The Spider Man
They called him the spider man.
He had a long, dirty-white beard, and long, dirty and tangled white hair, which grew in a fringe around his bald dome. He walked in the city woods along the river; that's the only place that any of the kids saw him.
His beard and hair were full of spiderwebs, the kids said – when they milled together by the river, throwing stones into the eddies or shoving each other on the slick bank – and if you got close enough you could see tiny black spiders crawling along the strands.
One day Jack went down to the river by himself. The spider man was there, next to the boulder that the kids called Skull Rock, after the rock in Treasure Island. Jack crouched down, on the path in the trees, and watched through the underbrush to see what the spider man would do.
The spider man knelt down by the river and cupped his hands to take up water. He brought his hands up, Jack swears to this day, not to his mouth but to the point of his beard, and a swarm of black materialized from the depths of his hair, coiled down like a snake into the spider man's cupped palms, and consumed the water before crawling back into his hair.
Jack insists that when the spiders crawled back into the spider man's hair, his hair began to shine and thicken. That the shine intensified, until it was so bright it was like a sun, and that when it winked out the spider man disappeared.
Charlie sat under the shelter in the park, keeping out of the misting rain that had fallen all day long. He smoked a cigarette, which he had rolled, because it was cheaper to roll them than to buy them, and Charlie didn't make a lot of money.
He knew that he shouldn't smoke; that not smoking would be a great way to save his money. But he told himself that he liked the habit, so he always found ways to keep it up.
The old homeless guy that Charlie often saw when he went down to the park shuffled along the sidewalk, came in under the shelter, and sat down at the picnic bench across from Charlie. He stank, and he didn't look at Charlie, just sat there staring down at the wood planks.
Charlie smoked his cigarette and waited. He knew, eventually, the man would talk.
"Did I tell you?" the homeless guy finally said.
Charlie took a drag. He knew that a lot of people would be freaked out talking to a homeless guy, let alone having one just come up and sit down next to them at a park bench. But Charlie had spent some time on the streets – he always hung out on the street, somewhere, when he was smoking. He often ran into the homeless, and to him they were just people.
The homeless guy continued: "I'm not crazy."
“No. Of course not.”
“He really disappeared. By Skull Rock.”
"Who, the spider man?" Charlie asked, and the homeless guy, finally, looked him dead in the face.
"How did you know?"
"Haha! I've heard that story," Charlie said. "It's part of Hoquiam lore. Our own little urban myth."
"Oh, no. No," the homeless man said. "It's no story. It's true. I saw him disappear. Right before my eyes. When I was a kid."
The man had Charlie's attention. They had all heard the story, as kids growing up in Hoquiam, and of course they all believed it was just a tale. But the look in the homeless man's eyes seemed so sincere.
Charlie chuckled. "Yeah, right. Are you telling me you're Jack? You're the kid who saw the spider man disappear?"
"Yes. I'm Jack. I saw him disappear."
"And they never saw him again after that," Charlie remembered. "That's how it goes, right?"
"I've looked," Jack said. "I've looked. And looked. For 50 years, every day. But the spider man never comes back."
"Yeah, right," Charlie said. Then: "Tell me about it."
So Jack told Charlie his story, his flecked grey eyes never breaking from Charlie's, and by the time he was done, Charlie believed.
Not long after that day in the park, when Charlie believed Jack's story, the kids in Hoquiam began to talk about an old homeless guy who approached them down by the river.
They called him the spider man, eventually, because every day, as they milled about throwing rocks, or roughhousing, he asked them: "Have you seen him?"
"Who?" the kids would ask.
"The spider man," Jack would say. "Have you seen the spider man?"
