Eric looked up from Jay’s hard hand. “Jesus. I got a hard-on…again.” Reaching down, he adjusted himself.
“Me too.” Again the big man chuckled. “I don’t have to ask about Mex.” He took his other arm from around the shorter man’s shoulder. “Probably so does Shit right now, wherever he is…by osmosis or somethin’.” Jay wiped his palm on the thigh of his jeans. “You think you can handle two in your mouth at once, like Mex was doin’ with us in the john? Or Shit?”
Eric nodded. “Sure.” Another skill he’d learned under the Atlanta highway.
“Then you’ll have some real fun with Shit and Dynamite. They’ll throw you all the dick you can handle. Now, ain’t him or Shit gonna force nothin’ on you. That’s Dynamite’s gay pride thing. He gets that from bein’ a dad. But they like to share — like me and Mex. Hey, you’ll have some good fun with ’em.”
Raising both hands, Mex signed something.
Jay glanced down.
Eric looked up at Jay.
Jay said, “He wants to know what you did with Al’s fuckin’ rubber full of nigger piss. You know — his jizz.”
“Huh?”
“That load he slipped you in his damned rubber, back at Turpens.”
“Um…Oh,” Eric said. “Last night. I gave it to Dynamite — ”
Mex exploded in grunting laughter, half of it sound and half of it just expelled breath. Pulling away from Jay, he stepped around the morning’s wet dock boards, bending and recovering. Every three or four seconds, his hands moved into articulation, till he began to laugh and shake his head again.
Jay was grinning, too. “He says he knew that was gonna happen. He said he knew that fuckin’ cum hound was gonna get that thing from you, one way or the other. I guess he was right, huh? Nigger cum ain’t safe around that white boy. Dynamite been that way since he was younger than you.”
Shaking their heads, both boatmen went over to untie the scow.
Then, moving onto the deck, Jay lowered his head under the chipped blue rim of the wheel shelter.
Eric watched from the dock as the motor began to froth at the stern.
“Hey,” Eric called, “it was good to see you again.”
One foot on the low rail, Mex leaned an elbow on a knee and waved his other hand.
“It was nice to see you, too, li’l feller,” Jay called back, hands wide apart on the wheel. Open in the back and half the sides, the partial enclosure was not quite a wheelhouse.
“If you’re around the Lighthouse, we’ll be back in about two, two-and-a-quarter hours. That’s about what it takes for a round trip run out there — ” he nodded toward the horizon, where water and sky came together at the stone colored seam, like a scratch along a fifth of the horizon — “to Gilead and back.” Jay was bending down to check stuff beside the wheel. Though the motor was going, the scow had not started moving. “Maybe you can take a trip out there with us soon, and see the island. The fare’s three dollars — but seniors and Chamber of Commerce employees ride free. That’s policy.”
“Hey,” Eric said. “That’s…really awesome!”
A truck — a Nissan Cube painted brown — rolled by, turning up the drive beside the post office.
Standing again, Jay waved and called, “Hey, Wally — !”
From the truck window, a black man’s naked arm came out and returned the hail.
Eric didn’t see what Jay did, but the scow pulled from the planks and pilings. “So now you know where the Gilead Boat dock is — like you wanted,” Jay called across the water, two thirds of his voice cut away by the motor and the roar and ruffle of froth. “Say so long to Mrs. Jeffers for us.”
When Eric walked into the Lighthouse Coffee, Egg & Bacon, the blades on the ceiling fans were turning, and the cup was gone from the table where he had sat that morning. Two more couples sat at other booths. Five singles sat at center tables.
The wall clock said eight-ten.
In her smock and with her fluffy orange hair, Clem stood at the counter. “Good mornin’, Eric. I just sent your mom out on an errand for me. She’ll be back in twenty minutes. How’d you like your first night in Diamond Harbor?”
“Mornin’, Ms. Englert,” Eric said. “It was fine. The sea air is nice. It’s okay if I sit down…?”
“I don’t even want you to ask next time.” Clem laughed. “Sure — you sit anywhere. Now, I call you Eric. You got to call me Clem. Go on, sit down now. I don’t think we ever get that busy, at least not this year.”
So Eric sat at a table across from the booths, wondering if he should ask for another cup of coffee — he didn’t want one.
He’d been sitting two minutes, when Clem finished whatever she was doing with the big juice cans on the back shelf, and came around toward him. “Sometimes I think figuring how many breakfasts I’m actually gonna cook will run me nuts. I’m ready for six, and twenty-four people show up, every one of them wantin’ sausage and eggs! I lay in for two dozen — and maybe the next morning I get three. And all they want is bacon and toast.” She stopped by the table and frowned. “The next day everybody wants poached and toast — and the day after that nobody wants nothin’ but a muffin! Tell me, honey — I was talkin’ to your mama just a little while ago. Do you really wanna be a garbage man?”
Eric looked up. “Huh? What you mean?”
“I mean it seems a strange job for such a fine young follow to go into. It’s so dirty, smelly — I was wonderin’ why you’d even consider something like that. That’s what you really want to do?”
Eric smiled, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. “I dunno. I guess so. Why…not?”
“Well, it’s good honest work. I’m not sayin’ it isn’t. Still, it’s not the most respectable job you could have. And Morgan and his uncle ain’t the most respectable people in the Harbor. It seems to me — ” Clem went through several expressions and settled on a smile that Eric wondered if it wasn’t for some all-purpose explanation — “you’d want a job where some nice young ladies might look at you and say, well, what a fine young fellow he is. He’d make a real good provider — you know: someone with prospects. A good person to start a family with. I was only wonderin’ why you’d wanna work with someone livin’ over with all those…strange people — in the Dump. ’Course, with your dad, you could be used to it already. I don’t know. Maybe it’s different in Atlanta. But down here, you kinda get known by who you work with. I don’t mean to say there’s somethin’ wrong with Dynamite — or Morgan for that matter, though I always thought he was a little odd — but there must be somethin’ you could do that would…well, look a little better.”
Eric said, “People need to get their garbage collected, don’t they?”