Sometimes, panting, grinning, Shit would say, “Hey…I finished up…that time…” which made Eric realize the two out of three he didn’t say it, he hadn’t. Well, since Eric hadn’t, either, he didn’t mind. He loved his position as the object of Shit’s enthusiasm. How odd that, as an eighty-five- year-old man, he could lie next to Shit, with copper sunrise coming under the window shade, and feel, now on one morning, now on another, these were the most satisfying moments in a life that, sexually speaking, had been pretty satisfying throughout.
A few times, there, Eric had said to Shit, who was still breathing hard on top of him, “Hey — don’t work yourself into a heart attack. I ain’t ready for your nigger ass to drop dead on me…” Then he reached up to pat the puffy hair of Shit’s beard; and Shit reached down to run his fingers through Eric’s.
One day, instead of making a joke about it and calling Eric a dumb nigger back, panting, Shit had said, “Don’t worry. I ain’t plannin’ to kill myself fuckin’ some damn white man to death! Even you!” For the first time, the racial slur sounded as though it had been intended to wound. Eric reached up and put his hand over Shit’s, still holding his shoulder. He felt the scarred and broken pits where nails should be. (How did one learn to find such violations beautiful…?) Eric listened to the labored breath above. Shit didn’t take his hand away. Well, maybe Shit was joking. Or grumpy…because he hadn’t come.
But, later in the morning, Shit said, “I wanna take a nap. Come on in with me,” which, as late as fifteen years before, would have been an invitation to make love.
Inside, on the unmade bed, Shit — as usual, he hadn’t gotten dressed all morning — said, “Lay up here where I can feel you against me. I’m gonna pull my damn pecker for a while. I swear, if I don’t get off, it’s gonna fuckin’ kill me!”
It began a strange and, finally, frightening spring, at the end of which, three months later (with or without Eric), rarely more than half dressed and often naked or just in an undershirt, Shit was beating off all the time…in bed, sitting at the kitchen table, out behind the house, in the bathroom, down beside the ocean, or out on the cabin’s deck at night.
At first Eric would say, “You gotta stop this, Shit. You gonna get sores on yourself, now.”
Shit would say, “I don’t give a fuck,” and keep on.
Later, Eric would say, “If somebody comes by, Ed or someone, and they see you, they gonna make me put you away. Don’t you understand?”
Not stopping, Shit would grump, “I don’t care. Besides, you’re the one who’s crazy — out there on the commons at two-thirty in the mornin’, with all your clothes off, talking to a damned statue.”
“Oh, come on,” Eric said. “I explained that to you. Since I was naked the first time I happened to see it, at Jay’s, I wanted to look at it that way again. That’s all. I thought it might…”
“And you never have been able to tell me what you thought it might do. And Dr. Zaya had to bring you home with a blanket round your damned shoulders. I told you, this ain’t like the damned Dump, where we could do stuff like that.” Having slowed for the length of half a sentence, Shit went back to pumping.
“Shit, that was three years ago — and…well, okay. So maybe I was a little crazy that night. I told you, I thought it was late, and no one would be out. Or — okay, maybe I forgot the Settlement ain’t the Dump. But that don’t got nothin’ to do with this. You gotta stop!”
“You’re crazy already! So I’m just gonna go crazy along with you.”
“Oh, don’t be like that.” It made him want to cry. Something was wrong with him, he knew. A couple of times Shit had tried to tell him, as had that new doctor, but it would never stick. “Stop, will you…?”
“Fuck you!”
Eating could halt it for maybe five or ten minutes, no longer.
Really, it was like a parody of that Costas fellow, back in Hugantown (odd: it was the only name he remembered from anyone in the place not in his family), who’d lived in the cabin in the lot around from Eric’s grandmother — only this was without climaxes. Eric wondered if the same fate had fallen to the plumber, who’d been more than a decade his senior, anyway. Twenty-two times in a…Was Costas alive?
In June, sitting in the kitchen, naked, in one blue sock, an old man with dangling dugs and bony hips, ankles, and shoulders, fist moving in the tight white hair at his groin, Shit said, “Come here. You gotta do somethin’ for me.” His hand pulsed about his soft, sizable penis. Blown up to twice their former diameter with age, from what they’d been thirty years back, Shit’s brown testicles moved with his fist on the chair’s stained caning.
Eric put the kitchen knife on the counter, left the carrots he was cutting for the last beef stew of the year, turned, and walked across the floor. In his own jeans and bare feet, the only other thing he wore was a green T-shirt.
Shit looked up at him. “Can you get down on the floor, between my knees, here?”
“Yeah…but I may never get up.” Eric began to lower himself, managing finally to sit on the rag rug that went under the kitchen table. “Now, if I asked you to sit down here, you’d call me a murderer — ”
“’Cause with my arthritis, you would be. Hey — I’m gonna ask you to do somethin’. It’s gonna be hard for you, too. I don’t think you’re gonna wanna do it…”
Looking up at Shit’s face, Eric saw the tears in the old man’s yellowing eyes, their green now mostly gray. Old man? No…as with so many older people, when he went down to the Settlement for the open air market or the groceries or sometimes went to ask Ed how the new ferry was working out and took a ride back to the Harbor, Eric saw a girl or a boy who had been oddly afflicted with one or another ailment, so that she walked slow and stiff or that he had lost most of his hair or the face was overlaid with odd folds of flesh — wrinkles. Bellies and hips were weighted with alien fat or had grown unaccountably thin. “Age” was a variety of bodily disfigurements that simply and eventually infolded the young. That’s all.
Eric put his hand on Shit’s thigh and looked up at the boy’s eyes to which something had…happened, that had discolored them and made them tear — made them…old. The flesh underneath Shit’s leg was wrinkled; what lay across the top was smooth.
Shit took a breath, and for a moment Eric was convinced Shit was going to ask Eric to castrate him. Eric’s heart was not pounding…But yeah, he thought, the nigger’s gone crazy. “Okay. What…?”
Shit said, “You gonna drink the piss out my dick, lick out my asshole, and eat my damned snot?”
Now Eric took a surprised breath. “Goddam it, nigger, of course I am!” The relief was disorienting. He lay his cheek against Shit’s soft thigh. With his other hand, he reached forward and cradled Shit’s testicles in his own old man’s labor-roughened palm. Under himself, Eric moved his legs to get them more comfortable, though it was futile. Shit’s goddam nuts were almost twice the size he once remembered them — not as big as Jay’s had eventually gotten. (Like a goddam grapefruits!) Still, they’d been out of his damned pants for…well, weeks! “I thought you were gonna ask me to do something hard.” Eric snorted. Could their bloating have had anything to do with Shit’s obsessive masturbation? (He remembered how Jay’s used to itch, if that wasn’t just a damned excuse…) Really, as much as Shit hated it, Eric had to get them both to a doctor, for a checkup. “That’s just…fun.” It had been at least twelve years now that both were taking pills for blood pressure, too. Maybe that needed to be adjusted.
After a long while, Shit said, “Well, you ain’t done none of it for a while…”
Was something like that really making him cry? “Well — you been so busy pounding your damned dick, how was I supposed to get your attention? What’d you want me to do? Bring you down, hog-tie you, drain your damned radiator and rape your nose?”