Eric stood up and stepped back. “Oh, sure.” He closed the refrigerator.
And outside, someone called, “Helloooo-ooo…?”
Barbara turned her head. “Oh, hi, honey.”
“Can I come in?” It was throaty voice, a black voice. “I’ve got mac and cheese. I just wanted to leave you a dish. I’m not staying — ” The screen door opened and a rather straight up and down black woman, not as old and not as attractive as Barbara, stepped in. She carried a casserole under one arm, the top covered with tin foil that looked as if it had been used and spread out and used again. “I thought I might be interrupting you and Ronny. But who is — oh, you’re going to tell me this is Eric, now, ain’t you?”
Barbara smiled. “It certainly is. Eric, this is Serena. She’s been helping me keep body and soul together since I’ve been down here. Serena, this is my son, Eric.”
Serena wore a colorful scarf around her head. Her features were broad and she looked like she laughed a lot. “Where in the world,” she declared, “did you find a good looking boy like this? One this handsome? Naw, I don’t think this is allowed, honey.” She narrowed her eyes, like someone appraising. “Mmmm! She told me you was comin’, so I brought a little somethin’ over.”
“Well, why don’t you stay and have some with us? We were going to make some hot dogs — ”
“No way, honey. Not on your first night. We both work at the Coffee and Egg. Different shifts, though. Clem used to let us run the place together, but I think she decided we was doin’ more gossipin’ than hash slingin’, so now she keeps us apart. And the talk’s got to be on our own time today. You can make me some decent coffee next Thursday mornin’, and I’ll drop by and you can tell me how it’s goin’. Here, take this — ” She thrust out the casserole.
Barbara took it and put it on the table. “Serena, that is so nice of you. Oh, it’s still warm!”
Serena laughed. “I just wanted to be able to say I seen him. And now nobody in Diamond Harbor is gonna believe me when I describe him, unless they seen him for themselves!” (Such comments confused and embarrassed Eric — even as that is what he’d always hoped the Bowflex would give him.) “I’ll catch you Thursday, honey.” Again, Serena made the sound of someone savoring something delicious.
“Well,” Barbara said, a minute later, after the screen door clacked closed — obviously happy: “I guess we have franks, beans, and macaroni,” while outside, a little down the slope, the car motor started again.
On the darkening porch’s bedstead, hands folded under his head, Eric lay on his back, smelling the new blanket, a strange pillow, the pines, the sea. From inside the porch, the Bowflex’s spiring exercise rods put shadows down the night forest outside the screening — it had taken him an hour-and-a-half to assemble it, until finally he found one of the nuts he’d first thought missing in the corner of the box, so that, he’d decided (for the first time in months) to skip his workout — lightened somewhere by the last of the quarter-to-nine sunset on the other side of the house.
Mists lay above the trees, bringing…was it starlight? Flakes flicked across it, too small, dark, and angular for birds —
Bats, Eric realized. He’d see them above the evening trees in Hugantown, when he’d return from watching Costas. (He liked to imagine — and often had, since — that the plumber knew someone observed him and wanted it. A few times Costas had glanced at the window — once, as Eric shot. That time he’d bitten the inside his cheek and almost swallowed his tongue — a moment easy to remember.) More likely, though — at least Eric had liked to pretend — Costas didn’t give a fuck, as long as whoever looked just spritzed the outside wall.
It’s nice here, Eric thought.
Though it’s kind of boring.
How could he get back to Turpens — which, not including Mike’s getting lost, was six miles and seven minutes away? Pulling one hand from beneath his head, he reached down for his penis, which, already rolling up his thigh, flopped back toward his belly. He caught it —
— and began to pump.
Should he think about Shit and Dynamite?
No. Save them for later. What about Jay? No, Mex. He could wrestle the stocky little guy, kiss on him while Jay took a leak in his mouth, touch his face with its smile and its rough craters and suck the cheese out of his barrel thick, long-skinned dick. Was that the fantasy figure to break his new space in with —
As Eric had become more and more at ease in his garage room at Mr. Condotti’s, more and more frequently for the last three months that fantasy figure had been Mike, maybe every other day, alternating with the most interesting fellows from under the highway. It’s whom he settled with on the porch that evening — but was surprised how quickly (within a minute) it became Dynamite, with Dynamite’s irregularly toothed smile, Dynamite’s thick fingers like gray sandpaper, Dynamite’s nails gnawed three-quarters away and his deep ridged knuckles shiny with cum that was two thirds nigger piss anyway. When Eric came he was leaning against Shit in the pickup, jerking off together, grinning at each other — because Shit had the same oversized hands, the same bitten nails ringed in black, the same knuckles, the same cock streaked with cum — it’s overhang not pulled back a week now as Eric went down on it, digging inside with his tongue, while Shit dug a middle finger in a nostril, then let Eric suck it…
— he woke, on his side, night’s crickets replaced by bird chirps and a breeze across his shoulder. Rolling to his back, he saw the screening crossed with sun. Outside, green boughs moved up and down. Eric stretched, feet taking away the blanket — to his hip, anyway.
From the kitchen, utensils clinked in a drawer — a pot top on a counter — and he remembered he wanted to catch his mother.
It could be as late as six-thirty, even seven!
Eric pushed up, then swung around to sit on the bed’s edge, stood, and stepped through the duffle bags and cartons, around the knapsack on the floor, pushed out the door to duck across for the bathroom.
From the kitchen, Barb’s voice came up the hall. “Sweetheart, put your pants on — please! There’s two of us here now. Come on, honey…!”
And he’d had a piss-hard flapping.
Such things had never bothered Mike — who would even joke about them. (What pretty lady you been messin’ with this mornin’?
(That’s for me to know and you to find out. Eric tugged his T-shirt over his head.
(Well, just make sure you clean ’er up. Then Mike’d laugh and, naked, stride back into the bed room.) Living here, Eric realized, was going to be notably different.
(Did it mean anything that, last night, he’d abandoned Mike so quickly for Dynamite, for Shit…?)
Glancing down the hall, he saw, in her pinkish robe, Barb look up as she closed the refrigerator door. He thought about going in anyway — Jesus, he had to pee. Wondering if there was any chance, once he’d been working awhile, of getting his own place, he turned, went back onto the porch, slid into his jeans, looked around the boxes and bent to open the top. He tugged out a T-shirt, this one clean. (Bending over like that, you could pee all over yourself!) That’s right. Mike had washed them all the previous night.