Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

And now she screamed bloody murder, and soon she really was bleeding from banging her head over and over against that pipe, bong bong bong . Emily superfluously screeched: “She’s bleeding, she’s bleeding, can’t none of you guys see she’s B-L-E-A-T-I-N-G bleeding”-I’ll never forget her spelling it like a lamb. “I’m getting a royal,” she threatened. “Don’t do that,” said Bertie smoothly, “we can take care of this-hey, easy, O, easy, be cool, don’t jump around.”

Dion tried to hold O steady-for after her shriek I wouldn’t have laid a hand on her again for a million dollars, lemme die first-and I stared at her long white throat and the flawless prow of her chin underneath (where I had a coupla black wires even then) and those flying drops of blood spattering the wall where she kept banging her forehead on the bolt that holds the tank to the toilet. Finally she held still.

Her neck stiff, her eyeballs swiveling around the room, she spooky-fluted: “Sufferin cheeses, Ursie! What the hump happened?” She looked at me pleadingly. “Could I please talk to O in private?” I said. “Like dat’s gonna help!” objected Dion delicately, “like you can muscle her dreambox outa dere all by yourself.” “Get out,” I shrieked and they finally went. After all they only had eight feet to travel back to Bertie’s private closet, where they had the whole H bomb of laughing gas to console them-and I kicked the door shut between us and the boys and said into O’s ear:

“We shouldna fed you to the Regicide.” “Aaaa who gives a gum wrapper,” she muttered. She wouldn’t meet my eye and suddenly I could tell she’d lost her way for love-didn’t I know the signs?-and of all people, right now it was me she loved. She loved me a little, that automatically put me above her, made me her boss or was it her pimp-I mean she’d take from the others and give to me-that was the way she thought. The tears were sliding backwards down her temples into her hair. And I was even more scared of her, like hanging by my fingernails, but kinda touched. “Gimme a smoke out my pocket, would ya?” she spooky-fluted. “Reggie gave me his Luckies, ya want one?” I thought it would be, er, unchristian, not that I pass myself off as a christian, not to smoke her swag, I mean the half a battered pack she’d picked up for herself, feeding herself to the Regicide. I stuck a coupla towels behind her head, pronged two fingers into the side pocket of her skirt-her hipbone stuck up like a rock in a harbor-and worked the Luckies out. I lit one for each of us. We smoked in worried silence. I mean, her head was still stuck all this time in the toilet pipe. Brown blood matted the pale floss at her hairline.

I thought I could smell the hot blue smoke on her that blows in your gills whenever you even kiss, never mind oink, somebody for a practical reason. I was trying to think of a way to artistically make her feel better, feel sumpm, when I was almost too scared to touch her. “Er, is it any fun, oinking a guy like the Regicide?” She shrugged. “Reggie ain’t so bad,” she said. “Him and me go way back. A lot of these fuddies won’t give you carfare to welfare. Reg, if he’s got two dollars you got one.” I smiled half-heartedly. She had to stop thinking of men that way. “Here’s the hump about Reginald,” she went on, “you never come first with him, ya see. You’re one bitch, he’s probly got five or six bitches, maybe even ten or a dozen bitches. He’s like the mayor of the bitches of Reggieville and you just get one vote. He’ll even tell you that very reasonable: He’ll run your life for you if you want him to, but you’re only gonna get one vote in Reggieville. The general good of Reggieville comes first, he says. He’s gotta keep peace among the bitches, ya see.” I nodded.

“Say, Ursie. You’re the only girl I’d do it with. But I don’t exactly think of you as a girl.” Again I smiled crookedly. I didn’t dare ask her what, exactly, she thought of me as. “I don’t want to run your life,” I said. “Hey, why not?” she spooky-fluted with a spooky smile, “ain’t it fun to run somebody’s life?” “I don’t even like to run the vacuum cleaner,” I hastily lied. For I wouldn’t mind one bit running everyone’s life, and then I could tell them to run the vacuum cleaner. It was just O poisonally I was scared to boss around. Frankly I didn’t think she’d listen.

“Let’s kiss, Ursie.” She closed her eyes halfway and stuck out her tongue a little. Her head was nicely framed in the toilet pipe, wreathed in and out with tongues of platinum hair. My heart started to gong Charlie Chan style, but I thought twice. I mean her forehead was still bleeding a little and the other three Bug Motels, who were probably listening, might throw open the door-it was quiet in there, too quiet, but every now and then Dion yelled out Hurry up in there you lesbos with a whoop of goofy laughter.

So I thought twice. But I had been starving too long. She waggled that pink goldfish of a tongue and said, “Come on, Ursie. Kiss.” “Right now?” I said. “Sure.” “You got nowhere to put your head.” “So lie down on top of me.” Wincing for her, but panting like a guilty dog I lay down on top of her body in its tight peel of black and pink. And since I was literally wincing, my lips curling back in animal dread from my teeth, in went her tongue as smooth as a letter opener. O my oasis-silk crossed the border, pepper oil, dried apricots, olives, tokay, how long we went on trading like this at the water hole I don’t know, not long, when

“ Gorgeous, stupid youths -perhaps you can explain me what is the difficulty?” Came into my ears for the first time that voice, that slow, scraping violoncello of a voice, melodious against the smoke of a hundred thousand Gypsygirl cigarettes. I pitched a bit to the right to see who it was, my hand still on O’s keel-puncturing hipbone. The door had opened above us, and here was Emily dragging help by the arm after all-a stranger, a woman, probably a doctor, long necked, muscular, her gray springy hair convict-cropped, her handsome face not young. No spring chicken but a silvery winter weasel-right away I thought of Mustela erminea .

I should have been horrified, considering that I was still a Unbeknownst To Everybody. Above all no dreambox mechanic should get wind-the nerve of these royals, butting into my private life, not to mention my death, if I should choose to off myself, with the rent here as steep as it was and the grub just eatable-and if any royal should ask me flat out, I’d never talk (lemme die first). Well, the woman observing me was clearly a royal, but of some novel and dazzling subspecies that mixed me up-and I ask myself, could I have been falling in love with Zuk already?

But she was a royal, so an excuse for lying on top of O could not be far away, here it was: “Thank godzilla you came,” I panted, with Camp Chunkagunk earnest. “I couldn’t have held up her head another minute. I got her loose as far as her ears,” and I bent out those small translucent cockleshells like a medical exhibit. “Maybe we could vaseline em.”

The newcomer stood between the two open doors of Bertie’s private bathroom and private closet, running her fingers through her spiky hair, looking back and forth from the H of laughing gas to the two shrimpy and sheepish boy worshippers kneeling at its foot among the smelly shoes and tennis balls, and on to the two girlgoyles lying en sandwich with their tongues lately in each other’s mouths, one of them with her head wrapped in the toilet pipe. She wore a soft and clinging dress of sumpm pearly gray-coulda been weasel pelt. And now she began laughing, slowly, low in her throat, in a kind of disbelief. “From where you kids organize this thing?”-pointing at the H. No one said anything for a rather long time, then Bertie: “Found it.” “Where you found it?” Shifty eyes, skating round and round behind his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, no reply. “Come, tell me, what room you got it? I don’t punish, I want be sure you don’t screw up anesthesia of somebody.” “It was loose,” Bertie assured her. She snorted. “Yes, I believe you-far too much loose articles around this rich like Rockefeller hospital. So. You gave it good home. And job. But you are sure it wasn’t already employed and you liberated…?” “It was down on three. On the landing.” She nodded her approval.