Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

Did this mean I was her beloved? Or she was mine? Maybe from Zuk it meant nothing at all. She left the room, tuneless harp of refrigerator shelf, jiggle of bottles, and was back again carrying two small glasses of pee-colored stuff. “ Stolat -may you live a hundred years.” She tossed one down. “Ugh, what is it?” “Is very good vwodka -the best-just drink. Or don’t drink, I don’t care. Come, greedy baby, sit next to me.” And she sat.

I sat at the far end of the white sofa and the lure of her presence came swirling around me like a surf. Then it was all undertow dragging me to her. A hum rose in my ears, my blood rushed by, trying to get to her, and my flesh went hot from resisting her current. Her large face was still, that was a kind of trick with her, she smiled the least smile and it surrounded me, a broth, a sea, a weather. I was a potato in the soup of her, no, a piece of soup flesh with bone. I was essential to her, and at the same time I was dissolving in her. “What you are doing?” she said. I was taking my clothes off piece by piece. There weren’t many pieces. “My god, stop this,” she said, clutching her spiky hair and laughing, “they can come at every minute.” Then I was sitting there naked and evening was all around us, breathing on the mosquito net and purpling the open windows. She gazed at me with as much delight as alarm. Finally she said:

“You are not mental patient and now is good, very good, I never was your psychiatrist. Shall I tell you? All my life I have dreamed of a girl like you, fierce, strong, beautiful and sly. Hungry like young blackbird who eats forty times a day. Nerve like one who hangs from rope and washes windows of skyscrapers. Muscle like girl who flies on trapeze in circus. Awake like bandit. A singer, a player of dombro, she comes, she comes like the fourteenth day of the moon. And then reads secret tracks of wild animals in wood. And all the better, Miss Bogey, that you have no mother or father to lick and pet you and bring you soft things to eat. As they say where I come from: Better to be a fox in the mountains than mother’s darling, I speak now of effect on character. A long time I wish to know a child like you. It is feast to look on you. But self-explanatorizing, my dear, I do not touch you.” “You mean never?” I said. It was true she had never touched me, but we two were outcasts now. “Because I am-because-you are young person,” she said, “very young.”

She had been about to say Because I am psychiatrist , but of course that wouldn’t matter unless I was a mental patient, and she had just said-hadn’t she just said?-I was no more mental patient than she was. “I’m not a mental peon anymore,” I said, “maybe I never really was one. I’m almost eighteen years old and I’m not even buggy, you said it yourself, and you never were my dreambox mechanic even if I needed a dreambox mechanic, and I’m not going back to the bughouse, Merlin won’t make me go back to the bughouse if I have any other place to go, so I figure I’m going to Caramel-Creamistan-with you. What the hump did I get better for if I can never have you or be you?” I think I was almost convincing her. Her hand, which kinda reminded me of an old gray root, floated above my knee, but then, bargaining, it turned over: “Of course,” she explained, “if you first touch me…”

This isn’t a comic book, but the blat of the doorbell came right then. “My god, where to hide you,” she whispered. With me stark naked it was too late for the balcony, and never mind that about not touching me-she yanked me by the elbow to my feet and stuffed me into a closet. In the dark I breathed her perfumed coats. By feel I must be in the chilly, shiny folds of a mink and again doubt overtook me: either she was the top Soviet spy of all Caramel-Creamistan or somewhere along the road to Rohring Rohring she had been some rich fuddy’s concubine, or wife.

“Hey, how ya doin, it’s the Regicide” came crackling out of the speaker system. “I am here to tell yall ladies, if yall still there, that Dr. Foofer has done bought it, correctimento the chief of treatment is no more, he dead as your pockabook, and serious heat is collecting to come in your building and beat the bushes for the Bogeywoman. Lucky for yall they set me to watching the lobby. And I hate to tell you, Doctor Zook, but you is persona niggerata round here. O the things they is saying about yall two. Meanwhile they watching the place, you hear, so if yall want out, Tuney and Chug be by the dumpster in fi minute, got that, fi minute, that’s yall only chance.”

I stuck my head out of the closet. “Ask him why he’s sticking his neck out like this,” I whispered, “he doesn’t like either one of us that much.” “Please explain your interest for us,” Doctor Zuk said into the grating. “Do I hear that hard-head Bogeywoman talking up there?” Reginald crackled back, “sassing everybody who tryna help as usual… O sent me, you hear that, Bogeygirl? She want you out the bughouse before she have to cut you and wind up in trouble her own self.” I pushed past Doctor Zuk and hissed into the grating: “You better be good to O, kotex sniffer, or pretty soon she’ll have your hairy onions on a plate.” “Yeah and I butter em and make your mama lick em.” “My mama’s beyond being riled by fuddy onions,” I said, “say, Reg-are you and O really getting married?” Long pause, then: “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.” “Cheese, good luck,” I whispered. “I still take your sister’s phone number,” Reginald added. “Eat hump,” I said. “Fi minutes, ladies. You pay Tuney and Chug good, you hear? Be down they in fi minutes, better make that fo.”

HOW LOVE GOT US OUT OF THERE

“My dear Bogey, now we have big adventure before us. You must rely on me, I know what I am doing in this business of fly away fast. With my father the Beetle I spend half my life escaping, you understand me? You must follow me and what I do you also do. You can follow?” If Zuk wanted to be wood wizardess, I would be her half-pint scout. I nodded. “I come right back,” Zuk slightly panted, kicking off her sandals and dropping her silky dress to the floor as she went. I watched the round pale planets of her buttocks recede, the articulate rather nasty wink of her black string bikini.

I nodded like a sleepwalker. I wasn’t even scared, not yet. A kind of gauze, like mosquito net, a white nuptial dream, had settled over everything. I was eloping with Doctor Zuk. They went south , the Bug Motels would say when they heard, hospital parlance for never coming back. Zuk and me, we were turning into one thing. In a white daze, I plunked down in the hall while I waited and buckled on her silver sandals, sumpm I’d always wanted to do. And clomped up and down a bit. I was amazed how comfy they were-a little big.

She came back buttoning up the vest inside a European fuddy’s pinstripe suit a lot like Foofer’s, only gray. And combing her strong ugly fingers through her hair, which lay flat and gleaming under some kinda gunk. And now she unfolded big square black sunglasses across her face. Her exotic face had always been big, now it was big, fuddy and tough. “Cheese,” I said, “you’re a man. Not even short.”

“Don’t get wrong idea. Is not what you think,” she said. “Sometimes you see I like to go at night in places where women don’t go. Boxing match, for instance. With little help”-she held a fan of grizzled mustache against her upper lip-“nobody gives me trouble.” “Doctor Zuk,” I asked sternly, “are you a spy?” She laughed. “Yes, I am spy-I admit is bad for character, but at least I don’t spy for fatherland-I spy for myself alone. Now, Bogey, we must dress you in big hurry-ach-” She saw her silver sandals on my feet. “How they are ugly, your feet- pfui ,” she said, “why I never notice this before, like goat feet…”