Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “But that’s in public. This was in private—alone with two old men she don’t hardly know.”

  “Yeah—two gay old men, remember—nearly sixty years old? Hey,” Eric said, “if you’re really interested, you can always go back, ring the bell, and ask if she wants you to spend the night. I ain’t gonna stop you.”

  “Naw,” Shit said. “I ain’t that interested. I was wonderin’, that’s all.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.”

  A minute later, Shit put his hand on Eric’s shoulder and leaned in as they walked. “You know we could both go back and see if she wants to take on the two of us…”

  “I ain’t that interested,” Eric said. “You’re a mess, Shit.”

  “Then—” Shit stood up straight again, though he left his hand on Eric’s shoulder—“I guess I’ll just have to get you home in bed and rub all over you and pretend like she did, there, so I can come all over your belly.”

  Eric said, “If you can stay awake that long and don’t fall asleep in the middle.”

  “Oh, you’re always tryin’ to be so funny there.”

  “You know, we are gettin’ on. I can remember when you’d actually’ve left me here and gone back and done somethin’ like that.”

  “Huh? Not with a woman—”

  “No, with a guy, I meant.”

  “Oh…well.” Shit frowned. “You would’ve, too…wouldn’t you?”

  Eric laughed—which ended in a yawn. “You know, we’re both pretty tired. But we could do it in the mornin’. Have sex, I mean. That’s always your favorite time anyway.”

  Shit grunted. “Aw, come on. When I get up tomorrow, you’re gonna be sittin’ out on the steps, readin’ your damned book, waitin’ for me to get up and make you some coffee.”

  Eric chuckled. “Yeah, probably.” He looked off the edges of the dark road. “Actually, I gotta fill out that government stuff tomorrow. And I do have to get back to my book again. I almost got it, this time.”

  “You say that every time you read it. You only promised Mama Grace you’d read it three times through. You finished that a long time back—”

  “But every time I read it, I get some more out of it. That’s why I keep goin’ through it again. I wonder how Mama Grace is doin’, anyway?”

  “Probably he’s dead an’ buried.”

  “That’d be a shame.” Eric signed. “I hope not. But…you may be right.” They wandered on over the rise. In the dark, a sea breeze touched their faces as they started down their side of the hill.

  “Hey.” Shit’s hand fell from Eric’s shoulder. “You liked them turnips?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “They were good. I could’a done without that tomato sauce all over them ribs. Made ’em taste like ketchup and candy. ”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “It was still nice of her to feed us—” they veered at the bend—“but they was easy to eat.”

  *

  The next morning, Eric went out to sit on the cabin’s kitchen steps. With a sheaf of government forms, a ballpoint pen that worked, a rock—and eighteen inches of pine planking—slowly he sat on the middle stair. Then he pulled the plank over the frayed knees of his jeans, and, on the step beside him, used the rock as a paperweight to hold the forms down. One at a time he began to fill them out.

  When he’d been working twenty minutes, Shit stepped around him, barefooted. “Here’s some coffee.” He passed the mug down. Eric had a yellow one that said SHIT. Shit had a brown one that said PISS. Shit had brought them both in Turpens Parts and Notions for a joke—long enough ago so that neither thought much today about what they said. “You fillin’ out them government papers you got in the mail?”

  “Yep.” Eric raised his reading glasses up to his forehead. “Thanks.” He took the mug and sipped. “That’s good.”

  Down the grass slope, water glittered beyond low rocks, becoming the blue-green of a Chamber of Commerce desk blotter, stretched to the earth’s edge. It was a September morning, neither overly brilliant nor particularly gray; neither darkly overcast nor crystallinely clear.

  Standing, Shit squinted at the sea. “Wished I knew why we had to fill out so many forms just to get old.” Mug in both hands, he drank some coffee.

  Eric pulled down his glasses:

  …last name, first name, name of domestic partner, date of birth. He wrote them in. “Well, ain’t you glad we got me to do it for you?” He grinned at Shit, then blinked at the ocean, which for so long had been his image for the repository of all past time—his own, history’s, anyone’s—though, from last night, he remembered today how much bigger and older the universe was than the sea.

  Intermingled webs of blue and silver, the water ended at the horizon, which, this morning, Eric realized was the base of a robin’s eggshell to cut him—and all humanity—off from any further glimpse of things; things further than the sun, dimmer than the moon.

  * * *

  [91] IN THE FIRST decade after Eric and Shit moved permanently to the Gilead cabin, Eric started attending town meetings in the Settlement as he’d attended them in the Dump. As he approached sixty, his energy was less. Things that occupied the meetings’ hour and a half—first at the old Meeting Hall down at the ferry dock and then, once they renovated the old Kyle Mansion, in the Library Commons Room on the second floor—were harder for him to stay interested in.

  Far more of the population in the Settlement than in the Dump made money from the production of one sort or another of art—as much as twenty-three percent. As well, more than sixty percent of the residents—overlapping with a significant number of the artists—did one form or another of “jack work,” where, through computers, they plugged into light office or heavy industrial machines, all around the country, all around the world—often one on one day, one on another. (Several times there were mentions of Bodin Systems, but usually in the context of its no longer providing this service, or its no longer doing that. Then it wasn’t mentioned at all.) That created whole ranges of political and economic problems in the growing town unknown in the Dump, with its local workers in local jobs, who’d never traveled more than half an hour or forty minutes to work. A jack job ten kilometers away or a job ten thousand kilometers away took the same three-quarters of a second to “turn on,” but conflicting tax scales and out-sourcing fees for this group or that guild took up more and more of the meeting’s discussion time. Eric had a harder and harder time understanding either the problems or the proposed solutions, so that by the end of the decade he was attending maybe two meetings a year and regularly abstaining from votes. The confusion and incomprehension he experienced often found him, the next morning, sitting in the kitchen across the table from Shit, fingers locked around his mug, while dawn light came in a bright line under the shade pulled down over the window behind the sink, gazing at Shit, who hadn’t put his shirt on yet. The tight tufts of hair on his chest were completely white now. Sometimes his beard stayed mussed pretty much all day.

  “What you lookin’ at me for? Is somethin’ wrong? What is it?” Shit would ask, curious.

  “It’s nothin’. I’m just thinkin’ about the meetin’ last night,” but what he was thinking about even more was Shit’s refusal, years before, to attend any of meetings back in the Dump, because they’d made him so uncomfortable. Through skipped meetings and their practically Luddite approach to computers and newspapers, they missed by a week the news of Robert Kyle’s retirement—out in one of his homes on the Oregon coast. He’d “jack run” most of the business in his Hemmings offices from there and from Columbus. “You know,” Eric said, thoughtfully, “I actually heard that man debate—in person. Back when he argued with Johnston, in the Dump.”

  But two weeks later they got the newsletter explaining that the Chamber of Commerce had dissolved and reconstituted itself as the Robert Kyle Foundation. It was no longer the Kyle Foundation, and the change was apparently significant, though how Eric wasn’t so sure. From now on, that would be the name on their pension
checks and their insurance correspondence.

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “And my daddy sucked that nigger’s dick, too—when the nigger wasn’t suckin’ his.” He laughed and poured the old coffee into the stainless steel sink, then ran water into the ancient carafe. Pulling loose a paper towel, he thrust in his fist that still had to squeeze to get through the carafe’s opening and wiped around the inside.

  “You think too much is gonna change, now that he don’t got his finger in things personally?”

  “You mean, more than it has already?” Pulling out the towel, Shit set the rinsed carafe on the drain board and looked superior.

  * * *

  [92] SOMETIMES WHEN HE was by himself, just walking down through the woods or along the beach—two nice ones had recently been cleared on the island’s south shore—Eric would try to remember specific incidents of sex, purely between him and Shit. (You could train yourself to remember up to them, or the falling away, moments after, which is what made them good or not so good. You could even remember what you said about ’em. Orgasms themselves, though, were all-but-impossible to remember.) He could remember things that had happened between them hundreds of times—walking up behind Shit and hugging him, and Shit pressing Eric’s hands against his belly with his own, slowly turning in Eric’s tight arms—as Eric himself turned—till Shit was behind Eric, and soon had him down on bed or couch or rug and, wetting himself with a fistful of spit, he’d fuck him; or, in the morning, now at Dynamite’s old cabin, now in the bed in the apartment above the Opera House, now in Dynamite’s old bed in its new home in the Gilead cabin, finishing up between Shit’s legs and rolling over Shit’s thigh, knee, and foot, from between, while Shit reached down blindly to pull him up and back against his belly, finally to pack his own still half-hard cock in the crevice of Eric’s ass, and moments latter, begin breathing quietly in sleep against Eric’s shoulder, in a grip Eric had to break in order to wake him, or, yes, Shit taking Eric’s face in his hands and with a violent kiss rooting within Eric’s mouth with his tongue, his whole body quivering, till finally Shit cock’s was lodged, at last, in one end or the other, and they could go on. When he tried to remember specific instances of sexual release, generally he could only recall two: once when Shit had sucked him off in the “Gay Friendly” Men’s Room at Dump Corners, or—the other time—up on the Bluff in the storm, when he’d first fucked Shit’s ass, which was odd because for every time he’d blown Eric, Eric had blown Shit twenty-five times, and for every time Eric had fucked his partner, his partner had fucked him close to fifty. But maybe because those two were so different—and had happened so long ago—they clung tenaciously to memory.

  (It was like being able to remember hundreds and hundreds of times looking at the sea, or, with his elbows up and swinging, walking out into it, or swimming through it, or trudging in the grass and rocks beside it, looking down on it, but not being able to remember single and singular waves…)

  There’d been a dozen years when Eric would say, repeatedly to their gay male friends, “For a natural top, that boy is as oral as any goddam mutt—you know, the friendly kind that wants to lick out your butthole and your mouth, an’ ain’t about to brush its teeth between,” till he noticed that most of their friends were now women, some of whom looked a little…uncomprehending at the refrain. (Not as to what it meant but as to why he would say it.) Did this, he wondered, have anything to do with Mike’s tendency to repeat so many things back when he’d been alive?

  * * *

  [93] HOLLY HAD TOLD Ed, “We can get Jeffers and Haskell to go over to the Library with the kids and oversee the moving.”

  The “kids” were six fairly “male-identified” young women in their mid-twenties to early-thirties. Three years ago, two had come to the Settlement homeless and camped out on the commons for more than a week. But now all were in a dyke commune (Shit: It smells like a damned flophouse when you go in there. And forget it, if Laura got home really sick-drunk the night before—

  (Eric: Shit, when have you ever been in a flophouse?) with some dozen other residents, among them, Frankie, who had a speech defect and seemed to have been here since the Settlement began. Shit and Eric both could remember her as a fourteen-year-old panhandler when this was all trees and ferns, and she was a grubby, pathologically shy kid, living rough in the woods. Among the “kids” there were arguments. There were unbreakable friendships that, several times, had broken up. There’d even been some relationships with the more stable Settlements residents, which, more than not, hadn’t worked out. In general, the best they seemed to manage was affairs with the more adventurous of the island’s summer residents.

  So they’d gone over to Jay’s place, which was now the Settlement Library—in the truck, even though it was only a hundred yards.

  As they got out under the trees, Shit asked, “So this is where you go for the town meetin’s, now?”

  Nodding, Eric looked around the familiar façade. The kids had gone around the back to get the winch. Today, lawn lay in front. No podium with switches and intercoms stood there, as there’d been when Eric had first visited.

  “Now, don’t you get started about how I ought to come to one of ’em. You know I don’t—”

  “Shit, I haven’t said anything like that to you in fifteen years—”

  “I know,” Shit said, “but you had that look on your face like you was about to.”

  Eric laughed and sucked his teeth in exasperation. “Hey, come on inside. I wanna show you somethin’.”

  “What?”

  “Come on. You’ll see.”

  “What is it?” Shit had on a cap, which he moved around on his head a little to get comfortable. “I always feel funny when I go in there. It ain’t like it’s Jay’s house at all no more.”

  “I don’t wanna tell you. I wanna show you.”

  “Okay…” Shit said, warily. He followed Eric between the columns, up the steps, and through the front door. In the renovations, they’d torn out the first floor kitchen—and the living room off to the right had been broken up into offices.

  They started up the stairs—which were completely new with a new banister, whose railing was black stone, which you could think the house had been built with, if you didn’t know otherwise. The vestibule library at the head of the steps remained, though the space behind it was now a public room for meetings and events. On the back wall the windows’ green electronic shades had been darkened to different opacities. Chairs had been set up in rows over a maroon rug for some up-coming evening gathering. The ceiling was a foot lower—which still left it higher than most—and speckled with hundreds, thousands of sound-absorbing holes. Eric led Shit to the side, beside the bookshelves and, among the desks with a few General Screens, glimmering, raised from them, and walked to one dark wood wall, hung with photographs in black frames. “Take a look at that one there.” Eric pointed.

  “What is it…?” Shit frowned.

  “Look,” Eric said. “Go on.”

  “What’s it say?” Shit asked.

  Eric leaned in a little closer, squinted, then leaned back again. Since he knew what it said, he didn’t have to break out his reading glasses. He read/recited:

  October, 17, 2012: Members attend a Town Meeting at the Dump, the Black Gay Utopian Community established on the Diamond Harbor Mainland by Robert Kyle, former owner of the Gilead Settlement Library Building.

  “What’s a ‘Utopian Community’…?” Shit laid a spatulate forefinger against the glass, all but nailess. Enlarged scar tissue knotted before the quick: he still chewed at them.

  “I think it’s just a nice place to live.”

  “The Dump…?” Shit glanced at Eric, incredulously. “Well, I guess it wasn’t too bad…” In their jeans and work shirts, half in peaked caps (completely unlike the one Shit now wore) and four or five with ’do-rags around their heads, clearly these men had been photographed forty or fifty years ago. Eric looked at the black men standing around, shoulder to shoulder, smiling out i
nto the midst of the twenty-first century. Then Shit exclaimed, “That’s you in there!” He turned to frown at Eric.

  “Yeah, it is. Somebody must have taken that after one of the meetings in the old Social Services building. You see the window there—outside it, I mean. That’s the old Hemmings shuttle goin’ by.”

  “Yeah,” Shit said. “It is—but that’s you!” Looking at the photograph wonderingly, he seemed to relax, slowly and completely. “That’s your old Turpens cap! Jesus—you were one fine lookin’ feller. What were you then? Sixteen, seventeen—?”

  “In ’12?” Eric said. “I got here in oh-seven, about a week before I turned seventeen. So I was…twenty-two, I guess.”

  “Jesus, you was like a fuckin’ movie star!” He grinned at Eric. (It was something he’d often said before.) “You had that cap forever. I remember—too—you had all your damned teeth. I wasn’t used to that, I mean with local workin’ guys. I didn’t think you was gonna like me ’cause I’d dropped so many of mine.” He laughed. “You know, Jay had to take me aside there, sit me down, and explain about how you was actually gettin’ off on things like that about me and my dad, like the nose pickin’—only I wouldn’t believe it at first. I mean, you used to live with your goddam tongue in my mouth. Finally, I figured back then, I’d let you live anyway you wanted to. Only then, I wanted to believe it so much I guess I started to—and by the time you told me he was right, I did.” That was something Shit had said before, too; but not for a while.

  Eric laughed. “Well, it still works.” Reflected on one wedge of the glass were the shelves and books on the room’s far wall behind them. The laugh became a chuckle. “You know, I wasn’t that bad lookin’, back when I was a kid.” He glanced aside to see Shit staring at him with his green eyes over his beard and under his high forehead with the wriggle of a vein on his right temple.