Eagerly Shit nodded beside Eric’s cheek. Eric could tell by the way the beard moved against his face.
Eric said, “Wow…You don’t mind doin’…stuff like that?”
“Hell, no…!” Shit said. “His middle name is ‘nasty’.” Then his inverted triangular face — the same shape as Dynamite’s only the nose was three times as broad — came forward, and grinned as Eric looked over. “Dynamite Nasty Haskell. And both of mines is, too — first and last.”
Beside Eric, Shit chuckled and squeezed his shoulder again.
“Go on, now,” Dynamite said. “Put it away. So we can get goin’. I think I’ll wear this thing for a while.” He gave a grimace. “Thanks, son. That feels nice.”
When Eric closed the zipper over it, Dynamite’s cock made an odd looking tent in his lap. A bigger and a smaller spot darkened the denim where it had leaked from the rubber’s collar. “Ain’t people gonna think you got somethin’ in there?” Eric asked.
“Naw,” Dynamite said. “They’re just gonna think I dripped a little, puttin’ it away. I hope when we see you again, we can get some work done, too. I mean, you guys got to remember, we got some goddam garbage to haul — as well as all this fuckin’ around. It ain’t just about bein’ nasty — though, yeah — ” and he half-frowned, half-grinned at Eric — “that’s a lot of it, too, I guess.” Dynamite sat up and started the truck.
Shit’s hand had dropped to Eric’s groin, to rub. “Eric got a hard-on, too — like me.”
“Yeah, well you always got a hard-on, nigger.” (Eric felt his own cock stiffen more.) “Come on.” Dynamite pulled around onto the roadside. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna let you get your dick in this thing, once I shoot in it later. Leave the boy alone, now — so there’s somethin’ to do for next time. He gonna be here awhile.”
When they walked into the Coffee & Egg, Barbara was taking a customer’s order. Eric glanced down and to the side — you could see Dynamite’s cock pushing denim forward. And the spots…
But they were half dry by now. And what would anyone say…?
Shit slid into a booth against the wall. Eric sat beside him on the outside. Across the table, as Dynamite sat, he pushed his rolled sleeves further up his hard arms, then folded his big hands on the tables planks. The neck of his T-shirt hung below the brown hair between his work shirt’s open collar and above the denim bib.
On his shoe, again Eric felt Shit’s foot.
Looking serious and unshaven, Dynamite said, “Don’t let that thing Shit does there on the floor bother you. He do that with ever’body he likes — Mex, Mama Grace, Jay. Even me: he’s got his other toes propped up on my shoe right now, under the damned table. It just means he’s comfortable.”
“Oh,” Eric said. And smiled.
Shit leaned against Eric. “That’s how our dog do — Uncle Tom. Back in the Dump. So I do it, too.”
Dynamite looked up, as Barbara came over, two cups in one hand, one in the other. “Got his stuff all squared away, Mrs. Jeffers — right out there on your porch like you wanted. That’s gonna be nice.”
“Thank you, so much. Mike got off okay?” She set the cups down. “Anyone want a piece of pie? Morgan? Mr. Haskell? We got peach, cherry, and pecan.” Barb’s smile grew richer when she looked at her son. “Eric? Really, that was awfully nice of you, Mr. Haskell.” She nodded. And asked again: “Morgan?”
“Glad to do it, ma’am,” Dynamite said. “Really glad to. Naw, the coffee’s more than enough.” He poured milk from the aluminum creamer, then passed it to Shit, who poured in maybe three times as much. Neither of them picked up the glass sugar container with the metal top. (So Eric didn’t either.) “Your husband — the boy’s dad, there — is on his way.”
“Really,” she repeated. “I can’t thank you enough,” dropping her own hand to Eric’s shoulder. (Its softness felt odd, after Shit’s rough grip.) “Sometimes I make him uncomfortable, I think — I mean Mike.” She sighed — in the kitchen a bell rang. “I wish I didn’t. There’s Darrell’s bearclaw.” She stepped back. “He likes it heated — ” and turned toward the counter with its window into the back.
“Hey.” Once more Shit leaned over toward Eric, his foot’s weight heavier, his whisper quieter: “I’m a bastard. What about you?”
“Huh?” Eric said. “Oh, uh…well.” He dropped his own voice. “Yeah. I guess so. I mean, no, Barb — my mother — and my real dad wasn’t — you know — married.” He added, “She married Mike.” Eric glanced across at Dynamite, but Shit was not trying to keep anything from him. So Eric didn’t either. “They’re divorced now.” Though he’d told Mr. Doubrey in gym, he never said that to anyone else in school — not even Scott.
Shit was still leaning across the booth table.
Eric had forgotten his smell — kind of like leather and vinegar. Driving back, he’d thought it was the truck cab — but now it brought back Turpens’ john. (The gasoline was Dynamite.) Well, whatever it was, he liked it.
“I figured you might be one, ’cause your dad there is one real fuckin’ black nigger. I never knew her, but my mama was a nigger, too — weren’t she?” Shit said sotto voce to Dynamite across the table.
“Your mama was a real nice colored lady,” Dynamite said quietly. “I told you enough times.”
“Yeah.” Again Shit turned to Eric. “But I don’t think she was quite as colored as your dad.”
“Maybe,” Dynamite said. “Not that it makes no never-mind.”
Shit’s foot grew even heavier on Eric’s, as he leaned toward Dynamite and whispered: “Hey — how’s Al’s rubber feel on your dick?”
Softly, Dynamite whispered back, “Nasty as hell. Some of it’s drippin’ down my balls.”
“Don’t let it all run out,” Shit said. “I wanna get my dick in that nigger’s mess, too.” He grinned at Eric. “Next time he gives you one, you can wear it around. It’s fun. It keeps you harder than a damned cockring. We like to wear each other’s. Maybe you and me could trade off one of these sometimes.”
Over the next hour and a half, the conversation started, stopped, started again, with stretches where they only sat and sipped sugarless, milky coffee.
“You live near Barb — my mom?” Eric asked
“Naw,” Shit told him. “We live about another mile-and-a-quarter southeast — in the Dump.”
A few times both boys got to laughing and Dynamite leaned back and grinned. Eric tried to find out what there was to do in Diamond Harbor, only to realize soon, there wasn’t much — or, anyway, not much Shit and Dynamite were going to talk about in a place where Eric’s mother worked. Dynamite sat forward and again said under his breath, “You can wear each other’s used scumbags. That’s more fun than cow tippin’.”
And Eric wondered what had happened to the two men he’d been terrified might say something in front of his parents…Runcible and Hemmings — outside the latter of which was a mall — were a little more lively. But not by much. “You read comics?” Eric asked, eventually.
“Dynamite reads them comics…sometimes, but me — I don’t read nothin’!” Then Shit sat back with his hands, as thick as Eric’s dad’s, as thick as Dynamite’s, on the table before him and said nothing, while Eric learned that, despite the occasional X-Men or Spiderman when he came across one, Dynamite did not know Moore, or Gaiman, or Wein, or Azzarello, or Ennis — which is also when Eric realized that, with Shit’s silence, Shit’s foot had moved away. So Eric went back to drawing Shit out, which he expected to be difficult: but with only a minute’s more attention, Shit was grinning again and nodding, his foot again on Eric’s.