Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

As for these horses, even if they were the world’s ugliest, with feet like laundry irons and drooping underlips as hairy as catfish, still they were horses and even to the seen-it-all Bug Motels, such an ancient career as horse and wagon and a load of vegetables seemed a romantic occupation, even movie starry-where else but the movies did you see a horse and wagon nowadays? The ayrabbers’ horses clopped up one street and down another with the frail rigidity of elderly mental patients. They knew the way. If the way changed, say, the street was torn away down to its brick sewer line, old Broomstick wouldn’t pull the wagon straight into the hole-he wasn’t blind-but he would stand there till tomorrow. Till he starved. Till somebody saved him, led him home to his bucket of oats and flake of hay. We could tell the horses were low beasts and the ayrabbers the lowest of the low, lower even than mental patients-dusty black wretches with caved-in chests and a few mossy crooked tombstones for teeth, even the young ones.

All the same we Bug Motels put ayrabbers, not that we knew any poisonally, up there with movie stars-in a way one end of the social ladder was as good as the other. The important thing was to live at the far end, where one more step and you fell off into nothing. Like the ayrabbers’ nags, we Bug Motels knew the way. We saw that yawning hole, the grownup world of work we weren’t ready for. For all our separate frenzies we were standing at the edge of it staring in, until we starved.

And funny how the Bug Motels, city slickers one and all, each dreamed themselves into movies of some kinda golden days gone by. Sometimes Dion got sick of Nino, his tailor, running his life and he said: “Who I really wanna be is the wild man of Druid Hill Park, hide in the bushes all day and let the lions and monkeys out of their cages at night and run around wit em.” “Ya mean naked?” “Nuttin but my hairy legs and froggies, man.” Emily was a saint in some Dark Ages nunnery living on communion wafers and dew, Bertie loved hashish because he wanted to wander around in humble disguise all night like the Caliph of Baghdad and his trusty wazir whassizname in The Arabian Nights , O was the beautiful slave girl who walked upside down on the golden daggers in her hands. And I always had this pipe dream of trekking with Broomstick, my nag, up the grassy median strip of the New Jersey Turnpike. Not that I wished to show off in my buckskins to the millions who travel that road. No, it was the only way I knew to get to New York City, which in turn was the only way I more or less knew to get to Camp Chunkagunk. I figured I could sleep over at Grandma Schapiro’s and tie Broomstick up in Central Park. After that I wasn’t so sure of the road.

I had probably killed my see-through princess, and Doctor Zuk, Madame Zuk, had bawled out my monster carelessness from high up on her horse-snorting greengold sparks from her nostrils, bareback, spume of silvery hair, spangled brassiere. And had refused to be my dreambox mechanic-would not even look down my rabbit hole, though I had clung to her ankles and begged. And now I would never have her or be her. My face hot as a frying pan for shame, swearing never to return, I bolted out the main entrance of Rohring Rohring, right under the bored nose of Lopes, the PM guard, and-maybe I was dreaming of Broomstick-ran across six lanes of traffic and four silver staves of trolley tracks, to the wide-open doors of the ayrabbers’ barn.

It was cool, dark and dusty inside, the dust dancing in great blocks in front of the open doors, and the perfume of horse manure lifting the air like a leaven, rich and tingling. Still halfblind from sunlight I walked in deeper and peered into the stalls one after the other. I was looking for Broomstick, for a nose to stroke, for some dumb creature to love me, but the cubicles were all empty though they reeked of horse piss that never dried. The straw bedding, what little there was of it on the wet cement, clung to itself in sweaty cowlicks. When I stuck my head over each gate, no Broomstick but a sharp slap of ammonia-tears sprang into my eyes. The water buckets were oily swamps of whatever had fallen in them. They stank.

Well it ain’t the Rohring Rohring of horse hospitals, I mumbled to myself-more like some horror behind the workhouse in a Dickens novel. To think old Broomstick shlepped all day, up street down street, to come home to this. The workhouse loomed blackly in front of me as it often had, the world of grownups: Doing what you didn’t like from one end of the day to the other, then shoving some unappetizing thing in your mouth, then falling exhausted into the sack. This made grownups mean and ugly before they got old, and they took it out on the young, except for Merlin of course and the rare other escapee like madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse. I knew I would not escape. I might as well weep on the neck of some pitiful nag, some circus reject like myself. Or I might become an ayrabber. If I were an ayrabber, a movie star yet the lowest of the low, I’d be good to my Broomstick, we’d be a legendary pair, known the length and breadth of Monument Street if not the New Jersey Turnpike. So where was Broomstick when I needed him? Didn’t these beasts get a day or a week off, to say nothing of a year seven months eight days, when they were sick or lame? No-one stumble and straight to the knacker. Of course you could hardly say with some of these fruit-wagon horses what was walking and what was stumbling. With some you would have said, to look at them and their eyes full of flies, they had died in their traces.

It was sumpm like being a Unbeknownst To Everybody all your life: was it life if you didn’t notice when you died, and went right on shlepping? I was a higher being: I could know my own misery, ergo I could off myself.

And just then I came to the last stall and found myself eye to eye with an animal after all. She was a big brown mare, and filthy, great clots of hairy manure hanging in her mane and crosshatching her rump, and besides that, the meanest-looking equine I ever hope to see. Not that I discerned behind her sneering lips, as yet, those teeth as long and playful as piano keys-all right at first I wasn’t properly wary, never mind that face, I still hoped to love her and scratch between her ears-but I did note that she wasn’t the dull resigned workhorse I was expecting, head drooping from withers like a soup spoon in a tired hand. I did note the possibly sinister intent with which she looked down the long brown barrel of her nose at me, as if using the thug’s bump in the middle of it as a sight.

“Probably I got sumpm in here you could eat,” I mumbled, feeling through my overall pockets for a Sugar Baby or a Pez or sumpm. She arched her neck, tucked her chin and rolled her cough-syrup-colored eyes. I found a linty green lifesaver, put it on the palm of my hand and thought about sticking it out. “So, how come you’re off work today?” I asked her cautiously. “Sick? Lame? Tired of it all? Heh-heh. Er, not confined to the quietroom for any… violent acts I hope?” She eyed me from those lowered pools of Robitussin. For some reason she seemed to be hissing. And suddenly she did a strange and hideous thing: she reared a little, the lips rolled up on those yellow piano key teeth and they crashed down hard against the gate of her stall. She made a noise like dishwater down a drainpipe, a sort of backwards belch, the air rushing in, not out, with a great froggy croak. Then she just stood there, gazing out of the bottoms of her eyes, looking bad, dazed and satisfied-like a mental patient who’s thinking she’s really done it this time with that old dreamboxoline, while she’s still vaporously elated and just a little wild and woozy, before she pukes up her guts or jumps out the window.