“You think I should ask him about a job in his office — too?”
“Honey — ” and here Barb leaned forward. “I want you to do whatever it is you’re happiest doing. Really. That’s all. That’s the only reason I wanted you to come down here.” She sipped from her glass. “Honestly, sweetheart.”
“You know, Barb,” Eric said, “if I keep that job for three months, I can start makin’ some real money. It’s not as much as Mike makes — but it’s more than twenty thousand a year. Twenty-seven, I think Dynamite said. That’s pretty good for seventeen or eighteen.”
Barbara looked at him, soberly. “You’re going to be working with them that long — ?”
[9] IN THE THREE days after Shit and Dynamite helped take Eric’s stuff from the Lighthouse up to Barbara’s, Eric ran into them twice — once on Front Street, going into the post office, and once up at the Citgo Station.
The first time, on the tree-shadowed concrete by the squat, square, black-and-aluminum pumps, Shit was still barefoot and in the same green shirt with the torn off sleeves; Dynamite was still in his work shoes, overalls, and garbage truck T-shirt — just what they’d worn at Turpens.
The second time, beside the large orange and brown roadside sign for Hurter’s Seeds, Tools, and Lumber, both got out of the pickup to say hello. Eric looked down at the frayed cuffs of Shit’s pants to realize Shit, though still sockless, now wore falling-apart basketball sneakers, from which his soiled toes showed through three rips in the rubber and the once black cloth. Some of the eyelets had pulled loose from the cloth and one sneaker was laced with brown twine.
Both times Eric assured them he’d be at the dock on Wednesday, four forty-five sharp. Both times, with Georgia seaside seriousness, Dynamite answered: “Sure. That’ll be good. We’ll see you,” while Shit stood behind his “uncle’s” shoulder, in the sun, looking so pleased Eric thought he might shout out in the street.
Over those same Harbor days, Eric learned Shit was called variously “Morgan” or “the Haskell boy” or “Haskell’s nigger bastard” by most of the Harbor’s permanent residents. From both black and white customers at Clem’s by now, he’d heard all three. (Maybe he felt “Shit” was an improvement.) Apparently Shit was only six or seven weeks beyond his own nineteenth birthday, which Eric also knew — now — came at the start of the second week in May. Over the same time he learned that Jay MacAmon lived out on Gilead Island at the old Kyle place — with his uncle Shad and that dumb (as in mute) Mexican of his, and Kyle’s cousin Hugh.
Both MacAmon and Haskell were nigger lovers — a term Eric already knew from East Texas and Georgia and West Virginia, all three, since it had been repeatedly applied to his mom. It had wounded him deeply till, in a kind of despair, he had adopted the strategy that a young, liberal, eighth grade teacher had told his class about — appropriating the enemy’s term: like the Radical Faeries and the Wry Crips. And Eric decided (he was not quite brave enough to do it out loud, but it represented a major internal change), Okay, that’s what I am! As well as a goddam cocksucker — and felt a little better.
And he’d started sucking a lot of cock — much of it black.
At five forty-five on Wednesday, four days before his own seventeenth birthday, after hiking down the dark path through the pine woods, over the meadow, and into town, Eric reached the surprising openness of Front Street and its night lights and the Gilead Boat Dock, where he started work for Dynamite Haskell.
In the pre-dawn dark before the sea, under the florescent ring in its tin shield above the dock’s slat gate, unshaven Dynamite waited, one big hand splayed over the truck’s forward fender’s two-and-a-half colors. “Good to see you, boy.”
To the left a similar light lit the dimmer web of the marina’s docks.
Now, looking again at the garbage vehicle, Eric saw that the orange between the two grays — one of them blue in daylight — was rust, not paint. “This is a good day to come — we can use you.” The hand slid off into shadow. Dynamite stepped forward.
Moths and things that looked like fleas flicked at the headlights, at the overhead circular bulb, or tinged its metal cone.
Grinning over his missing teeth, Shit reached out a hand as big his dad’s and grabbed Eric’s, to help him into the cab.
“Hey,” Eric said, as, on the other side, Dynamite opened the door and pulled himself in. Dynamite slammed the driver’s door. Eric said: “I…had fun, you know, thinkin’ about what you guys was doin’ with…um.” He sounded awkward to himself. “Al’s rubber — that I gave you.”
Dynamite and Shit both looked over at him. Shit finger was just coming down from his mouth. Eric wondered if he missed a dig and a suck — probably. Both were grinning in the dashboard’s lights.
“I mean, you know…jerkin’ off over it.” Eric wondered if he’d needed to say that.
The pickup’s motor turned over. “Well,” Dynamite said, “good for you. Then all three of us got somethin’ out of it.” The truck moved forward. “Only now it’s time to haul some fuckin’ garbage.”
“It’s just pickin’ up bags and throwin’ ’em in the truck bed.” Shit slid over to make more room for Eric. “Foltz Truckin’ handles the recycled stuff — the tied-up paper and the plastic. They take that out the county. We don’t even see that shit. We just do the black-bag stuff. It ain’t nothin’, really.”
The dark seemed to blow through the cab window, even flicker above green and red dashboard lights, as Eric took his first run along the garbage route. “Right in there.” Beyond the rubber-padded wheel and outside the windshield — wipers had smeared it with arcs of bugs — Dynamite looked at the tufted mound the headlights lit along the dirt road’s center. “There’s our first stop.” Between red parking reflectors, the truck lights washed the corner of a cabin, laundry hanging across the porch, and three black garbage sacks beside the steps — the lowest of which had come loose on the left.
Dynamite parked. They all got out, while quietly, Shit said, “This is Miss Louise’s place. She’s sixty-four years old.” Apparently, she was also already up.
As Eric lifted one bag against his belly, he saw her inside the screening, sitting at a kitchen table in something limp and green, thin hair undone, drinking a mug of coffee and smoking a cigarette above a broad flesh-colored ashtray where ceramic Disney figures of the seven dwarfs paraded after Snow White along the edge, in which were mountains of ash and butts.
Walking back from the next house over, lugging two trash sacks in each hand, Dynamite tossed them in and turned from the truck’s rear. “Hey — put your dick back in your pants. And don’t tell me it kinda ‘accidentally’ got loose.”
“Well — ” Shit grinned — “it did.”
Eric looked over and down, saw — it made him start — where Shit hung, visible among his trouser folds, and found himself grinning.
“He’s doin’ that ’cause you’re here.” Dynamite looked sourly at Shit. “Keep that for when you go to the Opera.” He looked over at Eric. “Someday he’s gonna do that when she decides to step out and tell us somethin’ about her fuckin’ crap — she’s gonna see his thing hanging there. And she’s gonna — ” in an abrupt crouch, Dynamite leaped with a growl (Eric flinched, then felt stupid at his own surprise) — “rip that sucker off!”