’s butt and Eric’s belly—

  Because of the birds, Eric didn’t hear the truck motor, but the clunk of the gate’s release made him turn. Morning light wiped glare over the entering truck’s windshield. Blue striations across the top for the solar strips, whose edges Eric could see as the truck rocked side to side, marked it as a carrier of one of the new hydrogen-ion engines. The truck halted, the door opened, and Tad swung down to jump from the step. “Hey, there…You sittin’ in for Al?”

  “I guess so.” Since Dynamite’s death, Eric was the only white driver left. (And once they moved to the Opera…)

  The other door opened, and another fellow jumped out—“Owww! Damn, man!” A younger fellow, he began to hop on one foot, looking down. “Jesus—oh, shit! Somethin’ almost went through my shoe—just about!”

  “You cut yourself?” Eric stepped closer.

  The kid put his foot down, tried his weight on it, then lifted it up and looked at the bottom. “Almost!” he repeated. “This is some dangerous junk out here.” The young man—who, Eric saw, was perhaps twenty, heavy, and Asian—wore low-topped sneakers.

  Eric said, “You’re new, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Tad said. “Aim here’s the son of a friend of mine. He’s helpin’ me out for a few days.”

  “Well,” Eric said, “you gotta get yourself some real shoes. Otherwise, I can’t let you out the damned truck. You could cut your feet up all to hell—it’ll rip right through a pair of sneakers like that. Tad, don’t let him come out here no more unless he got work shoes.”

  Tad said, “You know, Aim, he’s right.”

&nb
sp; “Yeah…” The Asian kid stepped gingerly about, looking at the ground, where the slats of a crate and a couple of tin boxes lay—the corner of one of which he’d stepped on. “Yeah, I’ll get some.”

  Eric said, “Hey, take your truck down about twenty yards there before you start tossin’, okay? And—Tad, I’m serious—don’t let that kid run around in no damned sneakers. Son, you could’a hurt yourself real bad. Okay?” He thought: Too bad Shit wasn’t here. He liked Asians—he’d think the kid was cute. (And he was.) But that’s how things happened…

  “Yeah,” Tad said. “He’s right. Come on, Aim. Get back in, and watch yourself.”

  Asian Aim and black Tad looked at each other—then the Asian glanced around uncomfortably, and climbed back up in the gray cab, trying not to favor the foot he’d hurt.

  * * *

  [66] MAMA GRACE’S VOICE: “It’s awfully nice of you boys to help me out like this. Really, I’ll never be able to thank you.” Somewhere, a convoy of what sounded like four, five, six Foltz recycling trucks they couldn’t see rumbled toward Dump Corners.

  “You know,” Eric said, “I used to think because we picked up the bagged garbage and got it to the Bottom, we was the most important niggers in the Dump. Only one day I was walkin’ up the road by the sea, and eight of them recyclin’ trucks, half of ’em all packed with bound paper and the other half bulgin’ out with bagged plastic, went on by me, one after the other, off to the recyclin’ plant, and suddenly I realized, hell, as far as garbage collecting was concerned, we didn’t do shit—”

  “Now, that’s not the right attitude.” (They still couldn’t see Mama, down amidst the plants.) “We all do our part, whether it’s a small one or a large one—”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “But, even so, that can make you feel…well—” The trucks were gone.

  A breeze rustled tall grass.

  Shit just grunted.

  From the greenery beside the porch stairs, Mama’s head—in his white sunhat, wearing purple sunglasses, fuchsia scarf, and white canvas jacket draped on his shoulders—rose, finally, above the leaves. Mama lifted his hands. In one, he held three yellow tomatoes, in the other, two. Looking down, he stepped forward, then to the side, on whatever path took him between the trellises holding up the vines. Coming from the tomato plants, he walked toward the house steps.

  “It took you long enough finally to decide to do it. But we gonna miss you here, Mama.” Shit laughed. “It was fun havin’ you around for a quick fuck. In fact, I wonder if that wasn’t why you kept puttin’ in off—”

  “Oh, shut your mouth!” Wind chimes and braided feathers were gone. “And I’m gonna miss you, too.” Porch chairs had been packed in the U-Haul. “No—it wasn’t you. Wally was just a little undecided there, when he thought he might take that other job they kept on dangling in his face in Valdosta. But it’s awfully nice of yall to give up your weekend to help me out like this.”

  Eric reflected. They hadn’t done that in more than three—if not six—years. Shit was still grinning. Suddenly Eric wondered if Shit had slipped in a few with Mama on his days off, when he’d come back to the Dump and left Eric at the theater, the way Eric sometimes did with aging Abbot. Maybe he’d ask him later.

  If he remembered…

  Without drapes or curtains behind them, the panes were the color of pencil lead. Fifteen feet off, the U-Haul stood on the rough dirt between the grasses, the back door finally down and lever locked.

  A wicker basket of yellow tomatoes sat on the lowest step. Mama put his five tomatoes on top, stood up. “And thank you for taking some of these. So many people grow their own down here, Dump Produce can’t hardly give tomatoes away during the season.”

  “We’ll think of something to do with ’em, Mama.” Eric grinned, now. “Probably we should get started.”

  “I suppose we should.” Mama picked up the basket, and they climbed into the cab, Mama in the middle, the basket on his lap. “You got anything else you wanna be takin’?” Shit asked.

  “Naw, I got it all.” Mama’s lean brown fingers—nails with Clear Rose polish—were together at the top of the basket handle. “Or if I forgot it, I don’t need it.”

  *

  Eric drove, braking in front of Dynamite’s old cabin.

  Shit picked the basket up from Mama’s lap, pushed open the door, jumped down, and left it up on the porch beside the rail. “I don’t gotta put ’em inside,” he said, climbing back in. “Nobody’s gonna walk off with them things. There’re too many around for the takin’.”

  When they were driving Mama’s U-Haul over to his new place in Savannah—they’d packed every inch with furniture, furniture pads, cartons and shopping bags; Eric was trying to ignore a slight pain from something pulled in his lower left flank—Eric said: “Mama, you ain’t asked me nothin’ about how I was comin’ with the book in more than a year.”

  “I told you, honey,” Mama Grace said. “It’s your book, now. You’ll look at it when you want to, when you need to. That’s how those things work. Besides, I said all I could say about it already.”

  “Why you so anxious to leave us?” Shit asked.

  “Like I told you, the Dump’s been a wonderful experience. But it’s time for a change. A lady gets antsy if she don’t have some variety in her life. Besides—” squinting, Mama Grace looked around—“only about half the people live here as used to—and with the ones who do, it’s too much like a hot house for me. You boys don’t even live here no more.”

  “Well, that’s just ’cause we stay at the Opera now.”

  “Well, if you were still in your old place there, you’d know what I mean. And Wally wants me to be closer to where he is—this way I will be.”

  In the last months, Mama had been to Savannah several times, so, with Mama navigating, they had no trouble finding the rundown black neighborhood and the shaky-looking two-story house where Mama was moving. They got out and looked at the gray boards—so different from Mama’s colorful cottage in the Dump.

  “I guess you gonna paint it…” Shit said, hands in his back pockets.

  “Well, I guess I am,” Mama Grace said, “when I can get to it.” He didn’t sound eager.

  They carried the stuff inside—got the bed, the chest, and the end tables upstairs. They set down the sofa and the TV in the big room downstairs. “No,” Mama said, hip against the sofa’s flowered arm. “Don’t unpack those boxes. I have to think about where I want all that stuff over the next few days, anyway.”

  Back in the Dump, the furniture had filled Mama’s house. Here, spread out among two stories on the strange city’s outskirts, it looked lost.

  “Well, it’s certainly more…roomy.” Standing in the living room, Mama muttered, “It’s amazin’ what a lady will do for love.”

  With Mama, they turned in the U-Haul trailer at the renting office. It was just after three-thirty. Then they drove him back to the house, where Mama’s four-wheel drive was already in the garage. “You boys get on back to the Harbor, now. Wally’s gonna come by about six-thirty, and we gonna go over to his house and eat. But I wanna astound him first with how nice I have this place lookin’ in just a couple of hours.” After hugs and Say hello to this one and to that one and vigorous waves and Good luck’s, and I’m really gonna miss you’s that took three times as long as Eric would have guessed—mostly it was Shit and Mama—they climbed into the pickup and, with Mama waving his fuchsia scarf from the doorway, they started back, again Eric driving.

  “You think,” Shit asked, thoughtfully, “he was expecting us to give him some kind of a good-bye fuck or somethin’?”

  “Actually,” Eric said, “I don’t think he was, Shit. Really. That wasn’t the feelin’ I was gettin’. Believe it or not, I think he just wanted us to help get his furniture into his new place.”

  “Oh.” Elbow out the pickup’s open window, Shit sat by the door, digging in his nose with a forefinger, sucking it, then gnawing some, collar and open shirt whipping about his neck and ches
t.

  Every twenty or thirty yards, the stretch they drove had a McDonalds or a tuxedo rental store, or a Chili’s, or a Radio Shack, when Shit looked over. “Hey—can you get me some money?”

  Eric asked, “Huh…?”

  “You got my bank card with you, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “But I got cash, too. You hungry or somethin’? We can stop an’—”

  “Naw, I just wanna get some money. Not a lot. Five dollars—that’s all.”

  “With the bank card, Shit, it’s gotta be in twenties. Or fifties, now, I think—at least most places.”

  “Okay,” Shit said, eagerly. “Fifty. That’s okay.”

  “Sure. But what you want it for?”

  “Well…my daddy, back when we first got them cards, he told me that once we had them things, as long as we had money at the Credit Union, we could get money anywhere we was—I mean, anywhere in the country. Atlanta, or New York, or Texas, or Washington. I wanna see if it really works.”

  Eric laughed. “Believe me, Shit—it works.”

  “But I wanna see,” Shit insisted. “I don’t wanna lot. I just wanna see if I can get it.”

  “Okay,” Eric said. “Okay. Lemme find a bank—but you know it’s gonna cost you five bucks to see it. They charge you five or so against your account, every time you make a withdrawal—unless you’re at the Credit Union. It used to be just one or two.”

  “Well, just to see—’cause we’re real far from the Dump and Diamond Harbor and Runcible and all them places. I mean, this is…Savannah! I wanna see if it’ll really gimme some money over here, too.”

  “Okay.” Grinning, Eric looked around. “Hey—there we go. That’s a Sovereign.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a bank—the Sovereign Bank.”

  “And that card’s gonna work there?”

  “It’s supposed to.”

  “Okay. Come on—let’s go!”

  Eric turned the pickup into the lot. Like an auxiliary building to a modern church, the structure of beige cement and glass stood near a low metal fence, cables between the stanchions and grass behind it, the back of some store beyond it.