Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“Yes, I am catastrophe in henhouse-like you tell me once,” she said with bitter pride. “You are one hump of a catastrophe, you are,” I admitted, “but you saved my life. You’re the only real monster I know. I wouldn’t have got better for anybody else.” “They will put you back in bughouse, if you don’t come with me,” she warned. “O no they won’t. They’ll try, but I’m never going back to Rohring Rohring-well maybe later when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself. You’re everything to me,” I told her truthfully, “only… only…” “Only you don’t want everything no more,” she said, “you want only little bit.” It was half true, just half, but I didn’t answer. I loved her reproaches and studied to deserve them.

“Now I must think, must find new way,” she panted to Édouard, or to herself, drawing herself clear of me again with a swirl of air and sumpm silver flashing. She paced a couple times more up and down the rotten porch-Édouard’s spaniels, regarding this tumult of legs, shrank away under the table. All at once she banged through the screen door and ran headlong down the dock to shore. Trotted along the mud bank a ways and disappeared into the blackgreen wall of the woods. The last thing I saw was one white calf flickering in the creepers. Then nothing. I jumped up.

“Please sit down. Do not fear for my cousin. God’s gate is her gate,” Édouard assured me, through the snake charmer’s oboe of his large and perfect nose. “Let her go. She knows the swamp. She knows what these woods are.” He raised his two hands, lazily invoking peace, not really caring whether it came or not. I narrowed my eyes at his beautiful-ugly face, but instead of running after her, I listened to him, shifting foot to foot-which was what gave her that fatal headstart.

Édouard said: “Perhaps we all know more than we say-? Even you, Miss Koderer?” (On this interrogative note, the gazelles of his eyebrows leaped, sailed, landed.) “My cousin is a remarkable woman, even great. I myself was one of her devoted, ah, students, at one time. But she has made a grave mistake. I don’t mean merely she has had the bad luck to offend her political patrons. This time she has gone too far.”

“She saved my life,” I said.

“She has made a mistake-not only a mistake- the mistake,” Édouard said, “broken not a rule- the rule.”

“For me she always did the right thing.”

“That is beside the point,” said Cousin Édouard. He gazed at me somberly. “My cousin is in disgrace. She sees that now. She has every right to lose herself,” he went on, “in a swamp well suited to that end, indeed I find it a noble choice, a beautiful choice, if this is what she chooses.”

“You mean you think she-o no-o my godzilla-”

I ran after her. That Édouard might hope to lose me in the Dismal right behind her, to turn us monstrous girlfriends into leather boggywomen with one mild wave of his hand-well, I thought of that later, but even that wouldn’t have stopped me at the time. I tracked the fat exclamation points of her silver sandals in the crusted mud.

Madame Zuk I repeat was no sylph but the length of the intervals amazed me. What strength she had with her belly dancer’s bulk, what spring in her silvery heels! The craters of her passing were as legible as puddles after a day of rain-some of them filled right up with swamp water and I saw them shining like stars. So far the trail was easy as pie, the trail was pie, while it lasted, a soft pumpkin-red custard all along the ditch bank. In the scummy water below, rings shed rings where startled reptiles had belly-flopped, and the air was never still-more buzzing, crackling and humming than the black cavity of a telephone. Once a root caught my bare foot and I almost went into the soup myself-my palms printed red dough. Then I winced to think of her running on those things, and pretty soon there it was, the little broken-off silver cone of the first heel, sticking up like a golf tee, and the hop, hop, hop of the other where she had righted herself. Here she tried to go on with no heel but the little nails were poking up into the pad, here was the deep round pock where she stood on her right foot and rocked and swayed and cursed and unbuckled-I calculated the arc and there it hung high in the smilax, one arched silver left sole with no heel, a sliding board for toads.

On she went and never fell and vaulted over trickling cracks in the peat and bore left, jogging along the ditches. We seemed to be in an ever-curving maze screwing down to some core, some center. The smoke that hung waist-high in the whole bog thickened. I coughed and sneezed and blinked back tears, but galloped on, I hoped, at least as fast as Zuk. I figured she had already horrified the rattlers back into their holes with her stampede so I could run faster, but just in case, contrary to the prescriptions of classical wood wizardry, I thrashed through the clumps of greenbriar and tupelo as loud as I could. Zuk’s white shirt caught on this and that-I tore it off and ran naked. Her tracks were so fresh I could almost see them puffing like dough prodded by a finger, and for a while I thought I might be hearing her. Or was that distant rumbly suck, suck, suck my heart?

I was gasping and soon I began to see that pacing round and round my quietroom in the bughouse or playing pukelele all day long with the Bug Motels was no way to get in shape for a life-or-death chase through the Dismal Swamp. The superhuman strength of the mental patient had deserted me. Doctor Zuk on the other hand must have been running 440 hurdles on the sly. You’d think I’d have been more scared what with turf fires all around but-I realize now I was counting on old Zuk to know I was there and save me, if not herself. She’d never lead me into eaten-away peat bogs whose cores fell in, I thought. Or would she?

On and on, her pegleg track (one bare sole, one high-heeled sandal) never flagged. Not even after I saw the first bright dot of blood under the big toe of her bare left foot-I fell to my knees to look at this up close. I panted like a dog. I touched my tongue to her blood just as a fat drop of sweat fell from my nose and washed it away. I was beginning to doubt I’d ever see her again. I crawled to the next drop of blood and the next. Curses upon her, she hadn’t even slowed down yet. How could she go on like this, hobbling gigantically on one high heel like some Oedipus from Vogue ?

Suddenly her footprints were everywhere; there seemed to be twice as many as she could possibly need. Was I seeing double? My heart drowned. At least down here where I crawled the smoke was still thin, and even when her tracks were blurred or smeared I could trace their edges with a finger. What if I lost her? What if I had to find my own way out? I realized I’d just been following, following. Some Wood Wiz lost-finder I’d turned out to be!-I’d given not a thought to north, south, east or west, or wind, or hour of day. In hindsight, prickles of sunlight flashed all over the sky, like lights on a spinning top, spiny blobs here, there and everywhere, piercing through rifts in trees. Where the hump was I? Nowhere but on her trail. But I couldn’t give up so I sobbed and crawled on.

And soon I saw sumpm else that sank my heart. Here was why her footprints were blurred and smeared-another set of feet mixed in with hers. I had no idea how long ago I’d started to see them, only that it was long. And maybe I’d counted them out because there was sumpm so repulsive about them, sumpm frightfully plain, deeply dull, sumpm so familiar and disgusting. What was it? I put my nose to them. A faint stink. They were grub-shaped, reticulated, ordinary. What then? That well-known shiny spot, no whorl left, there under the right first metatarsal where Dr. Beasley had dug the plantar wart out-they were mine! my own feet. Good godzilla this meant she had lapped me, we had gone in a circle and were still going, all three of us, two Madame Zuks and now me.