Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  THE DYNAMITE MEMORIAL

  FREE FEED-ALL

  Throughout, Shit was as quietly helpful as an assistant to an interesting madman might be. The blower was bolted in place, overhead. Because he had a computer, Jay had ordered them some red and green striped, fireproof cloth (and refused to let Eric pay for it) for the awning. Because Mex had a sewing machine, Mex ran up it up for them.

  They rolled it up the ramp, out into the Opera House lobby, and fitted the awning over the frame they’d put on the thing. All around, it was about three inches too big.

  That’s when Barbara dropped by to say hello. “Goodness gracious. You’re gonna start selling hotdogs or popcorn in here now? Well, that’s an idea.” When they explained the problem, she stepped back in her white sandals and her pale green dress, and declared, “Haven’t you boys ever heard of safety pins?” She had a dozen in the bottom of her woven straw handbag. In twenty minutes, up on the ladders, they got it folded, tucked, and fastened. It was a little bunchy at one end. “But it’s supposed to be a stove,” Eric said, “not a’ artwork in a museum. It’s okay. Hey, Barb—really, thanks. That’s good.”

  Lurking around and not looking in too good shape that day, Joady said, “Mrs. Jeffers, you sure you wanna be hangin’ around a place like this—with them movies they got playin’ in there?” He gestured to one of the posters behind glass that was not, actually, for any of the DVDs on screen.

  Barbara laughed. “Honey, I used to dance in a place that had movies like that and probably worse, playin’ right up behind me on the screen.” She shook her head. “I’m a little too heavy to do that kinda dancing now—but I could probably still surprise you—”

  “Barbara…!” Eric said.

  “Oh, let an old lady have a joke!” Barbara pulled her white wicker bag around in front. “The reason I stopped by—” she reached in and moved various things with one hand, then switched and reached in with the other, and pulled out two wide silver plastic bags—“was to give you two these things. I was out at the mall, and I saw them, and I thought maybe you could use them. You both wear your clothes till they’re just about fallin’ off you. So I thought, if you got these, maybe you’d use them.”

  “Thanks.” Frowning, Eric took one. Across the front of the silver bag, bright letters declared: A Permaclean Shirt! It’s new! It’s nanotech! And it’s eighty-five percent natural!

  Barbara held the other silver bag out toward Shit, who pushed both fists down in his pockets and grinned. “Oh. Well, thank you, ma’am,” but made no gesture to take it.

  Barbara explained: “Now don’t go and throw the bag away. You just hang the whole thing up in your closet. You take out the shirt, wear it, and when you take it off, put it back in the bag and close it up. Three hours later, it’s completely cleaned, and every six months or so, you take the strip out the bottom and throw it in the washing machine to get out all the salt and stuff that collected in it. Then you put it back in the bag, and you can wear it every day, if you want, for another six months.”

  “Oh…” Shit said, sounding honestly surprised.

  And Eric took the bag from his mother, because Shit didn’t seem to be about to take it himself.

  Though Shit did say, “Uh…thank you, ma’am.”

  That night they’d rolled the same stove outside and, in the street, tried it for the first time. Hamburgers. And sautéed onions. “Hey,” Shit said, “these are pretty good. But try not to burn the buns up, next time.”

  “There’s a kitchen knife there,” Eric said. “You wanna scrape off the burnt part, go ahead. Hey—damn…!” Because just then, the kettle of water he’d put on the back burner, to see if it would get hot enough to boil, began to bubble and splutter. Eric reached over and turned the burner down—wedges of blue pulled from the kettle’s bottom—leaving scorched black around the sides—to shiver beneath it. In three minutes, though, the water was still simmering. “Well—” Eric rubbed his red and gray apron—“if we can get it to do that when it’s full of crushed tomatoes, we can cook some chili.”

  Around toward the back, Shit was frowning at the sign. Now he looked up. “You think my daddy would’ve really liked somethin’ like this? I mean havin’ it named after him.” It was not accusatory. But it was dubious.

  With the spatula, Eric pried loose a burger, which left a scab of gray chopped meat on the skillet bottom. “He liked comin’ here to the Opera House.” Over the theater’s ornate cornice, the sky was darkening blue. Bats flitted over the street. “He brought you and me here enough times.”

  “Yeah.” Shit grinned at Eric. “You remember how he’d always go sit in the front row and tell and me and you to run off and have fun? You’d go upstairs—and I go down. When I’d come back from fuckin’ myself silly with them niggers who used to hang out downstairs in the men’s room, you’d always be there, sittin’ next to him with your face in his damned lap, and he’d be starin’ at the screen, holdin’ your head, and humpin’ for all he was worth.”

  Eric chuckled. “Hey, I never made no secret of it. Next to you, I thought your daddy was the sexiest cracker in Georgia.”

  “Aww, you was just bounded to him, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But I still never taste your fuckin’ dick cheese, today, where I don’t remember his, back then. I mean, the two of you were so much the same, down there. But you’re right. Everybody’s tastes a little different,” a point Shit made regularly, which he used to justify his unquenchable sexual inquisitiveness. “They’re all different…”

  “Yeah,” Shit agreed. “That’s what I told you. You know, it’s only when you start talkin’ like that, that I wish sometimes you wasn’t cut. That way I could see what yours tasted like—your cheese, I mean. I fingered out enough of my own and ate it, damnit.”

  Eric looked at him.

  “And so did he.” Shit looked at Eric, waiting.

  Finally, Eric said, “Shit, you remember that big storm we had, years back—Hurricane Edna? In oh-nine, I think it was. Remember how we took in Jay and Mex, when they had to leave Gilead? And how Dynamite and everybody workin’ together to feed pretty much everybody at our end of the Dump?”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “That’s right, we did, didn’t we?”

  “Well, that’s kinda where I learned to do somethin’ like this. And that’s why I thought I’d call it after your daddy—after Dynamite.”

  “Oh,” Shit said. “Yeah…I see. I see what you mean. Now I see it. I thought before it was somethin’ you maybe got outta readin’ Mama Grace’s book.”

  “Well,” Eric said, “that too—a little.”

  Suddenly Shit grinned. “Only in that storm there, while you was learnin’ that, I was learnin’ something else.” After a moment, he said, “Damn…!”

  Eric narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, I guess you was. Hey, go on inside and tell the guys down in the orchestra that we got some hamburgers out here for ’em, if they want. They don’t have to worry about gettin’ back in the theater.” By the handle, he centered the twenty-six inch skillet better on the burner. “I’m gonna put on another dozen. And Mex brought by that urn of lemonade. We got plastic cups. I don’t think it’ll go to waste.”

  Shit started back under the Opera’s marquee. “I don’t think it will, either.”

  Within minutes, two, then five, then nine men walked slowly from the lobby—some black, some white—in jeans, in T-shirts, a couple in tanks, a couple in work shoes, some barefoot, blinking in the seaside sun.

  That’s how the Dynamite Memorial Feed-Alls began.

  * * *

  [78] UPSTAIRS THE NEXT evening, Eric picked up the two silver bags from where they’d been lying on the table, carried them to the closet, and hung them by a hanger on the pole across the back. He started to close the door, then opened it again and pulled the zipper strip back on the first Permaclean bag to see the shirt inside was a red plaid.

  He zipped it up, then unzipped the other: a green plaid. Eric grinned. “I guess that’s your
s—matches your eyes.” He laughed.

  Shit stood in the middle of the floor, fists in his pockets. “I’ll probably give that to one of the guys downstairs. Maybe they can use it.”

  “Why you wanna give it away? It’s a nice shirt.”

  “Well,” Shit said, “it’s that science stuff. I can’t read the instructions, and I don’t got the patience for you to teach me. If you tried, we’d just get in some kinda argument. Besides, that stuff always makes me uncomfortable, and you know it never works—at least for me.”

  “Oh, come on.” Eric turned from the closet. “All you gotta do is wear it. Ain’t nothin’ more to it than that.”

  Shit shrugged.

  “It’s the same technology as them nanobolts, Shit, what we used to make the houses with, out on Gilead. You didn’t have no trouble with that—You did it better than I did.”

  “How’s cleanin’ a shirt gonna be the same as that Superglue stuff?”

  “They’re both nanotechnology,” Eric said. “The cleaning bag you keep the shirt in got these little tracks that run down on the inside. When you fold your shirt up, put it in there, and close it, these thousands and thousands of little molecule-sized machines get turned loose, and they work all through the fabric and take out the salt from your sweat and the dirt stains and the gunk that gets on it and carry it back to the bag wall, and then they move down those tracks to the pump in that strip the bottom, and then go back to their position and wait for the shirt to come back in there, dirty again. And you take out that strip on the bottom where they put the dirt and wash that out twice a year and your shirt’s all clean and ready to wear again, every day—”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Nobody told me, Shit. I read it on the back of the bag, before I hung ’em up.”

  “Oh,” Shit said. “Oh, I see. You read it. Get out of my face with all that reading nonsense, you fuckin’ piss-drinkin’ nigger cocksucker. That science and readin’ stuff always makes me feel funny. Sometimes I think you fellas can’t read no more’n I can. You just make it all up so I’ll feel like a fool—”

  “Okay, okay—forget it. I ain’t gonna push it on you.”

  But the next day, Eric started wearing his red plaid; and wore it every day for three months, too. After two weeks, though, when he was down in the orchestra, he was surprised to see Shit coming upstairs from the lounge in the green shirt. The sleeves were gone.

  Grinning, Eric asked him, “What’d you do? Tear the sleeves off?” That would be like Shit.

  Shit looked down at one shoulder, then at the other. “Naw. They come off by themselves—I mean you can take ’em off, if you want. You remember that Velcro? It’s kinda like that—only stronger. I can put ’em back on, any time I want. You remember that stuff…?”

  “Hey,” Eric said. “You get somebody to read you the instructions?”

  “Naw,” Shit said. “One of the California guys told me about it—and I tried it, like he said—you can’t just rip it. You gotta pull it opposite to the way it looks put together, and then it comes right apart. I left the sleeves upstairs, inside the bag.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Well…it looks good on you.”

  “Yeah, your mama got some good taste. Now why don’t you take the fuckin’ sleeves off yours and give us all a treat—you paid enough to get them goddam pictures you put all over your arms. Why don’t you let us see ’em?”

  “Okay,” Eric said. “I will.” Though, the next morning, after Shit had already gone down, when he tried to release the sleeves, he couldn’t get them to work. Back at the closet, he took the cleaning bag out, sat at the table where he read his Spinoza, and went carefully through the instructions printed on the silver plastic—and, yes, the final paragraph of small type was a description of how to hold and tug to release the sleeves and put them back on—which didn’t seem to work on his. For some reason, though, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was ask Shit to show him.

  Later that day, in the theater, he even asked a couple of the regulars among the California guys if they knew. It would have been nice if harelipped, snot-devouring Loop—whom they had befriended for a while, before he’d moved on—had been there. But he’d been gone three months now. And Dr. Greene said he’d seen some people in them four or five years before when they’d been really popular, but not since. “Why don’t you ask Shit…?”

  “Naw—Naw, that’s all right. Don’t bother ’im about it.”

  “Okay…” Dr. Greene smiled, as though he understood something that was escaping Eric.

  But nobody that he inquired from seemed even to know what he was talking about.

  Fucking modern technology…

  Then Eric thought—probably this is how Shit feels, much of the time. Suddenly not being able to follow the instructions became something precious. He’d been planning to get the bag for Shit’s shirt and read that one, to see if there was a difference. But now he went over and carefully hung his own bag back in the closet.

  Birds sang outside on the theater roof.

  In his long-sleeved red plaid, Eric went into the stairwell and walked down the dark steps into the balcony.

  * * *

  [79] STANDING ON THExsunny sidewalk, half a dozen of the men—bored by the film inside, which they’d sat through dozens of times since it had been changed three days ago—had come out to see, while, for twenty minutes, Eric used the broad spatula to push onions back and forth over the skillet’s bottom, then lifted the cast iron to scrape them into a kettle of crushed tomatoes. As he pushed them over the pan’s rim, a shadow crossed him. When he could put the skillet down, he looked up. “Hey, Al—how you doin’?”

  “This is a real nice day for your chili bash, boy.” The big man looked immensely pleased. “Got somethin’ for you. I assume you’re doin’ things according to Mex’s special recipe…?” He nodded off down the stove, where Mex poured rice, like chittering cicadas, into a stainless steel steamer Barbara had once borrowed from Serena at the Coffee & Egg and forgotten to return a hundred years ago.

  “Basically,” Eric said.

  “That’s what I figured. When I was a lot younger, you know I used to go out and hang around on Gilead with them two—Jay and Mex.” He nodded to the mute Mexican, quartering peppers and putting them into the plastic hopper, who grinned at Al. “Jay used to call me one of his puppies—I been at their house a lot of times, when they was making up that chili like they do. Slept over with ’em—ate with ’em. Just like you done.” (Long ago he had learned—then recovered from the surprise of learning—that Al was less than ten years his senior. Today Eric felt more like Al’s contemporary than the kid to Al’s fixed adult he’d assumed himself on that first day back at Turpens.) Al reached into his shirt pocket and pulled something long and latex, up and out. “Believe me, them motherfuckers didn’t do nothin’ with you they ain’t done with me. Maybe a little more, too. It wouldn’t surprise me, ’cause I was one curious black sonofabitch. Anyway, I thought you might want some of this for it.”

  Swinging from his dark fingers was a translucent latex tube, a third full of pearly liquid. Because it was so large, it took Eric seconds to realize what it was—and remember when he’d last seen one. “Christ, Al—”

  “I figured—” Al held it up to let it sway in front of Eric’s face—“you just might wanna dump that in the pot. You know…the secret ingredient that makes it taste right.” He lowered it a little, frowning. “Course they was younger, so maybe they weren’t doin’ that special stuff when you went out there with ’em…”

  Shaking his head, Eric chuckled. “Hey, Al, thanks—yeah, I know what you’re talking about. No. They were doin’ it when I was there. But we ain’t makin’ it that special…at least not this time.”

  “You sure?” Al lowered the condom completely, now. “See, I just shot that inside, when I was up in the balcony. I figured I’d bring it on down and at least make the offer.”

  Salt-and-pepper haired Joady had ambled up beside
them. He had a broad bald spot and wore a filthy white dress shirt. Under the frayed cuffs of his jeans, he was barefoot. “I tol’ Al you wouldn’t want that stuff. This ain’t that kind of party. When Mr. Jeffers wants that stuff, he likes to get it straight out your dead black hosepipe right into his belly. See, Mr. Jeffers here is an equal opportunity cocksucker.”

  A red-headed fellow with sunburned skin and big ears asked, “Why you gonna talk about Mr. Jeffers like that, Joady—I mean, outside where everybody can hear?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ about Mr. Jeffers I don’t wish he was standin’ there, stirrin’, and sayin’ about me. I’m grateful for the time and the tongue work he puts into gettin’ a load outta me. Now in the piss drinking department, he’s a bit more choosey. I feel free to comment there ’cause this old goat does have a thirst for the first full flush of dog, horse, or man. I’ve drained ’em all many times, black, white, brown, or the inscrutable Chinee. I give ’em all a head to hold and a handle to make love to. But if you’re feelin’ around in there, lookin’ for a seat in the darkness, and off in the corner you hear the fall of fresh waters, the hot flood that slops and flushes down, that’s gonna be Mr. Jeffers in a squat and Mr. Haskell standin’ over him, looking fondly down on the fjords of his face, pouring his soul out into Mr. Jeffers’ maw. Or, if not Mr. Haskell, someone Mr. Haskell has corralled in the urinal and before he’s had a chance to run free, brought up to the back of the theater to watch—Haystack, Gorilla Man, Pope, or harelipped Loop when he was still a fixture in our artificial night, or Sloppy Joe—only three hours ago I heard him, like an old time Tin Lizzy, fartin’ his way up the aisle—to service his lover like his daddy used to do. Hey, now Mr. Jeffers didn’t get his recipe from them island guys. He got it from that book he’s always in there readin’, I bet. Ain’t that right, Mr. Jeffers?”

  “I guess you could say that.” The chopper’s buzz stopped. Mex twisted the top open, and Eric—who had really not been paying much attention to Joady's encolmium—poured the aluminum pot full of cut-up and sautéed peppers into the chili, then gave it three, four, five big stirs.