Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

What was worse, this news made it impossible even to think of going back to the bughouse. Tell them I had a social disease at Rohring Rohring? Inform Foofer, Mursch and Hageboom, and Doctor Zuk ? Lemme die first.

“Say there, mayor’s daughter. You got nothing gone on? I take you junkin, for fi dolla.” I could have kissed him. How contagious could I be if Tuney would have me on his junk wagon? The next thing I hear is Cowpea peacefully grinding oats on the other side of the wall, then a bell-studded horse collar jingling. “Fi dolla,” Chug protested, “what she get out of it?” “Ima learn this young woman junking, show her my M.O., ain’t that worth fi dolla? Maybe aft awhile she drag in sumpm good and she make back that fin.” “You oughta leave that child in peace,” Chug grumbled, “you done showed her enough M.O. already.”

Tuney and Cowpea came around the corner and peaceful is not the word for Cowpea once attached to that junk wagon. The devil mare had died in her traces. There were zombie x ’s where her red eyeballs used to be. Her head bobbed a little at the bottom of the sliding board of her neck. Somehow her knees went up and down like crude pistons mechanically raising the weight of her feet. “What happened to her?” I said, figuring they had pumped some kinda dope in her. “She just like to go,” Chug said slowly.

I practically bounded into that wagon myself. I was a cockroach and a Unbeknownst To Everybody, a murderer and a disgrace, but I wasn’t dead to the glamour of ayrabbing. It was sumpm like going in the French Foreign Legion. Tuney piled the reins in his lap but didn’t bother to hold them. He slouched down under his fedora, leaned back and whistled around his two gold teeth. Cowpea clopped off towards the great blocks of dust-swimming sunlight up front. Chug walked alongside the wagon advising me: “Don’t you be giving this alley rat one nucka that money, you hear? You gone need that money.” “Tomorrow will tell,” Tuney piped down from the wagon, “you thank you somebody cause you oink the mayor’s daughter. Just remember who turn her out.”

Up front at the Broadway entrance a loiterer leaned in the doorway. The long pencil-thin legs said it was a fuddy; he was wearing white like an intern, or a busboy, but the evening sun behind him turned him black. To this sightseer I would be a junker, a white orphan fallen among ayrabbers and raised by them as their own child. I slouched down next to Tuney and whatever he did I did. I got set to hawk that sidewalk for anything loose like I’d been in a junk wagon all my life.

Then the wagon stopped. “Say there, Nurse Blanchard. How them loonies today? How all them Napoleons and Virgin Marys over there cross the road?” “I about to ask you the same question, Tuney, seeing as the top loonie be over here this afternoon, visiting you.” And a hard hand closed around my upper arm. It was the Regicide, who appeared to be well known in the ayrabbers’ barn. With one swift jerk, he pulled me off the wagon and straightened me on my feet. He was not as gentle as usual and I could tell he was displeased. “This litta Miss Razorblade,” Reggie introduced me to Tuney and Chug with a shake of my arm. “Yall look out she don’t push yall down no third-floor laundry chute. Course she only do her friends like that. Seein as yall strangers, maybe you safe.” Then he said to me with grim cheer: “Ready, Miss Razorblade?”

Chug burst out laughing, ho ho ho. “Way the joke at?” Reginald asked. Chug said: “This slick nigger Turpentine bragging bout how he turn out the mayor’s daughter. Come to find out he turned out a half-growed he-she lunatic from cross the street who only want to feed his horse, ho ho ho. Wait till Itchie hear that.” “So? You the one oinked her,” Tuney said sullenly, “you know I don’t mess with no wimmins.” “I seriously hope yall gentlemens have not taken advantage of this mentally sick teenager,” the Regicide exclaimed, “my, my, how many years yall get for that, with yalls records?”

“I never oink her,” said Chug, “this he-she? It take another kind of freak to figga out how to oink sumpm like that. I never oink her. I pity her.” “That’s what you call that? pitying? I never know you do that pitying with your pants down round your ankles, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e ,” Tuney commented. “I never oink her,” Chug insisted. “I never oink her either,” said Tuney. “You can take her to a doctor,” Chug went on, “she as cherry as Suburban Club Almond Smash, no lie.” “Don’t worry, you guys, I was seventeen in April,” I put in, “I can oink anybody I want.” “You a lie, Princess Razorblade,” Reginald said, shaking me by the arm again, “you know you ain’t but fi’teen years old. Why you want to drag these boys down?” “I’m seventeen and I never said I was princess razorblade either and you know it.” “She say she be princess sumbuddy sumbuddy,” Tunie reported, the dirty snitch. “Them paranoids be the toughest nuts to crack,” Reginald explained, “seeing as they not only think they Jesus, they know how to fake like they don’t think it.” “She thank she Jesus?” Chug asked in alarm. “Well… in her case, Moses,” Reg said. “How about you just oink yourself, Regicide,” I hissed, “I’m going junking with these guys and don’t try to talk me out of it.” “You maybe probly like to go junking with these fools,” Reg said softly, “I don’t put it past you, but I tell you, Princess Razorblade, I don’t figga these gentlemens will take you. I think they done took back. I think they changed they mind.”

I stared at the traitors and my mouth fell open in an O. Yes, here was the O face, the terrible face of a woman wronged, and in some wonderment I felt myself wearing it. In the privacy of my dreambox, I always used to sneer a little when girlgoyles wept over their boyfriends, believing, secretly, that all the girls, and especially my sister Margaret, got what they deserved for putting up with these bullies and fuddies. Now suddenly it dawned on me that the O look went with the territory-you got cow drek on your shoes if you lived in Holland, sand in your shoes if you lived in Arabia, and an O paper-punched on your face if you pinned your hopes to fuddy men and were forever thinking of men that way . For the first time to be a Unbeknownst To Everybody seemed to me a stroke of fortune, even of good fortune, or at least I could see how a girl like O might sometimes envy a freak like me.

Meanwhile, “Unh-unh,” “No sir,” “No way,” “No Princess Moses Razorblade on my junk wagon,” Tuney and Chug were muttering. “Cheese, you guys are scared of a measly mental patient? When I was the mayor’s daughter you weren’t backing out.” Chug and Tuney looked at each other. “Mayor’s daughter sumpm different,” Chug announced gravely. “Mayor’s daughter can cay for herself,” Tuney agreed. “Anyhow I don’t got to worry bout the mayor’s daughter,” Chug continued. “No more’n she worry bout me,” Tuney added.

“I’m never speaking to either of you again,” I said.

Chug and Tuney looked at each other again and, “ She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e ,” “Ho ho ho ho,” laughed a little sheepishly. “You just make that a promise and we be satisfied,” Tuney said.

“Come on now, litta Miss Razorblade.” I wrenched my arm away from Reggie but followed him toward the street.

HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

“Them is two raidin lootin thievin evildoin niggers through and through, what got no more civilization between the two of em than a pair of wrong-matched snakes,” Reggie fussed as soon as we were out of hearing. “You really lay your body down for them two?” He shuddered. “Your taste so low you could mine coal in it.” “What’s wrong with coal?” I replied testily, “I needed the money. Besides, what’s good enough for O is good enough for me. I can be as hard as O, you watch”-and I cut him a richly signifying look. But he didn’t catch the poisonal tilt of my remark. “That girl got to stop thinking bout menfolks that way,” he observed piously. “Not counting you I guess,” I said. “Huh? what you said?” “I know you oinked her in the broom closet, you hypocrite. I shoulda snitched on you.” “I never oinked no mental patient, and if I did she was sane at the time,” Reg said blandly.