Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Two women in jeans were coming from the glass vestibule.

  Eric stopped the pickup.

  “You really think it’s gonna gimme some money?” Shit asked.

  “Of course it is, Shit. If you wanna spend up five dollars to find out, that’s how they work. Come on.” Gold and black, the foiled lettering said “Nine A.M. to Five P.M.” over the glass. Eric pulled back the door. “Come on in.”

  “You don’t have to put the card in the slot to open the door?”

  “It’s still bankin’ hours,” Eric explained.

  “Oh…” Shit stood there, looking uncomfortable.

  “Come on inside—we can get your money.”

  “Naw—you do it. Like my daddy use to.”

  Eric frowned, and started to say, You know, Shit, you’re gonna hafta start doin’—

  Then he didn’t. “Okay. You said your number was your birthday.”

  “That’s right. Ninth of May, nineteen eighty-eight. You know that—”

  “Okay.” Eric stepped in and slowly the glass swung closed between him and Shit. On his fingers, Eric was counting through January, February, March, April, May to figure out which one May was—the fifth. Often Shit had gone into the Credit Union with Dynamite and watched him get money from his own account—and a couple of times deposit checks in Shit’s. (Their salaries were automatically deposited, though summer and winter bonuses came to the cabin in the mail.) He had no memory of the exact numbers, but he had a bodily memory of Dynamite’s pressing six numbers on the key pad below the screen: dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum. His own PIN was six figures, too.

  Getting out his wallet, Eric fingered Shit’s card from among the sheaf of cards, including his driver’s license and the Dump Produce card—which he had never been quite sure what he was supposed to do with, though Dynamite had said he should keep it on him. Maybe it was for some sort of identification, but nobody had ever asked to see it.

  Eric slid Shit’s card in and out of the jutting card reader. While the screen flipped through three advertisements before getting to the next message, he slipped the card back in his wallet. The instructions—“What Language Would You Like to Speak?”—popped up in dark letters on the light green screen. He pressed English and it responded by telling him to enter his PIN. So he pressed 05 09 88.

  Three humming seconds later, the screen announced:

  YOU HAVE ENTERED AN INVALID PIN

  Eric drew in a breath, got out his wallet again, and took out Shit’s card once more. Again, he slid it in. Again, he pressed English and then 05 09 88. Only this time he kept the card in his hand.

  YOU HAVE ENTERED AN INVALID PIN

  He got the message four more times.

  The air conditioning wasn’t particularly good in the vestibule. The back of Eric’s neck and the back of his hands were sweating.

  He glanced out at Shit, who was looked quizzically in through the glass. Eric grinned, then turned back to the machine.

  YOU HAVE ENTERED AN INVALID PIN

  Again, he grew a long breath, stood up, and went to the door—as two more customers came in. Eric caught the door closing against his hand and leaned out into the heat.

  Shit said, “It don’t work, do it? I didn’t think it was gonna.” His face was blank—which was one way Shit masked disappointment.

  “Shit, are you sure the number is your birthday—or that you got it right?”

  “Hey,” Shit said, “I don’t know a whole fuckin’ lot. But I know my goddam motherfuckin’ birthday—Dynamite said we was gonna use that, so I wouldn’t forget it.”

  “Well, it’s not workin’ for some reason. This is your card—it ain’t Dynamite’s. His got a different picture on it.” Eric stepped from the door. “Yours and mine is the same.”

  Shit stood there, his sleeveless shirt open, his beltless jeans sagging low enough to see the tan fuzz above his groin. His big hands and his big work shoes looking as if they belonged more to his dad than to Shit.

  “Only mine has a one-one-three at the end,” Eric went on. “You got a one-zero-one, ’cause you got yours before I got mine.”

  Shit began to shake his head. “I knew it wasn’t gonna work—that’s ’cause we ain’t where I was born and everything—nobody knows me around here. So nobody ain’t gonna give me no money.”

  “But that’s not the way it works, Shit.”

  “Does yours work?”

  “I didn’t try mine.”

  “Well, maybe they’d give you some—’cause you from up in Atlanta, in the big city. But I’m just Shit, the garbage guy’s nigger bastard what helps with the junk. Hell, I wouldn’t give me no money down here, neither.”

  “But Shit, they’ve got to give you your cash, wherever you are. That’s the law.”

  “How can there be a fuckin’ law that you got to give money to some dumb fuck you don’t know and never seen before? That’s crazy—come on. Let’s go.”

  “Lemme try mine first. Maybe the machine’s broken…”

  “I don’t know why you gonna bother with—”

  But Eric was back in the vestibule. Again at the screen, he fed in his own card, punched his own number…

  With its internal hums and ruffles and clicks, the ATM machine slid a fifty-dollar bill from the slot into Eric’s hand. And while he thought, Damn, I should’ve gotten more; it’s gonna cost me the same five damned dollars, no matter how much I take out, he turned.

  The glass and its glare—not even locked by a time lock—seemed to put Shit not a few feet away but miles and years beyond all but the slenderest contact with the world.

  Eric turned from the screen and walked to the door, opening it. “Naw, it ain’t broken. See, it gave me what I asked for.” He held up the fifty.

  “Well,” Shit said. “That’s ’cause it’s you. I knew it wouldn’t work for me. Come on, let’s get the fuck back home, huh? I don’t like comin’ around here, no way.”

  They walked back to the truck.

  After twenty minutes of silent driving, they were going through another small town, when Eric swerved the pickup into another lot.

  “What you doin’?”

  “I had an idea,” Eric told him. “I wanna see somethin’.”

  It was another bank—HSBC—one of three connected buildings. Eric parked, opened the door, jumped down and started over the tarmac.

  This time, he had to insert the card in the door slot, since the bank was closed.

  Following behind him, Shit said, “What’s this? Another one of them banks?”

  “Right.” The door came open. “Now, your birthday is the ninth of May, eighty-eight.”

  “Come on, nigger—it ain’t gonna work!”

  “Probably,” Eric said. He went inside.

  At the screen (which showed an illuminated map of the country), Eric looked back at Shit, who mouthed on the far side of the glass, “It ain’t gonna work, fool—!”

  Eric got Shit’s card out, put it in the slot—this one didn’t give him a language choice—and said under his breath, “Oh-five, oh-nine, eighty-eight…” Only he pressed “oh-nine” first, then “oh-five,” then the “eight-eight.”

  …PLEASE MAKE YOUR REQUEST IN MULTIPLES OF FIFTY

  On the three-by-three button pad, Eric punched in “50.” Behind the metal panel machinery hummed.

  Below the screen, a fifty-dollar bill slid—horizontally—from the slot.

  Eric took it, grinned, turned, and held it up—he went to the door. Stepping out, he laughed. “Well, it cost you five dollars and me five dollars, but at least you know the damned card works.”

  “What’d you do?” Shit said. “Get fifty with your own card and you’re gonna give it to me, now, so I don’t feel bad or somethin’?”

  “Naw, Shit! This is your own fifty from you own account at the goddam Credit Union back in the Dump. I got you the money with your card right here in…whatever the name of this little do-hicky pipsqueak town is—right outside Savannah.”

  “It sti
ll didn’t work,” Shit said. “I mean, before.”

  “It was just me, Shit,” Eric said. “I punched in the wrong number.”

  “You didn’t punch in my birthday? But I told you—”

  “They’re two ways to write a birthday, Shit. Today, people put the month first, then the day, and then the year. But the old fashioned way—I remember somebody tellin’ me, in fact it was my grandmother, back in Hugantown—that people used to put the day first. And I figured, maybe that’s how Dynamite had done it when he first got your card. A lot of things are a little old-fashioned, sometimes, down here.”

  “Well, they’re both my fuckin’ birthday. Don’t you think the damned machine ought to know that, at least?”

  “The machines don’t really know nothing, Shit. But the point is, you got your money when you wanted it.”

  “The point is,” Shit said, “the fuckin’ thing didn’t work!”

  Eric had long ago learned that Shit’s arguments were not so much attempts to determine what was true as they were demonstrations of foregone conclusions. If the results were in any way ambiguous, it made no difference. “Take your money, will you?”

  “You keep it,” Shit said.

  Shaking his head a little, Eric took out his wallet again and slipped the fifty inside.

  But that’s why he didn’t take the argument further.

  Back in the pickup, Eric started again. After about three minutes, Shit said, “You know I’m gonna fuck the shit outta you when we get home, nigger—I’m gonna stick my dick in every hole you fuckin’ got. You think you’re somethin’, but you’re just a fuckin’ nasty nigger shit hole. I’m gonna shoot so much cum into you, you gonna hear it slosh around when you get up to go to the bathroom. You gonna like that, too, you nasty nigger fuck—”

  “All right.” Eric grinned.

  “You fuckin’ piss drinkin’ nigger sonofabitch—” Shit reached over and rubbed Eric’s crotch roughly—“you got a fuckin’ boner already. God, you’re a low-down nasty black bastard.” Shit’s hand went back to rub his own crotch. “I should make you stop this truck, pull over, and blow me right here.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “Come on—”

  “Naw,” Shit said. “Get us home first. I wanna do it where we can really get into it and get comfortable.”

  “Okay,” Eric said. “You’re on. Let’s go.”

  Sometimes, when Eric was mad at Shit about something, he’d give him a hug—a real hard one—on the verge of too hard; it was a way of releasing anger through affection. Then he’d learned Shit had his own version of the same thing—that involved his violent invitations to sex.

  Once they got home to the upstairs apartment over the theater, they had a pretty intense and good evening. After midnight, they drove back to the Dump, got the tomato basket from the porch—halfway back, driving now, Shit, stopped the pickup and demanded, “Get down and suck my dick so I can piss in your mouth, nigger”—then drove back to the theater and, in the bed upstairs, rolled up into one another for another couple of hours.

  It was odd, Eric thought, the way sex confirmed their bodily closeness even as it signed a mutual acknowledgment of temperamental difference—an agreement that they would not argue about bank cards and the like any more, though, he knew, neither one had changed his mind about them.

  *

  One Thursday afternoon, Eric took a couple of hours off from the Opera. Finally, on the top steps of the porch of what used to be Dynamite’s cabin, where a padlock hung on the side door now, he settled himself. (Fred Hurter kept the key in his office desk up at the Lumber, Seed, and Steel.) Today a third of the cabins in the Dump were unoccupied.

  Mama Grace’s defection had only been one of many.

  From the back pocket of his jeans, Eric tugged loose the paperback and looked at the cover. He’d promised Mama Grace he’d give this thing a try—at real try. Three real tries, in fact.

  Not just the lackadaisical, half-hearted attempts he’d been giving it till now.

  Remember. He shouldn’t expect to understand any of it on the first go through, none of it. At all. Which was funny, ’cause it was written in English.

  (Originally it had been written in Latin, but somebody named Curley had translated it, Mama Grace had explained.)

  The time before, up in the apartment over the Opera’s projection room, eventually Eric had made his eyes move over all the words in the first thirty-one pages. Not a sentence had made sense—which wasn’t quite true, either. But no more than a dozen had. And three days later, he couldn’t recall a one of those…which also wasn’t quite true. The last had kind of stayed—but that, really, was only part of a sentence, embedded in another: “But to those who ask, ‘why God did not create all men so that they would be governed by the command of reason,’ I answer only ‘because he did not lack material to create all things, from the highest degree of perfection to the lowest’; or, to speak more properly, ‘because the laws of his nature have been so ample that they sufficed for producing all things which can be conceived by an infinite intellect’ (as I have demonstrated in p16).” He’d even gone back to check out “p16,” which was no fuckin’ help!

  But at least the question made sense: “Why did God not create all men so that they would be governed by the command of reason?” even if the “why” behind the purposed answer was beyond him…even, Eric thought, if you weren’t too hot on the notion of God in the first place.

  But God or whatever…

  What was “perfect?”

  The pattern one picked up from a spider web between the ferns…

  What one could see of the stars webbing the night…

  Eric opened the book again, paged to thirty-one—where the first section ended. And thought: No, actually I read a page more—or, well, didn’t read it, but looked at all the words. Somehow without really realizing it, he’d started the second part…

  Again, he reran his eyes down page thirty-two.

  One sentence that had made a kind of sense was toward the place he’d actually stopped. (Funny how everything you did you always did a little more or a little less than you intended…) “By reality and perfection I understand the same thing.”

  It kind of undercut whatever was half sensible in that non-sensible answer to the one question he remembered. He flipped the page back over to reread it.

  Eric had no way to know that he shared a certain intellectual masochism with many great scholars throughout history—and, though he would never be a scholar himself, even a self-taught one, he shared their isolation—and intellectual boredom. (A number of scholars would have enjoyed him as a conversational friend, if he’d had the fortune to meet them…) Above that, however paradoxically, between Shit and the visitors and regulars at the Opera, he had as much sex as he wanted, which, in league with the boredom, had kept him at it.

  Still later that day, back at the Opera, again at work, he wondered: was all this bodily pleasure at the Opera some reward? (Since returning an hour ago, he’d fucked around with two guys already—and on the second one Shit had joined in. And Eric had gotten loads from all three, which was pleasant enough to note.) Or a distraction? Or a way to ameliorate his frustration with page after page of the incomprehensible? Or all of those? Or entirely other? Anyway, he thought, as he pushed the broom up the second balcony’s side aisle, wondering if it would be worth going after that big fellow over on the other side, once he was finished: soon he would take his book back to where Barbara and he had once lived and seriously return to his endlessly postponed first reading.

  The one that would take him all the way through…

  * * *

  [67] THEIR SECOND SEPTEMBER at the Opera was a month of tarnished rains, of autumnal storms where platinum lightning electrified this or that half of the sky’s dark pewter, of literal ambles on leafy sand in hours off, with the stench of halides and wet wood, of ozone sharp under the nasal cavity’s roof…

  Their first order for closing the Opera was a phone call fro
m Jay—it was just for a few days. The municipal plumbers again had to get back into the water main to and from the theater—it was more than a hundred years old.

  Besides, they wanted to see them on Gilead.

  Robert Kyle wanted to talk to them.

  “Mr. Kyle?” Shit said. “What’s he want?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. The night of Dynamite’s funeral rushed up, surrounded him, and swept off under the sun like a wave near the grotto.

  Later, when Eric was coming down the stairs, into the lobby, Rudy—who was already standing there—asked, “What are we supposed to do, Mr. Jeffers, while the movie’s closed?”

  “Well, you’ll have to figure out something, Rudy. There won’t be no water, so you won’t be able to use the john. And the electricity’s gonna be off as well.”

  Eric heard something behind him. Reaching the bottom, he looked back up the curving steps with their ornate gilded banister. Al was coming down, buttoning up a faded blue shirt with a rip in one of the forearms. (Eric noticed that his fly was open.) The towering black man sauntered easily behind him, in big old work shoes. “Well, if you gonna shut this mother fuckin’ place up for a while, maybe it’s time for me to get back out to Split Pine and see if Nancy gonna take me in for a little while. If she don’t, maybe Lungey’ll let me stay with her.” Three weeks ago, Al had come into the theater, walked heavily up the stairs to Nigger Heaven, and, save for rare trips to the bathroom, had not come down since. His head was no longer smoothly shaved, and he was bald in front.

  Eric said, “We’re talkin’ a couple of days here. Maybe three—MacAmon says it shouldn’t be no more than four.” Once Eric had gone up specifically to see how he was doing. Al had sat with his shirt off—it was balled up in a paper bag under his seat—and his pants gaping, eating a slice from the pizza Dr. Greene had just brought in. Eric and Al had talked together about fifteen minutes, mostly about this or that regular who was or was no longer coming to the theater, by the end of which Eric decided not to inquire about his domestic situation.