Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  Eric glanced back. “I hope somebody else don’t get the same idea, now it’s out here.”

  “Later,” Shit said, “again, when I was I thinking about it, I decided that the big guy, with his claws and wings and his big black nuts, was protectin’ the little guy, the spider there—with her web and everything.”

  “Naw.” Eric let out his breath. “Naw. They never showed me that. I never saw it before—as many times as I looked at this thing. I should come back here in the sunlight tomorrow and take a look.” Then he said, “The Spider’s Guardian.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothin’,” Eric said.

  “Well, I hope some kid around don’t try to crawl in there and steal that little bitty spider off it—or break the web, the way I would’ve, if I could have.”

  Eric moved around to the front, stopping to look at the huge hand reaching out under the moon. “I do remember lookin’ at it when it was at Jay’s and thinkin’ its real hand there reminded me of yours—and Dynamite’s.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Look. Don’t you see the way she done the nails on it?”

  “Aw, hell.” Shit laughed. “That’s maybe Jay’s—or Mex’s. But if me—or my daddy—had that much nails left, we’d’a’ been ready for an all-day sit-down dinner.” The laugh became a chuckle. “If I had as much as he got left, it’d take me a week’s work to get them damn things right—I mean, down to where they ought to be.”

  Eric laughed. “Well, yeah. Maybe so—”

  Behind them someone said, “Mr. Jeffers—sir?”

  Shit and Eric turned from the glowering nameless god—as the first lecturer had explained it, when its picture had filled the church’s wall-sized computer screen.

  “Oh, hey, there,” Eric said, “Hannibal.”

  Six young people had walked out on the night grass.

  “Mr. Haskell…?” Hannibal said; more quietly, the others murmured greetings. Two young women, one black, one white, and both topless, had their arms around each other’s shoulders. It was nowhere as cool as it had been on the water.

  Under the moon, Ed’s kid brother’s own dark skin was the hue of the bronze’s near-black patina. “Did you guys go over to Runcible for the honoring?”

  Eric nodded. “Was you guys there?” He’s still one cute kid, Eric thought. It’s kinda of a shame he only snuck into the Opera two or three times. “We didn’t see you.”

  “No,” Hannibal said. “No. We didn’t go.” He glanced at the statue, then at Eric. “Mr. Jeffers, you know my brother…”

  “Ed? Sure.” Eric thought: Even if I’d just gotten to do him once, at least it would have been fun remembering. “What do you mean, ‘Do I ‘know’ ’im?’ I’ve known Ed all your life and most of his, too.”

  “Well, we were talkin’ about you two—not me and Ed. Just us here.” Nodding, Hannibal gestured at the friends with him, another young man and five young women. “Then we seen you, so we thought we’d come over and ask you. Years ago, when I was a kid, seven, eight, maybe nine, perhaps you remember: we ran into you guys and Mr. Grace Davis, out in the woods on the mainland, Ed and me. And you showed us a trick. It was that trick, you know, where you…pick a…well, a piece of…stuff out your nose, and you…um…you showed us this trick you did with it, the both of you.”

  Shit said, “If it’s the time I’m thinkin’ about, you had to be a lot younger than nine—’cause Ed was carryin’ you in his arms. You was more like three—maybe four or five.”

  “Yeah,” Hannibal said. “I could’ve been…maybe.” He looked around at his friends. “But after that, Ed talked about that trick you done for the next five or six years. Sometimes it seemed that was all he talked about—like he was scared of you fellers. He thought maybe you was gonna come and do somethin’ horrible to him in the middle of the night. I mean, I know now you’re his friends. But for half a dozen years, before he married Holly, he thought you guys were the devil incarnate—back while you was managin’ the movie house in Runcible. Anyway, I was wondering if you could do that trick for us again, so they—” he looked left and right—“could see it. Do you remember? It’s kind of a gross-out thing, like I told you,” he explained to them. “Like the fishin’ guys on the mainland, who rent their boats out to the tourists and take a handful of night crawlers and put ’em in their mouth and let ’em hang out and twist around all over their chins and crawl up over their lips and stuff to scare the kids.” He looked back at Shit and Eric. “It’s the same kinda thing, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Eric said. “Sort of.” He shifted his weight and slid his hands into his hip pockets. “But, see, ’cause you’re twenty-two, twenty-three now, if we showed it to you again, you’d see right away how we did it.”

  Among the loose group on the moonlit grass, the younger ones began to smile. Hannibal laughed. “Mr. Jeffers, I ain’t been twenty-three for a long time. I’m thirty-six.”

  One of the girls said, “You just wish you were twenty-three! Well, I guess sometimes I do, too.”

  Eric was actually astonished. “Well…but…” He hesitated. “That’s what I mean, though. You’d see right away how it was done. Then it wouldn’t be a trick no more—for you.”

  Again, Hannibal laughed. (They still looked like teenagers—all of ’em.) “See, I wanted to see if they could figure it out.” He nodded to the people with him. “Believe me, if I was twenty, I’d’a’ been scared to death to even ask about anything like that.”

  Shit had begun to grin. “Hey. Come on.” He turned to Eric. “Let’s show ’em.”

  Shaking his head and sucking his teeth, Eric said, “Okay…all right.” He lifted one hand, bent his head, put his thumb against one nostril, and snorted. Then, frowning, he looked at Hannibal.

  Eric bent his head again, closed his other nostril off with a forefinger, and snorted out once more. When he looked up, though, he shrugged, and turned up both hands. “I’m afraid I don’t got nothin’ up there. Sorry—but there ain’t nothin’ in there to do it with.” He shrugged again. “So—we can’t do it tonight, Hannibal. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh…” Hannibal looked disappointed. “Well, maybe if you…um, another…time. I mean, we didn’t wanna bother you, now.”

  “It ain’t no bother,” Eric said. “But two codgers like us, we ain’t used to bein’ up this late no more, anyway. We got to go home and get to bed. We’re gonna go home now.”

  “Oh, yeah—sure.”

  Eric smiled, hoping it registered in the half-dark. Shit smiled, too. They turned to start across the commons for the road leading to their cabin on part of the shore still heavy with scrub pines and ferns.

  Then, Hannibal called, “Mr. Jeffers—?”

  Eric stopped—as did Shit—and looked back.

  “When I used to help Ed out on the boat—the old one, I mean, not the ferry—I remember one mornin’, you guys were goin’ to the mainland with us. I saw you together at the back rail, and…probably you didn’t think nobody was lookin’, but y’all were…I guess, practicin’ your trick. It looked—really…interestin’. But that’s why I wanted to see you do it again. Up close.”

  Shit laughed now. “Hannibal?”

  “Yes, sir?” In the moon, even at this distance, you could see the boy…the man blink. Waiting through the encounter, his friends, who had been moving apart, drew together to recommence their walk.

  “That wasn’t no practice, Hannibal.” Shit sounded tired; and friendly; and content. (Eric wondered what in the world Hannibal made of it.) Taking Eric’s shoulder, Shit turned. Eric turned with him. They walked between the darkened kiosks toward the road.

  Behind them, at the common’s north end, winged, clawed, and tusked, ahead of its asymmetrical shadows, squatting, the chimera gazed over the grass, the youngsters, the oldsters, the island, and the island’s ages.

  Going along the road, at last Shit said, “Back there with Hannibal, it sounded to me like you had a good one up there.”

  “I did,” Er
ic said. “I do—but I didn’t feel like bein’ part of no side show tonight. Why? You want it?”

  “Don’t worry.” Shit still sounded tired and content. “I’ll get it in a bit. But I know what you mean about that side show thing.”

  Then Eric asked, “How did that boy get to be thirty-six years old? It can’t be more than six or seven years since he was workin’ with Ed on the Gilead—the Gilead II.”

  “I think that’s more like sixteen or seventeen…years.” Shit’s laugh rose over the crickets’, then dropped level with it.

  “That’s a damned fast sixteen years,” Eric said. “Or seventeen.”

  “Well.” Above them, familiar trees closed out the moon. “They do get to goin’ by pretty quick.”

  Together they walked through autumn dark.

  * * *

  [95] TWENTY-ONE YEARS after Shit and Eric had moved to the island, Gilead’s own year-round population had passed two thousand. When he felt grumpy, Shit called Gilead Settlement “the Curse” and said he missed the time when it weren’t but a graveyard, Jay and Mex, and two or three other people on the whole island—four if the Holotas’ nephew Roan was visiting them. As Eric pointed out, though, it provided the two bearded men—Eric’s, smooth and silvery; Shit’s, still tan and tufty—now (Shit) a gaunt year and a half older than, and (Eric) less than a year shy of, seventy-three, with as much handyman work as they wanted, a few friends among the older women artists, for whom they’d fixed leaky toilet valves and hooked up new light switches and unclogged septic tanks and changed washers in dripping faucets. As well, they had some friends, some regular invitations to holiday meals—Anne Frazier wouldn’t let them miss either of her Solstice suppers, or her Equinox parties, even the year it was photographed by the profilers—throughout the island’s violet winters, its misty silver springs.

  * * *

  [96] THEY WERE ROWING along Gilead’s shore, pulling, lifting, and leaning, pulling, lifting, and leaning. The island and its reflection was a frayed ribbon taping sea to sky. “Next time—” Shit leaned, pulled, lifted, pushed, leaned, pulled, lifted—“we gonna bring the damned outboard. That’s fun but this…is stupid.”

  “Come on, Shit,” Eric said. “We said we were gonna get some exercise, now. This is good for our hearts.”

  “I suppose with gasoline a hundred-sixty dollars a gallon, you could have a damned heart attack thinkin’ about usin’ a combustion motor…”

  Eric grinned. “I’ll spell you again in five minutes.”

  “You know what’s good for our hearts is you climbin’ on top of me or me gettin’ all over you the way we do at three o’clock in the damned mornin’. Rubbin’ ourselves off on each other…” He tugged, he bent forward; the oars dropped into the water behind; he pulled, and gray wood pushed the water, which rilled like a bolster of thick fabric. “You think you could maybe hold off till four? That way, afterward, we could get up at a reasonable time in the mornin’—together. I ain’t seen your white ass flickin’ through the kitchen in so long—I mean in the mornin’ when I’m up—I forgot what the damned thing looks like. I know it used to be cute…” Then, before Eric could answer, Shit asked, “Scumsucker, you know what was the only thing I didn’t like about fuckin’ my daddy?”

  “Huh…? What?”

  “He never called me ‘nigger.’ I mean, when we’d get into it.” Shit pulled, lifted, leaned. Leaden water wrinkled and smoothed. “It’s like when we was in bed, he’d forget I was black.” A drizzle had started and stopped twice since they’d started out. “I mean, you know that always gives me a hard-on—when someone does it who I know likes me, like you, or Jay or any of them niggers I used to fuck with in the Dump.”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “I always knew that.”

  “Well, how come you knew it and he didn’t?” Lift, lean, pull, lift, lean…

  “’Cause it always gave me a hard-on, too, when somebody called me one. But, thank God, you know that—”

  Shit exploded with laughter. “Well, I guess I do know it!” Sun-darkened skin around his green eyes wrinkled. “I guess I do!” He pulled up the oars and shipped them. “Hey, nigger, take these damned things and row for a while.”

  Eric said, “Sure…” But before he changed places with Shit, he reached into his open fly and levered free his cock. “See, that nigger thing still works.”

  “Yeah…” Shit reached down, grasped Eric, and rubbed his cheek against Eric’s cheek.

  Then, with minimal rocking, Eric moved onto Shit’s bench, and Shit moved around to Eric’s.

  “Okay…?”

  “Got ’em.” Eric had not put himself away.

  “There…you go.”

  As Eric unshipped the oars and dropped their edges into the sea, Shit explained:

  “When I was a kid, he only called me a nigger when he was tellin’ me how great I was. He made me think I was real special—that he’d done somethin’ to make me real special, by havin’ me with a real special woman—a nigger woman down at Turpens. How he brought that one off, I ain’t too sure. But he used to tell me right out, nigger women were better’n any other kind. I didn’t learn till Jay told me, a couple a’ weeks after his funeral, that she was the only woman he ever fucked—and then he was drunk.”

  “Yeah, I was there when Jay told you, remember—?”

  “Course, even when I was a kid, I learned it was a bad word and you wasn’t supposed to say it at all. So we didn’t for a couple of years—only then I realized everybody else did. Especially niggers. And that it got me hot.”

  Eric pulled, leaned, lifted; pulled, leaned, lifted…“You know, Shit, actually Dynamite used to call you nigger…all the time. That’s how I learned I could do it, and it didn’t bother you—that you liked it.”

  “He did? Well, sometimes when we were just jokin’ around. But not in bed…That’s when I wanted him to.”

  “Sure, he did. Really. All the time.”

  “Naw…”

  “Yeah. He did! But you was so busy fuckin’ him, you didn’t hear how he was talkin’ to you.” Eric pulled them along through the water. “‘Fuck me, you nigger sonofabitch…Fuck my cracker ass, nigger!’ Hell, he said it just like I do. I remember it would get you so goofy happy, after you’d come you’d wanna jump up and run out and show how your fuckin’ dick was still hard to everybody up and down the whole damned Dump.”

  “I did do that once, didn’t I—?”

  “You did it about six times,” Eric said, “that I remember! I remember you running into Lurrie once and him screamin’ and coverin’ his eyes.” Eric began to chuckle.

  “Naw…I did? Damn…” Shit put his heavy hands on either gunwale. “Well, they’d all seen it before, anyway. That was ’cause I was so happy you was with us. I was really just showin’ off for you. You was always good about callin’ me names when we was fuckin’. Unless you was nervous about somethin’. But I sure don’t remember him doin’ it.” Quizzically, Shit put his head to the side. “And what you anglin’ for with your dick all hangin’ out like that, now? I ain’t gonna suck you off, at least till we get home. So put it away.”

  “Yes, you are,” Eric said.

  “I am…?”

  “You’re damned right you are. You gonna suck my dick right here, you black bastard—you nigger scumbag, you low-down shit eatin’ coon, you gonna suck this nasty white motherfucker’s dick.”

  “Oh, all right. But they should put you in jail for murder, makin’ me do this with my damned arthritis—”

  “Come on. You took a pain pill before we started. I saw you.”

  “Well, that was just so I could row.” Shit looked up at Eric, frowning. “Now, I ain’t gettin’ down there for no forty minutes till you manage to shoot. I’m just givin’ you a taste, till we get back in.”

  On one side, then the other, Eric shipped his oars. “You mean, I’m givin’ you a taste, you fuckin’ nigger cocksucker. Get on over here, now!”

  “Hold on a second.” Shit stuck thumb and for
efinger into his mouth and with that wrench that always looked as brutal as some sort of torture, tugged loose his uppers, to slip them into the breast pocket of his open brown and tan plaid. Then he was back to work loose his lowers and sliding them into the same pocket. “Okay. Here I go.” He pushed himself forward, off the bench, to go down on his knees. Shit’s mouth seemed as though it had shrunk to half its size. Under the boat’s wooden floor grill, water sloshed up between the slats. Shit crawled forward on his knees, his jeans from the knees down sopping in seconds. His hands—one, then the other—left the gunwales, to grip Eric’s thigh as he went forward. His hands, Eric thought, with their big fingers and knuckles, the ruins of his nails bitten back till they were more pitted scar than chitin, look so much like Shit’s father’s, sometimes the nigger was really like his daddy’s ghost.

  Shit took Eric in his mouth—

  God, it was warm!

  His hands moved up under Eric’s open shirt to embrace him around his back.

  “Jesus,” Eric said. “That feels good…” Eric took his right hand from the boat’s edge to rub Shit’s skull. “Oh, that’s so fine, nigger.” The back of Shit’s shirt was not tucked into his jeans—which had pulled down from his flat butt, another thing, along with his nail biting, Shit had gotten from Dynamite.

  The two tongues of tight brown flesh that lapped away the hair at Shit’s temples and behind them had joined years ago to make a wide bald stretch in the tan-gray wool. (Three or so times a year, one would take the electric clippers and shear the other.) Moving his knuckles on the rough hair matting Shit’s cheek and jaw, Eric (whose own baldness was still limited to a spot on the very top of his head no more than the diameter of a coffee cup) thought: And I’d still trade his for mine in a minute. It just…is better; looks better, feels better, is better to take care of.

  Over his right thigh, Eric could feel the weight of Shit’s teeth hanging in his pocket, down between Eric’s legs.

  Shit’s moving head stilled, and he released Eric from his mouth. “You know, I’m about ready to get me a T-shirt that says ‘Toothless.’ After all, I finally am fuckin’ toothless. Since I got it, I might as well advertise. Maybe some good lookin’ forty-year-old is gonna come up to me and ask me what I can do for ’im.”