Attic

by Katherine Dunn

  She prints her name at the bottom with Xs. Mac is Dorothy’s man—her common-law husband—McInrick. He is in D tank two inches away through the steel.

  —

  Today Dorothy went to court. She washed her hair and combed every corkscrew around her fingers and drew on eyebrows arching and then down beside her eyes to the outside cheekbone. She put on red lipstick but when she relaxes her mouth the lips cave in and it doesn’t show. Mrs. Eliot brought in the clothes she was arrested in. Striped wool slacks—brown and tan and dark orange running down over her belly—a brown sweater tucked in at the waist. Her breasts come all the way down to the waist of the pants—no one told her to leave the sweater waist out to cover it—loafers—from behind she looks like a small child with her broad flat butt and the long curls. She is excited about seeing Mac again even in court. She is afraid. Does she look all right? Jean combs her hair. Rose irons the slacks. Joyce loans her nail polish.

  She has no coat. It is seven degrees Fahrenheit outside. The court is across the plaza in the building that matches this one. She may catch cold. The marshals come to take her. Everyone wants to touch her around the door the arms reaching toward her. They all nod and show their teeth and say good luck. When she is gone they sit silent on the bunks.

  Marge tells how her man drinks—how she wrote checks for a stereo and a dining room set and a play-pen and winter clothes for the baby. She laughs at how easy it was. Her soft yellow hair flies into her mouth and she spits and picks at it laughing.

  Suzie is twenty-six and looks sixteen—freckles, childishly crooked teeth—little girl hands and feet with high small breasts and tiny waist. Her hair is short and curly. Her man is in the state farm she went to see him behind the fence when she got back the welfare check hadn’t come she put the baby in the new blanket and walked along the street to where the mail stuck out of the door and took another welfare check. She spreads sweet smelling lotion on her legs from a round plastic squeeze bottle—rubbing carefully at the heels and knees. She likes the food here.

  “All for that fuckin skunk coat—that old mother did it but I was on parole for that when Sherman got this job and we were roaring down the road with the bottles in back and me in that old skunk coat she claimed it was mink but it wasn’t worth twenty cents to the skunk they took it off and to her own daughter-in-law she put her own daughter-in-law in jail for a fuckin coat but I was out on parole and they never did find that coat that old motherfucker had a broom up her ass all her life Sherman always hated her. Before that out in California she tried to get me put away said I was insane all because I liked to wear men’s shorts instead of panties but I like men’s shorts you know they’re soft and they don’t bind. But we crossed the state line and Sherman blew a tire with all the bottles so they put him in Seagullville and got me on parole violation. My little boy’s deaf out in California he’s twelve now and smart! hmm! When I want to do something I just don’t take my pills that day then look out!”

  She laughs with her hoarse blue voice from the delicate jaws the perfect teeth all the way back and the slim pink tongue. Her long lashes falling beside the aristocratic nose—Rose the beautiful—the terrible with her belly swelling above the shadowed knees—high arches in the stony leather puts a glass of milk next to Blendina’s bunk every night—sends ice cream bowls the whole length of the bull pen at Glad-Ass’s fat face and cuddles Joyce when she cries in her sleep.

  “Motherfuckin Commie! I’m a good goddamned American.” Goldie pronounces everything in the front of her mouth. I hate her she’s ugly and long ponytail and bangs. I am in the bull pen john just squatting afraid somebody will come and she comes. “Hey little girl—you know we’re all ’sposed to shower every day cause with thirty girls in here we couldn’t live with the smell otherwise did you take a shower today? I ain’t seen ya.” While you were all at dinner I did. I didn’t, not today or yesterday but the day before. I won’t say it she’s ugly and stupid. “You sure you did? ’Cause when we was all sitting in the bull pen there was sure an awful smell coming from your end of the table and we know we all took showers regular!” What about that cheese they brought up—you left it open and I smelled that. “No it wasn’t no cheese I know an’ you just better make sure you shower regular ’cause we can tell.” Maybe they’re right. Two days and I sweat a lot—but on the pot! how could she while I was sitting on the pot with my pants down and the thigh-links grinding in me and my skirt pulled far down over my knees how could I argue—my face is hot—I’m not coming out. It’s almost time for the gates to roll. People will be coming back here. There are only two girls in the bull pen. They are sitting on the floor together—Joyce and Goldie—they look at me I walk by stiffly not looking—feel hot hate them hate them—Goldie is whispering, giggling…“It was the cheese after all!”

  The anthill under the steps swarms in the summer so tiny they worry me even with glasses how to keep from stepping on them and tiptoe always on the concrete until that one perfect day when nothing happened and the hours slide backward into themselves in the afternoon a particular green in the young tree against that particular blue in the sky and only minutes later a perfect pink cloud in the sky still blue and that green and that pink against the same blue are never to be seen again though looked for on a thousand summer days and those colors in their light—in the innocence are all that is once seen and never seen again and the ants are swarming on the steps and in and out of the cracks in the sidewalk and thick and busy I stomp them and grind them—they screaming—I can see them screaming and somehow never worry about killing them again.

  The men don’t go down to the kitchen to eat. The food comes up on wagons and the plates pass through a slot in the door. Trusties work in the kitchen—in the booking offices below—as janitors. When I came here from Independence we stood in line behind bars—there were people everywhere in dungarees and white tee shirts—in the pale green halls with buckets and mops like women’s hair and he was tall and black—his biceps had purple veins across the cut—he took my hand and I leaned to him but he shoved it flat fingered on the ink pad and rolled it on paper and turned away—no eyes no teeth.

  There are no blue uniforms here. The Sheriff wears tan cavalry twill and a brown tie and rich brown leather holster and cream-color stetson with a brown leather band—stars not shields—boots not shoes—and his great gut hangs all the way over his belt in front—little arrows sewn into the seams of his shirt. When he stands with his back to us he is as wide as three men and his ass is flat all the way to his neck and his trousers tailored with a brown stripe down each leg. One old spade deputy—the token on duty in the kitchen where all the trusties are spades they don’t get pale here. Johnsoninthekitchen is his name. He stands near Rose at mealtimes with his brown skull shining through a fringe of gray wool, his kind old face spilling around a spatula nose. Cigarettes and candy because he thinks it’s his baby or she’s pretty or his wife died three years ago or all the uglies and others. She laughs at him upstairs smoking Camels.

  —

  Dorothy is back. The door opens and she walks in. Her head is down. Her hair hides her face. She has a handkerchief in both hands and the hands are flat against her face. She steps in—one step—two steps—the door closes—then fast to 3 cell where she falls into a bunk and shakes with the handkerchief flat under her hands across her face. The lines of her body are all round—round arms above the round belly—and legs curled tight and round in front of her—the knuckles of her hands are red. The bone at her ankle is red. The wet drips from the soles of her shoes onto the brown wool blanket. Everyone except Blendina goes into 3 cell or stands in front of it looking in. Rose and Jean sit down on the bunk on either side of Dorothy. They put their arms around her and stroke her softly. Kathy crouches on the floor in front of her. “What happened honey? What did those mothers do to you? How’s Mac?”

  “Mac? Mac he he…he…” Dorothy shakes harder all over—the hard edges of her shoes click against each other. “The old man said I st
opped him on the street and lured him into the alley—led him along the dark alley so Mac could jump him and take the money—and they would have let us off on probation but it came out I had a record so they gave me three years and Mac one and he jumped up and said you bitch you slut if it hadn’t been for you I’d be on the streets!” Dorothy’s mouth shows beneath the handkerchief. It hangs away from the gums on the side she is lying on. The clear spittle runs down onto the blanket. Jean’s lips go all the way in. Her jaw is tight. She stands up and pushes out of the cell. She walks out to the far side of the bull pen and walks from the windows to the john and back with her lips tight. She stops and looks at 3 cell. Her lips peel back. Her teeth show hard together. Her right hand makes a fist. It lifts almost to her chin and then comes down fast into her left palm near her waist. There is a loud slapping sound. This happens again. Her lips pop out and pull back and down at the corners. “And they wonder why I hate men!”

  I can see it—in the courtroom. He’s probably not much, Dorothy’s man Mac. Dorothy’s not much but she can’t afford to be anything but kind.

  Joyce is making yarn octopi. Lavender and yellow, they lie on her bunk braided and tied. She says she’s seventeen and has a baby boy and was living with two guys at once and turning tricks and her old man is a rich Mexican oil man and he sends her letters begging her to come back to him and her mother fucks the judge so she’s going to get released in the custody of her husband and she’s here for bad checks she brought me the Sheriff’s card and afterward when the white A was on my face she said they had had to knock some sense into her too her face is fat and round as a putty moon with dark brown pinpoint freckles. My freckles are dark gold with soft spreading edges.

  —

  It was the Greenbriar that day. All across the country if we saw another we’d say “Hsst on a Greenbriar” and the first to say it won. It had rained all night and the cold was deep in the wind. We drove across the bridge and out to Leavenworth dropping people on the way. I was the last. The highway went through a cut in the hills. The north hill was green with a red and white buffed colonial private girls’ school on top—St. Mary’s. The south hill had a blank-walled prison or factory. Between in the valley, on the south side of the highway was the settlement. All black houses in tall dead trees. A mud road turned off the highway and went down. The first house was on the left. There were two boards on bricks in front of the door but the top board was about two feet below the door sill. There was a round neon sign in the window neon red—CARLING. The tar paper peeled around gray tacks. The mud lay even from the road to beyond the house so you couldn’t tell where the road stopped and the yard began. The kind of very wet gray mud that swallows footprints into rain pocks so you can’t tell whether crowds have been passing or nobody. There were no lights anywhere. There were no people in sight up and down the road or by the houses.

  I went to the two boards—stood on the second and rapped on the door very sprightly. After a while it opened. There was a tall man with his shoulders hanging in front of him. His belt was high in back and low in front and his belly pressed at it. Gray, all gray but his black face smooth and thick—like a politician’s hiding bones—the bandanna gray on his head like my mother’s when she scrubbed floors or Aunt Jemima. I remember her on the radio when I sat under the table with the long cloth like a pale tent all around.

  Hi! I just came over to see ya for a while!

  “Come in”—so slow and tired his voice and so slow and low his head when I climbed up into the room. You see I’m in a contest where we get points for having people vote for us my teeth showing all the time we have to get fifty thousand votes and I’ve been working night and day and today’s the last day and I only need twenty more points to win and if I do I get (show the card with the jet on it) a trip to Paris, London or Rome. The house is one room. On the opposite side from the door is a very old cracked dried-up bar. There is a round wood table in the middle of the room. Two backless kitchen chairs are near the table. There are boards nailed to the walls behind the bar for shelves but there is nothing on them. One unopened bottle of Budweiser sits on the shelf. A bulb hangs on a wire from the ceiling everything is gray dusty or muddy. The tar paper on the outside is wrinkling in between the two-by-fours. He bends slowly and places one of the broken-backed chairs up to the table for me. He walks all the way around the table and sits on the other chair and leans forward clasping his hands and resting his arms on the table all the way up to the elbow. Standing at the bar is someone else but his face is too black to see.

  The man at the table looks at me gently, listening. And all you have to do to vote for me is look at this list of magazines and pick out your favorites hand him the card. He takes out an old steel wire spectacle frame with the top half of one lens still in place. He stretches the temples delicately over each ear with both hands and lowers the bridge until his left eye is looking through the piece of glass. He lifts the card with the list in huge heavy hands like my second stepfather’s with the nails pink and flat and black at the ends and his hands are black on top and pink at the palms and all the way to the tips of the finger bellies. He holds the card close up to the left eye and closes his right eye and looks at it for a long time. Then he clears his throat, slowly and uncomfortably and says “I like this here huntin magazine.” I have the order blank all ready how do you spell your last name sir? What’s the address here? “L-U-K-E just Mogul Flats just me Mogul Flats.” And would you like the six-year subscription or the eight-year subscription? His breath comes up slow from far away and he looks down through the empty frames at his hands. “Do I got to take a sascription to vote for you Miss?” That’s the way you vote for me Mister Luke and gee look here by choosing Hunting you’ve given me three whole points and I only have seventeen more to go and I win that trip to Paris ’cause that’s where I’m choosin to go Mister Luke, Paris, France. Isn’t it exciting Mister Luke? The long breath comes again as though all the air would come out and not go in again any more. “How much do this sascription cost?” Why it figures out Mister Luke to just twelve cents an issue and you know that’s much cheaper than you could buy it at a newsstand this is a special offer just for this contest and I sure thank you Mister Luke sir for your help in this would it be all right if I sent you a postcard from Paris, France, Mister Luke? Would you sign your name right here Mister Luke? He takes the pen and writes very carefully L-U-K-E. Now for the six-year subscription that’s twelve dollars Mister Luke but I just take six of it with me now and you send the rest in later. “Girl, Girl, Girl, I only got two dollars.” Oh I see Mister Luke well for the two-year subscription it’s only four dollars now and I just take two with me now to show you voted for me and you send the other two whenever it’s convenient and I send in your order and the first two dollars so you don’t have to bother with that and I want to thank you again Mister Luke for helping me out this way It’s something I’ve been working for for a long time Mister Luke You’re sure it would be all right if I sent you that postcard from Paris, France, Mister Luke. He pulls himself slowly to his feet using all his hands and arms on the table and moves to the bar. He lifts the unopened bottle of Budweiser and picks up two paper bills folded neatly in half. They are almost black and patched together with dry yellowed tape. He brings them to me on his open hand with the fingers and thumb flat like when a horse eats from your hand. I take it and oh thank you Mister Luke here’s your receipt and you send this form in with the second payment and then your magazines will start coming in the mail goodbye now Mister Luke and thanks again I’m out the door and prancing through the mud very proud and excited I made a sale.

  No lights. No people, only the tar shacks on their knees in the mud. The road is maybe half a mile long ending at the beginning of the south hill. The blank quick stone walls look down on the low sheds. Behind some trees nearly at the end of the road a green concrete block house pale and low set into the mud the tar roof dripping. We used to pick up chunks of cold tar like obsidian where the boilers sat for
the road workers. Chewing tar like Chiclets—no taste, no smell, good for the gums we’d say and hope it looked like tobacco. The long block house, a radio playing faintly the long tall Texan oorah oorah is dat yo hat? Knock at the low door just missing the roof beams. The door opens, I’ve forgotten his face. A white redneck middle aged very beery and blowzy gutted the belt high in back and invisible under the belly. Baggy trousers greasy stetson and plaid shirt sweat colored. “Well, well come right in girly come right in indeedy.” The room is long and takes up the whole house. Five army bunks along each wall—rumpled versions of the doorman flopped on each one. Short socks fallen, trousers rucked up over maggot-colored hairy calves as thin legs cross. Ball scratchers floor spitters fumblers in the dark can’t see their own pricks and take it out in more booze and brawling. Calendar cowgirl with fat cheeks and a palomino on the wall. Beer piss semen sweat smell of the old and balding even their pubic hair gets gray I seem to remember. Tried to do the contest bit in the leers but nothing it’s blurred here a cup of coffee from a hot plate at one end and they told me to see the Mogul in the big house he owns all this. I’m out somehow or other and walking in the mud. It looks like dusk but it’s still early afternoon. Deserted, the black shacks sunken. I see no windows, no doors. They are very crowded together and then fifty yards apart. On the earth lie hounds huge black and tan coon hounds dozens of them lying. Only their heads move or their flanks twitching soggy flies. Their muzzles gape and teeth show subtly. A small boy running in the mud. Short khaki pants hanging around his round belly, the navel distended, the ribs enormous faceless. Where does the Mogul live. A finger in a direction. He runs on sucking in the mud and disappears into one of the tar paper clusters. I follow and find a blanket hanging over a space between the two-by-fours. The mud does not stop at the opening but goes on inside to the darkness. “Come in.” I stand waiting to see but there’s nothing to look for. A long box—refrigerator crate with two gunny sacks spread on it. On top a war surplus blanket, between an old woman. An old woman. Her skin is the color of dusty tar. Tar with wood ash on it and she is lying in the room with no floors and no windows and a blanket over a hole and no she does not want any magazines thank you but just go on through maybe the Mogul would. There is another hole into more darkness with cracks and seeps of gray from outside and a kind of hall where one shack is leaning on another and a cardboard room at the end with a chair almost whole and a table like beside the bed in a cheap hotel and an old man smokes a pipe in the dark and he turns and his hair is gray and tight and his face is paler than his ears and neck and he has no lips and no nose but a hole like an apostrophe between his eyes and he’s very sorry but he’s blind and can’t read. But he tries to dust the chair off and find a match to light the lantern. I don’t know if I was outside again or in cardboard corridors and tar paper walls when I came to the door. Wood with panels and a hole for a knob with a twisted coathanger in it but I knocked and it opened on a little blond girl about four years old with a white dress and white shoes and pink stockings and a ribbon in her long shining hair and she spoke French to me which I couldn’t understand having written the verbs on my desk before every quiz and the room had white walls and curtains and flowers and cushions everywhere and ruffles around the daybed and a heart-shaped satin pillow from the greatest show on earth and the pretty lady knelt crying on the sofa above a white long-haired rug and the satin of her robe fell back above her elbows as she touched her face with her hands and the inside of her arms was the worst case of acne and the outside of her arms was like cream clotting in the jug and her wrists were shining and her hair like the little girl’s and she cried in French and pointed through the lace past the hounds in the mud, past the shacks and trees to the rails falling down by a maroon ’49 Ford on blocks where the white frame house leaned on its porch and sank toward the mud. “Mogul” she said. The Mogul. I know it was a road because the middle was higher. The hound at the tree was pale between the legs and the first house was very thin and I stepped down two steps and the bar was a door on saw horses and I asked for orange soda pop to soften them but the two women behind the door hated me. She had red hair and her arms hung from the collarbone and she had black hair stiff beneath the scarf and her breasts above the bar and her neck and the lips they said go see the Mogul. “He got money.” So I went out again and didn’t stop past the falling fences or the Ford with the Styrofoam dice on the rearview mirror and the wringer Maytag on the porch with one caster and the cord frayed into shredded plastic and thin copper and a boy came out and the floor of the porch shrank beneath him and his freckles sank into his gray face and his eyes were red on the rim of the upper lid and gray on the rim of the lower lid and a crust in the valley above his lip and his spine already swinging in at the base with the weight of his gut. The woman came out then, her feet spreading black bottomed in thongs, the legs falling down around the ankles and chins and tits and belly and butt and arms all dripping down from the bones and the eyes slits pulled open by the weight of the cheeks and the dress with no color and her hair and skin with no color and the hounds were asleep in their dewlaps in the dooryard. I sat down on the broken step with my boots in the mud and showed her all I had and lists of housekeeping magazines and true romances and movie rags. Her face never moved. Her lips sagged a little further into the first chin and the Mogul is the one. Have to talk to him about it. It was very cold. I was wearing the high black boots from the Thirty-fourth Street fag shop and the brown wool jumper with a long-sleeved blouse and a velvet collar on my raincoat and my hair blew when I walked and lay cold on my ears when I was still and she paid me no more mind but went about in the yard with a bucket of scraps for the hounds. Poured it out into bread pans beneath the dead oaks with puffballs hanging between their fingers and the hounds lay flat on the right side or flat on their bellies with their rear legs spread wide and the insides of their thighs flat against the ground what kind of dogs are those? “Them’s Blue Ticks—coon dogs lady.” His face shows nothing, the voice nothing. The words carry the tiniest condescension. They sure are big. “Yeah they run around a hunnert pounds—this here is the best pack in the county.” There is a scar running from the back of his right knee in the soft place to the heel beside the tendon. It is gray and puffy and shows when the slits in the overall legs fall aside. Looks eight or ten. Probably twelve or thirteen. Do they only hunt coons? “No these ol’ boys will go for possum too or a man if they’s feeling good.” He leers suggestively. Down the road something white is moving in the shadows among the trees. “Here comes the Mogul!” He drops the stick and runs down the road his toes changing direction every step. The woman stands on the porch. The hair is falling out of the bun on her neck. Her face is stony and expectant. He was not alone. He walked slow like for a showdown in the street and looked at me from a ways away from under his hand. He was the same as the men in the block house but different. Same beer build. Same stetson and khaki and belt. The shirt was almost clean. He carried a shotgun. A step behind him was a poolroom greaser in coveralls. Behind him, young men straggling with rifles and shotguns, eight or nine of them. The boy walked back with the Mogul trying to look as though he belonged with the group. They passed the rails and the boy said “There she is” in a low voice. He’s the same in his body but quick besides heavy. It’s just his place. It’s just the Mogul’s place. He looks at me so proud and cunning like he’s going to show the boys how no city slicker dame can get anything over on him. “Just exactly what’s this all about?” I get this lynch feeling. Not like they’re thinking of it but like it’s the first thing they would think of. Hi! Ya wanna buy a magazine? O.K. goodbye I’m going. He follows with his crew a hundred yards behind me till I get to where the mud joins the asphalt at the top of the road and they stand below laughing loud unfunny and giving each other huge pushes and slaps and whispering under the hat brims and I stand looking up at St. Mary’s Private Secondary School For Girls with its porticoes and formal shrubs and the rain begins again before the Greenbriar picks m
e up.