Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  That evening, Eric learned that not everybody had approved of Ben’s revelations at the funeral. Standing on the deck of the Gilead II, talking with Ed, he asked: “But what didn’t you like about it?”

  The heavy-set black man tugged at the bill of his captain’s cap. “I didn’t think it was appropriate to be bringin’ all that stuff up at a man’s funeral.”

  “I thought it was pretty movin’.”

  “Yeah,” Ed said. “Well, you would.” Leaving a surprised—and uncomfortable—Eric, he moved off to help Hannibal, who was working on the boat that summer, to get the ropes tied.

  Of all the deaths commemorated in that graveyard, Jay’s was the one that had made Eric cry.

  The night after the burial, Shit held him pretty much till morning, saying quietly, over and over, “Shhhhh—it’s gonna be okay, now. Shhhh, now. You gonna be okay once it gets light.”

  “But it’s so dark in there, underground,” which wasn’t really what Eric meant. “And he’s so alone.”

  “Naw, he ain’t. He got Mex now and all his old friends in there with ’im—like my dad,” which was exactly what Shit meant. “And Tom. He’ll be all okay.”

  At daybreak, Eric woke, moved over the four-poster to smell his partner’s sleeping breath and body’s scent. Shit’s arm lifted and slid over Eric’s back. Without opening his eyes, Shit smiled—then, after another three breaths, the smile relaxed and Eric knew Shit was asleep again. Eric watched him—the lips barely apart, a sliver of green between the lashes of the weaker eye (the left), and thought, Damn! How did I get lucky enough to be where I can reach out and touch his hip, his shoulder, his feet, his genitals, his jaw?

  That was what being alive was…

  From under the window shade, copper light fell, banding Shit’s cheek, to tangle in his beard’s tan wool. The flesh on Shit’s head was two-thirds clear of hair, in two tongues back beside the sparse knap down the middle. (What world do I live in that has already given me more than three decades of this to manure life’s roots so richly?) A vein scribbled the taut skin of Shit’s temple. Shit’s face was a third sunk in pillow. (Eventually, we gotta break down and wash these damned sheets and cases—under Eric’s hip, the cloth had stiffened from their joint spillage of the last months.) Save for the slight concavity in his cheek where a couple more teeth had gone, when he was like this (and even then…), sleeping, Shit looked to Eric like a drop-dead handsome Georgia redneck, with a touch of the tarbrush about him and not a day over thirty—maybe forty…

  Which, save that Shit was actually fifty-nine, is what he was.

  After another minute’s enjoyment of the proximity, Eric slid his shoulder off of Shit’s hand, got up, went into the bathroom, then stepped outside. Naked, he walked down through brush and long grasses. You would have thought (Eric recalled his upset from the night) that’s how I should have felt about Dynamite’s stroke.

  He glanced back at the bed. He’s the exact same age his daddy was when he died.

  A momentary eruption of memories assailed Eric: quiet Dynamite and loud Shit, thirty years ago. Shit saying, Come on over here, you ol’ honkey cracker. You threw yourself a nigger bastard and now he’s gonna fuck your goddam cracker ass, then, walking in a few minutes later, Eric would see Shit’s butt, bucking over his dad’s on the same bed they slept in now, and Dynamite, grinning out from around Shit’s elbow, in a way that said, Hey, don’t be scared you got a hard-on, it’s okay, and with Shit’s panting and friendly: Come on…Join the party…less’n you just wanna…watch and jerk off…—still made Eric smile.

  An arc of sky.

  Son, suck your daddy’s Georgia cracker dick—

  An arc of water.

  Nigger, fuck my cracker ass—

  (Exhortations Eric had first heard and even grown familiar with, under the Atlanta highway, as much as two years before he’d come to Diamond Harbor, but which had moved so easily into what had become his own home, as he’d grown easy with Dynamite and Shit.)

  *

  The water was flat. The sky ballooned up and so appeared two, five, ten times as large. The seam was the edge of everything and, below and above, both were fabulous with milky colors—the dawn water with wavelets a dozen grays, more blues and greens, microplanes of salmons and silvers, gold and platinum reflections of the creamy glaciers of pastel mist, sweeping out, in filmy cloud, not quite to the horizon. (Most guys getting fucked look blank—he’d watched enough of ’em under the highway or at the Opera or out behind The Slide beneath the moon—with a smile or a grimace reserved for afterward. Getting fucked, Mex and Jay looked about like anyone else. Not Shit and Dynamite, though. Whether someone was fuckin’ him or suckin’ him, Dynamite had always looked actively happy—as did Shit: a legacy worth leaving a kid.) The actual sunrise was hidden by meridian-high cumulus. From behind, marking the rims with ivory and gold, it hurled rays around a third of the morning. (Dynamite never got no tattoos—even if he always said he liked Jay’s…He’d kept them gold tit rings till he died. He’d been buried in them.) Eric imagined, in the hours since Jay’s burial, Jay’s inks running over Cassandra’s outlines, seeping through rock and sand, to the sea, to return Tank’s colors to the day, to the ocean, to the air.

  (What would them things have been like on Mike…?)

  Eric looked over the illustrations on his own arms, first the left, then the right: the Gilead scow, Pop, the serpent borrowed from Jay (Damn, Eric’s arm had grown sore under the needle’s battering point), Tom…

  He’d loved Dynamite, almost as intensely as he loved Shit.

  (What amazing luck that he’d gotten to make love with both and—so often—at the same time.)

  But he’d wanted to be Jay.

  Shit was the more emotional man, however, so that—two years before Jay’s—when they’d heard about Mex’s death, Shit had gone to bed for three days, leaping on Eric every time he’d joined him but otherwise taciturn, till finally he’d broken down and cried for two-and-a-half hours.

  Then he got up, more or less all right—just tired. Or, however many years before that, when they’d still lived on the mainland, and Shit had found Uncle Tom rigid under the back steps, or even the afternoon Barbara drove by to tell Eric that Mike’s brother Omar had phoned to say that Mike had passed after the last of three heart attacks over two weeks down in Pensacola (Come on, Shit, he’d cajoled, once she’d driven off. There’s nothin’ for you to cry about. He was my dad—not yours.

  (Yeah, but I always liked to pretend he was mine—there, when he’d come by to see you. ’Cause he was a nigger, like me) or the night Dynamite caught his stroke and, in the truck, barely alive, propped between Shit and Eric, died on the way to Runcible Memorial and the marathon night of sex that had followed it…

  …Hell, I’m tired, Eric kept remembering. But that had been Dynamite, not Shit.

  And years ago.

  The morning after Jay’s burial, when Eric had stood by the water some ten minutes, Shit came down, equally naked, and took Eric’s hand. “You okay, huh?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  Shit squeezed and did not let go. “I knew you’d be fine.” On three sides the rush and thrash of the ocean rolled into the grass and rock. Yes, Eric was all right—again. Then Shit stepped around in front of him and gave him a long, long hug and whispered, “Come on, let’s tongue-fuck a little…”—and got a hard-on, of course (as he would have even if they’d been clothed, Eric thought), that, as it lifted, lifted Eric’s penis across it, hardening.

  Then they went back up to the house.

  “You did pretty good, there,” Eric told him. They reached the bellied out screen door; Shit pulled it open. “You didn’t try to fuck me but once, all night.”

  “Yeah, well…” Shit didn’t look back. “I didn’t mean to bother you none—after you said no the first time. But I thought maybe…” He shrugged…“it would make you feel better. It always does me.”

  Eric said, “Yeah.” He smiled. “I know it does.??
? A naked Eric followed his naked partner through the kitchen.

  “While you was asleep, I beat off a couple a times. I put up a pot of coffee before I came down to see how you was doin’. Want some?”

  “Yeah,” and realized he could half-remember, cradled in Shit’s one-armed embrace, lying all but asleep in the rocking bed with the rocking body against him—but not the familiar warm splash and splatter over hip and belly that he would turn to press again Shit’s side, Shit’s tight-haired crotch, Shit’s flexing hand. (Now don’t go washin’ that off tomorrow…”

  (Don’t worry. I won’t.) He’d drifted off before Shit’s finish…

  Like Jay, no, Eric wouldn’t wash that stuff off. He liked being marked, like a dog. (Probably it was left over from when he used to fool around with Mex and Jay at their place on the island.) And anyone who said they could smell it, unless they put their nose right down on it, was a liar…

  The one-armed embrace had metamorphosed into Shit’s upturned hand under Eric’s shoulder.

  Then like Christmas, like the birth of a child, like a birthday, like the Three Bombs, like Jay’s life and Jay’s death—and the food and the drink and the reminiscing out on the deck down at Tank and Cassandra’s (it had been generally agreed they couldn’t put all that work on Hugh)—those events were a day, three days, six days in the past…

  * * *

  [88] THE CABIN HAD a small back room with a washing machine and a dryer stacked on top, which still—amazingly—worked. Even if Eric and Shit weren’t sticklers about softeners and bleaches and separating whites and colors, both were pretty good at throwing their clothes in the machine. Once a ballpoint of Eric’s, still in a shirt pocket, made it into the dryer—and melted—so that when Eric pulled the clothes out, the enameled insides were swirled with blue-black. A few stains marred the clothes themselves, but not—at Eric’s falling “Aw, fuck!” Shit stepped up, lifted a shirt from those Eric hugged, and frowned at it—so as you couldn’t wear them.

  Just not for company.

  They didn’t have much company, anyway.

  Once Eric got in there and tried to steel wool the ink swirls off. But after three or four more loads, it was baked on.

  They did use those little tissues that were supposed to make your wash softer and smell better, then got all over the floor when you took the clothes out the dryer—Barb had given them three big orange and yellow boxes, and once they’d started using them, they kept it up. It was the morning of Eric’s fifty-ninth birthday when he’d gone in to get the clothes out that he realized he was tramping all over the damned things—like skeletal specters of butterflies. He bent down and swiped some up, wrinkled and raddled, white and translucent, dry, soft, and scentless.

  Finally stepping away from the unpainted wooden walls of the walk-in closet that was their laundry room, each fist crammed with sixty or seventy of the things, Eric went to shove them in the trash under the sink. “Hey, Shit? You think when you take stuff out the dryer, you could start pickin’ up the softeners that fall on the floor? I mean, I ain’t been doin’ it, neither. But we could both start.”

  From where he was sitting in the sun on the doorstep in the open door, Shit looked over. “Nope.”

  “Huh?” Eric stood up and raised an eyebrow. “What you mean?”

  “I said, ‘Nope.’ I can’t do that. My hip pains me too bad. I can’t bend down and pick up stuff like I could—even last year. It’s just arthritis, that’s all. But it hurts like hell when I bend.”

  “Christ!” Eric said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “’Cause you didn’t ask. And I didn’t wanna bother you. But anything that gets on the floor, if you leave it to me, it’s gonna stay there. That can be your job, if you want. Otherwise, leave it. I ain’t gonna complain. But all I’m good for below waist level is fuckin’ your goddam cracker asshole—which, as you know, to make happen all you gotta do is fart in my direction.” He grinned waggishly. “This nigger’s on it like flies on shit.”

  Even as he worried, Eric grinned back. But two days later, Eric made Shit go see Dr. Elliot (whom they started going to on Dr. Greene’s retirement), who prescribed him some pretty powerful painkillers.

  * * *

  [89] BACK ON THE mainland, when her kidney cancer was found to have spread to liver, spine, and brain, Barbara transferred from Runcible Memorial into the Women’s Wellness Hostel outside the city for what her doctors were sure would be her last three to five weeks. There was a room in which Ron could stay.

  For a few days, Eric and Shit visited, too.

  The first day she came, Barbara went right to her room. Possibly it was the effectiveness of the painkillers they gave her. When Eric came in to sit with her, Ron got up slowly. He was a hundred pounds heavier than he’d been when Eric had first met him. These days, his suit looked permanently rumpled. But the fact was it was too warm for a suit of any kind, though he always wore one.

  Barbara sat in a green leather chair near the window, with a bank of drips and tubes draped down around her, and three different monitor screens with their traveling green and yellow lights on a stand behind.

  “Hey,” Eric said, smiling. “You feeling a little better?”

  She smiled back. “Not really.”

  He’d been planning to say something to Ron, but the heavy man had lumbered, slowly and silently, out.

  “Oh…Do you want to…talk?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I’m glad you came in.” She spoke slowly. Her collarbones were gaunt between her pajama lapels. Her robe was loose— sizes too big—telling of the more than fifty pounds she’d recently lost, as Ron had gotten more and more shapeless, heavier and heavier. “There a couple of things I wanted to…I guess talk to you about.” She coughed, a weak sound that could clear no phlegm. “Oh, you have to go over there and see that postcard Serena sent me. From the moon—sweetheart. Her daughter is a doctor on the moon. She sent it to her mother, in Ghana. And Serena sent it on to me. Really—it’s so cute.”

  Eric turned and went to the desk against the wall. Among several pieces of paper, he saw the card with a picture on it. As he lifted it up, the image—five or six young men and women, most of them looking like high school students, of the sort he was used to seeing on the streets of Diamond Harbor in the summer months—began to wave and laugh and call out, “Hello! Hello—we love you. And we want you to get well.” Brown and Asian, they leaned forward and waved. “Mama says you’re not feeling so hot—” one of the young men said—“but you’ll get better. We know it.”

  The inside of the lemon yellow room in which they sat was bare of decoration, save a few shelves with some pamphlets on them.

  “Isn’t that the cutest thing? You’d have to think of Serena, forwarding me something like that. It’s funny—”

  Eric turned away and stepped back toward the chair in which his mother sat, wedged in with pillows with pale blue covers.

  “But I’m pretty sure I could run the business without Ron, if I had to. I wonder, though, if he’ll be able to run it without me.”

  Eric was surprised. “Well, didn’t he start it…?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But things have changed so much. He’s not happy. I wish I could see him happy. I love to see him happy—I think that’s my favorite thing in the world. But I guess it’s the one thing that’s a little too big to ask right now. You know, practically everything we do today involves jack-work matrix schedules. We have clients all over the world. And those partial, double, and unmetered schedules take a sort of…well, maybe it’s talent. Or maybe it’s just being able to keep details and client needs in order. When Ron was looking at that postcard, it made him laugh. Then he started talking about getting some clients on the moon. I don’t know whether we’ll ever do that or not. And, one way or the other, I won’t be here to see it. Anyway, I’ve always had a feel for it. Ron just finds that kind of thing a nuisance.” Over the years at Bodin Systems, Barbara had taken various courses, quietly and at home, and had become
more and more integral to the company—not that you’d ever know it from talking with Ron. Possibly because Eric was partnered with Shit, a near-Luddite, the occasional hint that Barbara and Ron—especially Barbara—were making extraordinary progress in computer matrix schedule provisions always seemed to be an exaggeration, or just more of Ron’s self-aggrandizing. Did people really progress—and did they really progress down here? “When we started, it was like something I did on the side. But now when you look at our year-end spreadsheets, you can see it’s practically taken over. But I haven’t been able to do…anything for three months! And I just…well, worry about what’s going to happen.”

  Eric wasn’t sure what to say. “Do you do…any work for folks jacking out of Gilead?”

  “About sixty of our biggest clients are out there.”

  Eric was surprised. “I didn’t realize…”

  “Or they used to be.” Barbara sighed. “I don’t know where they are now. I hope he hasn’t just let them slip away—that he’s going to be all right. I know you’ve always had your problems with Ron. But, really, he’s such a sweet guy…This has been so hard on him.”

  Eric wanted to say, Hard on him? What about you…! But he didn’t want to argue with her. “Ron’ll be all right,” he said. “He’s pretty good at taking care of himself.”

  “But so much of it’s been having to take care of me, while I just…lie here and let it happen.”

  Eric smiled. “I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

  Then Shit stepped in. “Hey, Mrs. Jeffers—how you feelin’, there?”

  “Good as can be expected, I guess.” But she smiled.

  “Them folks that said we could ride back to the Harbor with ’em are about to go. I thought I ought to let you know.”

  “Oh,” Eric said. “Well, so long Barb.” He got up, went over, gave her a kiss. “We’ll be back in a few days—and we’ll call regular.”

  “I know,” she said, still smiling, though not looking at them.