Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Smiling, Anne nodded, as if to encourage the tale.

  “I was pretty scared, too—that he wasn’t gonna wanna even talk to me no more. But my daddy said, ‘Why don’t you wait and see when he shows up?’” Shit breathed out, slowly, as if, for a moment, the anxiety was still with him. “Hell, I don’t know what I woulda done without Eric. Best partner you could have. He can read. And write. That’s real important, ’cause I can’t. It’s a lot better when at least one of you can do that. Hey—” Shit had just tried the turnips—“you know, these ain’t bad? Easy on the store-bought, too.”

  “Mmm—” Anne forked up some potato salad—“I had a partner up until two months ago. Her name was Deborah. But she was young…we were together for seven years.” She looked down, then up. “When you’re nineteen—that’s how old she was when I met her, a student in my pottery class in Charlotte—someone thirty-five or thirty-six seems worldly and knowing and romantic all at once. Then, you reach twenty-six, and the person who was thirty-five-year-old is suddenly on the other side of forty; we start to look like one-time interesting has-beens. That’s what I turned into for her.”

  Shit asked, “You here waitin’ for her to come back?”

  Anne shook her head. “No—she’s not coming back.” She took in a long breath. “She wants to…to have fun, have a good time. And, well, she should have one. I want her to.”

  “Can’t you just let her run around,” Eric asked, “and have some hot soup waitin’ when she gets home—or a good pot of coffee? That’s what I used to do whenever he’d get randy and run off.”

  “Yeah.” Shit dug into more potato salad. “He makes some good soup, too.”

  Eric said, “And he makes good coffee.”

  “The coffee was for when he was cattin’ around.” Shit took another big bite.

  “I suppose,” Anne said, “men can do that—some of them. Gay men, I mean. Some women can, too. But I turn into a crazed, jealous harridan, and when she’d come back I couldn’t understand how she could do that to someone she loved.”

  “Sometimes—” Shit pulled more pink up from the rib bone—“it’s pretty easy. And with him,” he glanced at Eric, “he says he likes it—’cause I always come back horny as a motherfucker—excuse my French. He sure did. You know, it ain’t somethin’ she’s doin’ to you. She’s doin’ it to someone else.”

  “Well,” Anne said, “that’s the problem. And it makes me act like somebody I don’t like very much.”

  “Now, you remember,” Eric said, “a long time ago? I did tell you once, Shit, I didn’t care about what you did with other people. But sometimes, it could make you act pretty funny around me when you got back. That would get me a little crazy sometimes.”

  “Yeah, I do remember that. I thought about that one a long time. I changed the way I acted, too, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah. You did.”

  “See—” Shit finished his cola and set the bottle down—“that’s why we don’t got no television, him and me. It’s always telling folks how they should expect the people they love to give it all up for them, and how the person they love owes them that. And if they don’t get it, they feel insulted and disrespected and got the right to act crazy-angry and bust the person’s head open or kick ’em out. That ain’t right. You love somebody, sure, you try to make ’em happy. But nobody owes you their whole life when you ain’t there. That’s nuts.”

  “Well, I guess I’m nuts, then.” Something tightened in her voice. “Because that’s what I want. Believe me, to me it don’t sound so unusual.”

  “It ain’t,” Shit said. “That’s what’s wrong with it.”

  Eric wondered if Shit had gone too far. Shit had his opinions, and once he started he could run on.

  But Anne retreated into explanation. “Oh, of course, I don’t want the person’s whole life—though Deborah used to say I did. I just wanted the security of knowing that the intimate part of our relationship was…only for us. And, yes, I do feel demeaned when I find out she’s…Oh, you know what I’m talking about. I’m willing to give that up with other people. Why can’t she?”

  “Maybe,” Shit said, “’cause she’s twenty-six. And maybe nobody’s tempted you, yet. Aw, hell—it used to make me angry, seein’ people, gay ones, straight ones, gettin’ all twisted out of shape ’cause they think the world owes them that. Now it just makes me sad—’cause so many really nice people, like you, are all walkin’ around unhappy, thinkin’ they ought to have had somethin’ that, because they can’t get it, everybody else thinks they’re fools or stupid for doin’ without.”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m a fool for wantin’ it.”

  “But you think you’re a fool for puttin’ up with not havin’ it—’cause the television says you’re supposed to have it.”

  “You mean you think—” Anne managed a smile, but Eric thought she had to work at it—“I am a fool for wanting it?”

  “I didn’t say it,” Shit said. “But him and me—” he glanced at Eric— “done okay without it.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “Naw,” Shit said, “we just stay away from the TV.”

  “You know, for all his talk,” Eric said, “we don’t do too much tom cattin’ around no more—neither one of us.” He chuckled. “It’s easy for him to talk, now we’re gettin’ old—”

  “—and ugly, too.” Shit laughed. “It was one thing when we used to manage the dirty movie house over in Runcible. It was all just downstairs. We never even had to leave the building to get anything we wanted—either of us. And I mean anything! I thought I’d done everything when we started at that place. But we hadn’t tried nothin’ yet.”

  Nodding, Eric chuckled.

  “But right now, we’re probably the only ones who can stand each other in the sack, anyway—”

  Anne looked up and, smiling, shook her head at the notion’s outrageousness.

  But Eric noticed she did not contradict Shit.

  “It’s funny.” Anne sighed. “As nice as Gilead is, and as much fun as it is living in the Settlement, sometimes I think you can find a version of what I just told you in one-out-of-three houses all along Settlement Road. Really, they ought to call it Heartbreak Highway. Anyway—” She sat back and looked around her living room—“you can’t want to spend the evenin’ hearing about another old dyke’s depressing love life.”

  “Damn,” Shit said. “You ain’t old. I bet you ain’t forty.”

  Anne looked at him sideways. “Shit, you are a liar headed for hell.”

  (Eric had noted she did not use his partner’s name often, but when she did, he liked her decisiveness.) “I’m nearer fifty. You’re trying to be polite—”

  Below palm fronds, on the electronic equipment by the wall a light changed from red to green. Simultaneously, a bell sounded three times.

  “Oh.” Anne looked over at it. “I’d said something about watching television. There is a program I’d wanted to see…But if it’s not something that interests you, I’m recording it anyway. I can watch it later. You said you two weren’t really—”

  “No, ma’am,” Shit said. “No. Let’s watch your show.”

  “With all his talk about TV,” Eric said, “as long as it’s at somebody else’s house, there ain’t nothin’ he likes more than watchin’ television.”

  “He’s right,” Shit said. “Don’t mind my runnin’ on…”

  “Oh,” Anne said. “I see. Well, this one shouldn’t bother you too much. It’s a science program.” Anne turned in her chair, waved one hand.

  The wall opened.

  Each a meter high and a meter-and-a-half side to side, three screens slipped forward and joined along their edges, to make a single, curved, near fifteen-foot screen, end to end. The blues and reds of the title and opening scenes slid across, gaining a third dimension. Bits of light, gleaming letters, and numbers shot into the room, then retreated deep within. Opening drumbeats sounded.

  The show—the announcer, an authoritative wom
an with a European accent, explained—concerned the Universe, nothing less. Largely, it would survey radio pictures from the Yang-Kopffus Doppler Array, a collection of some twelve hundred radio dishes that had taken seven countries twelve years to send up, arranged in a pattern between the orbit of Saturn and the orbit of Jupiter, each just under six-hundred kilometers from the next, so that they were able to “duplicate” the image received on “an eye with a retina half again the area of the planet Earth, stretched out flat.” Guided by initial pictures from the old Webb Telescope, that had replaced the ancient Hubble, still orbiting after thirty years, when its images were gathered and properly enhanced, the Yang-Kopffus could observe the red dwarfs and their planets—even continental forms on them—within a hundred-fifty light years; more, it observed the ribbons formed by the millions of galaxies weaving through a universe three times the size it had been assumed to be as late as 2002. As well, it could make out, among those ribbons, the faint emissions of many millions of what were called, somewhat inappropriately, “dead galaxies,” alternate ribbons of galaxies older than the bright ones people had grown used to, made up of billions of small, dim stars, most all but extinguished, which comprised as much as a third of the matter in the greater multiverse—not the fabled and still mysterious “dark matter,” but something like it. The announcer talked of “weird galaxies” swept clean of all black holes and the great rent in the web—“the Axis of Evil, as its discoverers at Imperial College, London, Kate Land and João Magueijo, named it back in 2005—and the compensatory bright spot among them,” two- or three-hundred-thousand light years away. She went on to talk of the recent success of certain theories of asymptotic freedom and the subversion of the Higgs sensate…

  “That Axis of Evil,” Eric said. “That’s like the Dump. And the bright spot is like the Settlement out here…” He looked at the TV flicker on Anne and Shit’s concentrated faces. Neither had said anything.

  Over an image of headlights streaming through the night along intertwined highway underpasses and overpasses, intersecting and interweaving roadways near some city, the announcer intoned, “Consider each headlight here a collection of many galaxies, each galaxy made up of two to six billion stars, rotating around a central black hole, moving along through infinite night. Now assume we can see much better than we ordinarily do, and…watch…” The scene switched to the green fire of nighttime cameras and, between the streaming highways, they made out sheets of marshy water, and, here and there, stretching through them, strips of dark land. “Think of the streams of cars with headlights as ribbons of visible galaxies. The water that we can see on either side of the highway is the empty space between those galactic ribbons. The struts of land, here and there between the roadways through the water, are like the ordinarily invisible ribbons of ‘dead galaxies,’ which weave beside and between them…”

  “I never seen nothing like that on no highway—”

  “Yes, we have, Shit—when we went with Mama Grace to take his furniture up to Savannah…”

  After an hour and a half of galactic and stellar images, it was over.

  “Now, see—” Anne waved the show off. The screens split and backed into the walls—“if my brother had come up, we’d have had to watch the next program. That’s a show about how the world is only six thousand years old and all the species were put here ready made. And all variations from that original pattern are evil—” she laughed—“like us. They say homosexuality began not more than fifty years ago, when the Arabs blew up the towers in New York. The planes that ran into them released a special gas that started turning Americans gay.”

  “I know it’s a long time,” Shit said. “But I remember when them things come down. I been queer all my life—a long time before that. And so was my daddy.”

  Anne laughed. “Now, don’t overdo it, Mr. Haskell. How could your father have been gay?”

  “Well, he was.”

  “And what about all those famous people who were supposed to have been gay—Shakespeare and Sappho and that Woolf woman and Plato and Alexander the Great?” Several restaurants and even clothing stores by now in the Settlement displayed posters of famous lesbians and gay men. Eric had pointed them out to Shit.

  “That’s supposed to be part of the plot to fool people into thinking gay people have been here longer than we have—and besides, they weren’t Americans.”

  “Baldwin…?”

  “He was African American.” Anne laughed. “Apparently, they don’t count either.”

  Shit grunted. “They don’t count me, ’cause I’m black—?”

  Eric said, “That Axis of Evil was enough to make you think that was the religious program.”

  Anne laughed. “Sometimes that’s what it looks like. Well, whatever—the point is,” she went on, “that’s called a science program, too. And people believe it. I don’t see how folks can watch both of them and not realize one of them is taking them for a ride. Of course—” she eased forward in her chair—“most people don’t watch both. And I know a whole lot of people who won’t watch either one, ’cause they think it’s…kind of dirty. But I always loved that stuff. Science, I mean. That’s my own real perversion.”

  “Probably that’s why I don’t watch it—’cause I don’t wanna argue with people like that,” Eric said. Then he added, “Thank you for dinner, Ms. Frazier. That was good. And that show was interestin’. But we gotta get home. Usually, we ain’t out this late.”

  “That’s a big television,” Shit said. “Your eyes could get tired watchin’ that thing.”

  “You don’t have a television at all? Even a little one?” She walked behind them to the door. Finally, though, she said, “I’d hate to think all the pain I’ve suffered is just because I’m a dupe to social conventions.”

  “Well,” Shit said, “most of the pain most people suffer is because ‘what should’ is so far away from ‘what is,’ I mean, unless it’s a physical pain—and even then.”

  “Last time I was over in Montgomery, I saw a tree nursery that had some willows they said they could ship right out here to the island for me. I was thinking about getting a couple for the back.”

  “You gotta watch out for them willows,” Eric said. “The roots can do in your foundation. And run havoc on your water supply while they’re doin’ it, too.”

  “Pshaw!” Stopping at the doorway, Anne laughed. “They’re pretty! Now, here’s your money for the wind trap. It’s all there, like we agreed.”

  “Ma’am, after that dinner—” Shit shook his head—“I don’t know if we can charge you for—”

  “Course you can! Go on take this, now. I don’t want to hear that. Yall did your work. Yall take your money.”

  “Well, thank you.” Eric took the sheaf of hundreds, folded them, and put them in the pocket of his shirt with the torn-off sleeves. “Good night, ma’am.”

  Shit said, “Good night, ma’am.”

  “Good night, Mr. Haskell,” she said. “Mr. Jeffers. And thank yall for keeping an old lady company.” Behind them, the door closed. When they’d stepped out, the front light had come on.

  They started down the lawn path to the dirt road. Once they were beyond the motion detector’s range, the light went out again. Between the trees, as their eyes adjusted, stars broke through the moonless dark. “I like ’er,” Shit said. “She’s like your mama used to be—’cept your mama was a northerner and talked faster.”

  Eric grunted. “I hope she thinks twice about them willows.”

  “Long as she puts ’em a good ways off from the house…” Shit said. It was dark. They knew each other well enough for him not to need to complete the sentence.

  When they turned onto the path toward their own cabin, Shit asked, “Did that stuff on the TV, there, make sense to you?”

  “Some of it,” Eric said. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  As they walked, they looked up.

  “I don’t see no ribbons or webs of stars—or galaxies. They’re just…stars all over the place, l
ike always. I mean…the Milky Way over there. Maybe that’s what they were talkin’ about?”

  “Naw,” Eric said. “That’s just our own galaxy, from where we’re at inside it. We’re lookin’ at it on edge. That’s why it looks like that.”

  “What’s a galaxy, anyway? Just a whole lotta stars?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “Basically. They swirl around together, a lot of times in a spiral. You seen, they had pictures of ’em on the show.”

  “Yeah…” Shit said, pondering. “I don’t know why people got to watch that kinda stuff. It’s as bad as that damned philosophy. That’s probably why they put it on a special channel—or only show it late at night.”

  Eric smiled—he hoped not enough for Shit to see.

  On either side the road, crickets scritched through the night.

  Usually, Eric did not think too much of Shit as a social philosopher, though he kept his council. But now he said, “Hey—I liked what you were sayin’ in there to her—before the show.”

  “Mmmm,” Shit said, as if considering. “But I could tell she was still hurtin’ over that Deborah. That’s why I backed off.”

  “Yeah, I know you did,” Eric said. “I liked that, too.”

  Then Shit said: “I bet she asked us to eat over ’cause you was showin’ off your tattoos. You think she wanted to fuck us?”

  “What?” Eric said. “Huh? Why you sayin’ that, Shit?”

  “’Cause she was sittin’ around with us, all night, with no top on and her tits hangin’ out.”

  “Well, you don’t have no shirt on either—and yours are startin’ to hang a little, too, there, son.”

  “Yeah. But she’s a woman.”

  “Come on, Shit. She’s a lesbian. That’s the way most women walk around today—at least out here in the Settlement. You tryin’ to pretend that for the last twenty-five or thirty years, you ain’t never seen women goin’ around Runcible and the Harbor topless before? Even in the show tonight—”