Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

I loped on in despair, sometimes two-legged, sometimes propping myself like an ape with one hand, sometimes down again on all fours. I would never really have her or be her, I would never be the woman that Zuk was, not even in the woods. She had proved that. She had risen brilliantly back into my sky by reducing me to a crawl-at least I could breathe down here, where I richly deserved to be. But she only made sport of me this way for a short stretch. Now her intervals were less. She might be tiring, or maybe just tired of the race. After all she knew she had me beat. From now on she walked straight up on her one high heel at an easy pace, swinging her hips like a woman going home from a swim in the river. A canebrake crowded the bank and afterwards I discerned in the red mud only the footprints of our two old selves, the wild old Zuk and the scared-stiff young Bogeywoman chasing her. The new Zuk had veered off somewhere. The new Bogeywoman had not yet caught up.

She had struck off into the bog on no trail at all. Right away I sank in up to my ankles behind her, and the blackish red peat water hissed and bubbled around my hucklebones like drippings from a steak. It didn’t take a wood wizard-I saw plainly the hole in the honeysuckle where she’d torn it. Aimless, thin salt-and-pepper mist floated out of it. But on its other side dark smoke boiled in great swirling crepe ribbons and bows, and I heard a low roar. I sank exhausted against a cypress stump and stared at its broiled and twisted boll. It had a face like a gargoyle, where an iridescent beetle was crawling. I climbed onto it and as soon as my feet dangled free, Zuk exploded up from the honeysuckle and, showering red water everywhere, shot past me. Somehow I flew at her and got hold of the one silver sandal. “Sorry, dear Bogey-I never mean to harm-” She kicked me hard in the stomach. A wrench and her wet foot popped free. There I was, bunched over my belly, holding her sandal. I tried to say goodbye- oooof , was all that came out. She leaped over a heap of logs into that black smoke and you know the rest. An amphitheater of sparks, a million crumbs of orange flame, rose up behind her, opened like a cape and ate her. Then white steam everywhere.

How Love Got Me Out of There

Tuesday I called Merlin’s loft from a coinbox outside the Red Star Diner on Pulaski Highway, as far from the whitecoats and gumshoes as I could stash myself and still make a ten-cent telephone call. I was exhausted, fried and full of myself, puffed up with hot air and looking for a fall like a cheese soufflé. I mean I had just lost Zuk, and the old man had come halfway around the world to see me. I wasn’t going to insult him by calling long distance. He should at least think I was hearing out his counsel before I refused to go back to the bughouse.

“Good afternoon, Moilin’s Woi-i-ild.” It was the Flatbush mechanical tweetie bird of the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette.

“Is my father there?”

“Oi-sula! Where are you?”

“Never mind that, where’s Merlin?”

“He was on his way,” Suzette said, “we had just checked into the Bangkok Imperial Tiger when the most wonderful thing happened-you’ll never guess.”

“No. I won’t.”

“He got a why-uh that he got the Mung-he had to fly right back to Hong Kong for a press conference. He sent me on ahead.”

“The who?”

“The Vogelkuss Mung Prize for International Understanding Through Art.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a fifty-thousand-dollar prize, dear. Think what Moilin can do with that money. The poor man has expenses like you wouldn’t believe.”

“O I believe it,” I said hastily. In fact I saw what was coming around the bend and, hoping to head it off, I added: “Well let him know I’m not one of em. Not anymore. Oink that.” But too late.

“Like that fancy mental hospital for instance-such greed I never saw! And listen to you, Oi-sula, my goodness, what’s happened to your language in that place? It’s gone downhill since you started slumming around with that bunch of juvenile wards of the court. Frankly I’m glad you’re out of there.”

I had all my arguments in a row-why I shouldn’t, why I wouldn’t, why I couldn’t go back to Rohring Rohring-but somehow they seemed superfluous to this conversation.

“That place was fine for a month or two,” Suzette went on, “and, as I recall, the poisonnel-wasn’t his name Reginald?-was extremely kind. So helpful! But for two years, as a sort of sleepover boarding school without the school, the place was a little overpriced, don’t you think? I mean, Oi-sula, the bills are breaking your poor father’s back.”

“Well that’s over,” I said, noticing I was rather superfluous to this conversation myself. I thought I’d better remind her I was a wanted woman. “I’m not going back there even if they say I did murder. It was an accident.”

“O that,” Suzette said with mild surprise, “I forgot about that-it’s all cleared up-didn’t you see it on TV? Turns out the poor doctor died of an aneurysm, I mean they found out some bubble boist under his heart, you know, where it goes into his stomach? Very unfortunate, the loss of a woild-famous diagnostician and that, but the problem was in his organs, dear, it wasn’t you at all.”

“That’s a relief,” I said uncomfortably, feeling like the late summer grit blowing across the highway. So Foofer hadn’t died of a broken head or a swallowed pipe-his heart had drowned, drowned in its own blood-while mine had washed up here, bone dry. Between trucks in the parking lot sat the taxicab I’d come in, BLACK-AND-WHITE CAB CO Lizzy City N.C . At the counter the driver pushed the last kink of a glazed doughnut into a moony jowl and studied the Morning Telegraph . Thank godzilla I had found a coupla hundreds crunched down the bottom of Doctor Zuk’s black bag when I snuck back on the Jenghiz Khan . And Zuk’s long white dress shirt in a tree, only a little soggy. And Fazool’s tire-bottomed flip-flops.

“I should say so,” Suzette replied. “The coppers ransacked this place for a picture of you. Finally they had to settle for some ridiculous four-foot-long megillah with every last girl at Camp Chunkagunk on it. You’re in the back row with some kinda black gunk on your Adam’s apple, what the heck was that stuff? Well anyway dear you were famous. For two days. They blew up that tiny face and plastered it all over the TV screen…”

“I was famous,” I parroted, in a daze.

“… right next to your father’s-as if the poor man didn’t have enough trouble. Oi-sula, you wouldn’t believe the hate mail Moilin’s Woild gets! Two big bags full every day, half of it’s fan mail it’s true but the other half, dear god the things they say! Of course the Mung should help with that.”

“Did you get my Camp Chunkagunk picture back?” I growled.

“Did I what? God knows, dear, I’m sure I never gave it a thought… Oi-sula, Mrs. Kuchmek from the Juvenile Court has been calling. They’ve got to appoint some sort of, er, adult guardian for you if you’re not going back to the hospital. Somebody has to officially receive you.”

“Why not you and Merlin?” I said. “Just sign whatever they hand you, I won’t be any trouble, I promise, you’re never even gonna see me, I’ll disappear, I already disappeared, the taxi’s waiting outside…”

“Mrs. Kuchmek knows I’m flying to Moilin in Manila on Friday, and anyhow your father’s far too well known for you to go around pulling stunts like that. You need an adult to keep an eye on you. What about that woman doctor you ran away from the hospital with, that Zook or Shook or whatever her name was, she seemed interested in you-”