2.23.05Resurrection
By Ashley O'Dell
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The town my mailbox was assigned to was Castalia, population 300, but technically, the house I lived in wasn't even in Castalia, but on a highway, NC State Road 56, a two lane highway stretching from Louisburg (population 3,000) to Castalia and all points beyond. I lived across the street from a farm equipment auction lot whose bright lights were like a beacon through the "Silence of the Lambs" fog I drifted in beinh the wheel of my 1967 Mercedes sedan, curb feelers skimming through the humidity like Pixar bug arms off a parade float -- going 65 mph, of course.
Most of the buildings were abandoned: houses, stores, slave quarters, all standing a foot and a half off the ground. Landlords treated their rental properties the way college students treat couches. Someone will use it until it's no longer usable. Then someone with even lower standards or fewer means of having higher standards will come along, and hey - that couch has a couple more sits in it, and that house has a couple more months of rent check to squeeze out of it.
You may not be able to get blood from a turnip, but you can get $150 for a room of a house that makes the Paper Street house from Fight Club look palatial. But at some point, the landlord gives up, or he kicks out the tenants, and the fire department comes and sets the house ablaze as a training exercise. They hang around and chew the fat for a while, and then they leave the house to blaze and crackle in a frozen field of soybeans while juiced-up Ford pickups rumble by, shotguns clanking around in the backseat, fishing poles upright in tubes attached to the grills in front.
The house I poked around in had been taken over by little saplings, dogwood thickets half bent over from the occasional devastating hurricane or tornado. The house was askance, but not as bad as some of the places you still see used as garages, and I climbed into it, my own leaning tower. The windows were foggy and dirty, and mostly broken out, and the floor so bowed and warped that even I had to stoop on the ground floor. I climbed the stairs to the second floor, where there was more light, as half of the roof had fallen away.
Upstairs I found things in an expected state of disarray. But this was human disarray. There were bed posts carved like Mexican molinillos, chocolate stirrers, and probably some of the planks on the floor had been a bed; Women's small-heeled shoes, the inner liner curled, the glue hardened; old-fashioned men's shoes, laces eaten away; thin patterned cloth belts to some shirtwaist dress long turned into nesting and soil; bottles of hard liquor they don't even make anymore, some empty, some full (a rural North Carolinian may leave their shoes behind in an emergency, but their liquor?); and the two items I took with me. One was a bottle of Rawleigh's Internal Linament, half full, which I wish t' God I hadn't opened, but I did, and the other was a patchwork doll. This doll was homemade, it was obvious, stitched together from now-turquoise and pink scraps, with a round head, handless arms, and footless legs. A little yarn face faintly designated eyes, nose, and mouth. The inside was made of cotton batting, which had only come out through a small chewed area near the back of a knee, tasted by a mouse and rejected. The doll had laid on its back for decades, while the house bent and broke around it, while the man who'd worn those old formal shoes and the woman whose dress was missing a belt told their little girl they'd get her a new one, someday. Maybe.
In Arizona, the squatters take over the houses -- gangsters, illegals, Hot Topic runaways who share cloves and Mad Dog 20/20 and try to claim the place as their own by writing in Sharpie on the busted faux adobe. They sweat in fear of the Vatos, the pigs, or La Llorona - Bloody Mary - that may bust in the door at any second. Kangaroo rats and scorpions and kissing bugs and black widow spiders crawl on their backpacks, or at least that's what they imagine. The buildings don't stay that way for long, though. As the sprawl does what it tends to do, abandoned buildings go the way of the saguaro boots - the hollowed and dried out belly button caves carved out by animals, sometimes found among the decomposing log of a centuries-old saguaro - which is to say, they get mixed into the same bulldozer-scraped compost pile as the ocotillo, cracked in the sun plastic toys, creosote bushes, and bunny holes, and trucked away to the dump to make room for more pink houses.
In New York, the buildings get graffitied over and over again. People come in the night to paste up huge posters. Anarchists and bloggers put up stickers against war and fashion. Crazy people sleep on the stoops, their heads wrapped in newspaper wrapped in the black plastic bags particular to the region. If the abandoned building happens to be a family relic, a crazy lady sleeps on the top floor, washing her socks in the sink, cooking cream of corn on a hot plate, and petting her black cat, while the ornate front of the building rusts away. The buildings, supported on either side, die standing up, like fans sometimes do at packed rock concerts, held aloft only by the crushing crowds on all sides. Eventually, an investor comes along, buys out the crazy family member, buys the building, airs it out, mercilessly Bob Vila-s it to within an inch of its shaftway, and sells each floor for a million dollars. Either that or dozes it and turns it into a parking lot so jammed it makes the word "jelly" look like its not pulling its weight, Porche 911s and Kia Sephias as close together as the words are on this very screen.
But in North Carolina, where space is not at a premium, these houses sit. They don't just sit, they set. They see-yit. And people don't tend to nose around them too much.
I soaked that doll in Woolite in the sink and dried it on the windowsill. I stitched up the hole in its leg. For all intents and purposes, it could have been sitting in one of those dreadful antiques stores in Boone, for $80, never to be sold.
But though I emptied that bottle of Rawleighs, soaked it, ran it through the dishwasher again and again, filled it with bleach, scrubbed it with Bon Ami, it was impregnated with the foul smell of seventy-year old fermented blueberry quack medicine. Amazingly, people were selling this very stuff on eBay, empty bottles and half-full bottles, like mine had been. Were they crazy? Probably.
The very thought of the smell that resided in its glass was enough to make me queasy. Maybe there's some of that indefinable devil terror forever embedded in the chunky cotton batting of that doll. Maybe it's just rotten blueberries and alcohol been settin' too long.
I had to chuck that stupid bottle out. It wasn't just the torment of leaves and ice storms swallowed by a gutted home that it held. It was the sweaty, long-ago rush of eviction and abandonment. It was the amnesia of sixty, seventy years that had left the abandoned house still twitching. It was the still-rippling whatever that had caused the last people who lived here to leave the way they did. And maybe it was that some living thing had ripped off that scab and dug at the nerve endings of a dead, failed home.
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Ptiza Odelay was created in a factory by Nazi scientists during World War II. She was to be the ultimate weapon against the Allies, but before she grew into maturity in her birthing tank, the war ended and the project was scrapped. Years later, she was found still in her tank in a hidden sub-basement of a warehouse in Berlin and inadvertently shipped to the United States. During transit the casing of the tank was ruptured and she was born seemingly in her early twenties with all of the knowledge of mankind programmed into her brain. She speaks eighty languages and has been known to crush diamonds with her bare hands. She is wanted in twenty countries and was last seen diving into an active volcano somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In her spare time, she writes popular children's fiction, erotica and groundbreaking journalism under the name Ashley "Danger" O'Dell.
© 2005 Me Three