“Huh?” Eric blinked. “Jay…? Eh…yeah — maybe. What kind?”
“Over in Diamond Harbor. Haulin’ garbage with me and Shit.” The thumb went toward the light-skinned black kid, Shit. The very wide thumb (like Shit’s) did not have a lot of nail left — nor, indeed, did any of his fingers.
(Why couldn’t I have hair like Shit’s…? Puffy hair — ) To protect himself from the feeling of confusion, Eric was about to add, Well, I dunno…
—when, against the wall, watching the whole room and, clearly and equally, watching Dynamite talk to Eric, Shit raised an equally big and knuckly hand to his face, dug a broad forefinger into a broader nostril, pushed, twisted, pulled the finger free, and put it in his mouth, while he watched.
Chills engulfed Eric, not just on his back, but from foot soles — as if he no longer stood on the floor but rather atop six inches of raging electricity — to scalp. Suddenly everything sexual about the encounter so far, he realized, had been some version or another of the ordinary. Every sexual evaluation he had formed or forgotten over the six or seven minutes — really, it couldn’t have been longer — since he’d entered the john revised itself into something extraordinary. If Eric had had any hair there to speak of, it would have danced on his scalp.
A collar of over-thick fingers, Shit’s other fist hung on his dick, which, with the cuffed head protruding an inch, still looked hard. A droplet glimmered on the bottom of his foreskin.
(Eric thought about going over, squatting, licking it off…)
The urinal’s timer turned over. (Since last time, it felt like five minutes — certainly no more than six.) Again water flushed the steel. (Fluffles, flaps, flops, floshes…)
With their unreadable black markings, Al’s arms gripped Ted’s yellow shirt. In his jeans, with his belt end swinging, Al’s thrusting buttocks clocked the world.
Somewhere inside himself, Eric found the words, “Yeah. Sure, I…” obliterating his wariness. He hadn’t intended to say them. But he had.
“You got somethin’ I can write on?” Dynamite took three inches of pencil from his pocket, while Eric thrust his hand into his own pocket (I can’t feel anything…! Glittering chills armored him…) and managed to get out the paper Bottom had given him that morning. He handed it to Dynamite.
“If you gonna be around a few months and serious about workin’, show up at the Gilead dock come Wednesday mornin’—four-thirty, four-fifty. We get started by five.” On the paper’s back, with heavy, soiled fingers, Dynamite scribbled, then, keeping the pencil, returned the paper to Eric.
“Thank you — hey, thanks!” Eric found his voice. “Yeah — hey! Thank you! Sure.” Taking back the paper, without looking at it, he returned it to his pocket. As if he were encased in electric armor, Eric reached between Dynamite’s legs.
If Dynamite had knocked his hand away, he wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Now what, son…?” Dynamite smiled. The skin on his neck and arms was sun-roughened and redder than Shit’s. “You want some more of this Georgia cracker dick?” He pushed the pencil into a pocket on his bibs, moved…toward Eric, who still fingered the work-softened denim to grip the man’s cock. Dynamite reached for his own chest, looked down, and unsnapped one strap, then the second.
As his pants dropped again, Dynamite’s hands came out and took Eric by the shoulders. He bent his face down and opened his mouth.
Then, his hands like slabs supporting Eric’s back, the back of Eric’s head, Dynamite’s tongue went in, thickening and thinning against Eric’s. It tasted…God, good! The smell was like Jay’s, with a different automotive overlay.
(Regular instead of diesel…?)
Shit had moved up, too, breathing hard, waiting his turn, finger still in his mouth.
Though he was no longer picking.
Through the long kiss, Eric thought: My goddam tongue is glittering — and finally dropped to his knees for Dynamite’s cock — thick, big, uncut — that pushed against his upper lip, then went into his mouth.
In small, upward movements, surely timed to Dynamite’s heart, it hardened.
It had salt and — Eric got his tongue under the skin and into the circular pocket around the head — cheese. This guy was so good — not, Eric thought, that Scott would agree. But Scott wasn’t sucking the redneck sonofabitch. His mouth filled with that cock that was — again Eric took it to the root — bigger than Jay’s, if not so thick as the black driver’s, while, with another heartbeat, it expanded to the size of Shit’s.
Fingers like bars, rough as rust, Dynamite held Eric’s head, his cheeks. Denim bound Dynamite’s thighs. Eric reached between them, under the long scrotum and moved his hand up warm buttocks, firm, flat, furry, to feel more testicles behind the garbage man, swinging into the back of his hand. Eric’s fingers stubbed the firm stock moving there.
Shit had moved forward and was again fucking the guy!
Once Eric kneeled on a bib-denim strap across the tiles, as Dynamite tried to step with his big shoe and staggered. . . “Damn, boy — what you doin’? Tryin’ to pull me over?”
“I’m tryin’ to see,” Shit rasped, softly, roughly, on Dynamite’s back. “I wanna watch your fuckin’ cock goin’ in and out this white scumbag’s mother-fuckin’ suck hole!” Yeah, he had to be black…
Eric gripped one of Dynamite’s hands — as big as Shit’s — as he moved to the side.
“Hey, yeah…” Shit drawled from above in an uprush of pleasure. “I got it now. Good. I can see it. Okay!”
Eric heard shoes on the concrete behind him, then felt something press his back — a hand slid under his jeans.
“What you doin’, Al — ?”
And the other driver said, “Nigger, you gonna kill that boy — he can’t take that thing like Ted!”
Al said, his voice like something way under the ground, “Why the fuck not…?”
Eric wondered if Ted had gone when his own attention had been elsewhere. (He hadn’t heard the door springs.) How had he left such a small space without Eric hearing — even if Eric was sucking someone off?
Apparently, though, Ted had.
“Least I’m gonna try — ” which was Al’s voice lowering behind!
Reaching for his own waist with one hand, Eric thumbed his jeans’ button out of its hole.
“See, dere — he don’t min’. He wan’ me to.”
Someone — Al, on his knees behind him — tugged Eric’s loosened pants back below his buttocks. Already Eric could smell him, adding to Jay’s, the black driver’s, Dynamite’s automotive odors. It was not the smell of the black homeless men Eric had gotten used to in Atlanta. (The plastic road vest had its own odor.) It was the smell of a man who’d been working hard outdoors, like the smell of some odd wood, sawn fresh — cedar or sequoia — that Eric was not familiar with but wanted to smell again. He pushed as if he were taking a crap — the way, just two weeks ago (De firs’ time or so, da’s de only way you gonna get it all in, bitch. So push, cocksucker!) Frack had taught him. Al entered him. “Yeah — hey, da’s goin’ in jus’ as easy…I thought it might…”
“Goddam…!” Shit whispered above them.
Al’s arms gripped him — whatever wood it was ripsawed end-to-end, yielding its intense smell — and he no longer had to work at sucking Dynamite, because Al’s rhythm moved Eric’s head in and out. All he had to do was hold himself up.
“Jesus, boy — what, you come in here already greased, too? Da’s fuckin’ sociable!” Since Al was supporting his own weight, it felt pretty good. “I thought it was jus’ niggers who was supposed to be so greasy. Not all you nasty white fucks.” Eric heard Al’s grin and — still sucking — grinned with him.