Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Bind, yeah,” Eric said. “I mean bond. Okay—”

  Shit released his shoulders and moments later had both of Eric’s feet in his rough hands, pressing them to his face. “Oh, man…” he took a long, long breath—“you ain’t gonna go and leave, now—is you?”

  “Huh? What you mean?” Eric asked. “Why would I leave?” He looked at the cleft in Shit’s buttocks, darker than his own.

  “’Cause this is a little fuckin’ harbor county where nobody fishes for a livin’ anymore and there ain’t nothin’ to do except fight and fuck—and ’cause you wanna get back to the big city where all them interestin’ friends are and where you could see people and stuff and do things that was fun, other than hang out with a stupid nigger who don’t know shit about nothin’ and can’t do nothin’ but fuck ’cause he’s too scared to fight.”

  “Jesus, Shit,” Eric said, “you know that bondin’ thing works two ways.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But Dynamite ain’t here no more. You sure the reason you wasn’t hangin’ around is because he was so good to you?”

  “Shit…I wanna be with you. Yeah, I loved Dynamite, too. But that’s because he was your dad.”

  “But you see, I got to know what it is you want.” Shit’s face was, now, somehow against Eric’s neck. His rough fingers hooked Eric’s shoulders. “You wanna go back to Atlanta? You wanna get a good job there, where you ain’t just sloppin’ ammonia round in the basement piss troughs ’cause another drunk nigger couldn’t aim straight when some damned Polack state trooper down there finally convinced ’im he was serious about wantin’ ’im to piss all over ’im—?”

  “Shit, that was probably me,” Eric said. “Don’t blame it on the niggers.”

  “Yeah, I know. But you wanna go off and meet all different kinds of people—who I don’t even know. Even maybe get married and have kids and stuff. With a woman, maybe. Or adopt ’em if it’s a man. And maybe come down to someplace like this for just two weeks in the summer, and when you see me, not even nod, ’cause you ain’t even sure you know me no more, ’cause the guy you done married wouldn’t like somebody like me, anyway. ’Cause I’m too fuckin’ dirty and stupid and nasty—”

  “Oh, come on, Shit—stop it, now!”

  “Don’t go—cocksucker.” Shit’s arms had gone around him. Shit was talking into his neck. “I’m gonna rub all over you, and then come and piss at the same time, and rub it all in with my belly, and we ain’t never gonna wash it off.”

  “Hey, I’ll give it three days. But after that—”

  “Don’t go, you piss drinkin’ snot eatin’ nasty fuck. Don’t go. I’ll fuck your ass. I’ll piss in your fuckin’ face, over at work in the Opera House or out in the street in the Dump or up here on the bluff. Don’t go. You can have anything that comes out of my damned nigger dick, my nigger nose, my nigger mouth, my nigger ass—but don’t go! I’ll lick out every hole you got for half an hour every day—then push my dick in there and leave it in for a long, long time—”

  “Shit, I know how large the world is. I don’t got no reason to wanna leave…”

  Shit blinked at him, with something close to wonder.

  “I mean, why in the world would you think I would wanna leave—?”

  “’Cause I’m a half-toothless, green-eyed nigger what can’t read or write and ain’t got the patience to sit through a whole town meetin’, where people are talkin’ about important shit, and I don’t even understand it and nobody wants to be around me ’cause I ain’t got no nails left and I’m forty-four years old and I still I eat my own goddam snot and they think I’m some kind of fuckin’ creep unless somebody told ’em how big my dick was and they wanna get fucked, and even then it ain’t like I’m no super-buck like Al or that nigger you always talkin’ ’bout knowin’ when you was a kid back in Atlanta…while you look like some goddam gold-headed movie-star out of a fuckin’ magazine—”

  That’s when Eric grabbed Shit and pulled him to the grass, tonguing eyes and nose and mouth. They gripped each other’s backs and the backs of each other’s heads.

  Later, when Shit lay there, and they’d held each other with their tongues deep—and slowly moving—in each other’s mouths awhile, Eric pulled his head back and said, “You’re forty-four. I just turned forty-two this July. You think other guys our age who been together as long as we have still carry on like this?”

  “You mean bindin’?”

  “Well, that an’ everything else,” Eric said.

  “If they don’t, they don’t know what they’re missin’.”

  “Why do you think we do it?”

  “Huh? ’Cause we’re always fuckin’ so many other people.” Shit nodded in the grass. “It’s ’cause we’re always gettin’ back together again—I mean at least every couple of weeks. Hell, sometimes we get back together two or three times a day. That’s always good…!”

  Eric laughed. “You think that’s what it is?”

  “I guess so. At least part of it,” Shit said. “That’s how I figured it. Besides, you smell good. I ain’t never been able to get enough of it. It’s strongest when you drink my piss—which reminds me, I gotta take a leak. Hey, when you go down on me, hug my butt real tight, so I can rub on your head and you won’t come loose.”

  “Aw, you’ll just get all excited and halfway through, you’ll get all hard and won’t be able to finish.”

  “That’s what you think,” Shit said. “Naw. That was me five years ago. But…um, you’ll see.” And when Eric came up, Shit gave him a long, long, tongue-searching kiss that ended with a relaxed sigh from Shit, as if, finally, something had been completed.

  Eric propped his head up on one hand. “You know, you got a lot more reasons to leave me than I got to leave you.”

  On his back, Shit looked over. “How you mean?”

  “Between the Dump and the Opera and guys in Turpens from all up and down the coast, you gotta have fifty people who’re just waitin’ for you to fuck ’em. I bet anyone of ’em would move you in with ’em in a New York minute if you was lookin’ for a place to stay. And me…? Now where the fuck would I go? Back with my mama? That would mean puttin’ up with all Ron’s bullshit. So I don’t think you got to worry about me runnin’ off nowhere.”

  “Oh…” Shit said, thoughtfully. “But see, there was only ever two guys I wanted to fuck who I wanted to fuck me, too…now and then, that is. One of ’em was my dad. And he’s dead. And I guess you know the other one.”

  Eric put his arm around Shit’s chest and squeezed him.

  And a little later, Shit said, “I’ll tell you one thing that would be nice.”

  “What?”

  “A little place out on Gilead—somewhere near Jay. And I could go to the graveyard and be with Dynamite whenever I wanted.”

  “You really do miss him, don’t you?”

  “Not that much—but when I do, I do. A couple of nights back, around three in the mornin’, if we’d been out there, I would’ve gotten up and walked over there and hung out with him awhile.” He snorted. “And when I got back, I’d of probably fucked hell outta you.”

  “You did,” Eric said, “I think. You know, if we were out there, you wouldn’t have as many people to fuck as you do now.”

  Shit took a big breath and rolled to his back. “Well, I’ll tell you. That might even be interestin’, too.”

  October’s breeze whispered in the nearer, then the further grasses.

  * * *

  [70] CLOUDS AND CLEAR blue unfurled over cornfields and kalefields and fields of summer squash. Eric moved the truck up, turned off the ignition, reached down, and tugged on the hand brake.

  Today there were two barns. While the orange hand-pump was still pictured on the plastic ATM cards for the Credit Union and loomed to the left of the big DUMP PRODUCE highway sign down at the junction with I-22, four years ago the clanking thing had been dug up, the concrete base smashed (Shit’s dry comment: “Now where they gonna park the pigs when they go to fuck ’em?” w
hich Eric never came by without recalling), and the whole area planted over with grass.

  In the green siding of the New Barn, built three years ago, the roll-up door began to rise. (Today the refuse cans stood along the building’s back. Although Eric had never had to collect the refuse there, he was sure it would be a nuisance because of the slope.) Opening the cab door, he twisted in the seat and, one foot on the step, swung out, holding the overhead handle.

  It was warm and breezy.

  Inside the lifting door, Horm walked forward from the shadows. He wore a sleeveless V-neck red shirt and baggy work pants with vents cut up the sides. These days, he lumbered. The shopping bag, with corn tassels and the green and purple curves of peppers and eggplants over the top, banged his calf.

  As Eric swung out from the truck, Horm stepped into the sunlight and squinted. “Got your usuals here. You want some fresh dill for your mama?”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “She don’t do much cookin’ no more,” which was what he’d said pretty much every two weeks now for two years.

  “You know what to do with them artichokes?” Horm handed up the shopping bag.

  Eric took the reinforced paper handles. “I sure do.” He swung the sack

  up into the truck seat,

  Horm said, “When you gonna bring that horny partner of yours around and let ’im fuck my black ass? Pretty soon, I’m gonna forget what hole that damned thing goes into.”

  “You know where to find ’im.” Eric turned and climbed back up into the cab. “He’ll be waitin’ for you. He’s always sayin’ he likes ’em with experience.”

  At the same time, at the edge of the barn doorway, the scrawny kid everyone called Grubby looked out. He wore sandals and had a shaggy mop of bronze hair. Edging up beside him, was his black partner, Shooter, a devilishly good looking, coal-black Caribbean, in work boots. Both kids wore denim shirts that hung wide open over muscle-banded bellies. (Eric thought of them as “kids,” though both were almost thirty.) Itinerant laborers, traveling the country, about four months ago both had gotten jobs at Dump Produce. Both spent their days off at the Opera, where they had latched onto Shit and Eric, which, so far, was working out.

  “Hey,” Horm said. “You heard about the Markum fella, didn’t you? The little guy?”

  “Big Man—you mean the dwarf? Joe Markum’s son?”

  “Yeah. The one-legged one.”

  “Naw. I didn’t hear nothin’.” Eric hesitated with his hand on the cab’s open door. “What about ’im?”

  “He died—” had a child been playing in a bowl of ice cubes and, with wet cold hands, turned and grasped Eric’s lower intestine, it might have felt the same. It wasn’t fear. But it shocked him—“yesterday. Yesterday afternoon. Down in Hemmings. He said he wasn’t feelin’ too well, lay down—and forty minutes later he was dead.”

  “Wow…” Eric said quietly.

  “A lot of them little guys go early like that,” Horm said. “A cerebral hemorrhage—that’s what Dr. Greene said, when he told me about it last evenin’. He come by for his corn, celery, and tomatoes. I swear that’s all the man eats. Corn, celery, and tomatoes. I don’t know why he gets ’em here. He could grow ’em hisself. I guess you can make a salad with just tomatoes and celery. Dr. Greene said them little guys is prone to them things.”

  “Um…” Eric’s heart was beating harder than it had been, but now it quieted. “I don’t see why not?”

  “It don’t sound to me like it would taste like much. They’re gonna have some kind of memorial for ’im tomorrow. With his family, I guess. At four. Down in Hemmings. You guys were pretty friendly with him, weren’t you?”

  “We used to go down there on holidays,” Eric said. “Save a couple of times when he come up to the Opera and I got to nod hello, I ain’t seen ’im for almost—well—six, seven months, now.” Eric shook his head. “Shit’s gonna be surprised.”

  Horm nodded. “A couple of years ago, I remember Shit drove by with him to pick up your vegetables, and I gave him a whole bag of stuff to take to his daddy—he was just as appreciative as he could be. He was a real nice little guy. It’s funny, knowin’ I ain’t never gonna see ’im again. I’m kind of sorry I didn’t run into him more recently than I did.” Horm straightened, as though recovering from lugging out the sack. “He always had somethin’ to laugh about. Well, you give my best to Shit.”

  “Sure,” Eric said. “I’ll tell him you sent your regards.”

  Giving a mock salute—“See you in a couple of weeks—” Horm turned and lumbered back onto the hay-strewn planks of the New Barn’s floor. Ahead of him were stalls and a ladder, up to the loft.

  Fifteen yards away, the Old Barn had just been painted blue and looked kind of odd, sitting there in front of the corn and kale.

  At the edge of the New Barn’s door, Shooter and Grubby still pressed together, watching Eric.

  Eric grinned at them. Turning to face them, he took a hold of the crotch of his own baggy work pants and joggled himself.

  Eric saw both of them laugh.

  Then, closer to the wall, Shooter pulled down his zipper, tugged out his genitals, and Grubby—noticing—reached over and began to shuck on his partner’s cock. Oblivious, Horm continued on into the barn’s shadow.

  Eric laughed, too, figuring it was their way of saying they’d be at the Opera in a few days, and swung the cab door closed. As he started the truck, the combination of sexual anticipation coupled with the shock of his friend’s extinction, made his stomach queasy. He drove out beside the two parked tractors and the row of tool shacks—all relatively new—and out the gate.

  It would be nice, Eric thought, to go down with Shit to Hemmings tomorrow for the memorial. Myron could sit in the booth for a couple of hours. It would be nice to listen to the family reminisce about the little fellow. As a little kid, Eric knew, Big Man had had a whole bunch of operations and Mr. Markum was always going on about how brave he’d been through them all. He wondered would they see Danny, if not Buddy. It would be good to say hello to Mr. Markum. He wondered if the conveying of his condolences would help heal the absoluteness of the shock.

  Through the window, the March air was pleasantly cool.

  *

  Under the chipped and ornate arches and the mirrors marred with black stains and cracks, Shit stood with his mop in the ringer of the yellow plastic pail. “Naw,” he said, “I don’t wanna go.”

  Eric was as surprised as he had been at hearing of Big Man’s death. “Huh? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I just—” he shrugged—“don’t feel like it.”

  “But, damn, Shit. Big Man and Mr. Markum both came to Dynamite’s funeral—and helped us dig his grave.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “But…can’t you tell me why?”

  Shit turned back to the pail, took out the mop, and slopped it down on the red tile of the basement lounge area. “It’s just…well—” he shrugged—“his daddy makes me feel funny, sometimes.”

  “When we go down there for Christmas,” Eric said, “we ran into his dad a few times. He was all right—and he was always nice to us and Dynamite, both. And you’re the one who told me how much you thought they needed each other.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if they always got each other. Sometimes when I went down there with Big Man by hisself, and we was goin’ up to Big Man’s part of the house, Joe Markum didn’t have nothin’ to say to me—not even ‘Hello, dog.’ You would’a thought I was goddam Danny Turpens.”

  “Huh?” Eric frowned. “Well, that’s…”

  From the arch into the dark part of the rest room, where the urinals were, someone’s voice echoed within. “Oh…oh, oh, fuck me! Fuck me, man! Yeah, that’s right! Fuck me—yeah! Harder!”

  Shit leaned into the mop and moved across the floor. “You go on down there, if you want. You see Mr. Markum, you tell ’im hello and how sorry we are and all that stuff. If you wanna go, I don’t care.”

  “Well, I’m gonna feel a lit
tle odd without you…” Eric already felt strange. “But I guess…” He breathed out—and didn’t say anything more.

  From one of the other arches, he could hear a quiet grunting. Only from its sudden quickening, did he realize someone had simply gone into the alcove to beat off. On the table against a red stone column, a cardboard box was less than half full of brown and blue plastic packaged condoms. I should go upstairs, Eric thought, and get some more from the carton under the cash register in the booth, and fill that thing up.

  “Well, look—okay. I’ll go. But, damn, I wish you was goin’ with me. I’d feel a lot better.”

  “I wish I felt like I could,” Shit said.

  *

  Six-thirty the next evening, Eric got back. Shit was coming across the lobby. “How was it? You have a good time?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “Actually, it was kinda nice. Pike and Larson and the guys we always see down there on Christmas—I mean, Space Program Day—” Eric chuckled, and Shit smiled—“was all there. They asked after you. I told ’em you was up mindin’ the place here.” Then Eric made an odd face. “It was a little funny, though.”

  “What you mean?”

  “When I got there, the first thing I done is go to the house. But there was a piece of paper taped to the door with gaffers tape that said the Big Man Memorial was over at the Hemmings Community Center, so I drove over there. They were havin’ the thing down in the basement. I guess Larson was in charge of settin’ it up. About thirty people done come. I recognized about half of ’em. They had a table with some pictures of Big Man and some flowers and a couple of his toy rocket ships. And we sat down—in a circle, ’cause Larson said that’s how Big Man always had meetin’s—and Larson called on folks and they stood up to tell stories about him, and how much he liked them science fiction movies—”

  “Anybody tell about tryin’ to fuck that little guy when his pee hose busted loose and wet us all the fuck down, up there in his rubber bed with the rubber floor—?”