Behind him, somebody said, “Day after tomorrow? That old fool is supposed to come back here from the hospital the day after tomorrow? You mean the one there in Runcible? Naw — I don’t believe it for a minute! I don’t think he’s comin’ then. You just put that right out of your head, Mr. Eric Jeffers — ”
Frowning, Eric twisted around. Shit was standing there, with a cloth bag and his hand inside, reaching in to pull out three apples — he had the hands for it — which he set down on the table and grinned. “Hey, there, good-lookin’. You think your old fuck is gonna be home from the hospital tomorrow? I know I sure as hell don’t. I think he’s come back already!” Shit pulled out three more, set those down, then dropped his hand on Eric’s shoulder and kneaded. “You talkin’ to my friends here — we was laughin’ and havin’ a good time on the boat across from the Harbor. Wasn’t we? You know who this is? This here is Al Havers granddaughter! Would you believe that? Like I told you, sweetheart, six times, on the boat comin’ across, I used to look up to your granddaddy so much. I used to tease him all the time. But that’s ’cause I wanted so much to be like him, when I was a kid, I didn’t know what to do — only I couldn’t, at least not in the daddy and the granddaddy department, ’cause — ” Shit grinned wickedly — “I was a nigger cocksucker. Your granddaddy was quite a guy.”
From her cross-legged position on the grass in front of the table, Deena went on sketching. “Your partner there, Mr. Haskell, is a cut-up.”
Dreads shaking around her ears, the other girl laughed.
And Eric thought, the goddam sun has come up…!
“Hey,” Shit said, “take an apple, too, with that cookie!” He turned two of the green fruits over and set them on end, so they wouldn’t roll. When he’d put out four more, he started a second layer. Finishing the three-sided pyramid — the two girls (and Eric) had watched, fascinated — he said, “Hey, I’m gonna run over and ask Hap and Bulah if they got any peaches for us.” Holding the empty sack by the neck, he flung it up and over his shoulder and stalked off across the grass, with the side to side sway his arthritis had given him in the last twenty or so years. “They’re always good for that.”
Eric had a weird expression on his face that was half frown and half grin. He was trying to think how to ask if they knew why Shit was back two days early. It would be just like Shit to get up and leave in the middle of things — though he looked healthy enough —
— when three young men came up, two of them holding hands. “Hey, you came out here, too?”
The girl with the dreads said, “You can take some fruit or some cookies, if you want. It’s free.” She looked back at Eric to explain soberly, “They came out here on the boat with us, too.”
“Wow,” one of the boys said. And did. (Eric heard the cookie breaking in his mouth.) “You know, they were right. Out here, this is like something you read about happening in the thirties.” Then they walked away.
From her seat, Deena said, “All of the island here — at least this part — is like a left-over piece of the thirties. Of the good times before today. But it’s nice.” She went on sketching.
The girl with the dreads said, “We were talking to them last night. His brother was on the moon — but he’d never met anyone who’d been to Mars. Like Deena. We almost convinced them to get married. You know, you and your partner should think about it.”
“Come on,” Deena said. “Everything doesn’t have to be politics. Besides, if you’re living in the thirties, it isn’t quite as important as it is today — I mean, in the rest of the country.”
Two minutes later, Shit was back with a bag of peaches. “They only gimme a dozen. But that’s somethin’.”
Eric pushed up from the table. “Will you please stay still long enough for me to hug you and ask you what the fuck you’re doin’ back here and how you’re feelin’?”
“Okay,” Shit said, still grinning.
Suddenly, Eric stood up and hugged him — and Shit hugged Eric back. By his ear, Eric heard Shit say, “Excuse me, yall, but I am a tongue fucker from way back, and I ain’t sucked on no part of this old bastard in three days now.” And Eric had a mouth full of everything in Shit’s.
The two girls laughed.
I could break down and just ask, but why can’t I remember it…?
When Shit pulled his face away, Eric said, “You ain’t had no coffee yet.”
“Don’t worry,” Shit said, “I’ll make some when we get home.”
Finally, Eric asked, “Why are you here? Ain’t you supposed to be in the hospital for another day? You got pneumonia!”
“Not no more, I don’t. Last night,” Shit said, “they told I could leave this mornin’, if I wanted to. Whatever they gimme knocked that stuff out right away. They got medicines now they didn’t even have when Shad come down with it — you remember Shad?”
On the ground, Deena did a last few lines on her drawing, then said, “You want to see what I’m doing?” She turned the pad around.
Shit and Eric both looked down.
So did the girl with the dreads.
It was a sketch of Shit, with his grin and his tufty beard and his caved-in cheeks and his bald spot and his incongruous hoody — seeing it drawn, and drawn so well, with folds and the ragged elbow, made it look particularly odd — bent over the table, holding his bag and setting out apples. “You can have this,” she said. “This — ” she gestured with the pad — “keeps a copy on store for me, if I need it later…for reference.”
[105] IT WASN’T A full year later that Eric made the transition into relative sexual inactivity. He was eighty-five when he’d noticed that, along with his erections, his orgasms of every three weeks, or month or so had…well, stopped.
There’d been two and three month interruptions in them before, and for a while he’d even taken testosterone.
(Remember you had that testosterone pump fixed in the side of your belly? You had to get it filled every month for…hell, it had to be more’n ten years. I just made mine naturally, with my balls I guess.
(Yeah, Eric said. That would be you.)
But this seemed permanent.
Over the same time, two years older, Shit would still declare, now on one morning, now on another, “Get over here, y’ol’ white bastard; this nigger’s gonna fuck your cracker asshole.” Fifty years before, Eric had heard Shit approach Dynamite, pretty much every second or third morning, with the same words: it made the arc of coastal life coherent, and though Eric’s response to Shit’s weight and rhythm was sexual in only the most general way, it rarely hurt. (Didn’t I used to wonder if I would ever be able to do this? Now I can — at least if I grease myself up the night before — which probably means I could’a done it back then. Damn…) It was more pleasant than he’d remembered it when the same acts had made him come. A couple of times, looking at the pale blue KY pump on the night table (though you could get it in various sized plastic envelopes with self-sealing spouts, you couldn’t find that stuff in real collapsible tubes no more), he told Shit, “You know, I understand a lot about your daddy I didn’t when he was alive,” not that Shit was curious about what that was.