Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Well, I hope he feels better. Thanks, Mex.”

  * * *

  [86] LITTLE CAN BE said about the transition between the end of Eric and Shit’s baker’s dozen years managing the Opera House as a porn theater in Runcible and their permanent move—in ’41—to the Holota cabin Hugh had been holding for them, without much comment, half a dozen years now, on Gilead.

  It came with still another threat to close down the Opera—this time, no kidding, for good—which threats they’d grown used to, and which, though they thought of it as an inconvenience and a major annoyance to them and the men who, now and again, made it a home, they’d learned not to take seriously.

  Once it had been cleared out, the movies no longer running on the tan screen with its stains at the side, and the cleaning lights on under the boxes, Eric walked down the left aisle from beneath the first balcony, and, for three minutes, stood on the gray-black runner—last replaced sometime during the (first) Iraqi war with some industrial carpeting, back in another century, and which he’d shampooed with the big machine only last month—looked around at the peeling gilt, at the broken plaster molding over the cavernous ceiling, the mural, around at the orchestra seat backs—among which a dozen were missing, like broken cells speckling a honey comb—and up at the edge of the two rococo balconies, with their iron supports from when they’d held old iron spotlights from which the bulbs had all been removed decades ago. He thought the things you might think he thought, and because he was more imaginative than Shit, even wondered would he see the inside of the place again.

  The theatrical space was large enough so that when it held fifty people, as it did most days and nights, it looked no fuller than it did now that it was empty. On weekday evenings, often it held two hundred and fifty—and looked not much fuller. The five or six hundred who gathered from up and down the coast on Friday and Saturday nights between five in the evening and one or two in the morning at least looked like some audience.

  For the first months in which he’d been here, the daily take had always surprised him—even with the twenty-five to forty-five free tickets that went out to the working men. The first year he’d started coming here with Dynamite, tickets had been five dollars. The first year he’d started working there, on odd weekends with Shit, they’d gone up to ten. Now, after the devaluation, they were seventy-five—which was actually less than five, Dr. Greene had explained to him, at 2010 prices.

  There’d always been handyman work to do out on Gilead—on a dozen weekends already they’d gone out there to visit Jay and Mex and found themselves with jobs. Moving out there permanently, especially since their Foundation pension kicked in next month, it’d be fine.

  The dozen-plus years they had been at the Opera had encompassed Dynamite’s death, Eric’s own four-times a year Free Feeds, his first real encounter with Mama Grace’s book—that is to say, a real encounter, where, after spending how-long-was-it learning how to read the damned thing, he’d gone through it and really thought about what he was reading.

  (Shit—he had gone down into the basement lounge among its broken tiles and cracked and missing mirrors—you know this thing here is really interesting…? But for the first time, he’d said it with true wonder.

  (Well—from the bucket Shit looked up and paused, his yellow rubber gloves gripping the mop handle—considerin’ how much time you done spent with it since you got it, I figured it must be, and Eric realized Shit had no idea the level of interest to which his reading had suddenly moved. But that was Shit; it was okay.)

  The day they were leaving, Shit didn’t even go inside to say good-bye to the place.

  He waited for Eric out by the ticket booth—where they had already brought most of the stuff down from the apartment, including Dynamite’s four-poster bed frame, already disassembled, loaded it into their pickup to take it out to Gilead.

  In later times, on several evenings, sitting in the hardback chairs, on the deck of the Holota cabin, they’d try to fix what year they’d made the actual move and finally gave up.

  The fact is, though Eric had gone into the cavernous theater to assemble his thoughts on leaving, he returned to those thoughts—possibly because he had been successful and they were now assembled—no more frequently than he returned to his thoughts of his first, forgotten Diamond Harbor wave.

  * * *

  [87] ALONG WITH A maintenance shack and an open porch on the front, the Holota cabin stood a mile, then half a mile, then only a quarter of a mile outside the Settlement. It was still a fifteen-minute walk from their place to the old Indian graveyard, where Dynamite, Walter and Ruth Holota, and Jay’s Uncle Shad were buried.

  Yes, Uncle Tom had his grave there—next to Popinjay’s (called “Pop”), the parrot Hugh had owned for years.

  Mex had been buried there for two years, after the boating accident in which he’d drowned.

  It was 2047.

  Shit and Eric had been living there for six years, when the highway accident occurred on the mainland—Dr. Elliot had told Jay he’d lost too much peripheral vision to drive. (Probably because he wasn’t Dr. Greene, Jay hadn’t paid him much mind.) For the last few years Jay, ran the gossip, had gotten almost as pig-headed about such things as Shad had once been—only Jay hadn’t been lucky enough to get himself crippled.

  At seventy-eight, on one of his rare trips to the mainland, Jay had got himself killed instead. Ironically, he’d run his car into a Johnston Construction earthmover, whose driver turned out to have been drunk and already had four DWI’s on his license. People had already started to wonder, given Jay’s history with Johnston, if it really was an accident—or even a suicidal gesture.

  In the wreck, Jay was the only fatality.

  Through the plastic screen door, Ed left Shit and Eric looking at each other, not sad so much as surprised. Then Shit said, with wonder: “We ain’t seen him in so long…”

  “Not since Mex died, last year—no, that’s two years, now!”

  “Jay’s just down the road,” Shit said. “How come we ain’t seen him in so long?”

  “You know,” Eric said, “we ain’t seen a whole lot of people recently…”

  Jay’s death had been hours ago, sometime that morning—the funeral and burial were to be the day after tomorrow. Eric expected Ed to come—and he did. Jay had worked hard to make sure that boy got to take over the Gilead boat. Two days later, Eric and Shit went, of course. But—Eric’s first surprise—practically every nigger left in the Dump had come out to the island, as well as fifty or more people from the Settlement.

  “That’s Mr. Kyle,” Shit whispered quietly, nodding toward a tall black man in a dark suit, who stood with the black-denimed Bull, over at the side—and said nothing through the entire service.

  “Yeah,” Eric whispered back. “I thought I recognized him…”

  Many people had stories to recount over the grave—how Jay had done this or that for ’em, saved this one’s life, paid that one’s mortgage, helped with that one’s younger sister’s schooling (who hadn’t even lived here), brought heating oil for half the Dump the weird winter it hadn’t gone above thirty-five for three whole weeks and had, for two and three days at a time, lingered below freezing. (With his face stinging, Eric had come into the cabin and Shit had grabbed him, and hugged him, and wrestled him around, saying, Gotta get you warm! Gotta get you warm! Gotta get you warm…till finally they’d ended on the bed under the blankets.) Tank had cried openly—while Cassandra, with two vague dots of blue under the outside corner of her eye, told how not only had Jay been their best tattoo customer, but after Shad had died and Jay inherited a third of Gilead island, he’d given her the land to move their home and business here. “If somebody wanted to name this place MacAmonville, I sure wouldn’t object. Probably Jay would, though—because it was Shad’s name, too. Come on here, honey,” and she dropped a fleshy arm around Tank’s wide shoulders. (Standing at the cemetery edge, under the trees, people chuckled.)

  “O
r maybe—“ Tank paused to blow her nose in a blue bandana—“Jay’d think that was poetic justice—naming a colony of dykes after his…” she looked around, blinking her Native American eyes. “…homophobic uncle.” Laughter rose and fell around the grave. Tank smiled, her face still tear speckled.

  Eric’s next real surprise was the last person who spoke. A good looking, very black man in his late-fifties wore jeans and a sports jacket and a pale blue dress shirt under it, which made him notably better dressed than almost anyone else there. He introduced himself as Ben Forman, and explained he was one of the summer people, who used to come out to the Harbor with his parents, years before, in the first decade of the century. Over a few summers, as a teenager, he had met Jay and Mex and spent some time hanging out with them. “Even after I stopped spending my vacations here, I used to phone Jay up, three or four times a year, and talk with him. Actually, I spoke with him three weeks ago,” which was a lot more recently than had either Eric or Shit. “When I heard he was dead, from Hugh Kyle, I flew out here because I wanted to pay my respects and because I wanted to be here for Mex Jalisco. I didn’t know Mex had already died two years back in a boat wreck.” (The barrel-solid mute’s drowning had decided Jay finally and officially to give over the scow to Ed.) “Jay never told me that, when we talked.” (The fact was, Jay hadn’t told anyone till a month later—even though Mex was buried right here. That had been strange…But it made Eric, at least, realize how far they’d drifted apart.) The man sighed. “He knew I would’ve come. But I don’t think he liked to think about that too much.” Among the group there had been random nods, more assenting mmmmms. “Maybe it made it too real. Yall know how close they were.” Taking a deep breath, Forman looked at the dug up dirt. “Anyway—Jay MacAmon was certainly the most generous man I’ve ever known. I’m a biochemistry professor now, at Florida State. During the third time I went back to graduate school to get my Ph. D., things weren’t going too well—that must have been in thirteen, fourteen, when the Recession was pretty bad. Once I was telling Jay about it on the phone, and how, because my parents had died, I didn’t think I was going to be able to afford to keep up school in Massachusetts, where I was. He was so concerned and thoughtful—and made me feel so much better about myself, that I really believed I could withdraw once more, work for a while, then go back again. Only three days later, in the mail, I got a check for fifteen thousand dollars. From Jay. This was more than six years before the first devaluation, I mean, when a graduate student could actually live for six months on fifteen thousand dollars. I called him right away—I didn’t know what else to do. I thought maybe it had come from Mr. Kyle. But he said, no, it was a present from Shad. I asked him what he meant. And he told me…” Ben took another breath and looked around at the crowd. “I stayed in Diamond Harbor enough so that I know there’s probably nothing yall don’t know about each other. So I doubt I’m telling any…secrets. And I’m both surprised and, I guess, not surprised that I know a good number of you, from when I used to come here, all those years back. You guys remember the old Slide—the black gay bar that used to be between Runcible and the Dump? Jay told me that once, back in the eighties of the last century, Shad and some of his cronies had decided they just didn’t want a black gay bar around here. So one night, Shad and some boys went over there and tried to torch the place—and the white boys he was with caught some guys coming out and beat up a couple of them pretty bad.” Some people made surprised sounds; from others came the assenting mumble of communal memory. “Jay learned they were about to do it, and he phoned the police and the fire department and told them he’d come bust heads if they didn’t get over there right away. Well, they did. And they saved The Slide—nobody got killed. Jay was a pretty big fella, and you didn’t want him bustin’ your head—even if he was gay.” Around the grave, people laughed. “They never arrested Shad or anything—he was a local, and that’s not how they handled things like that back then. But yall know, later, when Shad had his accident and couldn’t walk, Jay took him in and took care of him the rest of his life—he used to say he couldn’t kill him because he was his own blood. But the family had some money—not a lot, but I guess it was a lot around here. Jay was the conservator. So Jay said as far as he was concerned, Shad owed a major debt to every black gay man in Georgia—not to mention Diamond Harbor—who hadn’t gotten a shotgun and blown Shad’s head off when Jay or Mex would come rolling him, in his wheelchair, into town.” Forman laughed uncomfortably. “Because yall knew Jay, you know he didn’t call us ‘black gay men’ anymore than he called himself a ‘white gay man.’”

  Among the chuckles, Black Bull’s voice, still impressively deep at eighty-two, came clear and sharp: “He called hisself a nigger-lovin’ redneck faggot cocksucker—’cause that’s what he fuckin’ was!” For some reason, at that, no one laughed.

  Ben Foreman looked down. He said in a voice that kind of swallowed itself, “Well, somethin’ like that. Anyway—because of the Dump, there were a fair amount of us in the Harbor.” Across the crowd more folks chuckled. “Permanent and visiting. The day I got my first paycheck as a tenured professor, I phoned Jay and told him I was going to pay him back—at least the principal. Once I got that out the way, we could figure out the interest. Maybe you remember, inflation had become so runaway back then, that sort of thing had become real important to people. And, of course, he told me what I’d known all along. It wasn’t a loan. It was a gift. He said if I couldn’t stand havin’ the money in my account, I could pass it along to any other black gay men I thought could put it to good use. I should treat it like it was a stipend directly from the Dump.” Forman shrugged. “So that’s what I did—I broke it in two and gave it to two young scholars in need. I told them it was grant from the MacAmon Fund.” A few people applauded. “Anyway, my point: Shad—or Jay—is pretty much responsible for my being here now, or even more, for my having a job in the Biochemistry Department of Florida State and a really wonderful partner, who I only wish had been able to come with me, and whom I’m going home to when I leave here. Hey, thank yall for letting me tell this about Jay. He was a wonderful man—but yall know he wasn’t much for tootin’ his own horn; so I wanted to toot it a little for him.” He smiled again. “With the rest of us.” Then, suddenly looking uncomfortable, he stepped back among the others.

  A few people dropped flowers into the grave, open beneath the May afternoon. (It was two days beyond Shit’s birthday.) A line filed past, most picking up a handful of crumbly dirt from the mound beside the grave and scattering it like rust on the casket top—dark polished wood, not the simple pine that (Eric remembered suddenly) had been Dynamite’s—showing between the white and pink blossoms. Eric said softly to Shit, “Did you know about Shad and The Slide?”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “But if you were Jay’s friend, you didn’t talk about that.”

  As people were leaving, Eric went over to Forman and said, “Excuse me. My name’s Eric Jeffers. That warmed me, what you said about Jay. He was a good friend to us, too. Eh…This is my partner here,” because Shit had tagged behind him, “Morgan Haskell.” (Listening, Forman smiled, with faint interrogation.) “We live together, right over on the other side of the Bluff. He knew Jay even longer than—”

  Only now, Forman’s face got an astonished look. Raising both his hands as if he didn’t know what to do with them, he exclaimed, “Shit Haskell…!” He shook his head in bewilderment. “Jesus God in heaven! You still here—in Diamond Harbor? Oh, man!”

  Shit grinned and said, kind of quiet, kind of smiling, “Hey, Dog Turd. I sure didn’t expect you to come out here for this. It’s good to see you again, boy.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you, either. Oh, this is…well, amazing—!” Forman seized the shoulders of Shit’s faded shirt. “Wow!” He looked at Eric. “Shit was my good buddy, back when I first used to come out to the Harbor—back when we were twelve, thirteen. In fact I think Morgan, you were the one who took me out here to meet Jay and Mex for the first ti
me. They’d just started running the scow.”

  “So you’re a professor, now—and I’m still ‘Shit,’” Shit said, in the same low, easy voice, then looked at Eric. “You know, this here nigger was a sweet fuck, too, when he was a kid.”

  “Oh, now you’re gonna tell on me to your partner—?”

  Half embarrassed and half infected by the friendship’s eruption, Eric said, “Hey, that’s okay—”

  “Jesus…” Forman repeated. “How many puppies from Jay’s kennel are still running around this place?”

  “Fair number.” Shit glanced at Eric. “Us two was his favorite nigger puppies, back then.”

  “God, that man could keep us laughin—”

  “Among other things…” Shit said.

  Only more people had come up to talk; so finally Shit walked with Eric back over the rise. Kyle, Eric noted, with Bull and Whiteboy, had disappeared.

  After maybe a dozen steps, Shit took Eric’s hand. “That’s so you don’t have to worry about gettin’ jealous or anything. He was a sweet fuck—but he was a little snot, too. At least when he was a kid. If anything, he looks like he’s nicer now. I hope Jay taught him some manners.”

  “If he did,” Eric said, “that would be Jay,”

  “Could be.”

  After a moment, Shit asked, “What you thinkin’ about?”

  Eric laughed. “Dog Turd scratchin’ Jay’s balls.”

  Now Shit laughed back. “How’s that make you feel?”

  “Jealous,” Eric said.

  Shit’s laugh quieted to a chuckle. “That’s what I figured.”

  “But then, you guys got the hair for it.” Eric glanced at Shit’s head, a third of the scalp bare now. “Or you used to.”

  “Well, you can scratch mine when you get home. But, yeah, I know; it wouldn’t be the same thing…”