Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
“And you been sayin’ that to me for the same thirty—or…twenty, anyway.” Eric’s own arms still looked good, but—he knew—they were softening.
“Well, them tattoos still look fine,” Shit said, echoing Eric’s own thoughts, as he so often did.
Or was he the source of those thoughts?
Bending his elbow sharply, Shit thrust a thumb under his vest’s armhole to push it out from his chest. “I’ll swap with you right now. That way you’ll know I’m warm, and you can stop pesterin’ me—and I get to look at Cassandra’s pitchurs. You know how much I like them things. I think you cover ’em up just to spite me.”
“Naw,” Eric said. “That’s all right…”
Both had turned from the water to look at each other.
Across the deck, in her captain’s hat, Lucille stepped from the wheelhouse and looked around. It was the final eleven-thirty run on Friday night. (There were crossings this late on Fridays and Saturdays; other nights, during winter, the last trip was at nine-thirty.) Among the dozen-and-a-half women on board—and the five men—someone stepped up to ask Lucille something. She answered, “’Bout six or seven minutes, I’d say.” You could always hear her rough voice clearer than most.
Shit said, “I guess that means Ed must be thinkin’ about retirin’.”
Shit had said that, too, six times in the last three months. Still, Eric was surprised that he could follow the logic. The last years Jay and Mex had worked the old scow—Gilead II—between Harbor and island, more and more they’d left holiday runs, weekends, or especially early or late night trips to their nominal assistant, Ed—till Ed took over after Mex’s death and Jay’s official retirement. Now—though it didn’t feel like that many years later (but it probably was), Ed was turning the things over more and more trips to his own assistant of the last decade, Lucille.
“I thought for sure,” Shit said, “Hannibal was gonna take over the boat from Ed. When he was a kid, he sure loved runnin’ Gilead II. I can see him now, waitin’ at the wheel for Ed to give him a chance to pilot the thing—eager as a damned puppy at the door ’fore ’er walk. But I guess that boy’s too smart for a crap job like this.”
“It ain’t no crap job.” Eric looked around at the upper deck. On either side, webbed metal stairways went down to the car deck. “But since they got a real ferry now, they need a real captain. So that’s gotta be…” He shrugged. “Lucille, I guess…or Ed.”
Blurred off in a dark November fog you could feel on your neck and wrists, if not see, fuzzed pearls—two together, one apart, the last lights from Settlement Village—hung in the night. Make the trip two hours earlier—at eight-thirty or nine—and the whole north end of the island would have been a-glitter from lighted houses, lighted lawns, lighted street posts. Then, over the next two hours, the little city would sink into black, to become an image of the darkness that was its past.
Eric had told Shit about Ed’s revelation. Now Shit asked, “You think Ed would have liked that talk? I mean, maybe he would’a learned somethin’ from it—I mean, more’n me.”
“I don’t know,” Eric said. “Maybe he would have—maybe he wouldn’t.”
The boat crawled over the night. Then, when they were thirty yards out, someone turned on the shore lights so you could see the truck tires fixed around the dock’s concavity. Thirty seconds later, they thumped against them, moved to the other side to thump again. Everyone standing around swayed twice, then continued walking toward the boat’s front.
With the other passengers, Shit and Eric climbed the concrete steps that connected with Settlement Road.
At the top stood the unfinished station for the free tram that ran for four miles along the Settlement’s west edge—all the way out to the new Brown-Folz filtration system, which turned the island’s septic sludge into algae that was released into the sea. Arlene—who’d once worked at some mainland supermarket—was the tram’s terminal manager and, when she saw either Eric or Shit during the day, always hailed them to take the next car that came by, since it let them off thirty yards from their cabin.
Taking it as infrequently as they did, both Shit and Eric were proud of the thing—possibly because Arlene was someone they had known when they were on the mainland and she had been a produce stocker at the Stop and Shop, and sometimes because it was what, for six months now, everyone in the Settlement had been talking about. An old-fashioned mini-maglev, initially it had been built for a mountain town in the Apennines—destroyed by an earthquake in thirty-nine, before they could lay down the single buttressed rail. Because of the recession at the start of the forties, it had been stored in a Milan warehouse for a decade and a half. Then someone remembered it and shipped it here to Georgia. The Settlement had gotten it for shipping costs with the new international tariff abolitions. Above the tram-car doors, embossed metal letters read USCITA and INGRESSO, which in its six weeks of operation had already sedimented some myths about the Settlement’s non-existent Italian-American origins, helped by the fact that the current mayor, Suzanna Faluddi-Cocio, was a first generation Settlement dweller, raised by a pair of Italian-American lesbians who had moved there back in thirty-four. Born in the Settlement, adopted by the Faluddi-Cocios, and raised there, Suzanna was the first man (and a straight man, too) to be elected mayor in the town’s history.
Eric and Shit knew Suzanna by sight, but neither had ever done more than nod to him in the market and been nodded to and smiled at in return—they spent more time with the art people than the political folk—though at some function back in forty-six they’d been introduced to him in the basement of the same mainland church at which the lecture had been held that night. Back then Eric assumed he was a teenager.
On the ferry over, people had talked of Suzanna’s turning up, perhaps, though no one had glimpsed him, either on the boat or at the church.
Sometimes if it was raining or looked as if it might rain—this had been a wet spring—they took it, with Shit going on from the time they got on to the time they passed the Settlement Library, which was their signal to get up to get off, about how weird the notion of public transportation on a place like Gilead was. Tonight, however, the tram station was closed up. The unfinished shelter was just a couple of plywood walls with aluminum-framed windows in one of them and lumber stacked near the foundation.
From across the lot, by her car door Phyllis called, “Mr. Jeffers? Mr. Haskell? They had the ferry going, but the tram’s not running this late. We’ve got room for you. Let us give you a lift out toward your place.” She held the evening’s program in the hand hanging over top the car door.
“Thank you, ma’am.” Shit waved. “But we gonna walk. We can use the air and the exercise.” Which, even if the tram had been operating, is what they would have done in this weather.
“Well, of course.” Phyllis laughed. “After the movie, it was a little on the stuffy side. But we’ve got room for you young fellers. You sure you won’t ride?” (Phyllis was in her forties and thought calling sixty and seventy-year-old men and women “young fellows” was good fun.)
“It was a real nice event,” Shit said. “But we like to walk in the fog.”
“Well, all right, then.” Dropping down and backing onto the driver’s seat, she pulled the door to.
The car moved off, from one lighted area through another, as did three others, then two more, following their headlights into the fog and out of the glow that now lit only the tarmac, some board railing, and, behind it, trees.
Eric and Shit walked up through the quiet town.
“That first man who was doin’ all that talking there about Mr. Kyle’s grandmamma, where she went to art school and who she studied with and everything, did run on, though. The second one was better—at least he made some jokes. That stuff about how they wouldn’t call her Mrs. Kyle in the newspaper down here ’cause her husband was a nigger—now that was interestin’. I never knowed that, and I was born here.”
“Well, black people and white people couldn’t
even get married back then. It was against the law. But I guess she had enough money so she could pretty much do what she wanted.”
Shit looked at Eric wickedly. “But I could marry you today, if I wanted to marry a dumb ol’ white fuck—”
“—or I wanted to marry a damned nigger who didn’t have enough sense to lay out and be lazy like a nigger’s supposed to be and let his dumb ol’ white fuck take care of ’im.”
Shit humphed. “Anyway, the first one ’bout put me to sleep, so I couldn’t hardly pay no attention to the second.”
Eric grunted. He’d enjoyed them both, in different ways. But there was no reason to argue with Shit. Though it had been his “yes” grunt, he was sure Shit knew what he meant.
“You know, that’s only the third time I been to a real church before—in Runcible. I mean, not when there was people in it. But Dynamite wasn’t a church-goin’ man.”
“We was there, before,” Eric said. “Don’t you remember, when they had that dinner there and we met the mayor ’cause we were some of the oldest citizens in the Settlement?”
“Now, that’s right. I forgot. That was the same place. They gotta start havin’ the Settlement stuff out here in the Settlement.”
“And when they do, you’re gonna start grumpin’ about how come they don’t have them affairs on the mainland, like they used to.”
Shit chuckled. “Probably. Hey—I remember when how you, me, and my daddy all fucked in there that mornin’ we come by for the garbage. But now that you’re all civilized and interested in art and shit, you probably forgotten that.”
“I remember it,” Eric said.
Shit started to laugh, quietly.
Then Eric started laughing, too.
In near dark, relieved now by a light from an antique-store window, now by the flickering LEDs—green, red, and blue—of a beer sign inside a closed bar, they reached the commons, where, only six weeks ago, the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday Outdoor Market had become the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday Outdoor Market.
Right then, moving northeast, the fog bank cleared Gilead’s end—dim and halfway up the night, the blurred moon that had given so little light they’d paid it minimal notice out on the water, became luminous, bright, gibbous, lighting the grassy commons with silver, the few permanent kiosks at the side, the blond-wood picnic tables here and there, which, during the day, were covered with craftwork or produce, fish or fruit, along West Rockside.
Thirty feet away, on its black stone pedestal, which Holly had worked so hard to raise the money for, two sides polished and two rough and purposely unfinished, the statue knelt on one knee.
Both stopped.
“Come on,” and again Eric started toward it.
“Why?” Shit said. “You know what it looks like.” But he walked after Eric.
It had been six weeks since they had helped bring the statue over from the library. For their efforts, along with the hourly pay they’d netted, Shit and Eric had received tickets to the mainland ceremony, documentary, and commemorative lectures and dinner in honor of the artist—Mr. Kyle’s grandmother—in the church parish hall. So had all the kids who assisted, but only three of them—Laura, Billie, and Rhino—had actually gone. And they’d left early to explore a recently opened mainland women’s bar once the film was finished.
(Shit: I don’t see why we gotta stay. I can’t make no sense of all that talk about history and stuff.
(Eric: I’m kinda enjoying it, Shit. Come on, listenin’ to it for an evening ain’t gonna kill you. Besides, they’re gonna give us dinner afterwards. That should be fun.
(Shit: Well, I don’t really mind taggin’ along. It’s just sittin’—and I can look at the people. If you wanna, we’ll stay. But don’t ask me no questions about it afterwards—what I thought about this part, or what I felt about that one.
(Don’t worry. I won’t.)
Shit and Eric had remained for it all. Two days before Lucille had agreed to do a late run back out to the island for the residents who had to get back—about half the number they’d first figured on. None of the “kids” were on the return boat, though. Maybe they changed their mind about the bar and returned early. Or they were staying over on the mainland.
It had been interesting enough, watching the documentary, listening to the two lecturers, and attending the dinner honoring the late Doris Pitkin Kyle.
“Eighteen-ninety two,” Eric read out loud, bending to see the inscription hammered into the base, “to nineteen seventy-eight.” He stood up, stepped back, and squinted up at the bronze beast. “I saw this ol’ feller back at Jay and Mex’s the first time I went out there. I remember wonderin’ if Jay had posed for him. But I don’t think Jay could have even been born when she done this.” Eric stepped back, then stepped back further. “Besides, the man at the church said it was probably Kyle’s granddaddy—he was the model.”
“Dynamite or Jay never said that,” Shit said. “But the lecturer said it was in her journal. Maybe Kyle just didn’t know.”
Three times the size of a man, its brazen wings, like a bat’s or a demon’s, spread wide and gigantic under the moon. On massive shoulders, its bull’s head suggested a flying minotaur. Only above its forward-curving tusks, its snout—indeed, the whole of its fore-muzzle—was that of a boar. Its arms were huge, the left pulled back against its chest, thick with muscle and ending in a demon’s foot-long talons. The right arm reached down and forward, with a hand that, because of the artist’s rough rendering, still reminded Eric of Shit’s—or Dynamite’s—and which now held out thick curved fingers full of moonlight. It kneeled on its human knee, its human foot back by the coils and piles of a circling and recircling anaconda-like tail. Before it, its other leg was a huge bird’s claw, quite big enough to grasp your head and tear it loose. Feathers rose over its knee, its haunch, back to its hip. Around and under its claw, tail, and foot, for the bronze base, Doris had sculpted branches, a starfish, leaves strewn on sand, shells…
The creature had landed on, or was about to take off from, a place where the woods came down to the water.
“Naw.” Shit spoke behind Eric. “That couldn’t be Jay. You ever look in under it there, at its nuts? You can see ’em in there. Besides, its dick’s too big—and both its balls is the same size.”
Eric laughed. The more personable of the church event’s two speakers had made some quietly risqué jokes about Doris’s refusal to put fig leaves on her hyper-masculine nudes—which had gotten her in trouble in the early-twentieth century with several of her public commissions, as one small town after another had refused to display the finished work. Eric stepped forward again. “The first time I saw this, upstairs at Jay’s, I almost bumped into it in the dark. It about scared me to death. But I told you that—back when we were haulin’ it over here.”
“First time I saw it, or saw it by myself when there wasn’t nobody around to tell me to leave it alone, I was about five or six—maybe four or five, even. First thing I did was reach in under there and feel its balls and cock. They surprised me, too, ’cause they was all hard and cold. They wasn’t soft and warm like my dad’s.”
Eric frowned over. “Now you didn’t tell me that…”
“We had the kids with us. And some of them still ain’t gotten comfortable with what they’re always callin’ my damned abused childhood. Or theirs, maybe. I figure there wasn’t no need to go upsettin’ ’em even more.”
“Well, I’m glad you—”
“I still remember thinking that, though—’cause, yeah, I done played enough with Dynamite’s by then.” Shit frowned at Eric. “I told you how he’d sit me on his lap and put his arm around me and let me watch him beat off.” The frown became a chuckle. “Then we’d play in the stuff that shot out. That was a mess—and I used to love it. So did he—lickin’ it off my nose and my ear and laughin’. Anyway…when I climbed down off it, that first time at Jay’s, I scraped my knee on the metal there—I mean, the first time I fooled around with it,
I left my blood on that thing! Downstairs, Hugh put a Band-Aid on the cut for me. A few years later, though, I got to thinkin’ that thing was like my guardian angel or somethin’—I mean, not with those words. But I used to pretend it was followin’ me around, just outta sight, but protectin’ me, ’cause it was hard and cold and big and nothin’ could hurt it. Hey, come on over here.” Shit moved around the base’s corner. “Did Mex or Jay ever show you this?”
“What…?”
“Come on around here.” For a moment, Shit squinted up at the onyx and ivory clouds, their blackest streaks darker than the night. “The moon’s behind it, so I don’t know if you can see it all that good. And when it was upstairs, this part used to be back by the wall, so you had to know where to look for it.”
Beside the huge foot, propped on it toes, the coiled masses of its tail, loop upon loop atop one another, a bronze branch angled from under, to fork beside the carved scales, the thousands on thousands of them that Doris Kyle had etched over the nightmare’s prehensile caudal appendage—seventeen feet long, if uncoiled, the second lecturer had told them, earlier that night.
“Go on. Look down there. Can you make it out? It’s pretty small, so maybe you’ll need your readin’ glasses—”
“Naw—that’s okay…” Everything before Eric was dark gray against darker gray. But he made out the filigree—
When he reached to touch it with a forefinger, the wires from which the web between the forking branches had been constructed gave slightly. Crawling down its rayed and circling strands, the body big as Eric’s thumbnail, was a metal spider…a spider of blackened bronze.
“Mex pointed that out to me one afternoon.” Shit stood at Eric’s shoulder. “I’m glad I was as little as I was, or probably I’d’a’ tried to climb in there and pull the damned thing off to play with, soon as I got by myself with it. That’s why I didn’t say anything about it when we was movin’ the thing. Now them lecturers didn’t say nothin’ about that.”