“Sure,” Eric said. “That’s fine.”
“Come on.” Holding Eric tighter, as if steadying himself, Shit said, “Take your clothes off and lie down with me. We can make out. He gonna be asleep in fifteen minutes, anyway: this is when he takes his nap. When he wakes up, he’ll grab some nookie off you, though…in about an hour, an hour-and-a-half.”
On striped sheets, to the right, maybe two feet end to end, an irregular blotch was stiff with — Eric realized what it was — weeks of spilled semen. When he looked up, Shit was grinning at him. “We keep most of that stuff on my side — ’cause wet or dry, it don’t bother me. In fact I like rollin’ around in it…oh, hey! Look at you grinnin’ there. What? You like that, too?”
Their medallion…?
Shirtless, with his back to the bed, Dynamite dropped his pants, then pushed down his gray briefs (a frayed hole showed one hairy cheek), particularly soiled along the seams, and eased onto the bed’s left side. The mattress gave.
As Dynamite started to swing up his legs, Eric said, “Wow, you got some dirty feet. Why don’t you let me clean that stuff off for you?”
Dynamite said, “Huh…?” and put his feet back down and sat up again.
Shit laughed.
Eric pulled away from Shit, went around to the other side, and dropped to the floor, cross-legged, in front of Dynamite — who looked down at him curiously. “You sure you wanna do that?”
“Un-huh.” One of Dynamite’s big feet was under Eric’s shin, and one was in front of him. “I did this a few times for some homeless guys I used to mess around with, in Atlanta.” Well, three times, anyway. The fourth, actually, was why he’d stopped. “They liked it.”
“You gonna scratch mine there, when you’re finished?” Having dropped all his own clothes, Shit sat beside his father.
Eric lifted Dynamite’s foot up onto the knee of his jeans. He pulled the big toe away from the toe next to it —
“Ow…!” Dynamite said.
Eric looked up. “You okay?”
“Yeah, sure. But that’s like mud — it dries and holds the hair on ya’ damned toe joints together.”
Not just a line, the dirt was a black wedge (it might as well have been mud) a quarter of an inch wide — and a quarter of an inch thick. With his forefinger, Eric broke it off in three long pieces and two short ones, so that it fell, crumbling, on the gray, gritty rug.
Then he ran his finger down between two others.
“Like drillin’ for oil,” Dynamite said. “Ain’t it?”
At which point Eric reached the space between the little toe and the toe over. There was almost as much dirt between those two as in the wedge beside the big one. The broad nails were bitten or picked back from the quick as badly as on Dynamite’s hands.
“Feels good, you runnin’ your finger down between them suckers,” Dynamite said. “Go on, do it some more. Then do Shit’s.”
Shit poked at Eric’s shin with his own toe. While his feet were pretty soiled, they weren’t as bad as his dad’s.
While he was fingering between Shit’s toes, Dynamite left his foot on Eric’s knee. “How you doin’ with the smell? You wanna kiss ’em, or sniff ’em, or hug on ’em, that’s all right with us. Suck ’em if you want. I promise.” (Probably because he went barefoot half the time, between Shit’s there wasn’t actual mud.) Dynamite chuckled. “We won’t tell.”
“We ain’t got nobody to tell,” Shit said. “’Cept maybe Black Bull…and Whiteboy.”
“We’ll let ’em find out on their own,” Dynamite said. He reached up and took Shit’s shoulder.
“Naw.” Eric looked up and grinned. “That’s all right. That…looks a little better.”
“Yeah,” Dynamite said. “That feels better, too. That could be part of your job every afternoon — if you wanted to take it on.”
“I mean,” Shit added, “that’s some garbage we don’t need.” Shit pushed the wide ball of the foot Eric had finished with into Eric’s crotch. “I’m tryin’ to feel if you done come in your pants, yet. One friend of mine over at the Opera shoots a load in his jeans every time he gets to playin’ with them things.”
“Hell,” Dynamite said. “Who does? I’ll have to go look ’im up.”
“Fuck it,” Shit said. “I don’t remember his name.” He pushed his foot harder into Eric’s lap, scrunching his toes through Eric’s pants. “Hey, he’s got a hard-on, at least.” Shit reached down, grabbed Eric’s arm, and tugged him up. Dynamite’s foot slipped free; his heel hit the rug. Some of the dirt jarred loose from Dynamite wide foot.
“Come on around here and get ya’ jeans off,” Shit said, while Dynamite swung up his feet and this time lay down on his back.
Eric pulled loose from Shit and walked around to the other side of the bed to look down again at the twenty-five inches of stiffened bedding. Shaking his head, he said: “That’s fuckin’ impressive. It’s bigger than the one I used to keep on my wall in the john.”
“Yeah, I figured you might like that.” Shit went on, swinging himself around onto the side of the mattress. “You get proud of that thing. And we do it a lot. Hey — most of it’s just jerkin’ off, me in the mornin’ and in the afternoon sometimes, and my dad — ” with his chin, he indicated Dynamite — “at night.”
Dynamite bounced over two or three times, to turn his naked butt toward them. And Shit pulled Eric forward on top of him. They stretched out beside Shit’s father.
Twenty minutes later, naked Eric whispered into naked Shit’s neck, “You make me real happy; I wish I could make everybody else feel the same way.” The pillow’s ticking stuck from the ends of the mismatched cases, which probably weren’t the right sizes.
Shit said, “You don’t gotta whisper. He can sleep through anything.” Besides bigger, the bed was more comfortable than either Eric’s, out on Barbara’s trailer porch, or his army cot in the Atlanta garage. “He don’t care — you can play with him now, if you want. See…?” Shit reached over his father’s faintly freckled hip to lift Dynamite, as, furrowing the hair on his chest with one hand, Dynamite rolled to face them.
Eyes still closed, with one hand Dynamite reached, sleepily, to catch one or the other boy in a hug and muttered: “Yall sure make a racket when you shoot. Hey! Come on, Tom! Stop lickin’ my damned nuts! You sonofabitch! You can’t do that now! We got company! Get outta this goddam bed — !”
“No — Don’t stop, just ’cause he say so!” Sitting up cross-legged on the bed, Shit laughed at his father. “Besides, that ain’t Tom.”
Reaching down, Dynamite opened his eyes. “Oh…! That’s you?” Looking down over himself, his other hand came to grip Eric’s head.
“He do that good, don’t he?” Shit said. “He was doin’ it to me, too. That’s how he got me off…See? He can take it all in.”
“Goddamn!” Dynamite began to move his hips. “You suck like a nigger, son.”
Shit said, “Like a good nigger, too.” He squinted at Dynamite. “So you got two niggers, now, you ol’ pig fucker — that’s what I call my dad ’cause he’s white. Hey, pig fucker, and one of your niggers is a white boy, too!”
As Eric was getting ready to go, he said, “Hey — why don’t you lemme wash your dishes before I leave?”
Standing in the archway to the bedroom, Shit asked, “What you wanna do that for?” He had not put on any clothing.