Katherine Dunn - Attic

They took the Bible away with Mad Patsy. We have a book, very carefully preserved. A western paperback taken from a John Wayne movie McClintock and we have all read it several times carefully on the bunk between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner. The first two pages and the last six are missing. Nobody discusses it and between readings Kathy keeps it under the mattress on the empty bunk in the key-cell where the matrons never look. There was a newspaper a while ago maybe a week or so ago and we took turns reading it — reading every word about weddings and deaths and stock market numbers and recipes and on the top left-hand column of the fourth page there was a blurred dot photo of Aldous Huxley from the armpits up very gray with Gothic letters HUXLEY DIES and a paragraph and I had never liked him I remember reading Brave New World in high school English class when we were proud to be so sophisticated and analyzed and sat at the desk with my legs crossed at the knee with my body long leaning away from my legs with desk smooth in front of me leaning on one elbow on the desk with my face resting in my hand just so the index finger could smooth in and out of the deep hollow between my cheekbone and forehead beside the eye and slip down to the strong hard muscle just where my lower jaw joins the skull and feel how smooth my cheeks and lean when my mouth pursed to say to or you . And he was dead and I always thought he was a fool and talked too much, not wrong you see but a fool and the paper was a month and a half old when it came in wrapped around the new mop for C tank. I almost cried — tried to even but was too tired — about all the old guard dead and dying and who was there to take their place even if they were fools who was fool enough to take their place and I used to let the pencil hang slack between my finger and thumb in my left hand with the wrist bent slightly and the forearm balanced but dangling off the back of the chair and moved it slightly, just for me, counting when I made a point in the green room with green blackboards and the low windows raining and we few so bright young reading and talking in earnest impressive voices for each other and some they we had heard about which was supposed to discover us if our voices had the proper timbre.

I can’t remember how long it’s been since my last period. I know it’s been since I joined the magazine crew because Horace caught me taking time off from the route to buy Tampax and there has been no man though the lawyer and the detective tried to make out that it was just a front for prostitution and the boys and girls traveling together and I would have and they hinted around but there was never any time and we were always so tired and nobody on the crew ever except maybe Horace and his silver-haired German who was not Mrs. He always wore clothes like a Texas oil man in the movies and spoke with a Texas accent and when I first joined he wasn’t there for a week and they were waiting for him to get out of jail for beating up one of the boys but nobody mentioned it and it was as though he had been away on a business trip and I wanted to I remember in all the rooms and houses where men were alone and maybe they would have but I didn’t know how to make them only how to be made so I couldn’t be pregnant or maybe the laser it’s so hard to remember how long has it been? Not since I’ve been here I know at least five months then but my belly is fat evenly and not swollen or pooched. I haven’t been horny much here. Once in a while when somebody’s talking very specifically or in the bunk alone at night but never just generally horny I have to think of some particular time before — some moment when it was particularly hot with somebody in particular. Even then there’s just a kind of nostalgic shudder, no need for relief, no hunger, just the memory of hunger.

I haven’t got the energy for it. I am so tired all the time and I do nothing. There is nothing to do. On Friday mornings we clean the tank — change sheets, sweep and mop and wax the floors — dust the bars — change uniforms but there are thirty of us now and it’s all over in twenty minutes and we sit on the tight stretched bunks in the clean smell of ammonia and wait for the gospel to begin on the speaker so there will be something to complain about — but there is never anything real. Sometimes if somebody’s uniform doesn’t fit or the coffee’s not hot enough in the morning or we hear about something on the grapevine we make trouble. The others do. They rattle things against the bars and curse and run up and down the bull pen screaming mad but somebody comes, the matron or the Sheriff. If it’s Glad-Ass there’s more screaming and they throw things at her. Once Rose hit her from the far end of the bull pen with a thick crockery ice cream bowl — she drew her arm back and the curling pit hairs nudged out of her short sleeve and flung her whole body straight after the arm and the bowl didn’t turn in the air but still as glass moved over the heads, between the bars and caught Glad-Ass right at the base of the skull with her stiff hair glued down under and didn’t break when it hit her but fell to the floor and starred under the glaze and Glad-Ass turned around and yelled who did that and everyone got quiet and Glad-Ass threatened no TV and Rose stepped out leaning forward over her belly with her arms stiff with fists beside her and her delicate head forward on the long neck and it all blew over. Usually it’s not Glad-Ass, it’s Mrs. Eliot and she tsks and sympathizes and compromises and explains and everybody feels bad about causing her trouble or the Sheriff jokes them out of it and nothing happens. I like all this and lie on my bunk looking through the bars at it.

He was just a puppy furry and slept on the bed and one night it was so cold I put him under with me and when I touched myself there he started to lick there too — his tiny tongue so fast — and after that I would put him between my legs and put his head there and he would lick — until one night there was blood there and first he licked and then he bit me there his teeth like needles in the raw part and I threw him across the room and felt and found the blood and thought he had done it — I held the mirror there and saw the tooth marks and the blood coming from somewhere else and he lying still with his head bent under in the corner — I put him in the garbage can and said he hadn’t come back when I let him out that night — we all walked up and down the streets whistling and calling and I cried when we couldn’t find him and didn’t tell about the blood until the next time it came.

She is one of the three ugliest women I ever met. She weighed four hundred pounds at least and her teeth were gaping black and tiny tight against the gum and she tied her greasy hair back so her small head sat high up and far away on the six-foot lump of her and the creases of fat at the back of her head rolled straight into the hump on her back with no neck her bottom chin folded under the roll over her collarbones. Her eyes ugh how small. Like a sow she was but without a sow’s egotism. She knew how ugly she was. She was stupid and shy and wrung her hands and cried if anyone spoke harshly to her they kept telling her about getting her teeth fixed she was dirty and stuttered and when we went through Salt Lake City she looked at the Tabernacle all the time and said that’s Joe Smith no nails it’s gold and they wouldn’t stop the car so she cried.

Sometimes at night after supper the TV goes on. It sits all day on a platform hung from the bull pen bars but nobody pays any attention to it. Somebody just walks up and turns it on I guess we could watch it anytime but nobody ever does except after supper. Mostly cops and robbers and cowboys. Once there was a cowboy story with old-time nuns trucking around saving heathens and one was very young and brave named Sister Blendina and before that she had just been Blendina but after that everybody called her Sister Blendina to each other. No one ever called her anything to her face because no one ever spoke to her or about her in 4 cell. I don’t watch TV. I can’t follow the stories. I can’t concentrate. I see it for a few minutes and then think of something else or fall asleep. Kathy watches it a lot and hits it just right when it needs tuning or fiddles with the antennae.