Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “No. Yall can eat.”

  “Or maybe,” Sandy continued, doggedly, “just for the gay guys. I thought maybe that’s how you worked it.”

  “Weren’t you here for the last couple of these cookouts?” Eric turned the long ladle through the red-brown mix. “No, I told you. You can have some, too. This pot’s ready. If you’re hungry, get yourself a plate—on the other side of the smelter there, from the cups. Shit’ll be here in a second to dish you up some rice.”

  “So you mean the straight guys who just go in to watch the porn can have some? You don’t have to be one of the ones you let in for free, ’cause they let the faggots suck their dicks…?”

  “Like I said,” Eric repeated, still stirring, “it’s for everybody. And I don’t ever remember askin’ you to buy no ticket. Suck studs, cocksuckers—and even you regular jerk-off artists.”

  “Oh, hey, man. I don’t mind a good blowjob, now and then. Even if it’s a faggot—”

  “Now, how did I manage to figure that one out already, Sandy?” Eric raised the chili ladle to scratch in front of his ear with his thumb.

  “’Cause you love suckin’ on this big black dick yourself—you just thought I was asleep—”

  “Sandy—” Eric went back to stirring—“I’ll let you in on a secret: not for one damned second!”

  “But, see, I was wonderin’—” Sandy gestured over to the side— “what about them women there?”

  Up the street, ten or a dozen women had gathered to stand and talk outside Cassandra’s place, occasionally pointing down the street—some were laughing.

  “It’s for the women.” Eric stirred. “It’s for the men; it’s for the guys who pay for their tickets; it’s for the guys we let in free ’cause they’re willing to work it off in trade.” Eric said. “It’s for gay men and lesbians—it’s for straight men and straight women, too. It’s for people who happen to be standin’ around on the street. It’s for anybody who’s hungry. Even fellers from California.” (Eric’s was not a joke that more politically sensitive people were likely to make. Even before the catastrophe, Southern Californians had had a reputation for weirdness. Since the Three Bombs, that reputation had only grown.) “And it’s for anybody who just wants to try some. Okay, now?”

  Others were already edging around Sandy, plates ready.

  In her Army jacket and her tent-sized fatigues, three hundred-pound Tank had gotten hold of a paper plate. “In other words,” she declared in her hoarse voice, over the roar, “like the man says, this is for everybody.”

  “Well—” Eric grinned at her—“I wouldn’t say that exactly. If it was for everybody—I mean really everybody—there wouldn’t be enough. But let’s say it’s for everybody who happens to be around here. ’Cause that’s how we figure on the proportions. Okay? But that’s why some of you other people, who can afford it, might think of doing somethin’ like this, too. For the ones who need it who can’t get here today!” Eric turned, to shout the last part over the gathered heads. “It’s for you and you and you and you and you…!”

  A bunch of people, men and women, applauded, while others ran up.

  “…Come on! Get a plate and get some rice!” Waving a long slotted spoon over his head, Shit was making his way forward, a large pot of rice that had been steamed upstairs on the stove there held against his hip. “I got the rice here!”

  *

  For eight years, Eric—with Shit and others pitching in—ran his Dynamite Memorial Free Feed-Alls, pretty much four times a year, mid-summer, mid-winter, fall and spring. That year The Hemmings Herald even published a profile on them.

  “That’s my crazy ol’ man,” Shit would say, sitting out on a stumped piling on the Diamond Harbor dock, beside Tony’s Coffee, Egg & Bacon (which a few older folks still called the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg), watching the water’s inward roll or standing in the back of the Opera or sometimes leaning against the wall with his dick dangling from his jeans, rarely for more than an hour without somebody coming by, squatting down, and sucking on it for a least a while, nor was he above snagging one of half a dozen regulars, including Eric, simply mumbling to himself; or while he walked in the overcast street in which it had started to sprinkle and it seemed too stupid to hurry up, ’cause either you were gonna get wet or you weren’t. (For the first year or so people thought he was talking on one of the new invisible phones—but Shit didn’t own one.) Or sometimes when, in the Opera’s scenery storage room alone, he just stood, frowning at where the cooker sat, up against the wall, three empty propane tanks with green painted nozzles propped beside it, which they had to take back to the company, if they wanted to get their rebate. “He likes doin’ that kinda stuff for people. And, yeah, I like helpin’ ’im.”

  * * *

  [80] SURELY A SIGNIFICANT number of readers have entertained the thought that Eric’s four-time-a-year Free Feeds were in the spirit of the generous and large-hearted decade in which they occurred. (Writing her profile for the Hemmings Herald, June 22, 2034, nineteen-year-old reporter Mary Jane Jenkins, working for her uncle on the paper that summer, used the phrase “the spirit of the thirties” toward the end of her piece and felt it marked her as sensitive and prescient to the forces so many had been manifesting around the country for half a dozen years and so few were actually synthesizing in any systematically analytic way—though, four-and-a-half years later, the same phrase had become such an overwhelming cliché that, in rereading her article before she left school to move in with two of her friends on Gilead Island, it would redden her ears and make her delete all her early published local journalism, from both her personal files and from her back-ups. What she wanted to write, anyway, was poetry.) To many, it’s clear today, that—at least for a while—those words seemed to characterize more and more activity in the country until repetition emptied them of all meaning, especially for the writers who had used them first.

  At least one other incident of international importance that year impinged on Shit and Eric’s lives—one that figures in the lists of the decade’s many, many positive accomplishments.

  Interruptions in the running of the Opera House they were used to. More than once, when the theater was shut down, at a request from Randal at the Chamber of Commerce Office Eric and Shit found themselves with three days or three week’s work, back on the garbage run, to spell this or that driver who needed time off. Half the time they were allowed to go on living in the upstairs apartment in the temporarily empty theater, where, from the days when Eric took time off from cooking, pizza boxes and Styrofoam chicken containers and empty plastic soda bottles accumulated, until once a month, they packed them down into the Folz Recycling Bundler out in the alley, one of the dozen now standing here and there around the county and the most outré piece of nanotechnology Eric had yet seen.

  That November, when the theater shut once again, Jay phoned to ask if they wanted to come out to Gilead.

  They took knapsacks and rode the shuttle up to Diamond Harbor.

  Ed was running the scow. A dozen young women were on their way to the island that afternoon—they were having some sort of shindig out there that night.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Shit wanted to know, looking around the boat.

  With a coil of rope over his shoulder, Ed told them, “It’s that thing on the moon they been talkin’ about for the last week.”

  “What’s that?” Eric wanted to know.

  “Those people up there.” Now it was Ed who was barefoot. He nodded and wandered back toward the stern, where luggage made a pile that a tarp had been roped over. The prow smacked the water, which sheeted up on the sides of the Gilead.

  Lights stood on stands around the settlement. At the top of the new wooden steps up to the new clearing were loudspeakers and a platform, above which hung a large TV screen. Tables had been set out in front of it. Music played, and many women—most looked like laborers who’d worked on the new houses—were milling around and talking together. “Hey,” Shit said. “This is kind of
fun, ain’t it?” He was eating some sort of fried cake and stopped to look down at it. “It’s kinda greasy—but it’s tasty.” Many of the dishes were Latino—as were many of the women, Eric noted.

  It had been fun having all that going on the day they’d checked their Gilead place.

  Then some musicians on the platform began to play. In succession, three women made speeches.

  And Eric learned that this was all because tonight the first group was landing on the moon. Originally, they had planned it to consist of three couples, two with men and women, and one pair of gay men. Only lots of women—dykes, who, apparently the vast majority of the women around them were tonight—had started writing into the government, saying that was silly. They should make it even. It made more sense that way. Women had written them from Provincetown, and North Hampton, and Bolinas, and Bolder.

  And a group letter had gone out from eighty-two of the women working on Gilead that Margaret Arnold had organized and taken around personally and gotten as many signatures as possible before she sent it.

  *

  The next day, when Eric had taken one of the trucks over to the Bottom and climbed out, he was explaining to Tad, while Shit leaned out the cab window, listening.

  Finally, Tad said, “Yeah. Well, dykes would, wouldn’t they?”

  “The government knuckled under and said that was probably better. One of the women who made a speech last night said they was always leaving’ out the lesbians and forgettin’ about ’em, unless they made a stink. So they’d made one.” Eric laughed.

  Over Eric’s head, Shit said, “I guess as stinks go, it must have been bad as the Bottom here.”

  Standing before the new, aluminum-sided shack, Tad said, “So you saw all that business on the moon last night?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “On that big television they had out there.”

  Shit said, “They said they brought a lot of that stuff in by helicopter. We didn’t see that. But we saw it on the screen.”

  Tad said, “You really think they’re gonna stay up there for three months? You know that thing was on all day.”

  “We just saw the end, when we was out there. We don’t got no television. But we’re gonna get a place out there—they’re gonna let us have one of the old Indian cabins that’s still in pretty good shape. The old Holota place.”

  Overhead, from the open cab window, Shit said, “They were havin’ a big party in the Settlement all about it. They were makin’ speeches and havin’ free food. Probably got that from us—over at the Opera. And music—and that big old public TV screen, where you could see it. It was one of them 3-D things, where you don’t even need no glasses.”

  “Yeah—I seen one of them at a bar in Manchester. But why was they havin’ a party?”

  “’Cause of the women,” Eric said. ’Cause they’re puttin’ four couples up there for three months, instead of three. And one of them is women.”

  “Yeah,” Shit reiterated. “Two regular couples, one a pair of guys, and one a pair of women.”

  “Oh,” Tad said. “But why they havin’ a party about that? In the show I was watchin’ on it, they didn’t hardly say nothin’ about any of the gay ones at all. I don’t even understand why they’re doin’ it that way.”

  “To see what they gonna do, each different kind, livin’ all together on the moon for three months. Isn’t that what they said?”

  “They didn’t talk a whole lot about that on the show I watched.” Tad sounded uneasy. “They just talked about eight people bein’ up there, half of ’em women, half of ’em men. Out on the island, they don’t got nothin’ but women out there, right? Dykes—lesbians, I mean. I guess they really liked that—”

  From the truck, Shit chuckled.

  “They got some men there,” Eric said. “They got me and Shit. Like I say, we gonna be livin there. You know Jay MacAmon? Him and Mex are out there in the old Kyle place.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right…” Tad reached up and scratched his head. “I forgot about them ol’ boys.”

  *

  Later on, when they were driving back to Runcible in their own pickup, Eric said, “You know who woulda really liked that party out there last night? I mean, he woulda really gotten into it—if he was alive.”

  “Who—what you mean?” Shit’s gray hoody hung down his back.

  “Big Man Markum. Remember how he thought the space program, once they started it up again, was the most wonderful thing in the world? You know how he was always celebratin’ that instead of Christmas.” Over the highway edge, Eric glanced out on the winter sea.

  “Hey,” Shit said. “You know, you’re right.”

  * * *

  [81] OUTSIDE REBA’S GLASS window, the sky’s upper half was deep blue, while the lower half was streaked with violets and salmons, pale grays and breaths of green, and robin’s egg blown across it.

  Eric slipped into the booth across from Jay, while Shit hung back a little, listening.

  Across Rockside, Nightwood’s window—in the Gilead dress shop— was dark and empty. The huge, hi-def TV screen that had broadcast its advertising was gone, as was the woman who’d run it. Maybe eighteen months ago she’d shut the place up and left. Someone had said that soon it might become a medical clinic. Well, the Settlement could use a clinic of its own.

  “So when’s Johnston gonna shut down the Opera for good—this time?”

  “That’s why I asked you to come on out here to the island and talk.” Jay shifted on the booth’s wooden seat and said, “He ain’t.”

  Shit said, “He ain’t? What happened to all that stuff about buildin’ the world’s biggest coastal hotel up in Runcible?”

  “Well, actually…he ain’t interested in this whole section of the Georgia coast no more. And we done convinced people—again—the Opera’s a historical institution they gotta preserve.”

  Eric looked at Shit, who was frowning something fierce. Then he looked back at Jay.

  “Besides,” Jay said, “he’s pulled up and taken himself off to California.”

  “California?” Eric said. “What’s he wanna go out there for?”

  “Cheap land—at least he thinks he can get some of it cheap—cheaper even than around here.”

  Eric frowned too. “’Cause of 3-B stuff?”

  “I guess, indirectly. But that was a while ago.”

  “Oh…” Eric said softly.

  “And it’s got Johnston and his like out of our hair down here—for a while. What do they say—it’s an ill wind that don’t blow nobody some good. I guess it blew us a little.”

  “It’s gettin’ time to do another Free Feed,” Eric said. “They’re gonna keep us on, aren’t they? And they gonna keep runnin’ things like they were?”

  Jay nodded. “That’s what it looks like.”

  “So our homeless guys still got a place to live?”

  “They do. Come on out to the house and have some cod stew—that’s what Mex’s makin’ for dinner. Ed’ll run you back on the scow.”

  “Good,” Eric said. “’Cause there’ll be somethin’ nice to celebrate.”

  “Come on,” Jay said, “Tell me about it.”

  Shit said, “I think you’re crazy, nigger.”

  Jay said, “I’ll run it past Kyle.”

  Later, Mex and Jay went down to join Ed for a late night run through the moonlight, back to Diamond Harbor. While the sea rushed and slapped around them, Jay stood at the wheel and said, “Kyle said he’ll even throw in a few bucks for you, on your pension.” Eric was surprised the call had already taken place—though Shit, who’d lived there all his life, didn’t seem to be.

  “What you mean, pension?”

  “Well, I assume you want to retire pretty soon.”

  Milky froth rushed under the night.

  * * *

  [82] RUSHING BELOW THE rail, night’s end joined the whispering water, different textures though all but one color.

  On the boat, shoulder-to-shoulder, they leaned togethe
r. Somewhere at the indistinguishable horizon, in minutes the sun was due to seep across the sea. “Come on,” Shit said. “Take your shirt off. I done took off mine. See, it’s tied right here.” Ahead in the dark was Diamond Harbor’s mainland.

  “Why?” Eric couldn’t see. “It’s cold.”

  “No, it ain’t. Come on, nigger. Please?” Shit slid his hand around Eric’s neck. He rubbed.

  “Why you callin’ me nigger?” In the dark, Eric grinned. “You gonna fuck me? You know there’re people still sittin’ around, back there, on the deck.”

  “Maybe I will.” Shit moved his arm up around Eric. “I wanna see them pitchurs you got all over you, when the sun comes up.”

  “Huh…?”

  “Yeah. Come on. ’Fore it starts to get light, now.”

  Eric sighed. “All right.” He began unbuttoning his cuff. The summer morning was…well, not warm. But an indifferent coolness moved up his forearm, down his neck

  Shit’s hand was warm and big and rough behind Eric’s shoulder, on Eric’s back. “Yeah, like that.” Eric shrugged out his shirt, cloth tugging from between his back and Shit’s hand, so the hand was suddenly both rougher and warmer. “See, now I can get behind you and hug on you and rub my hands all up and down your arms over them colors and wedge my dick in your ass crack. And by the time we get home, you gonna be beggin’ me to go out to the end of the docks where you can get down on your knees and I can whip it out and piss right in your mouth there and you gonna be lookin’ up at me, almost as happy as you were last week when I brung Haystack up from the john to pee in your face—”

  “Happy as I was,” Eric said, “actually I will be even happier.”

  “Oh, shit,” Shit said. “You really will be, won’t you? Come on, let’s tongue fuck on each other for a few minutes before this old thing pulls in…”

  “Just a second…lemme get the sleeve around the rail first.” Eric assumed that was what Shit had done with his. “Like yours, there.” Reaching though to grab the cloth, pull it back, and knot it, his wrist’s knob hit a pipe. Eric grunted—