Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“Holy godzilla did you see that? A giant pig just jumped up from the mud bank right there between the cypress knees and trotted into the bush. Cheese, look at the bald spot-that’s where it was wallowing. Where the hump is this place and where are we headed? [ Sniff, sniff .] Ya know I know it sounds perverse when there’s water water everywhere, but I swear I smell smoke…”

“Speaking of smoke, speaking of meat, what you suppose is feast day game of men in all Karamul-Karamistan? I tell you. Is kind of crazy polo with carcass of sheep. First they cut throat, like that, kr-r-r-ch . Then they race around like crazy on strong little ponies, and tear sheep apart with bare hands. Who has biggest piece at end, wins.”

“Wins what? Cheese, there goes another pig, with big black spots. You see any farms? See any peanut fields? Must be a pig gone wild, I mean, you know, a feral pig. What the hump is this godzilla forsaken place?”

Outside the portholes, thorny-vine and creepy-briar shot straight up the tree trunks, fifty sixty feet in the air. Bulrushes brushed peacefully by, then, rat-a-tat-tat on the Jenghiz Khan , a canebrake was playing our bottom like a snare drum. Doctor Zuk stuck her head out the gangway. I stuck mine out next to hers. “Where the hump-” “Hush, Bogey. Make like you speak no English. Do like Fazool, whatever he does, you do it too. Hallo-o-o-o!” she shouted. Fazool grinned his square grin and waved. Zuk waved. I waved. A streaky tin roof swam into view, then a Nehi Orange Crush sign, its orange weathered to that shy flamingo that pleases me best of all colors. On the bank a galvanized steel privy sailed by, its door banging in the wind.

“Hey what is this place?” Then I saw sumpm like thick pink cellophane-a bulge of peat water gushing over a slimy spillway. And before I knew it I was tilted back like in a roller coaster. Holy godzilla, a winch was hauling the Jenghiz Khan up a coupla boat rails. A Popeye-looking fuddy in khakis was working it. I read a sign on a shack, UNITED STATES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS. I was on the point of yelling Help me I been kidnapped , when I remembered I hadn’t been kidnapped, I’d been saved. “Where the hump are we or I’ll scream,” I screamed. Luckily the winch chasing over the metal frets was loud as a Gatling gun, and nobody heard me, not even myself.

Then a red lake was opening out in front of us as far as the eye could see. “Wow, how the hump did that get here? What-” “Hush-only little while longer now,” Zuk said. Fazool steered the Jenghiz Khan left along the shore. “You, Bogey, keep eye open like owl for Ditch Number 19. Ditches don’t have signs like streets so is important, very important, you watch and count.”

The lake: red like the bilge that laps the toilet bowl the first day you’re on the rag-and a few cypress knees sticking out of it like hairy upside-down carrots. “So what about The Beetle?” I dared to whisper (I had never asked about her father before.) “I figure he grew up eating kreplach in Plock or somewhere, just like my Zayde Schapiro…”

“Ah, you speak of Mr. Zuk,” she replied stiffly. “What means this-kreplach?” She made a face. “Mr. Zuk was champion fencer at Jagiellonian University. Son of famous doctor of geophysics from Warsaw. He wrote not only in Yiddish-sometimes in Polish, sometimes French. Even before start of war, even before Polish Communists die in Russia, is over with him and communism. He trusted nobody. Karamul-Karamistan you know is never spoon of his mouth. Even in Karamul-Karamistan, for eleven years we are running. He is at home nowhere, and that temporarily saved his neck. Place of safety, place of danger-I am accustomed to flux of this, perhaps I even like it. In Karamul-Karamistan I learn to eat every kind of food. I learn to watch all night from rock in desert while in tent Mr. Zuk write stories which nobody now reads. Mr. Zuk is thin like walking stick. Mr. Zuk never liked much to eat but he eats whatever his benefactor gives to eat. But I-I like to eat.”

“Don’t I smell smoke?” I said, “isn’t that smoke floating in the trees?”

“And now I tell you disgusting. You know what is kumiss ? Liquor from mare’s milk. Don’t make ugly face, is good, very good, like vwodka and yogurt mix, and good for you, but sometimes we are in nomad village, kumiss is bring in to drink inside great bag of raw skin, one meter wide, and, Bogey, hair of horse still grows on inside part of bag, and plenty islands of black hair are swimming in kumiss. Pfui . And one time, bag, it bubbles too much inside, and just when we drink, whole thing blows up, bloomps! in hair, nose, eye, everything. Disgusting.” Her creamy laughter.

“That’s the eighteenth little creek we passed…”

“Is good.”

So now we were off the lake and nosing up another skimpier ditch, parting reeds and yellow scum and scraping bottom, and all of a sudden we’re smack in the middle of a big fat smoke ring, tunneling down the tonsils of it, visibility is the hole, that’s all, in this great white doughnut of smoke…

Zuk didn’t seem to notice. “Is not far now,” she murmured. “Hey-” [ sniff, sniff ] “I don’t just smell fire, I even see it…”

Fazool shrieked again and splashing out of the thick white smoke came a small black cow, with a nose like a wet black charcoal filter, and twisted horns where you looked for antlers. In deerlike arcs the cow launched herself and her freckled udder across the stream, trailing garlands of honeysuckle. “What the hump is this queer place?” I burst out, “I’m no mental peon, I can take it. I can take it if you can take it. We’re almost there, now come on, tell me where we are.”

“You are right, Bogey. We are deep in Great Dismal Swamp. We go to remote hunting lodge of my cousin, Édouard Suleymenian, vice consul for trade in America of Karamul-Karamistan. Édouard will help.”

“Chee-e-e-e-ese, the Dismal Swamp, I always wanted to go there, in a creepy sorta way, try tracking in the ruby-red peat bog, ever since Willis Marie Bundgus, the wood wizardess, told me it was the northern limit of the water moccasin, cheese,” and I began to tremble all over to think I had been wading up to my chin in the snaky soup.

“These little peat fires” [ cough, cough ] “they are as nothing, they happen every day in low water in August, dark of moon” [ cough, cough ]. Is very beautiful at night, that red ring of fire in bog, you see? Ranger men come put them out. Now and then, is true, ranger disappears in swamp. Crust falls in, bloomps , like top of meat pie under spoon, yes? and poor fireman falls into burning peat and we never see him no more…”

IN THE HUNGER DESERT

The hunting shack of cousin Édouard, second vice consul (department of sheep exchange) of Caramel-Creamistan to the United States of America, had a warped and wavy tin roof like an old broiler pan, and needed paint. Well, perhaps it didn’t need paint so much as never had any. Paint was a citified notion hardly known in the Dismal, judging by the few dumps we’d passed. The shack was built of silvery planks and stood on not too crooked stilts on the shore of Ditch 19. The sagging front porch screens had a greenish cast, and all around the front door, curious perches for birds seemed to have sprouted-antlers, as it turned out, of every shape, but all kinda pipsqueak, nailed up as they were without the heads they grew on, godzilla be thanked.

All told, an unassuming den of classic fudd, according to your Baedeker. So I wasn’t allowing for much of a spectacle from Cousin Édouard. In fact I was thinking that, after Madame Zuk, a soldierly old fuddy with a firm paunch and grizzled sideburns would be a relief-a modest, dignified sportsman, that was the ticket, given to colorless oaths, politely indifferent to women but a mean hand with a frypan full of fliers-I mean, how many fantasticoes dare we hope, or rather must we dread, from any one family?