The Spider Man

They called him the spider man.

He had a long, dirty white beard, and long, dirty white hair, which grew in a fringe around his pinkish white dome. He walked in the woods along the river; that's the only place that any of the kids saw him.

His beard and hair were full of spiderwebs, and, the kids said, when they milled together by the river, throwing stones into the swiftly moving water, if you got close enough you could see the black spiders crawling together in the webs in his hair.

One day Jack went down to the river by himself. The spider man was there, next the the boulder that the kids called skull rock, after the rock in Treasure Island. Jack hung back a ways, on the path in the trees, 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 to the point of his beard, and, Jack says to this day, 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.

When the spiders crawled back into the spider man's hair, Jack says, his hair seemed to glow and become more vibrant. The glow intensified, until it was so bright that Jack couldn't see the spider man anymore, and when it winked out and Jack's vision returned, the spider man was gone.

...

In town, Charlie sat under the shelter in the park, keeping dry from the steady 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 really shouldn't smoke; that would be the best way to save his money. But he told himself that he liked the habit, so he always found ways to keep it up.

The homeless guy that Charlie often saw when he went down to the park shuffled along the sidewalk, came under the shelter, and sat down at the picnic bench with Charlie. He didn't look at Charlie, just sat there staring down at the wood slats between them.

Charlie smoked his cigarette and waited. He knew, eventually, the man would talk.

"Did I ever 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 just having one come up and sit down next to them at a park bench. But Charlie had been around; he'd spent some time on the streets, just because he always hung out on the street, somewhere, when he was smoking. So he often ran into the homeless; they were just people to him.

The homeless guy continued: "One time I saw a man disappear."

"Was it a spider man?" Charlie asked, and the homeless guy, finally, looked him dead in the face.

"How? How did you know that?"

"Ha! I've heard that story," Charlie said. "It's part of Leiter's Ford 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."

Now Charlie was a little freaked out. They had all heard the story, as kids growing up in Leiter's, and believed it was a story. But the homeless guy 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, that's right. 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. Every day for the past 50 years. The spider man never comes back."

"Yeah, right," Charlie said. Then: "Tell me about it."

So Jack told Charlie his story, never breaking eye contact the whole time, and by the time he was done, Charlie halfway believed him.

...

Not long after the day in the park, when Jack told Charlie his story, the kids in Leiter's began to talk about the old, homeless guy who hung out down by the river.

They called him the spider man, eventually, because every day, as they milled about throwing rocks, he asked them: "Have you seen him?"

"Who?" the kids would ask.

"The spider man," Jack would say. "Have you seen the spider man?"

---

Image from Pixabay, by Leroy_Skalstad