Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Eric sucked the hard nub free of its salt load and concertedly did not look around to see if anybody watched. “Yeah—you’re my nigger.” Jesus, he thought. And it still gives me a hard-on—and still surprises me, when it does. “And don’t you forget it. Hey—all I got to do is vacuum between the seats, mop up every three days, and screw in some light bulbs. I even had Manny and Little Joe up there, keepin’ an eye out so nobody steals ’em no more.”

  “Which one’s Manny?”

  “Well, you don’t see him that much, ’cause he don’t come down from Nigger Heaven all that often.”

  “He ain’t one of the Breakfast Club, is he?”

  “Sometimes—at least I think so. When he can swig a whole pint of vodka down to get himself up for it.”

  “Oh. Well, if he does his job, he can wolf down as much as Haystack, for all I care. I don’t give a fuck. Send him downstairs for lunch, and I’ll shit in his fuckin’ face myself, if he wants.” Shit took a long breath and watched the waves, moving, breaking, slipping past. The island’s mist neared. Digging in a nostril, again Shit offered it to Eric, then returned his finger to his own mouth to gnaw the broken nub. “You know, when we get out there, we could just lie around at Jay’s and do the same damned thing. I mean, with each other.” The air tugged and flapped the collar of Shit’s sleeveless shirt back from the tendons in his neck. “They got enough room. I wonder what it would be like to have sex with the same person three or four times in a row—even if it was you.” He gave Eric a wicked look.

  Raising his eyebrows, Eric looked back at his partner, as Shit pulled his finger—finally—free. Above the water, the moon, near full and visibly spherical, was an ivory ball on the afternoon’s blue. Hadn’t the moon been up the first time—how many years ago now?—Eric and his dad had driven down to the Harbor from Atlanta?

  “Eric?” Shit began to frown at the water. “Do you mind when I tell you to fuck off, I mean, sexually. I don’t ever really say ‘no’ to you, do I?”

  “No,” Eric said, thoughtfully. “You say, ‘Fuck off, man. I’ll hold your balls while you beat off,’ and hold ’em about thirty seconds till you start snoring again. Or you say, ‘Aw, man, I’m too tired to fuck you. Climb on my belly, stick your tongue up my nose, and glue the two of us together with a nice load on my gut,’ then you go to sleep by the time I’ve hunched my third hunch—”

  “—but I been keepin’ my arms around you, ain’t I?”

  “That’s right—when you’re awake. Or you roll over on your stomach, tell me to get on top and rub off in the crack of your cute half-breed redneck ass, but I shouldn’t put it in. And then…go to sleep.” Eric humphed. “Again.”

  “Was that the time I got kinda squeezed out from under you, off the edge of the bed and fell on the floor?”

  “Yeah. That’s happened about three times, now.”

  “Hell—and I only remember the once.”

  “Well, you were asleep. But it’s true, you don’t never say flat out ‘No.’”

  Shit chuckled. “Well, one thing: you sure know how to keep this nigger laughin’. You’re the funniest white man I know. And I wanna try screwing you three or four times in a row. Workin’ with all that loose meat flappin’ around there in the Opera has got me kinda crazy. Jay won’t mind if we just took off and did that for one of the weeks we was out there.”

  “Shit—we’re supposed to be workin’!”

  “Well, then—let’s just work and fuck. You and me. That’s what ordinary people do, ain’t it?”

  “Okay. I’d like to try that.” Eric grinned.

  “Then let’s do it. But don’t forget—or get all distracted with your goddam book.”

  At the dock, Mex was waiting.

  Among a dozen women, Mex, Shit and Eric, were the only men there that morning. (Several had come to meet visiting friends. Four together had come to meet a fifth, with much embracing and laughter. Another had come to wait for someone, who apparently had not shown up.) They walked up the steps from the dock, where, at the top of the hill, Settlement Road bloomed around them.

  “Damn,” Shit said. “The last time I was out here, it wasn’t built up this much…”

  Mex paused to look around. “There’s more,” he signed, “on Rockside—the street over. That’s gonna be for shops and stuff.”

  “Two streets?” Shit said. “This place got two streets now? What, they’re trying to make it bigger than the Harbor? Hey, what’d you say the other one’s name was?…Rockwall?” Shit translated Mex’s signs.

  “Spell it out, Mex,” Eric said.

  So Mex did.

  “Rockside,” Eric told Shit. “It’s called Rockside.”

  “Damn.” Shit squinted around in lingering amazement. “This place really has changed, ain’t it? Hey, it’s been so long since I seen you, I forgot half my sign language,” though, of course, he’d never had the spelling part at all.

  At Reba’s—on Rockside—they met Jay to get some breakfast. He was waiting for them in a booth.

  “Damn,” Shit repeated. “This is as big as the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg—where your mom used to work. The last time I was out, there wasn’t nothin’ here at all.”

  “Hello, there.” Jay turned around in his booth seat. “Hey, Reba, you wanna bring these boys some breakfast? When you guys was out here for the meetin’, this was the only buildin’ they’d gotten started on—’cause Reba said right away she was all for it.”

  Behind the counter, a very black woman in a white smock, who was straight up and down without a waist and had her head shaved, said, “That’s what I’m here for—to keep the girls and boys from goin’ hungry.” She came out. “What you gonna have with your coffee, now? We got pretty much everything—bacon, ham, scrapple, seitan, eggs, muffins—grits, hash browns, home fries. Toast or English. Orange, cranberry, grapefruit, apple, tomato—and startin’ Monday we’re gonna be squeezing our own orange juice. When you’re this close to Florida, you got to take advantage of it. Right now, though, it’s still out the carton.”

  Probably, Eric thought, he’d seen her at the meeting, though he didn’t recognize her. He remembered the single half-built building, but he would not have been able to identify where they were now from memory.

  Through the plate glass window, over the curtains, on the other side of the street, was a…dress shop window (the sign above it said NIGHTWOOD) in which everything was black or silver, plastic or leather. Lots of things had metal studs on them. After the tourist blues, pinks, and oranges that dominated the bathing suits and summer ware up and down Runcible’s mainland streets, they looked…weird.

  While Mex was drinking his second glass of juice, Shit explained to Jay: “Now, I hope you told ’em, I don’t read or write. And don’t put me on no ladders higher than the second floor. You told ’em that, now—didn’t you, Jay? I just don’t want no confusion. Long as you told ’em that, I’ll work my black ass off.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jay said. He was wearing a long-sleeve plaid shirt, so that, thrust from beneath his cuff, the snake’s head alone showed on the back of one big, blondly furred hand. “I told ’em.”

  Others came in, mostly women, most wearing elastic orange, green, or brown halters.

  The same serpent bared its gold fangs under the near-platinum fuzz on the back of Eric’s.

  Pausing over a fork—held in his fist—of eggs and grits, Shit asked softly, “How come they all wearin’ them things? Half the women on the mainland go around with theirs titties all bare—I’d thought out here they all did.”

  “Probably,” Jay said, “’cause most of the women who come in here are all gonna be doin’ some work. Physical work, I mean. It’s more comfortable, when you’re gonna be bustin’ your hump, if you got some support.”

  Right then, three people darkened the doorway behind the curtains. Then they were ambling leisurely in. The middle one was a bigger (and maybe a decade older) version of Reba. Under a desert army jacket, hanging open, she wore a halter. T
he much younger woman on her left was bare chested—and had nothing really to restrain. The one on her right was black, somewhat older—and also bare-topped.

  They came between the tables. Jay swiveled at the end of the booth bench. “Hey, Darlin’, how you doin’? These are the boys I told you about.”

  At Darlin’s side, with no halter and breasts only a suggestion bigger than a boy’s, the younger girl looked about eighteen. Her face suggested both Asian and Latino ancestors. “Hey,” she said, suddenly. “You both got a lot of the same tattoos.” Her smile swung from Eric to Jay and back. “Does that mean something?”

  They all laughed.

  “You guys worked with nanobolts before?” Darlin’ asked.

  “Huh?” Shit asked. “Naw.”

  “I didn’t think so,” Darlin’ said. “But I can show you. Come on. Let’s get out to the site.”

  *

  Tearing off gray plastic from the piles of prefab wall units, windows of several sizes, flooring panels and framing pieces, on site, Eric and Shit had been working for half an hour, when Eric realized neither of them had answered her.

  “Okay, now pay attention to this. It’s real easy, so I won’t have to explain more than a couple of times.” Darlin’ propped a piece of sheet board with braces backing it on top of a cinderblock that lay on the dozed slope.

  “I gather ain’t none of you ’cept Ruth—” who was a taciturn black woman on the crew—“used this stuff before. So I’ll go over it with you as many times as you need me to. Get over here, Gus,” who was the Asian-Latina. “It’s like weldin’, only with wood—or stone. Or metal. Or wood to metal or stone to wood. It’s real simple. But like anything else, it helps if you know what you’re doin’.”

  Shit said, “His daddy is a welder in Atlanta. His daddy’s a nigger, too—like us. A real black one—like us. But Eric’s just another nigger.”

  Eric had heard Shit say that too many times, starting at the old Slide, for the combination of sexual varismo and embarrassment to bother him any more. But he was curious—even a little anxious—about the women’s response.

  Darlin’ frowned, dropped her head to the side, then lifted it upright—and chuckled. “Son, has anyone ever told you ain’t supposed to be sayin’ that word—specially to strange black ladies you ain’t known for more than ten minutes.”

  “Hell,” Shit said, “people been tellin’ me everything what come out of my mouth I ain’t supposed to say—since I been born. Not to mention what goes into it. I can’t even tell most people my damned name, ’cause it’s too nasty.”

  Darlin’s smile filled out into a grin. “Well, you got a point there. So maybe that just means you should keep that mouth shut and pay attention to what I’m sayin’.”

  “Yes’m.” Shit grinned back. Though Eric was not exactly sure what Darlin’s grin meant—where on the scale from eccentric to lunatic to retarded she placed him (from the anxiety of meeting someone new, Shit’s desire to impress could sometimes get out of kilter)—at least Eric knew that Shit’s grin meant things were fine on his side.

  “What’re them little pieces of pipe stickin’ out here and there all over things?” Eric asked.

  “Nothin’ you need to worry about. You can put in water works—sinks and bathrooms—in any room you want. Basic pipin’ for hot and cold water is already in all the components. But that ain’t your concern today.”

  Darlin’ went on to explain how you put two pieces of wood or stone or metal together that had this gray plastic stuff painted along one side, then just touched it with the barrel of the sealing gun and pulled the trigger—a green light would come on and shine on the seam—and within three-quarters of a second, they sealed themselves together all along their length.

  The prefab parts had single, double, and triple registration marks that you lined up. “But you don’t even have to get ’em exact, as long as they’re within an inch of one another. The bolting—that’s the gray stuff—will pull ’em into line. Now, it ain’t gonna pull ’em more than an inch. So you try to get’em as close as you can. And if one piece is backwards or somethin’, it ain’t gonna turn it around for you. But it will line ’em up if they’re half an inch, a quarter of an inch, an eighth of an inch off. Now, if you do have the wrong piece in place, or have it backwards, the sealing gun reads that and this yellow light comes on the first three times you pull the trigger. So if it turns yellow instead of green, you stop and figure out what you done wrong. ’Cause on the fourth try, it’ll seal ’em up anyway—and you’re more or less stuck with it. That’s nanotechnology.” She looked at the piece of braced board she was showing them. “Now don’t be tryin’ to line single registration marks up with double marks. Or double marks up with triple ones. I had a young feller workin’ with me about three months ago, and she couldn’t get that notion through her head any old way. Just remember: one goes with one. Two goes with two. And three goes with three. And if it’s really off by eight, nine, ten inches—or two or three feet, you just got the wrong damned piece. Un’erstand? Also: I shouldn’t even be tellin’ you this until the very end—’cause it’s a waste of time and just leads to confusion. But if you do make a mistake, you got exactly six hours to correct it. Turn this knob on the sealin’ gun to red, pull the trigger again—and they’ll come right apart. And you can fix up your glitch. After six hours, though, it’s there permanent-like. But I warn you, it’s a whole lot easier if you don’t make no mistakes the first time.”

  Then she showed them how to put a two-by-four with that gray stuff on one end up against a cinderblock with the same gray stuff on it, click the sealer gun four times, and have a bond where the wood or the block would break first before the joint separated.

  The girl said, “It’s like that old Elmer’s Glue-All—or Super Glue.”

  “Yeah,” Darlin’ said. “I been on crews where the girls called that stuff Super Glue. But it ain’t glue. One person told me it was glue what been to university. The sealer gun sends out a message and the stuff works all into the wood or the metal, in little spikes, where the ordinary plastic turns into this special polymer that’s harder than titanium steel. And—” she held up the gun again—“remember, you got six hours to fix any mistakes. Green light—it seals up. Red light, and it comes loose again.” She twisted the little dial from one setting to the next, and back. “Yellow means you’re a damned fool—and that’s the one, at least at the beginning, you’re gonna be seein’ a lot.”

  Around them, floors and walls and staircases and windows began to rise without nails or screws. Gray plastic bags and red plastic ribbons in which the building parts had come made big piles. The wind pushed at them, between the sites, flattening the crackling plastic to the angular shapes within.

  When they’d been working awhile, from behind the wall next to them, Eric yelled, “Oh, fuck…!”

  “Wha’sa matter?” Shit called and ran over. Gus hurried behind him.

  Darlin’ had decided they were coming along real well and was on the other side of the road, helping some women in the trucks unload another delivery of great, gray plastic-bagged parts.

  In the roofless house, the Asian girl stood there, looking confused.

  Shit asked, “You hurt yourself?”

  No. Eric had put up a whole stairway—a relatively complicated process—without putting in the braces along the side wall. “Jesus, I am a fuckin’ idiot!” He set his teeth, looking at the lines of gray down the inner wall where no planks were, then—across the floor—at the bracing beams still bound in strips of red plastic. Quickly, it was clear that you couldn’t slip them in, now that the steps had been set. “It’s all got to come apart…!” The space smelled of cut wood.

  “So—” Gus said—“let’s just do it.” The black bandana binding her head was printed with red-eyed skulls.

  “Oh, fuck, man…” Eric reached up to rub his forehead.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Shit said. “Just put on the red light.”

  “We better w
ork together on this one,” Gus said. “Somebody’s gonna have to hold ’em, ’cause when they come loose otherwise, they’re gonna fall.”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “I was thinkin’ the same thing. Hey, you know I’m pretty glad it was you what fucked up, ’cause I was sure as my name’s Shit it was gonna be me, see, ’cause I can’t read and write. This way, I don’t have to feel like I’m the fool.”

  “You can’t?” Gus looked surprised.

  “Nope.”

  “Come on,” Eric said. He still sounded disgusted with himself. “Let’s see if we can fix it.”

  So they did.

  When they got back to the building they’d been working on, Eric asked, “You want me to go up and do the second-story work?”

  “Naw,” Shit said. “I’m okay. Long as you got the floor down and at least one wall up there, I’m okay—basically.”

  “Fine,” Eric said. “But if you feel a little queasy, you call me. I’m on it.”

  Just then, the door in the half wall opened, and Darlin’ walked in. “Hey, I seen you runnin’ around up there.” She was talking to Shit. “You work real hard, boy—harder than your friend here, and he ain’t no slacker, either.” With a thumb, she adjusted her orange halter over a breast.

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “That’s ’cause I work like a nigger.”

  Darlin’ looked at Eric. “He sure knows how to put his foot in his mouth, too, don’t he?”

  “Better than anyone I know,” Eric said. “It’s one of the reasons I love ’im.”

  “Mmm,” Darlin’ said. “Well, there’s no accountin’ for taste.” She turned, went back across the floor, and this time stepped off where there was no wall, and—as she wandered back by a building they’d completed about an hour before—stopped to check a window that had been sealed into place, then a doorway, and finally bent to examine the set of steps leading up to it, none of which had been there three hours back.

  She looked over at them and grinned. “You boys fucked up on this one and had to do it over again, didn’t you?”