Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Like hell I don’t.” Shit’s chair legs hit the woven rug that had ended up on the kitchen planks, under the table’s slanted legs. Lankily, he stood. “That’s your mama, Eric,” he said, as though confirming Eric’s insight. “I’m goin’ with you. I never had a real one. But I sure had my daddy—he kinda did double duty, I guess. You go do what you gotta do. But once you do it, I’m gonna give you a hug and not let you go for a real long time.”

  In the kitchen corner, Eric started looking for a shovel. Rakes, spades, pick axes, long and short handled hoes leaning there clanked on one other, till he pulled one loose.

  *

  At the cemetery, with its grove of pines to the side, above which the sky was half gold and half gray, the road ran the whole mile up from the Settlement—and halfway through the graves. Above, leaves gnawed away the blue edging. Since he used to come out here back when they were building, he never looked at the thing without thinking of the graves under that tarmac—graves paved over how many years now. Hadn’t even moved them when they put the road down. Eric still felt odd that he couldn’t remember any of the names—not one—on the markers that once stood where the road ran.

  Lots had been Indian, though.

  (Had there been some Mikkos? Some Jumpers? Those were Creek names old timers occasionally mentioned, on the mainland…)

  Somebody—probably a particularly militant lesbian from the Settlement—had put up a sign toward the cemetery’s edge, on a piece of plywood of the sort they used to board over windows in wind storms. A post at either side, it was painted white. Inside red quotation marks, black letters read:

  REMEMBER, THE DEAD DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE GAY.

  Shit asked, “What’s that say? I know it says ‘don’t’ sumpin’”—the only word you might find on a road sign, the only words he could read.

  Having found the two slanted boards that were the grave markers for, respectively, Jay and Mex, lopsided and already hard to read, Eric sank his shovel in the ground and tossed dirt to the side. Now looking over, he read the sign out loud, “Remember, the dead don’t care if you’re gay.” Chuckling, again he pushed the blade into the gray and sandy earth, with its sparse grass, to pry up a second spadefull.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Shit wanted to know.

  “It’s kind of a joke, I guess.” Eric dug some more.

  “I don’t get it,” Shit said.

  “Well…” Eric paused. “You know how Jay’s Uncle Shad was always goin’ on about how guys fuckin’ around with each other was unnatural and how black and white folks together was evil in the eyes of the Lord and how we would all go to hell and everything?”

  “Yeah. That’s ’cause he was crazy.”

  “But you see—” Eric nodded across the mounds. Four graves over was the one in which Dynamite was buried, six feet down by the retractable steel measuring tape Mama Grace had brought with him that day—“now Shad don’t care.”

  Three graves further on was Shad’s.

  “How’s he gonna care?” Shit asked. “He’s dead.”

  “Well, that’s the point, Shit!”

  “But it don’t make no sense.”

  “Yes, it does.” Eric was not planning to go down any six feet. For a plastic can of ash, two or three was enough. This time, one shoe on the shovel’s edge, again he pushed the blade in—and felt it hit some piece of wood. When he worked it loose, roots and rocks fell from it back into the hole: six inches of broken plank. From a coffin…? Though never populous, the graveyard did go back to Indian times. “Some people get so upset about it when they’re alive, like Shad—especially people who think they’re goin’ to heaven and you’re goin’ to hell—they get everybody around ’em all worried about all the bad things they’re gonna be thinkin’ about ’em through all eternity. Then somebody comes along with a sign like that and it reminds everybody that it really don’t make no difference.”

  “But it don’t make no difference,” Shit said, “dead or alive. So why’s it funny?”

  Whether newspaper cartoons or jokes on the TV at the bar, this sort of thing was a monthly argument with Shit. Eric took a breath. “It ain’t that important, Shit.” Eric turned back to dig.

  “Yeah, like your damned Spinoza book. I think a lot of people is stupid and say stupid stuff like that, ’cause it’s supposed to be funny.” He grunted. “Or philosophical.”

  “Well…that’s what a joke is, Shit. Somethin’ stupid that’s funny.”

  “But it ain’t funny. It just don’t make no sense.” Shit grunted again. “They gonna hafta put a fence around this whole place soon, to keep people from doin’ what we doin’ now.”

  “If they do, how are you and me gonna get each other buried?”

  “We’ll just walk in,” Shit said. “Like we did with Tom. I dug that one—”

  “Uncle Tom? That wasn’t sneakin’. There just wasn’t nobody here, except Mex and Jay.” Today there was a gravedigger, Cora, in the Settlement, who used an electric backhoe—and who, everybody said, was never around when you wanted her. “But you know, they don’t really let you bury pets and people in the same graveyard.”

  “Well, that’s stupid. Hey, I’ll dig the rest, if you want. But maybe you wanna do it ’cause it’s your mama—”

  “Naw, that’s okay. I’m more than half done, anyway.” After a few more shovels full, Eric asked, “You ever think about your mama, Shit?”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “All the time, when yours was dyin’.” Then he looked down from pewter clouds. “But mostly I don’t.”

  Eric took the canister from Shit, stooped down, and put it in. While he was tamping it, suddenly Shit called, “Hey, Frankie. You can come out…”

  Eric looked. Back among the trees they heard leaves brushing leaves. Eric frowned—but saw nothing.

  Shit called. “Come on. I’ll give you ten dollars, if you come out.”

  Eric thought: What’s that, not quite what twenty-five cents used to be when I first got here? A lot of people even let you use the old quarters for a current ten spot, if you wanted. He looked at Shit, who waited like a dog at point. “Did you see her?”

  Shit relaxed and shook his head. “Poor kid. I wish she wasn’t so damned scared. We ain’t gonna hurt her.” He looked back at Eric. “Course, when I was her age, I was scared of ever’body, too.”

  Eric pounded the ground again. “Unless you was fuckin’ ’em.”

  “Well, yeah…” Shit chuckled. “I guess so.”

  Eric stood up again. “Poor kid.” With the back of the shovel, he bumped the earth some more, while Shit went back to humphing about how only lesbians would put a joke sign up in a graveyard, anyway, funny or not. Then practical Shit got a branch and raked around over the earth, so that you really couldn’t tell how long ago it had been dug. “Since we don’t got a permit,” he explained. “We might as well be on the safe side.” Then they walked up the trail to their cabin, the trees closing out the sky. Halfway, Eric realized Shit’s preoccupation with the joke had put the long hug out of mind. He sighed. “I’m gonna leave a covered dish of chili out back for Frankie, when we get home.”

  “If it’s gone in the mornin’, it’s just gonna be some damned raccoons what got it.”

  “Well,” Eric said, “’coons gotta eat, too…Maybe she’ll get it.”

  Once more in the kitchen, when they were sitting at the table, Shit suddenly stood up from his coffee mug, came over to Eric, and put his arms down to hug him. Eric’s face pressed against Shit’s warm, flat belly, chin against the ridge of Shit’s jeans. (Well, he had remembered.) The muscles were still hard, but the skin over them was looser now. Under his cheek Shit’s belly was warm; the denim under Eric’s chin was cool. Behind Shit’s back, Eric grabbed his own wrist and hugged. One of Shit’s hard hands was on the back of Eric’s head. He remembered how Jay would rub his or Mex’s—or really, anyone’s—head, when you were sucking him. Yeah, he’d been thinking about Jay. He thought now: And I ain’t a puppy no
more. I’m an old dog. Shit’s other hand splayed over Eric’s shoulder. Eric’s arms were around Shit’s waist. “What you thinkin’ about?” Shit asked.

  “Frankie, my mama, her mama—I mean, she musta had one—your mama…” Breaks caught on Eric’s voice. “Just stuff…”

  Shit said, “You wanna cry some?”

  Against Shit’s belly, Eric nodded.

  “Go on—it’s okay.”

  “I wanna,” Eric said. “But I can’t.”

  * * *

  [90] IT WAS SPRING when they made friends with Anne Frazier. Like them, a recent island resident, her hair was short and brown; her skin was lightly tanned. Forty-six or forty-seven, out on Settlement Road, she had a kiln in a shack behind her house. Across the water in the Harbor and in Runcible, she rented shelves in three ceramic shops. Probably she had money of her own—that was Eric’s notion. Although her large copper, bronze, and glass-green pots were expensive, he couldn’t imagine she sold enough to support herself: her house was twice the size of their own cabin—a prefab but a good quality one. It had three rooms on the second floor, four on the first. Her kitchen had a skylight, and a recent wind had blown a couple of those things loose in other houses on the island’s far side.

  At Thursday’s outdoor market, they were standing before the sign beside the awning over the boxes that still said DUMP & SETTLEMENT PRODUCE. (Back on the mainland, the eastern edge of the Dump had been bulldozed flat for beach parking a year ago, someone had told him. But who…?) On the commons, the Settlement Market is where, roaming among craft tables and food kiosks, they’d run into Anne, carrying her blue canvas bag. Over his shoulder, Eric had his orange one. Between stalls of green and fuchsia rhubarb, red and yellow tomatoes, green and red apples, and wooden trays of shaved ice spread with mackerel, cod, and shellfish, she told them how worried she was that hers would blow off too, and Eric told her they’d put up a wind trap around it for her.

  People milled before the display tables.

  “See—” Shit stood beside his bicycle (he rode their heavier purchases to the cabin; and, since he’d fallen and twisted his knee—badly enough for Eric no longer to trust himself on his bike—Eric carried the lighter ones), explaining—“if you get a real hurricane, like Edna, back in ’oh-nine, there ain’t nothin’ gonna keep that thing on. Don’t be surprised if you lose your whole damn roof. But it’ll do for most. Those prefabs like you got are solid. When they first started puttin’ ’em up, I thought they’d come apart like matchwood. But they surprised me. For somethin’ that goes up in ten hours, they hold together pretty well.”

  The next day, they arrived at three o’clock.

  On Anne’s sloping shingles, the trap was an eight-inch chimney of metal-braced planks around the skylight’s lower half. With wind from the east, it served as a break and counteracted the Bernoulli effect that tried to lift the whole thing off and fling it twenty feet or more across the road in any wind over sixty-miles-an-hour. When wind came from the west, the trap caught the air and built up pressure to cut the natural lift that a full chimney all around would have created.

  Inside, over the kitchen’s black floor, flowered with images of foot-wide crimson and purple blossoms, Eric—on the upper steps of the aluminum ladder—reached through the six-inch opening with his cordless and buzzed the last screw into the brace that held the chimney wall vertical. Pulling his hand in, he scraped his knuckles on the edge, muttered, “Fuck…!” and came down the ladder again, as Shit walked in from outside.

  “Well, if that don’t do it, nothin’ will.” Shit grinned.

  In bronze earrings and a bronze neck chain (and, like Shit, barefoot), Anne said, “Hey, I can’t thank yall enough. I hope I’m not being forward. But I’ve got a tub of ribs in my refrigerator. My family was supposed to come out from Manchester this weekend. All yesterday and the day before I was making ribs and potato salad—not to mention three strawberry rhubarb pies. But my brother called this morning and canceled. Last night he broke his ankle at some political demonstration.” Roughened from clay, she clasped her knuckley hands before her drab military slacks. “Would yall do a kindness to an Alabama gal on her own in Georgia and have supper with me? Ain’t nothin’ fancy.”

  Eric laughed. “Well, that’s nice, ma’am.” He pointed a thumb at Shit. “You know, I love ’im to death, but he ain’t never learned no table manners.”

  “Huh?” Shit said. “Hey, I can eat polite. When I have to.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Anne made a dismissive gesture and turned. “I’m from forty miles southwest of Mobile—I had four brothers and six uncles, about as country as you can get. Really, I’d appreciate the company. Come on—we’ll eat ribs, drink beer, watch television, and swap lies. How’s that sound?”

  “Well,” Eric said. “That’s nice, but—” about to decline.

  But Shit said, “Okay. Yeah. That sounds good. We ain’t beer drinkers. But maybe you got some pop—”

  So that’s what they did.

  There was potato salad and slaw—

  Red and black and running with sauce, the ribs came out of the kitchen’s convection oven in a big aluminum bowl.

  There were whipped turnips—

  “I never had ’em before,” Shit said. “You wouldn’t be offended if I passed on those?”

  “Oh, for God’s sakes.” Anne came in with a dishtowel over one sunburned and freckled shoulder. “Eat what you want and forget the rest.”

  —and green beans.

  “Hey.” Shit already had sauce in his beard. “These ribs are tender, ma’am. They’re almost as good as yours, Eric—”

  “I’m gonna take that as a compliment.”

  “Yes’m,” Shit said. “If I didn’t have my store-boughts in, I could still gum the meat off these things.”

  Eric said, “Do you think you could hold off and wait for the rest of us before you got started? Grab a napkin and wipe the stuff off your fur. We’re company, now.”

  Shit blinked, surprised. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  But Anne had gone out and came in now with Coca-cola. “Go on. It’s there to eat. Someone down in town told me yall been together since yall were children—that yall go back to the twentieth century.”

  Following Anne, they sat around the coffee table.

  “Naw—we got together in July oh-seven.” Eric chuckled. “We’re old, but we ain’t that old.”

  Shit said, “We was born in the twentieth century—him in ninety, me in eighty-eight.”

  “That’s wonderful.” Turning to Shit, she picked up a beer bottle. “Can I open one of these for you? Maybe you’d like a glass…”

  “Don’t waste a glass on ’im, ma’am,” Eric said. “He wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

  “Course I do. Balance it on my head, toss up boiled peanuts, and catch ’em in it.” Shit grinned over the white wall of his teeth. “Yeah—we ain’t never been drinkers. Though my daddy would have a bottle or a can now and then.”

  She laughed, coming back with a large bottle of orange pop.

  “Oh, you musta known he was comin’,” Shit said. “That’s his favorite.” A moment later, the bottle cap fell on the coffee table’s olive colored surface. “Here you are.” With a questioning glance at Eric and a nod back from him, she set down a blue ceramic plate, which clinked the stone. After a serving spoon of turnips, a spoon of beans, and one of potato salad, she picked up the plate and passed it over. “Take as many ribs as you want. Use your fingers—I’m gonna.”

  Eric, too, was wary of the turnips. But he tasted a forkful. “These are…good.”

  “Mash ’em with vinegar, butter, lemon juice,” Anne said. “There’s nothing better. You sure you don’t want a taste, Mr. Haskell?”

  Shit said, “Well, maybe…”

  “That’s just polite,” Eric explained to Shit. “See, ma’am, he was raised by his daddy—and like you said, his daddy was about as country as you could get. Dynamite was the best man in the world…once I was sixte
en and come down here, he raised me, too. But there was never no mama in that house at all.”

  “See, Eric here,” Shit said, “was my mama and my daddy and my first main fuck—excuse me, there—once my daddy died. Eric here’s a pretty damn wonderful feller. I was nineteen—we met there in Turpens Truck Stop, right in the back john.”

  “Oh, yes,” Anne said. “I’ve heard about that place.”

  “It’s still there—too. It was kinda wild—sometimes it still is.”

  “Didn’t they used to have a ladies night or something? Somebody was telling me about that.”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “Saul and Abott was real proud of those.”

  “But that was later—in the thirties. And it wasn’t just a night, either. It was a whole weekend—last weekend in the month, all during the winter. They’d close the place down for men, and women would come from all over—and cruise the halls just like guys. A lot of ’em were truck drivers, too. That’s when we were in Runcible, managing the Opera House. Turpens’ dyke night’s one of the things that started bringing all the women in for the Settlement, here.”

  Anne chuckled. “You know, I think we’ve lost a lot of ground since the thirties. That was a decade where there was real hope for people, not just gays and lesbians—for everybody.”

  “Yeah, well,” Shit said. “But Eric and me got together a long time before that, and…in about two seconds, too. My daddy was right there with me, and as soon as we went out, I asked him if he thought there was any chance of me gettin’ to this little guy again who’d come in there said he was movin’ to the Harbor. And he just drove me over to the Lighthouse where his mama was workin’ to wait for ’em. ’Course we couldn’t say anything ’cause we done met him in a truck stop john, there, and it was his mama.”

  “But I didn’t know that—” Eric laughed—“and as soon as I saw ’em, I thought they’d come to blab about everything to my mama, to my dad. I was a real dumb little shit…excuse me. But you know what I mean.”