Katherine Dunn - Attic

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 me up.