“Maybe you could do…a little of that.” Behind the tears, Shit began to smile. “I wouldn’t mind. Would you at least call me a goddam motherfuckin’ piece of mule shit, so I’ll know you care?” He sighed and turned to the window, as though he wondered if anyone were looking in — and his hand…stopped moving. Eric was about to do it, when Shit interrupted him:
“I remember the first time we was ridin’ together in the truck with my dad, you was pickin’ at yours and eatin’ it, but you was too scared to give me none. So finally, about after ten minutes, when I got tired of laughin’ at you to myself, I dug out a finger-full and gave it to you. Later, Dynamite told me he thought we was cute.”
“Yeah, well I guess I was. Scared, I mean. Sure. I remember bein’ scared to give you any with your dad there, even though I knew he wouldn’t mind. But I don’t remember you givin’ me none.”
“Well, I did. And when you took it, you looked so…grateful, there. I already knew I wanted you around. But that’s when I knew I wanted you around for a long time — forever. ’Cause it was so easy to make you happy.”
Eric snorted. “And I can’t even remember it.”
After another pause, Shit said, “’Cause I don’t get hard now, I thought you didn’t want to no more. Or you didn’t like it now or somethin’.”
“Well, I don’t get hard, either — ” Eric lifted his head from against Shit’s leg and wondered how he was going to stand up — “no more. What you mean, I didn’t want to? Nigger, you are as crazy as a damned white man — course I want to. I’d do it even if you didn’t want me to. And if you do want it, that’s better.”
Shit looked down again. With the back of his wide, bony fingers he rubbed Eric’s beard. “Your beard looks nice.”
“Well, yours looks like an old worn out door mat…but it’s still sexy as all hell…You gonna help me up from here?” Shit’s hand went under Eric’s arm. He tugged. “And, please,” Eric said, “let’s go and lie down on the bed for a while. Together. And hold each other. Please…?”
Then began three weeks where, first for an hour, then three, then five, Shit stopped — “Goddam, I’m glad I still got your dick to hold onto!”—till he was only doing it forty minutes or an hour each day, usually in the morning before they got out of bed, one hand pushed under Eric’s shoulder.
Sometimes, with Eric, he’d even joke about that, saying he had to keep it up, in case something happened that surprised him. “We might as well, since we don’t got nothin’ else to do.”
[106] NOT ONLY DO Wonder Decades take their place in the past; so do perfectly ordinary years with little of interest about them save that ordinary folk like you and me and Shit and Eric survived them.
[107] THE CYCLES OF Eric’s life took in stony beaches and pine forests where you could walk in a daylight all but night dark and fields where there was no grass, only stones and moss, alongside tar and macadam measured at its edge with poles and wires and solar panels, and water, broken, flickering, so much water, as much water — salt and silver — as there was sky, enough to make you scream or laugh at such absurd vastness, swelling within until Eric became his self exploding through today toward tomorrow, water green as glass falling between rocks and wet grass, the smell of dust and docks and distances, and sometimes Shit stepped up and took Eric’s rough hand in his rough hand.
Under scruffy brows, Shit’s eyes watered a lot these days, so that frequently he thumbed them dry, then rubbed it away on hip or T-shirt hem.
Sometimes Shit would say, “It’s nice today.” And sometimes, “It’s gonna rain.”
Most of the time, when he said that, it did.
[108] THAT WINTER THEY hadn’t gone to Anne’s but rather to Hanna’s. Two weeks before the solstice, while he was helping Anne pack her latest set of large pots to earn a couple of thousand, Anne herself told Eric, “Hanna wants us all — you know, the people who come to my place — to come to her studio this year, instead.”
Eric pulled the tape gun over the crevice and tore off the brown strip.
Anne grasped the carton’s corners and, left and right, walked it over the cement floor toward the ones by the door. “For eggnog and dinner. Yall don’t mind — ?”
Through the screening, the wind lifted Eric’s hood from his shoulders, then dropped it, so that the fur tickled his ear. “Well, I’ll tell you — since you ain’t doin’ it, we’ll probably stay home and just — ”
“No!” Anne insisted.
Eric pulled the sealing wand down along the next carton’s overlapping flaps, covering part of a large “F.” Within, foam packing held another of Anne’s big pots.
“She already told me. She’s gonnna come and get yall. You just gotta walk from your door to the car. She’s really eager for you to meet this young woman — from the university over in Mobile.”
The screen door did not quite fill the top of the kiln room’s side doorframe. When the kiln was on, it could get hot in here — even in January. Anne only fired one pot at a time.
“Well — ” Eric lifted the wand and turned to the last box — “I don’t really got an objection. But, you know Shit — if he ain’t doin’ what he’s always done, he gets grumpy.”
“Well, you ask him,” Anne said. “Tell him it would be a favor to both me and Hanna. Because of the Atlanta show, I just can’t do it this year. And, besides — hell — I’m gettin’ on. You know, Hanna’s got heat in her big studio.”
“Well, I — ”
“Please.” She let go of the carton corner to smile at him, under wisps of scarlet. (This month Anne’s hair was scarlet.) “Tell Shit it’s for me.”
“Sure. I’ll tell him,” Eric said. “But I ain’t promisin’ nothin’.” He smiled back. The fact was Eric was pretty sure Shit would have no objections. To his own surprise, though, Eric had become the one not too eager to try new things, new places, though he didn’t like to admit it. Blaming it on Shit was one of those convenient things to say.
But then, by now all their friends knew that, too.
Finished helping Anne pack up the biggest works, he stepped outside as the truck down from the Atlanta Gallery pulled up, and, in a thermal web suit, Geraldine climbed out. “Hi, there, pretty lady. Hey, there, young man.”
Eric smiled and thought: People used to say that to old fellows when I was kid. He still wondered why…?
Eric was rolling the last of them out on the red power dolly when he noticed the address on the truck bed’s blue side was 4667 Montoya. “Hey, you know? Hey — Geraldine?” He worked the carton onto the tailgate, which had begun to whine and lift. “Up there in Atlanta — you fellows can’t be more than half a block from where me and my daddy used to live. A big ol’ private house, divided up into apartments. Guy named Condotti owned it — but I know he’s long gone.”
“On Montoya?” Geraldine frowned down from where she stood on the hydraulically rising platform with the carton. She had heavy, muscular arms, both of them sleeved with tattoos. It was hard to believe only that flimsy netting along with some black engineer style boots could keep you warm. For all her shoulder muscles, her tits were long and flat. (How far back had he gotten used to seeing women and men walking around in clothing that revealed pubic hair, breasts, genitals…? Drive by a road crew in winter or summer, and as the job had become safer and safer — no more hot tar, no more bits of gravel and flying lumps of macadam — it was pretty usual to see six or ten men, buck naked, at least that’s what they looked like from more than fifteen feet off, in nothin’ but boots and hardhats, puttin’ down a road. As a young man, he remembered actually thinking it had to stop with breasts.) On her rather prominent cunt she’d attached a couple of small carved charms — two red, one gold — to the graying hair behind its length of wire with the tiny silver beads that kept in the heat.