Inside, behind her translucent curtain, Miss Louise glanced at the window, then at her cup.
Shit pulled back, but only smiled, while his father stood up. The smile went to Eric.
And Eric realized (as he’d soon learn about all coastal jokes) it had been performed before.
But Shit pushed himself — leisurely — back in his corduroys.
As he walked to the cab, Dynamite chuckled. “Someday he’s gonna hang himself with his goddamn pecker.” At the fender, he turned to face them. Then, standing by the amber parking light, with work-gloved fingers, suddenly Dynamite yanked down his own fly, reached into his overalls, and tugged free his testicles. The heavy penis flopped forward over his glove’s knitted wrist. In the yellow gleam, he swung them side-to-side, six, seven times. “Now you know he ain’t the only one with enough to shake at you.” He pushed them back in and, in his gloves, fingered for his zipper, got it, tugged it up. He reached to open the cab, turned, and climbed in.
Chuckling, Shit climbed in the other side. He wore those low-cut basketball shoes, coming apart at heel and sides — and still no socks. Eric climbed in after him, dazzled by two generations’ display of such raunch.
Dynamite started the truck.
Eric looked up to see Shit still grinning at him. “You can toss them bags two at a time, if you want — even four. It goes faster.”
“Yeah — okay.” Did Shit own socks, Eric wondered.
“Give ’im them gloves we brung him.” Dynamite switched gears.
Shit pulled them off the dash’s counter to hand to Eric. “But you ain’t gonna need ’em till we get to them stores in Runcible. Mostly around here it’s just house garbage. But sometimes there’re broken bottles and stuff…”
They drove through coastal dark. Across the seat, the three of them felt like twice as many people as had sat there before. Only now Shit’s leg leaned easily against Eric; Dynamite’s arm pressed his arm. No one scrunched over so as not to touch another in a space in which that would have been impossible, anyway. It was more comfortable and relaxed than the three individuals who had been there before. (Later, Eric decided, perhaps only he had done the scrunching; or maybe Shit, in response.)
When they weren’t hauling green rubber trash barrels or black plastic sacks, but were driving, Shit pulled off his own gloves to lay them in the wedge with Eric’s between their thighs — half-an-inch of thumb on one of Shit’s had frayed away — then (once more) dropped his own thick-fingered hand around on Eric’s far shoulder —
— and began, rhythmically, squeezing.
While he squeezed with one hand, Shit bit at the nails on his other, or prodded in a nostril wonderfully wider even than Mike’s, then put it in his mouth. Yes, it got Eric hard. A few times Eric did some nose picking, too — then glanced at Shit to see him grinning over in a flicker of road light through the cab, chin tufted with a late teen’s tan beard, his nostril rim or his eye-socket roof lit by the dashboard dials. Then he changed hands. Eric imagined offering him some, but finally ate it himself.
Lifting first one hand from the wheel, then the other, with committed intensity Dynamite gnawed at his own nails. Driving, he paid as little attention to the boys as Mike would have. Eric fingered and fed himself those saline crusts, those lengths of mucus — and caught Dynamite giving Shit a grin, which, because he was looking, now shifted to Eric, as one or the other of the boys sucked a finger clean, index, middle, or ring.
A few times, during that first morning’s ride, in a headlight’s gleam over the road from the other side of the trees, or from Shit’s leg moving against Eric’s on the seat cushion, Eric saw that, in Shit’s baggy corduroys, the wale was worn flat on both thighs.
Shit’s fly was still open.
From the crotch hair glimpsed in there, clearly Shit wore no underpants. Did he have any? (Back in Atlanta, Buckethead Zawolsky said his mom had simply never bought him none. And Scott used to joke that, for all Buck’s six-four height, his dick was too small to raise sweat enough to need them.) Goin’ commando, the guys on the team had called it, giggling.
Could it have been poverty?
How old were Shit’s pants? Did he have others?
When Shit got down to haul garbage, Eric also saw that the wale on his butt was equally flat-worn.
At Barbara’s, Eric had a carton full of socks: a third he’d brought with him from Atlanta; two-thirds Barbara already had with her. (She lived as if she always expected Eric to turn up, unannounced, and move in: but, till now, he hadn’t.) Three times Eric had started to offer to bring Shit some of his. But now, Eric thought, as they bounced through the night’s end: I’m thinking like a kid again. That’s silly. I’m just scared — and you can’t be too scared to help people. “Hey, Shit?” he said. “You guys brought me the work gloves. I’m gonna bring you some socks next time I come — tomorrow, I mean. That’s gotta be more comfortable.”
“You got some of them socks?” Shit turned with a wonder at their potential presence as great as Eric’s had been at their absence. “Oh, wow! That’d be great. I bought some of them white ones, once, that come in a package — a dozen for six dollars? But you wear them things twice and wash ’em, and they come all to pieces. That’s expensive. I didn’t have enough to get no good ones what’ll last. Oh, fuck, man — that would be great!”
With Shit’s gratitude, Eric felt relief cascade through him, chest, back, and belly. “Sure. I’ll bring ’em tomorrow. Hey — you don’t use no work shoes, like…” He hesitated between “your uncle” and “Dynamite,” then chose: “Like Mr. Haskell, there?”
“You mean this ol’ pig fucker?” (Again, Eric was shocked, though Dynamite drove on.) “Yeah, I got ’em. But I don’t wear ’em ’ceptin’ on the days we take the stuff over to the Bottom to toss — and even then. I mean, at least, most of the time, I don’t bother. But, man, if you can loan me some socks, I can wear ’em again.”
“Loan ’em? I got enough to give you a bunch.” Then he wondered if that meant the work gloves were only a loan. Still, the relief left him even more silent than he had been before, rather than more voluble.
The next ten minutes’ driving seemed the longest in Eric’s life. But what ended it? Did they reach their next job? Did Shit say something? Or did Dynamite? He remembered his glimpse of Miss Louise through her curtained screen or Dynamite swinging his nuts outside the truck, though he could recall no other detail from the dark hours of his first garbage run — except stopping just down the slope from Barbara’s, tossing her sacks in the pickup, and driving on to the next house without comment.
For years, though, the rest of the day remained as clear as a film.
Behind clouds squashed on one another over the sea, the sun rose and, for four or five minutes, stained sky, sand, and water a scarlet as intense as a neon tube or an LED display.
“Now, that’s a color you don’t see around here so often,” Dynamite muttered as they coursed beside the beach. The flesh on his own neck and face looked as if it had been burned a brick hue by the light through the window. “I mean, you get coppers, oranges, all sorts of golds. But not that red.” Even as he spoke, the sun started paling to orange. They turned away, and the dawn was redder than the earth piled by the highway constructions they pulled past or what heaped in a new foundation’s sloping pit, or — seconds later — where a cinderblock wall rose beside a leafy turnoff.
Then the clouds were gone. Blue reclaimed the sky.