“There’s also the fact that MacAmon kept his partner, who was deaf and dumb, I gather, pretty isolated from others like himself. I know he spoke the hand sign language fairly common back then, before they developed really efficient brain prostheses for deafness and blindness. That doesn’t sound like respect to me.”
“ASL,” Eric said. “Naw, Jay respected him. First of all, Mex wasn’t deaf. He could hear as good as we can — probably better than me today. Jay spoke that sign language, too, and they taught it to a lot of their close friends. Me and Shit both could talk that stuff back when we was young — I forgot more than half of it by now, I know. But I used to be able to say pretty much anything to Mex or Jay or anybody who knew it.” Were these how stories came together or fell apart? Or is this how they did both? “And Mex went to a group of people who signed, down in Pinewood — same place as our friend Big Man lived — and Jay would drive him there pretty regular. He wasn’t that isolated — Jay saw to it.”
“Actually that does make me feel better about it. I surprise myself sometimes with how involved I find myself with all these dead people and how they lived their lives. My supervisor says I should just try to accept everything and not judge anything. Maybe after I’ve been doing this a little longer, I’ll be able to.” She smiled. “But it’s hard not to have your own opinions.”
“Sure,” Eric said. “Lord knows I got enough of my own. But I can pretty well tell you, there wasn’t no Satanic rites goin’ on out here on Gilead, or anywhere else I know about down here. Ed Miller was just a nervous little kid — he weren’t but seven or eight — maybe nine — goin’ out to a funeral at the Indian Graveyard we got back there, what he didn’t understand.”
“Perhaps it was an Indian ceremony — which he took for something more sinister.”
“No,” Eric said, impatient. “It was just Jay buryin’ his Uncle Shad. I was there. That’s the whole point — it wasn’t no kind of religion!” Eric suddenly found himself with a mind full of Spinoza’s intentionless God, who was everything and desired nothing — neither from man nor from anything else…
“Mr. Jeffers?”
“I’m sorry there. But it…just wasn’t. Some friends had come out to see him through it — that’s all. And Ed was just little kid with a big imagination.”
“We’re also trying to run down some stories about man, a friend of Mr. MacAmon’s, who lived in the Dump and who ran some kind of torture dungeon, with his partner — ”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “Black Bull and Whiteboy.”
Ann nodded.
“They did a lot of work — mostly I think for people outside, from all over the state — and the surrounding states, I guess: they had cars comin’ up to their cabin with license plates from all over. They did their work in the place, too, when somebody felt they needed it. But they must’ve charged pretty reasonable rates, as I understand it, ’cause it was pretty cheap livin’ in the Dump with everything subsidized like it was. Yeah, they were a little strange — ”
“—and the kinds of things they did don’t strike you as Satanic? I’ve seen photographs taken in their basement, sixty and seventy years ago, that go pretty much beyond anything I could certainly imagine. We found more than seventy pictures in Kyle’s personal papers on store in the library.”
“Hey, I bet that was just some ordinary S&M — sadomasochism. You always gonna have some people into that wherever you got gay people. It’s just one of things that goes into…what you call it? The community. Men what like to dress us like women or wear make up or just be real soft and gentle — wear their inner consciousness out where everybody can see it, even if it’s a gentle one. And men who like to wear chains and leather and act like Nazis or — I don’t know — they’re doin’ some kind of Satanic rituals. You know, I had to come all the way down here from Atlanta, before I learned that that was okay — the S&M and all the soft femininity. But that’s what community is — a lot of different kinds of people. Together. It ain’t the difference between. It’s the difference among — the difference within, see?”
“You know, there are some people who think that sadomasochism doesn’t have a place in healthy gay relations. It’s a symptom that something is wrong.”
Eric chuckled. “There’re people who think men changin’ into women — and women changin’ into men — is wrong, too. But we got ’em here in the Settlement. And we should have had a lot more in the Dump — or I should’ve known the ones who was there better than I did. Hey, how old are you?”
Ann looked up, blinking. “Pardon me — ?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” she said, “last week.”
He started to say, You too? But that was the detritus of some dream. “And how long you been researchin’…sexuality and the gay community?”
“About three months now.”
Eric laughed right out. “Oh, well…then you probably just don’t…” He halted. “Naw, I ain’t gonna say that. ’Cause you’d think I was one of them old guys who believe a young person can’t know nothin’. And that ain’t true. You young folks know as much as us old people do. But, see, all of us at different times know different things. That’s all. It ain’t a matter of more or less. Just different.” He took his glass from the desk and sipped at his ice soda water. “Naw, Bull and Whiteboy was really nice neighbors to have — they was right across the road from our cabin. Sometimes they’d come over and have coffee. Sometimes we’d go over there and…” He stopped — for two reasons. First, because he’d been born in another century, he wasn’t sure how far he should go in detailing what she claimed to be interested in. Second, was the surprise on her face.
She said, “You…lived in the Dump?”
Eric looked back with equal surprise. “That’s right…”
“I didn’t realize that,” she said. “We’ve been talking to dozens of people, it seems, who knew people who lived in the Dump or worked with them or heard about them from parents and aunts and friends. But you’re the first person — or persons, I suppose — we’ve talked to, or I’ve talked to, who actually lived there. Mr. Haskell somehow led me to believe that you first lived together upstairs in the old Opera House, when it was a pornographic movie theater.”
“We did,” Eric said. “Pretty much all during the thirties — till we come out here to the Settlement. But before that, we lived in the Dump, all three of us — Shit and Shit’s daddy and me. I met Jay MacAmon the first day I come here. And Shit and Dynamite, too. Dynamite was what every one called Wendell Haskell, Shit’s dad — though a lot of people thought he was his uncle. I guess I met Bull and Whiteboy pretty much by the end of the first week or so — though I couldn’t say I was friendly with ’em till a little later. But Black Bull used to baby-sit for Shit when he was a baby.”
“Baby-sit — !” Apparently the idea astonished Ann.
And Eric found himself imagining what might have been in those pictures.
“Oh…well,” she reiterated. “During the time I was talking to him, Mr. Haskell didn’t make that clear.”
Eric put his glass down. “Truth is, Shit ain’t never been too good with his dates. He’ll tell you ’bout somethin’ he’ll say happened fifteen years back, and you go look it up and find out it was forty years ago — not that I’m too much better. But at least I know I got the tendency. Also, see, when we all lived in the Dump, that was before his daddy died — and he don’t like to talk too much about that time.”
“Oh, well I can understand that. Did Mr. Haskell have a particularly…difficult relationship with his father? Dr. Zucker, the supervisor of our dissertation group, told me — ” and Eric had the impression that mentioning a supervisor was a great admission for her — “that many gay men — he said ‘most’—have a particularly difficult relationship with their fathers.”