Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Eric sighed. “Yeah…kinda.”

  Shaking her head, but smiling, Darlin’ went down the steps.

  Gus came in from another room. “You guys are funny.”

  Shit said, “Hey—someday I may just show you how funny I really am. You know, when it’s hard, my dick curves down, ’stead of up. Tell ’er, Eric.”

  She smiled. “Don’t push it.”

  Then Shit hurried up the steps and they were back to work.

  Eric had forgotten about the unanswered question about his snake, till they were all strolling along the path. It was almost four-thirty. Looking at the buildings coming into being at either side of the road, four of which had not been there that morning, Gus said, “You got some really nice ink. I’d like to get a snake like you got.”

  Shit said, “Get yourself over to Runcible. Eric got all those at Cave et Aude. That’s Tank and Cassandra’s. Or, if you wait a few months, they’re gonna open up a place out here—you can get it then. Tank’s got that thing wrapped around both of his arms—it goes across his back, there, and down to his hands.”

  “I’d like to,” Gus said. “But I don’t know whether I really want to—or if that’s just when I see somebody else with something interesting.”

  Then Gus and the black woman—Ruth—turned off the path.

  Shit and Eric both had been really impressed with the nanobolts.

  Eric was silently awed. Shit ran on and on about them till Eric wanted him to shut up; sometimes Shit’s enthusiasm could get on your nerves.

  Shit walked along with his hand on Eric’s shoulder. “You know, them nanobolts is so neat.” Shit’s palm had the texture of a slab of cement. And that, Eric thought, was exactly what a man’s hand ought to feel like. They ambled on together. “And I can do it and pretty much understand it.” (Eric ran his thumb over his own palm. It wasn’t much different.) “I like that—and you get a whole lot done. And you’re the one who messed up—not me. That’s funny, huh?”

  “Hey,” Eric said. “Look, I ain’t forgot any of the stuff we was sayin’ before. And I know you ain’t either. Let’s go back to Jay and Mex’s—we can lay around and hug on one another and do all sorts of nasty shit—”

  “I got an even better idea,” Shit said.

  “You do?”

  “I wanna go and look around at some of this new stuff out here. Just for an hour or so—and you wanna go sit down at Reba’s, where we was for breakfast, have a cup of coffee, and read your book. Come on—lie to me and tell me you don’t.”

  “Well, that actually would be nice. But the book’s back at Jay and Mex’s—”

  “I bet she got some readers in there, like they do at the Lighthouse. She’d probably let you use one for a hour or so.”

  Eric frowned. “Well, yeah—probably.” He was always a little surprised how much Shit actually knew about reading culture, for all his protests against it.

  “Go ’head,” Shit said. “I’ll be waitin’ for you.” He stopped. “I’m goin’ back this way. Hey, we got two weeks out here to be together.”

  “All right.” Eric paused for a second, then sighed. “I won’t be but an hour, an hour-and-a-half. Then I’ll come back to Jay’s.”

  “Yeah.” Shit grinned, turned, and started at a trot down the road in the low gold light between the lowering trees.

  Grinning quickly, Eric turned back to go toward the road into the new town.

  He walked on dust mottled with late afternoon light and shadows, wondering when he’d first look aside and see water. It was after five. At the brown corner walls of the third building he passed, in a wedge of sun, ferns had already tangled as high as his shoulder, so that their fronds were as luminous as any green he’d ever seen.

  Was this how wilderness transformed itself into town?

  Eric turned and walked the four-foot width between the buildings—to notice a Styrofoam cup, already on the ground and stepped on.

  If we come out here, he thought, we could be garbage men again…

  Around the edges of the eves above him were the grooves every three inches that spoke of the solar panels on the roofs themselves. Eric reached the cleared part of the Settlement. A big (four story) glass-walled building stood up on the cliff. Eric wandered below it. On either side, he counted two, four, six, eight—then four more people, three women and a man—walking down the street: one of the men and one of the women he’d recently met in Ron’s office when he’d dropped in to see Barb, back in Runcible. They smiled, nodded. Eric called, “Hi…” and walked on. The old stairs from the Gilead boat dock came right on up to Settlement Road, the ones you used to walk up to the rise, through the trees, out to Jay’s.

  After the—he counted—tenth, eleventh, twelfth house, the bulldozer had put an angle in the road. He looked at the blade’s edging, still clear in the dirt. This would be a street soon.

  Three months ago, when he’d last been out, only a little clearing had been done.

  That, he thought, is fuckin’ amazing!

  The path on which he had walked to Jay’s dozens of times had curved. Now earthmovers and architects had reduced it to two straight lines at an angle.

  A set of steps rose off the old stairs up from the boathouse—made of clean, white wood—to join up with Rockside.

  Is this what a city looks like when it’s born? Had Atlanta ever been like this? Or Diamond Harbor itself? Or the Dump?

  Not only were Shit and he observers, they were abettors, constructors, enmeshed in the process…and, with nanobolts (he laughed aloud), they were doing it five or six times as fast as it might have been done a decade or two back.

  As he reached the alley’s end between the buildings, across the unpaved street, he could see NIGHTWOOD’s window. Turning onto the sidewalk, he realized he had been walking beside Reba’s—though from the back he hadn’t recognized it. Swinging about, he went into Reba’s front door and looked around the space, at the framed samplers on the walls, at the ceiling fans.

  Four people sat at separate tables. Three were women. Eric slid into a booth, sat for a moment, then slid out again and walked to the counter. On the end, on a tray in a pile, were half a dozen readers. (He imagined the physical book, still in his knapsack, back at Jay’s.) Their frames looked like damascened metal, but—when he lifted one—from its weight he realized it was plastic. “Can I use one of these…?”

  “That’s what I got ’em there for, honey.” Reba paused, moving cups from one tray to another. She smiled and, he realized, recognized him from the morning. “You want some coffee?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You guys on a library program?”

  “Sure thing,” she said. “L-7, like usual. Though you’re the first person to want it. Most people just want P-2…e-mails, bloglogs, and magazines.”

  “Oh.” Somewhat embarrassed, Eric grinned.

  He took the reader back to the same booth where he’d sat with Mex and Jay that morning and started playing with it, while Reba brought over a coffee cup. Since he’d never owned one, he always had to do everything four or five times to call up his book, which was stupid, since it was always the same one.

  Then, out the window, something moved…

  In the NIGHTWOOD window display, a huge TV screen had come on, draped around its edges with black and silver Mylar, at least six feet high and almost ten feet wide. Behind the flat face, a dark tree rose to spread its branches across the store’s window’s array of leather pants and black plastic jackets, strung with fishnet, a web above a glimmering reproduction of the sea. At either side of the display, giant mâché lobsters, each at least twelve feet from head to tail, painted in shades of kelly, olive, even metallic green, rose from molded waves to balance on their tails, claws poised. On the eyestalks of one (complete with brown pupils and long curling lashes) hung a sign that said “Keith.” On the eyes of the other a sign read “Esmeralda.” On the TV screen between them, the picture had just come on: the inside of a large theater, that could easily have been his and Shi
t’s own Opera House, restored. The picture swept around the audience. On the screen, a woman in a black coat was looking at a microphone.

  Later, he could not remember what prompted his curiosity. But Eric stood, leaving the reader on the booth table beside his cup. He hurried toward the door and pushed out to lope across the dirt and gravel between. What he had not seen before, but expected to find because he’d seen something like it in a few other shops in Runcible: on crinkly black cords three sets of earphones dangled before the window glass.

  Eric lifted one set, slipped them over his head—and, because of the high electronic wail in his right ear, pulled it off, dropped it, and picked up another. When he slipped those on (there was no static here), he heard the woman say:

  “…my good friend, Laurel Owen.”

  Applause grew. Now, also in black, with feathery blond hair, another woman walked out from the backstage confusion. Applauding, the audience began to stand.

  As the two women hugged, one or the other said, “You’re wonderful, honey. What a honor.”

  The audience quieted.

  Holding hands, both walked forward. To the orchestra’s quiet introduction, with her long bronze hair, the taller woman began to sing, quietly, pensively:

  “The dawning sky is blue and gray,

  “and blue and gray mists veil the hours—”

  Here she looked down:

  “annul the waters, hide the towers,” She looked up, and added, “erase the spires that crown the bay…

  “Ininity is blue and gray,” Tossing back her straight hair, she sang on:

  “The undefined and incomplete

  “moment where sky and water meet,

  “before the day is ripped by gray

  “blades of gleaming metal gray.

  “Swimming gull-forms melt and float

  “in liquid air around the boat—”

  The other joined her—“that moans in blind flight on the bay,” and the music’s energy increased enough to make Eric step back, as the two turned at sing to one another:

  “Hold me, love. I quake with day,

  “Blind beneath the staring hours.

  “See the cracked reflected towers

  “Burning crimson on the bay,” and the taller tossed her mike from one hand to the other, turning to the audience, in some sort of totally naked confession, “The dawning sky is blue and gray—”

  Again they were singing together, the words the same but not the music, notes stretched into a rich retardondo:

  “and blue and gray mist veil the hours,

  “annul the waters—” and on “waters,” they turned to high-five each other—“hide the towers,

  “erase the spires that crown the bay—

  The first syllable held for two seconds and the second for four, carrying both voices in a rising glissade that turned their bodies to one another and returned their voices to the tones they had begun with.

  “Hold me love,” sang the shorter one, quietly again, which made Eric astonishingly, even uncomfortably, aware—because his body was tingling—of how intense the music had grown during the last chorus: “I quake with day.

  “Blind beneath the starting hours,

  “See the cracked reflected towers

  “Burning on the bay—” and here both threw back their heads and sang out again:

  “See the cracked reflected towers

  “burning crimson on the bay—!“

  Which is when Eric realized what the two women—blatantly, blankly, inarguably—articulated, though not in the words, but in the rising and tumbling shape of the melody itself and the harmony supporting it, that strove for a seventh and, not achieving it, tore down through it, covering a range that felt as immense as the theater on the screen, as the Opera he came down into, to work everyday with Shit, a theater whose edges he could not see. It hit him with an energy whose “why” till now he had never been sure of. That the audience felt, at least, its power and had risen throughout the theater was secondary. Again the women sang (“See the cracked reflected towers. . .”), with even more intensity, each with a fist clenched, each with her body spasming rather than shaking to the rhythm—and Eric realized he wanted to see Shit.

  He wanted to tell him…

  He wanted to tell him that they were making a world, a county, a city together, and that it was wonderful. Shit was the reason he slept through the night, that he woke and slipped from the covers—Eric began to grin. He thought: I’m grinning at myself, standing here, grinning—at what had been spoken, or sung, or celebrated, thanks to some song I don’t remember ever hearing before, probably twenty-five or thirty-five or forty-five years old.

  “…The dawning sky is blue and gray,” the taller sang—finally. Then they hugged.

  And kissed deeply on the mouth.

  The audience screamed.

  Eric thought, Jesus Christ…at its electric sensuality. That’s not even two men, he thought. Or a man and a woman. It’s two women—and it’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!

  He thought it nakedly, numbly, even reverently.

  He felt air rush in, under and over his front teeth, expand his chest. And that’s…

  Raising his hands, he pulled the earphones from his ears. He had to find Shit—and find him soon. (The shorter woman looked dazed, while the camera followed her off stage…)

  Eric turned from in front of the window and started along Rockside, in the direction of Jay and Mex’s. Soon he was half running. As he glanced down, pebbles and rocks and sticks on the path flickered under his eyes; when he looked up branches and bits of sun flashed by. What am I going to say when I see him? I was just watching some old song on a TV in a store window, and suddenly I…fell in love with you, all over again! So I come runnin’—!

  —sprinting, Eric felt as if he were watching himself run rather than running. I like feeling like this—

  —he felt his foot twist. He flailed out an arm, expecting to fall. And didn’t. His other foot came down—and he expected it to hurt, from the twist. He looked at the half hidden root in the road that had all-but-thrown him. It didn’t hurt, actually—though he decided he’d better slow. And did, grateful not to have injured himself in this passion. It would be just like him to twist an ankle now.

  Shaking his hands, looking around—Eric stood a moment, breathing—then again started walking. In the breezy woods, he tried to sing, “See the cracked, reflected…!” and laughed at his own voice, so rough, so wildly off-key.

  No, Shit wouldn’t understand if I did that…

  But how the hell do you tell somebody…that? Was it something you could only do through the intensity of music? Or making music? Or making a town? Or making love? That’s what Shit had wanted to do with his days on the island. And isn’t that, he thought, amazing in itself…?

  His feelings still a-broil inside, Eric tried to walk more carefully over the rest of the roadway, toward Jay’s. It was like tiny lights, swarming up, down, around inside his chest, cool, comfortable fireflies, small but blinding whenever he tried to look at them directly, inchoate and precious.

  To his left, trees fell back. Eric reached the first of the stony outcrops that made up this end of the island. For twenty feet he could see the seaward horizon’s knife-edge above feathering shrubs. On his first trip to Jay’s, in the midst of a moonless approach, he remembered how he’d missed it, and how surprised he had been at his first morning trip back, in the bird-lanced sunlight, along the path to the boathouse. At any rate, it meant he was about fifty yards around the bend from Jay’s.

  Wind rose, branches moved—and something way along his path on his left moved behind them. Momentarily, he thought it was Jay’s pick-up, coming forward (and so rarely used on the island—but, since the construction had begun, certainly used more frequently, Jay had said only that morning at breakfast).

  But it was Hugh—on foot. A faint fuzz of hair blurred Hugh’s braided, salt and pepper cornrows, their ends twisted over his green shirt col
lar, opened over a sleeveless undershirt. With his walking stick, Hugh ambled up.

  Eric said, “Hey—Hugh? Did Shit get back to the house yet? I was lookin’ for him—I gotta find him! I wanna tell him somethin’.”

  “He came by.” Hugh smiled benignly. “But he kept on goin’ along the road. Looked like he was gonna take a walk maybe—probably went out toward the Holota place…unless he kept on to the cemetery. There ain’t no place else to go out this way.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Sure. Thanks.” He hurried forward—and somehow didn’t remember passing Jay’s—

  When he saw the squat Holota cabin with its flattened A-roof and its deck off to the front, the first thing he thought was that they’d done some clearing around it, too. Then, with another four or five steps along the road, he saw, beyond the building’s corner, someone standing toward the deck’s back, looking in the sea’s direction. (Had you been able to see water from the road, before…? He didn’t think so.) Shit? A wave inside him, both grateful and greedy, rose up. (What wave was it? It was—or was like—a very specific wave, once seen, and now returned, and—now—forgotten once more…) He started over the shrubs, reached the steps, hurried up onto the porch, and turned right along the boards, under the deck’s roof. “Hey…” Eric stepped around the corner, hearing as much as feeling his own grin.

  Shit turned from the back rail. His green eyes were incredibly bright—and the first thing Eric thought, was: of course, he’s as excited as I am…

  The features, blurred within Shit’s beard, moved toward…no, it wasn’t a smile—

  Eric repeated, this time with curiosity, “Hey…?”

  Shit said, “They’re tearin’ it all up.” Then he blinked—and, for a moment, looked like someone Eric had never seen.

  A tear moved in an angular line down Shit’s cheek toward the fuzz, and Eric thought: Has he got somethin’ in his eye…? Other tears stood on his tan cheeks.

  Or, maybe, he had seen the expression. What returned, with ghoulish precision, was the night Dynamite died, when, with the rain and the corpse outside, for a few seconds they’d turned on the light…

  “They’re tearin’ up the whole island. And we’re helpin’ ’em. It ain’t theirs…” Out from his sides, Shit’s big hands, not opened, not closed, moved a little this way, a little the other. He looked lost.