Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“That night Ableemooch heads for Grandmother Bearsquaw’s den with the ball of sumpm disgusting. Ableemooch is in a good mood and hungry and he thinks to himself, ‘That little ball of food looks disgusting, but it must be kinda good if Gooskuk liked it so much. I’ll take a tiny bite.’ So he does and then he takes another and another and he can’t stop eating it. The ball doesn’t get any smaller and Ableemooch thinks pretty soon his belly is gonna burst. But he knows that Grandmother Bearsquaw will make him pay a million wampums’ worth of corn or berries or sumpm to take the ball of sumpm disgusting away .

“Just then Gooskuk comes walking along and Ableemooch says, ‘Gooskuk, if you’ll take this ball away you can swipe my lunch whenever you want.’ ‘Okay,’ Gooskuk says, and he does it . And that’s where Doggett left off.” I waited for Lou Rae to say o rats, but she didn’t. “So I figure tomorrow night Gooskuk probably gets hungry and takes a bite of the ball of sumpm disgusting and on and on and back and forth… What do you think?”

The hard-boiled egg yolk moon ploughed into a blue cloud and turned into a pirate ship. Lou Rae sighed desolately and whispered back, “I despise those boring Chunkagunk legends that go on and on and around and around and refuse to end.” “Well, like Gooskuk says, to a silly rabbit the world is what it is, gunk for lunch, over and over. That’s why a brave girlgoyle has to fast someday, to find out what’s for dinner, that is, if she ever wants to eat anything but stewed worms.” “I fast between candy bars,” Lou Rae murmured. It was true she was the pickiest eater at Chunka Chow, and, except for her amazingly big momps, as thin as a birdleg. “Anyway that is the legend of the lost chunkagunk, the magic food of Gooskuk that never runs out or gets any less.” “How repulsive,” said Lou Rae. “Well, yeah, course it is. If it was any good they’d run out of it. But this way nobody starves, not even if they want to.”

The moon hurried on, always in the same place, a whippoorwill sang and we thought this over. “So how does Grandmother Bearsquaw get her ball of food back?” Lou Rae asked. “She doesn’t. There’s always more of that where that came from,” I reminded her. “I know where the lost chunkagunk got lost,” Lou Rae mumbled sleepily. “Where?” I asked, then I heard her lacy snore.

So Doggett tented us together and probably hoped I would drag Lou Rae behind me to Evening Pro and Chunka Chow and Wood Wiz and Lake Sci (and by now I was thinking grimly: Why these bleached-bra Christian girls from Maine have to cuten the entire world with nicknames I don’t know) but exactly the opposite happened. Pretty soon I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody and I wanted to be near Lou Rae. Pretty soon I would rather hang around Lou Rae than please Mrs. Doggett, the excellent old dame with a meringue of white hair on top who ran Camp Chunkagunk from the turret of the lodge. Mrs. Doggett was rarely seen, but she knew everything that went on, and she had shown me her favor. She was top queen and I was bottom girl, I mean I was the Bogeywoman, once wild but now tame. She picked me to be herself on Upside Down Day, let me rule the camp with her long old-fashioned spyglass for a scepter and even dressed me in her lilac crepe, measly in the shoulders, baggy at the waist-she stuffed a towel in the widow’s hump herself. And she went around with a bowl-cut mophead on her head and blue-veined legs sticking out of my camp shorts like columns of Roquefort cheese.

But now I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. All at once camp, which had always been swampy with life for me, thick with acts, canoeing the rich dark lake, tracking the amorous woods, trying to get the eye of the older girls -all at once camp seemed busy and in the way.

This was that morning I had been doing the dead man’s float and suddenly wanted to put my hand between my Lake Twinny’s long green legs, and so found out what a Bogeywoman really was. I was out beyond the White Caps’ rope, swimming with the other White Caps around and around the float farthest out in the cold white lake, careful like never before, lemme drown first, not even to brush another girl’s toe with my finger tips. I thought of Lou Rae: way in, out of sight, Lou Rae was dog-paddling through oyster-purple shallows, tearing them shaggy with her fellow Red Caps, all on the verge of panic, most of them little girls half her age. Then thank godzilla a whistle blew. Lake Sci ended. Our little cove of Missionary Lake emptied. The water flattened to a mirror. A double file of campers snaked slowly up the steep stair cut into the bluff, and at the top two counselors, two older girls as tall as priestesses, let go two drops of alcohol into the ears of two girls one step down. The holes in your ears would open as you walked away, with a furry and satisfying pop.

I looked around for Lou Rae. Usually we met here at the bottom, went up the stairs together and got our ears popped together, but she was gone. I knew she couldn’t have drowned. No Red Cap, however in love with death, could tangle herself in the duck lettuce and drown, for her Lake Twinny would holler and older girls would blow their whistles and in a moment she would be spotted in the cold brown tea washing about everybody’s shins. And even if she had thrown away her Red Cap they would haul her up by her yard of hair. I let go of this beautiful nightmare: No, Lou Rae hadn’t drowned but had given me the slip before I could talk her into going to Wood Wiz. She figured me for some kind of enforcer for Doggett and the wood wizardess-which maybe I was. I felt the blood swarm in my cheeks. I tried to head for the Wood Wiz tracking sand pit but my feet bent like dowsing rods towards Lou Rae. I went to our tent at the end of the tentline.

And that was how I found her, sitting on a spar under a green tent flap with her feet dangling above the weeds. Tell me she wasn’t trying to cook my goose: There wasn’t a blessed thread on her front, except for the grapey bunches of her hair. On her head was that pancake stack of maple leaves, fixed on with bobby pins, and she had two silver dollars of gray mud on her pink cheeks.

Today I knew what I was-to get the eye of the older girls, I ran the fastest when I was watched; when all those eyeballs lightened the air, my feet vibrated like violins. And now my fingers buzzed to find the fairy body under that hair. I put one bitten nail to the mud on her face instead.

“For the complexion,” she explained, in that honking contralto that always took me by surprise-there’s sumpm so touching in a beauty who thinks she needs to be funny. “Even Indian princesses wear the lost chunkagunk-for the complexion.” “Er-are you a princess?” (I wanted to kiss her bare brown foot with the chipped Revlon Candy Apple polish still clinging in patches to three of its five toes. I wanted her to say she’d run the world if I would give it to her, since I could give it to her if she wanted it. I mean, she did run it. She ran mine.)

“No,” she said sadly. She was holding that white metal bandaid box full of mud, with a pencil sticking out of it. We had the last tent in the tentline, miles from any water. I suspected she had spit in the dry dirt in the can or probably even peed in it, half out of laziness, half to ripen its powers. Lou Rae made up religion as she went along.

“You could be my princess,” I said shyly. She looked up at me with curiosity and I saw, the size of a flea, a blond-bearded long-faced billy goat totter on spindly hind legs across the amber clearings of her eyes, chewing a tin can-was that what she saw in me? I shrank into my shoulders. I wished my neck would eat my head, so I could disappear.