Finally, they finished with the squalid houses along forty miles of forking back roads.
Four miles away in Runcible, they pulled up just beyond the Opera House and two doors down from a tattoo and body piercing emporium, Cave et Aude — in purple curlicue letters, with gold highlights.
They’d stopped at the clinic building.
On the broken pavement’s corner were two four-foot posts topped with black tarnished horses’ heads.
Dynamite took Eric in through the red-framed door. Colorful wall posters showed smiling black, white, and Latino young people, advertising HIV medications. Mr. Haskell told the heavy black woman with man-short hair at the desk that Eric wanted a test. “But I don’t think he’s too anxious his mama should know he’s gettin’ it.”
“Of course.” She smiled at Eric.
“Me or Jay’ll come by and pick up his paper in a couple of days for him, if he can’t get over here hisself. He works for me, now — like Shit.”
The woman slid her hands out to the blue blotter’s edge. “You know, Dynamite: the rules are that this has to be confidential. We’ll give the results to the young man here. But he’s the only one who can get ’em.”
“I thought,” Dynamite said, “yall could bend ’em a little: he lives in Diamond Harbor and don’t got no car of his own. But we’ll do it however we have to.”
“Fine.” She smiled at Eric again. “We have to get a little blood from you; that’s all. You step into that room there — ” it had a Dutch door, like Bill’s in Mr. Condotti’s basement; except it was all white — “and someone’ll be with you in a minute.”
While they waited, Dynamite talked with lazy openness about who he could fuck with in the Dump and who he might hold off on, none of whose names stuck in Eric’s mind. In return, Eric told Dynamite about getting the test before in Atlanta, when Mr. Doubrey had sent him and Arnie to the free clinic there.
When they were again in the pickup, Dynamite slammed his door.
In the middle, Shit looked back and forth between them.
Dynamite said, “When they get it, she’ll give it to Jay. She’s Hugh’s cousin: she knows we look out for the puppies comin’ ’round this part of the coast. You don’t have to tell your mama if you don’t wanna. I mean, that’s the damned law. Every nigger in the Dump got his. That’s one of Kyle’s rules for living there. We should all probably have ’em laminated and nailed up on our doors.”
Eric grinned. “I guess it’s like the foundation of the world.” He wondered if either would say anything about that. But neither did.
Shit asked, “They stick that needle in you?” (Probably because he didn’t understand it, he didn’t ask about it.) “It don’t really hurt. Hey, you want some boiled peanuts?” From somewhere, while they’d been inside, he’d gotten a bag. Probably it had been down in one of the Dump Produce sacks.
Outside, a white police car with two blue lines around it, separated by a thin red one — “Runcible Township & Highway Constabulary”—rolled by. “And that there’s another,” Shit said, though Eric wasn’t quite clear what that meant. But neither Shit nor Dynamite explained.
“If you end up inside one of them cabins and you wanna mess with one of them black bastards — ” back in the cab, Shit made fists near his shoulders and stretched — “don’t be shy. Down here we figure any kind of suckin’s okay; kissin’, anything like that. But when it comes to fuckin’, you need your paper — or a rubber.” Yawning, he raised his elbows.
Dynamite positioned himself at the wheel. “Ask to see it and make sure it’s less than four months old. It’s free, and it don’t cost ’em nothin’ to come over here and get it. That’s been keepin’ the guys in the Dump pretty healthy since eighty-five, eighty-six now.”
While Eric wondered if he should ask more about Kyle, Dynamite started driving.
At about two, they drove back to the Harbor, where they stopped to say hello to Barbara — she had another shift at the Lighthouse Coffee & Egg.
Jay and Mex were there. Eric grinned when he saw them. Dynamite hailed them — and they all squeezed into a booth together. It was as easy and anxiety free as that first day had been fraught. “You know, this guy here — ” Jay grinned up as Dynamite sat beside him — “has been my best friend since I was a lot younger than you.” Today Jay’s arms were covered in a denim work shirt.
Two other black men came in — “Hey, Randal,” Jay called.
Dynamite said, “Eric, this is Randal and Tod.”
“See,” Shit explained. “This here’s our boss man, Randal. He tells us where to go every morning.”
“It’d be fun to tell you where to go, if I thought for a minute you’d go there.” Randal squeezed in next to Eric, and grinned at him. “How you like workin’ with these clowns?”
Tod was thick and friendly looking and hovered about twenty-five — he sat across from Eric, next to Shit. Then got up and got a chair, put it at the tables end, and sat once more.
Randal’s leg cleaved to Eric’s, and for a moment Eric wondered if Randal was hitting on him — or if it was just some country way.
Pressed around a single booth table, four garbage men and two boatmen, Eric realized, did have a smell. It wasn’t even unpleasant — but it was recognizable.
Shit said, “You got to get Jay to show you all them pictures on his arms. Tank and Cassandra did that, right over in Runcible. He got some good pictures on ’im.”
Eric frowned a moment, then realized that — probably conscientiously, the whole Turpens experience had fallen out of their conversation, even as — for Eric — it made everything about it that much more vivid in memory.
“Yeah,” Tod said, who was only a couple of years older than Shit. “Go on, show us, Mr. Boatman. If he shows them half a dozen more times, I may go get me some.”
Barbara brought coffee for them all.
Jay sipped from his mug loudly and did not open his shirt.
In the corner, with his black denim jacket and (still) no shirt beneath, his pockmarked smile, and his big hands folded on the table, Mex was still the winner for sex appeal, at least for Eric. Finally, Dynamite (still close second) said, “I think we’re gonna run Eric here out to the Dump to see how the other half lives. We’ll get you back by the time your mom gets home.”
“Good idea,” Jay said. “Have fun.”
“Dynamite’ll bring ’im back to the house by dinner time, Mrs. Jeffers,” Shit called — and sounded a little awkward, doing it. “Cross my heart.”
Dynamite slid from the booth to stand and stretch.
As the crush at the booth table broke up, the chair at the end where Tod had been sitting scraped back. Guys stood, digging in their pockets for wallets or change. “So long, Mrs. Jeffers,” they called.
Stepping away from Jay and Randal, Mex and Tod, Eric called, “So long, Barb.”
Tod ambled over to joke with another customer about something, while the three of them went out to the truck to drive to Shit and Dynamite’s cabin.
Easing around on the pickup’s seat, Shit’s hand went back on Eric’s shoulder, again to squeeze. “Me and Dynamite, see, we live in the nigger part of Diamond Harbor — what they call the Dump; ’cause that’s what it used to be. Randal should be over there, too. He’s as gay as a plaid rabbit.”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “He was sittin’ pretty close.”
“Was he, now? Randal?” Shit asked. “Ol’ Randal? Rubbin’ his leg up against some good lookin’ white boy he ain’t never seen before? Naw, I don’t believe it — I’m surprised he didn’t have his hand under the table before we left, jerkin’ you off!”