Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Shit said, “‘Wasn’t’…?”

  Eric said, “Well, I sure don’t look like nothin’ today. I’m sixty years old and twenty pounds overweight—” He patted his belly—“You know, this stuff ain’t muscle no more. I’m a fat ol’ man now, Shit. But I sure didn’t realize how good lookin’ I was.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re all beat up and rickety and fallin’ to pieces. Nobody could ever look at you twice today. And you better go on believin’ that about yourself, ’cause that’s the only way I’m ever gonna get to keep you for the rest of my goddam life!” Shit drew in a sharp breath. “Don’t you realize you’re still the best lookin’ thing up and down the whole damned Georgia coast?”

  “Aw, be serious,” Eric said. “That’s just you. You been tellin’ me that since I got here, Shit. I ain’t nothin’ special—”

  “Yeah? Well, you just said yourself how good lookin’ you was as a kid—”

  “Okay. I was a little better lookin’ than I thought I was. But probably everybody feels that way. I mean, when I look around today, sometimes I think there ain’t no really bad lookin’ kids. The ones with no chins, the big ears, the funny noses—that’s all just cute. Or gives ’em some character. Or somethin’. It’s a shame they don’t know it, too—” Eric stopped. “What’s a matter, Shit?”

  Shit stood very still. Then he swallowed.

  Eric frowned. “You’re cryin’, Shit…What is it?”

  “Nothin’.” Shit pulled in another breath. “I’m cryin’ ’cause every once and a while it hits me how fuckin’ amazin’ it is that I got you. I mean, you’re all I ever wanted—and when I’m messin’ around with someone else, it’s like you’re always tellin me, from that book of yours, that I’m fuckin’ with another part of you or the world or the universe and—I guess—God. ’Cause everything’s a part of everything else, and that’s why I always get home extra horny. And I always got you there to hump and hang onto your dick and nuzzle on your nuts and stick my fingers up your asshole and smell your farts under the covers and take a leak in your mouth and hug onto you and breathe in how your breath smells in the mornin’ before you wake up and lick inside your nose and rub my dick all over your butt and gettin’ it in and hangin’ onto you. Or just suck your damned dick. And it’s mine to hold onto pretty much whenever I want.” Another breath, “Wow…”

  Eric hugged him, feeling Shit’s shirt bunch in front of his collarbone and Shit’s buckle corner poking at his belly.

  “I mean, it was like a goddam movie star had come on down here and met me in the back john at Turpens and decided he wanted to do everything nasty I’d ever thought about doin’ and a couple of more I hadn’t even tried.”

  “Movie star? Hell—I look like some dumb, big-muscled farm boy that ain’t got a brain in his hard, dumb head.” Eric laughed again and let go. “I wish they had a picture of you—or your daddy. Dynamite used to come to some of those meetin’s. But I guess he wasn’t there that night.”

  “Jesus, I know all these guys…” Again, Shit looked at the photograph again. “There’s Fred, and Mama Grace, and…wow!” He took a breath, standing up. “I’m glad I ain’t in it. If I was, somebody might expect me to do somethin’ or be somethin’—like you.”

  “Ain’t nothin’ special about goin’ to a town meetin’, Shit—”

  “You gonna get started again, ain’t you?”

  “No! I’m not startin’ nothin’!”

  “Hey, lemme tell you.” Shit turned from the photograph. “Yeah, the truth is, I guess that could be a picture of a pretty ordinary lookin’ white boy—at least in some places.” Shit turned and stepped away. (Eric was surprised—and disappointed—Shit had not lingered with the picture more. But Eric followed his partner, who went on. The first time he’d seen the picture, he’d looked at it ten minutes, thinking over the things the passage of time between now and then had meant.) “You do look kinda like a deviled egg tossed into a pail of plums. But the fact is, that ain’t no white boy in that pitchur. That’s a town meetin’ of a black community—you told me it says so, right under it, inside the frame. You read it out to me. A black, gay ‘U—…’ whatever it was.”

  “Utopian—”

  “Yeah, like you read it. So maybe you are a pretty ordinary lookin’ white boy. But you’re a real interestin’ lookin’ nigger. And I know you is one, ’cause I met your damned daddy, and he was as black as the Ace of Spades. I bet you somethin’ else, too. Half the people who stop there and looked at that picture and read out what it’s a picture of, they’re gonna be lookin’ at you in particular and they’re gonna think the same damned thing.” He grinned again. “That is one interestin’ looking nigger. Now—you got a hard-on yet?”

  Eric looked around the meeting room, with its empty chairs, its vacant podium on the other side. No one was in it but them. Looking back, he took hold of Shit’s hand and dragged it against his crotch.

  Matter-of-factly, Shit said, “I guess you do,” and squeezed gently and rubbed a few times. He looked around. “I can’t even believe I had sex in this place here maybe a dozen times, even before you come down to the Harbor—and how many times afterwards, with you…? I mean when Jay and Mex lived here with Hugh. Wasn’t Shad a mean sonofabitch?”

  Eric looked up. One wall was notably higher than the others.

  “I remember once I was suckin’ off some Injun kid in here, when we come in here to fuck around, and Shad rolled on in with his wheelchair—and seen us and went off like a stick of damned dynamite. I thought he was gonna explode and have a heart attack—and I don’t even remember the Indian kid’s name, ’cause I never saw him again.” The ceiling bent up sharply to join it. High up, six rectangular windows let in sunlight in veritable slabs that fell through the room, slicing the great space into light and shadow, glinting on the metal chair backs, striping the carpet. A memory struck Eric: molding, white plaster urns, drapery in relief across gray-violet plaster…Only today the second floor space had been redone in the insistently bland style of a century before—like (Eric found himself thinking) the flat, functional interior of the Hemmings Interdenominational, before they’d torn it down. “You know,” he said to Shit, “a whole lot of your people are out here—in the Indian Graveyard: your daddy, his daddy, your great granddaddy—he was half Injun. Dynamite told me that.”

  Shit frowned. “Yeah…? Your mama’s there, too. And I guess we’ll be—if they remember to stick us in and don’t go to burnin’ us up in some crematorium. Hey, why you thinkin’ about stuff like that?”

  “I dunno. It’s just…well, it hit me. This is the same place it aways was. This building, I mean…Kyle’s old mansion. It looks a little different, and they keep giving it a new paint job or face-lift or whatever they do in here, to keep it from fallin’ apart. But it’s the same place.”

  “Yeah,” Shit said, looking around, as though he were not so sure. “I guess it is…”

  Chuckling, Eric walked with Shit back along the maroon rug, down the steps, to the ground floor.

  *

  With the help of the half a dozen “kids,” who’d finally got the winch and chains and green quilted pads all arranged (Shit hadn’t realized the statue was hollow at first, though it was still nearly eight hundred pounds: solid, as Eric had pointed out, it would have been more like a few tons), and they managed to get the great bronze—now in a back room of the library’s ground floor—outside and onto the truck bed to drive it back, and finally move it to Holly’s new stone base, which had stood vacant three months at that point.

  The day they were doing it, while the sun blazed in the September heat, Ed wandered by, looked at the statue, and frowned. Shaking his head, he grunted like a brown bear. “I don’t like that thing,” he said. “I never have—from the first time I saw it, back when I was a kid. Why they got to put that thing out there—it’s kind of obscene, actually. Somethin’ to scare children with.”

  To Eric, in the sunlight the blackened bronze looked pristinely harmless, sit
ting on its plinth on Settlement Commons, as if the day had wrapped it in some protective shield that held in all its resonances and suggestions. “What you mean, Ed?”

  “I don’t know. The first time I saw that thing, I must have been three, four…maybe five—I know it was before Hannibal was born. My daddy brought me on his fishing boat with a whole lot of other people out here to Gilead, and we stayed in that old house there, when it was just a big old shell. It was stormin’ and rainin’—I had no idea what they all wanted. Somebody had died, I guess, and they were doin’ some kind of crazy religious ceremony or somethin’—that’s all I can think it could have been. It was all creepy and weird out there. They went into the house there, and I guess some of them had sense enough to leave me behind and let me take a nap, and so I went to sleep in this room right near the kitchen—that I remember. Then I woke up. I was still kind of scared and didn’t know where I was, really. So I got up and started sneakin’ around. I found the back steps, I guess, so I went up there, and I come out in this big old room—I still remember it—with big old chairs and couches sittin’ all around it. I think it’s the one they use for meetin’s and things today. I’m walkin’ around, and suddenly the storm breaks, and it’s rainin’ against the windows, and I turn around…and there it was, in the corner. I’m surprised I didn’t pee my pants.

  “I tell you, I couldn’t move.

  “I was sure I’d stumbled onto what they were all prayin’ to and all that Indian mumbo jumbo that they was tryin’ not to let me see.”

  “Ed—” Eric began.

  “I managed to find the steps I’d come up and scurried down those things, scared to death. I started callin’ for my daddy and I was cryin’ and he just wouldn’t come. I don’t know if he heard me or not. Then, finally, I found where they was all sittin’ around, eatin’ after it was all over, I guess—” Ed caught his breath, as though some bit of terror had leapt from the past to fix the present on its barb. “I told ’im I wanted to go home. He wanted me to eat somethin’, but I swear, by that time, I figured everything you could have put in your mouth in that place had to be poisoned or somethin’.” Ed shivered, as if wet breath had blown across the years. “But they finally got together and drove back down to where his boat was, and we come back to the mainland.”

  Smiling, Eric said, “You know, Ed—if that’s the thing that I think it really has to be, I was there. So was Shit.”

  “No, you wasn’t.” Ed frowned. “I know Billy was—my dad’s first mate.”

  “That’s right.” Eric nodded. “‘Cause he’d done that nasty thing all them shore fishermen used to do with the night crawlers.”

  “But you wasn’t there. I’d remember you—”

  “Yes I was.” Eric nodded. “So was Shit’s dad, Dynamite—Mr. Haskell.”

  “Then what the hell were you all doin’ out there, anyway—besides scarin’ a three-year-old out of two years of his growth.”

  Benignly, the winged chimera’s brazen hand reached through the sun—to placate both men with an offering of what the years between might have taught.

  “And you wasn’t no three-year-old. Or five, for that matter. You was at least eight or nine.”

  “Oh, no,” Ed said. “I had to be a lot younger than that.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And that thing was the idol presiding over all that mumbo jumbo they was doin’ out there.”

  “There wasn’t no mumbo jumbo, Ed.”

  “Sure there was. I remember there was all these eggs—they called ’em devils. Each one of them had a red star on top of it. There was a whole tray of ’em—and another one in the refrigerator. I looked in an’ saw it. That had to be something to do with the some ritual.”

  “There wasn’t no ritual, Ed. Them was Cassandra’s deviled eggs. She just brought too many.”

  “Then what was the star for?”

  “Decoration,” Eric said. “That’s all. You take a piece of paper, fold it up, then cut it right, unfold it, and you got a hole in the paper like a little star. You put that over the half an egg, sprinkle some paprika on it, and you get a nice red star there.”

  “Why was there so many of them? It wasn’t supposed to be for some magic or something—like that nigger over in the Dump, Black Bull used to do?”

  “No, Ed. It wasn’t. Black Bull was somethin’ else entirely—that was just some gay S&M that a few folks was interested in. So they’d pay him to do it. Really, Cassandra just made too many deviled eggs for lunch. That’s all—”

  “And that thing wasn’t presidin’ over no ritual?” Again Ed nodded toward the statue.

  “There wasn’t any ritual, Ed. Jay MacAmon’s uncle Shad had died, and we all come out there to pay our respects and get him buried decent.”

  “There wasn’t no preacher or no minister or nothin’. How could it have been a decent burial?”

  “Jay didn’t believe in no religion. You worked with Jay and Mex on the boat—for how many years? Didn’t you ever ask him about that?”

  “No…”

  “Why not? He was your good friend.”

  “I was scared to. My daddy told me I wasn’t supposed to go off with them by themselves too much or anything. You knew they was homosexuals.”

  “Course I did. So was everybody who was in the Dump—includin’ us.”

  “Yeah, well I know about you.” Captain Miller had died in his middle seventies, when Ed was…fifteen? Sixteen?

  “I thought Jay was kinda like a dad to you.”

  “He was.”

  “He never touched you or did nothin’ to you, did he?”

  “Naw. But I always figured he must have had a special secret religion that he practiced on his own—I mean, back when everybody except my dad used to talk about him funny and say all that stuff about him. Like what it says about you gay fellas in the Holy Luminescence Newsletter. If you was there—which I still sort of doubt, or I’d remember you—I figure there’s one of three explanations. You was there, and they kept it from you—”

  “Which would have been pretty hard,” Eric said, “’cause after you and your daddy left, we stayed over that night, me, Shit, and Dynamite—Mr. Haskell. Maybe ’cause we wasn’t on the boat goin’ back, that’s why you don’t remember us.”

  “Or you’re confusin’ something else with what I’m talkin’ about.”

  “Well, I suppose that could be it.”

  “Or I’m confusin’ a couple of times out there. I remember, though, once when I was tryin’ to find out where I was, I went in to one of their rooms, and their was this nasty picture, lyin’ katty-corner on a bed, of a man having congress with a pig. Now, you gonna say that ain’t part of no satanic rituals? I seen that, and I turned around and ran—got up them stairs and seen this evil thing. No, that thing ain’t no artwork. It’s some kind of evil symbol for something deep and dark and terrible.”

  Eric frowned.

  “Oh…” Ed drew in his breath. “But Holly thinks that statue is somethin’ worth perservin’. I know it’s a lot of nonsense. But I could have the thing burned up and melted down in a minute, and I wouldn’t miss it a bit.”

  Later that afternoon, Shit and Eric bolted the creature down—though the Settlement Museum, the statue’s new custodians, had still not officially opened. When Eric recounted this to him, Shit’s responded: “Well, whatever he says, you know he wasn’t no three or four years old. What three- or four- year-old could even recognize what a man ‘havin’ congress with a pig’ in a situation like that looked like? Especially a three- or four-year-old like Eddie was.”

  Eric said, “Thanks, Shit. Sometimes you can be a good reality check, know what I mean?”

  * * *

  [94] OVER THE SETTLEMENT ferry rail, a floodlight clamped to the shelter roof put their shadows on the water, two decks below, a shaking gray on a secanted circle of smoky green, rushing across the night. “I will never understand why they named this thing The Johnston.” Shit leaned and looked. “It should?
??ve been The MacAmon—or The Jay MacAmon, or The Jay and Mex. Or even the Gilead III. But The Johnston…?”

  “You’ve said that to me every time we done rode on this thing since they started running it, five years ago.” Eric leaned on his hands.

  “It still sticks in my craw. The Johnston. I can’t say it without my dinner wantin’ to come up.” Shit leaned down on crossed forearms.

  “Well, the Chamber of Commerce agreed to name it after him to get ’im off our backs on the island. He wanted to go to California—so he gave ’em a nice chunk of change if they’d set up somethin’ to remember him by.”

  “With all Kyle’s money, what they need Johnston’s for?” (Eric had his suspicions, from a couple comments he’d heard from Molly—the new young artist who’d bought Willi’s old place—about the Settlement’s own finances, but the inexhaustibility of Kyle’s millions was one of the things you didn’t argue about with Shit.) “Hell, he’d’a’ gone to California, anyway—greedy sonofabitch. Tryin’ to make money offa all them poor folk what still struggling out there.”

  “Yeah. But the Settlement wouldn’t a’ got the money—or gotten left alone to spend it.”

  “It still ought to be The MacAmon—you know: somebody you want to remember. Or the Gilead III.”

  “Yeah.” Eric sighed. “You’re right. It should be.” He glanced at his partner in the dark blue thermal vest and no shirt under it. “Ain’t you cold?”

  In the upper deck’s floodlight, the vest looked almost black. Standing up, Shit unfolded his ropy arms. They were still strong, yes. And he’s still good-lookin’, too. But his arms ain’t never had no real bulk. “You been askin’ me if I’m cold for thirty years now—if not forty. And I always tell you the same thing. No!” Shit looked over at Eric, who wore a buttoned-up sweater that had some snags and some outright holes. “You ought to be wearin’ this. You got your pitchurs all up and down your arms. But three-quarters of the time, you cover ’em up, so nobody can see ’em, ’cept the snake head on your hand. What you get them things for if you didn’t want nobody to see ’em?”