Eric shrugged. “I had a pretty good one with mine. I don’t know about most. But they were very close, Shit and Dynamite — and loved each other very much. Shit and Dynamite…Dynamite was Shit’s father, like I said — were…well, best friends. That’s how they described it. All three of us were…” Eric let the sentence hang, leaving her to decide wither it had ended or continued. “But when he died, it was real hard on Shit. That’s why he don’t like to talk about it, I guess.”
“How old were you, then?”
“Thirty-seven, thirty-eight when Dynamite had his stroke. Which would make Shit thirty-nine or forty. And really, I started livin’ in the Dump when I was seventeen — maybe eighteen. So that’s a fair amount of time to get to know a place — not that you ever gonna know the whole thing. But enough of it.”
“We had such an impossible time trying to find people who lived there.” Clearly, Ann was again surprised. “There are all these mentions of it, through all this rather ephemeral gay literature from the nineteen eighties on. But when they tore it down, the people who lived there pretty much scattered to the four winds. Dr. Zucker found one man, a hundred and three, in an old-age home in Ohio who’d lived there — Ronald Jones. He used to be a cook in a couple of restaurants in this area — ”
“Ron Jones?” Eric said. “Chef Ron? Yeah, we knew him. He didn’t live far from us either.”
“Well, he’s the first person who made Dr. Zucker decide that all this would be worth researching. He died a few years back. He had a younger partner, Joe, who’d lived with him in this area, too. But Joe had some serious memory problems.”
“Ron made it to a hundred and three?” Eric frowned again. “Hey, that’s gettin’ up there.”
“So you actually lived there — and had coffee with Black Bull.”
“And that ain’t all I had from ’im. When he went, I was really kinda sorry. We both was.” Eric laughed. “You know, Chef Ron baked me my seventeen-year-old birthday cake. At a restaurant. Chocolate…I don’t like chocolate very much. Upsets my stomach — did back then, too. But he didn’t know that — he was a real neighborly fella.” He took his glass for another sip, then set it down again. “Real nice. Good cook too — except for birthday cakes.” He chuckled. He looked because she was writing again, and in the space on the page where she was not, three paragraphs appeared and vanished in quick succession, two of them red and one of them blue.
“Hey, were you here five, maybe ten years back — it could’ve been longer — when that art historian was giving his talk at the Hemmings Interdenominational on Mrs. Kyle’s sculpture? That’s Doris Pitkin Kyle, Robert Kyle’s grandmamma. I’m talkin’ about the one they got out on the commons now?”
Again, she looked up. “I didn’t visit Gilead for the first time till about eight, nine months ago. Ten years — or longer — back, I was fourteen — or younger. Why do you ask?”
“Well, he probably had the answers — or some of ’em — to Ed Miller’s Satanic magic rumors, if you ask me. Maybe they got a copy of his talk somewhere in the library. I’d look it up, if I was you. It might be interestin’.” He moved back in the chair. “You know, Shit’s daddy, Dynamite Haskell — Wendell Haskell — was Robert Kyle’s lover when they were kids. I mean, eight, nine, then, on through twelve and thirteen — up to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Then Kyle took up with Jay MacAmon — Jay and Kyle would fool around in the summer, and Jay and Dynamite would fool around in the winter, when Kyle was off at school in Europe…” He stropped, because Ann was frowning.
She said, “What do you mean — nine or ten?”
“Yeah, that was the same age I was when I used to fool around with my cousin in Texas — ”
“Mr. Jeffers,” she said. “I’m afraid Mr. Haskell was misinforming you. Or, at any rate, you are misremembering. Children don’t have sexual relations at that age. It’s a biological impossibility. Boys don’t reach adolescence until thirteen or fourteen at the very least.”
Eric frowned now. “Oh…?” He wondered if Harry — Hareem — were still alive.
After their session, Ann Lee wandered out to speak with them both and asked how they’d feel about meeting with her again.
(As they were leaving, Eric asked, “Shit, what’d you tell her about them Satanic rites she was all interested in?”
(Shit frowned. “She didn’t ask me about no Satanic rites.”
(“Well, what did she wanna know about?”
(“Sex. Lord, that woman’s got a filthy mind!” Shit grinned. “How many and in what positions and with who and where did John put it when Jim couldn’t see it — it was fun.”)
Over the next month, Ann Lee recorded nine more hours of Shit, fifteen more hours of Eric, and three hours of both of them together — those didn’t go too well, “’Cause we’d end up arguin’ too much,” Eric explained to Ed, down by the dock, laughing — though as soon as they got alone, they’d start chuckling about it and hugging each other in bed a lot, even more than usual. It wasn’t exactly “fight and fuck” because fucking per se was pretty much in the past, but it was not far from it.
At relatively infrequent intervals, Eric would take the maglev tram and ride it around the island. Sometimes he would get off a stop early and wander up to the Old Kyle Place/New Library — he was never quite sure why.
The very first time he went, he tried to get up into the tower room but a door had been installed there, and it was locked. He managed to sit down in the downstairs office with the Library Supervisor, Arnolda Hamilton, who explained they didn’t let anyone upstairs these days. No renovation had been done above the second floor. He tried to describe the orrery — he still didn’t have the word. She did, however, and said she had never seen anything like that upstairs — that was the day she broke down and, in her shiny black pants and her bleached silver hair, took him up there. The shelves were empty. Nothing was on the walls. One window — broken apparently — was boarded over. It was very dusty. The floor was uncarpeted and, she told him, sections of it were actually unsafe, though, if they stayed near the stair head they should be all right. So far no one had fallen through. And it smelled funny.
Eric said thank you, smiled, they went down again, and he left — visiting the octagonal room had been like visiting a space in an entirely different building.
Once, when he returned and was walking around the ground floor, and the women who sat behind the desks would look up at him and smile and nod (Ms. Hamilton — that day in red slacks — even came through, smiled, and said hello), he saw Ann Lee coming down the central steps, from the upstairs. They said hello; she’d been here to finish up some of her research, actually.
“Well, here it is.” He looked around the renovated rooms. “A thousand years later…”
“What was that?”
“Nothin’.” Eric laughed. “Wasn’t nothin’.”
“How is Mr. Haskell?”
“He’s doin’ fine,” Eric said. “He’s just fine there.” In truth, though, Shit was slowing down.” And how’s everything comin’ with you…?”
They wandered together across the ground-floor lounge. “You know, there’s a lot of history,” he told her “in a place like this. But you know that. Still, the trouble is, you can’t see it a lot of times. ’Cause everything gets cleaned up and rebuilt and polished over, and there it all goes.” He stopped, and looked toward one of the walls, near the floor. “Over there, for example — that wall?” He wondered, did he have the right wall — or was he a room away? “When this was the big, downstairs livin’ room, right at the door, there used to be mark — a big black dent in the molding down there, from where a sad old feller kicked a cat to death and the young feller what owned that cat and loved it lost his faith in God and, I guess, began to get his faith in humanity. You know who that was, don’t you?”