Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

I bet you think I was buggy with jealousy. You’ve got it all wrong: at first I was dying to catch those two, Willis and Ottie, in the act, I was ready to crash their picnic and eat the crumbs with the ants, I’d take what I could get. I wanted to be sure that everybody was doing it as soon as they had the chance-those Maine girls most of all, with their sturdy legs, smooth hair and strong teeth, their glass-clear voices singing Old Hundredth and I never saw a moor in three-part harmony.

I rubbernecked for a better view. In my dream their shirts had already unwrapped them like a picnic, fluttered down and flattened puffily underneath them. She lay on her back on this billowing tablecloth and clutched Ottie’s ugly head to this nuzzy and that nuzzy, passionately imprisoning his bubblegum ears in her big strong hands, her bare biceps glittering with sweat. He kissed and struggled and all of a sudden gasped for air and sat back on his heels. And in my dream there they were, her wizardly breasts, two lovely round custards, wet and slick, with their brown nipples pointing up like fuses. And, dayenu! stop right there, lord. I swear I would have been satisfied.

But no. The two were doing nothing. They sat on a low stump, not even side by side though their shoulders bumped. All their zippers were zippered and snaps snapped and laces laced. I heard Ottie’s voice:

“I mean whatsername, you know the one, sounds like a national park?” he was saying, and he turned kinda boiled pink, then light dove into the woof of his flat-top-he looked sheepishly down at his feet. “The one with the hair? The fairy princess about four foot tall but with real jugs, from the Lower Big Bear line?” (That’s where I close to fell out of my apple tree, for that could only be one person he was describing. Now I knew who it was in the raspberry bush. Blood surged into my face and it’s a wonder I didn’t jump someone right then.)

“The one with the hair, I mean hair like hot fudge pouring all the way down to her little ice-cream scoop butt, you know the one? The one who thinks she’s in the Land of Nod or Cockayne or somewhere?” I saw sumpm flash in his hands-he was carving a peg with a jackknife. Willis’s hands were tucked away, out of trouble, under her big thighs. “Whose dad’s supposed to be in jail? who lives on Platform 92 with the Bogeywoman and the red bedspread? I think she’s gonna be the one…”

“The one?” Willis said. She glanced up at him and I was shocked at her shipwrecked face-but Ottie was studying his feet.

“Ya mean the only one? For me? Heck, no, I mean the first one,” he said, and laughed, but bashfully, not like a cad, and his ugly-cute face lit up with that thought and the queer greeny light of the woods. “I always figured one of these days even a ugly guy like me would stumble across one of those nymphos you hear about. So I been bracing myself for somebody old and scary, probably one of my buddies’ mothers with cottage cheese thighs and lard lumps hanging out of her girdle, I’d take anything-and who comes along but this little number, whatsername. She’s like a movie star who ate a eat-me pill and shrank down in perfect proportion-you know?” Willis mumbled sumpm or other. “Cheese I’m glad I can talk to you, Bundgus”-he gave her a gentle punch in the shoulder, which was larger than his own, and she smiled a closed smile with a greenish cast.

“What I mean is,” Ottie went on, “for five years now I been wondering if I was ever going to… I’m not the kind who could push a girl to… I’m nineteen years old, I got big ears, a Howdy Doody face, all the girls want to be my pal and nobody wants to, you know. Only this one, I think she really likes to-anyway, she was sposed to meet me here and-I hope she didn’t get pinched.” “I’ll haul her in myself,” Willis growled. “Aw cmon.” “You could get in a lot of trouble.” “She’s not the type who’d ever tell,” Ottie said, “-ya know I used to think she and the Bogeywoman had some kinda private club together, NO BOYS ALLOWED. But yesterday she led me out here when she was sposed to be shooting targets with the Chunkagunk Bowwomen and I got the poison ivy to prove it.” He started fussing with his floppy overalls but then pointed, to my relief, at his bare ankles. There they were, fat crusty white clouds of calamine lotion.

“She said we were looking for some kind of dirt from the lost chunkagunk-what the heck you think she had in mind? Anyhow we were crawling around in the briars, scratching up dirt, and something told me I could kiss her.” Dirty rotten double-timing Lou Rae , I wanted to shout. “I swear I could have gone as far as I wanted with her,” Ottie added, “I think,”- and Willis asked in a small voice, smiling faintly though the color of white asparagus, “So why didn’t you, Turkeyneck?” “Hey, Bundgus, you’re not mad, are you?” Ottie asked with a hiccup of pleased laughter. “Well-I didn’t push it. Later I coulda kicked myself. Anyhow she promised to meet me here-” “So where is she?” Bundgus inquired. I wanted to rat to the wood wizardess-I was on her side-but of course I said nothing (lemme die first).

“Don’t worry,” Ottie mumbled, “a girl that young, I’m waiting for her to ask me, well not exactly ask but, you know, put a hand on me first, something like that…” He stretched out his long legs in their puffy green overalls and stood up to go. “Hey, I got hogs.” (He meant his KP duty.) “So what brings you out here anyway, Willie?” Willis shook her head miserably and he kicked off through the grass polls and leaf trash, whistling up the trail.

And that’s where I went buggy, right there in the pleasingly anatomical forks of the apple tree, variety Northern Spy. My blood was singing like a chain saw. Never mind that Ottie’s courtship of Lou Rae had come to nothing, like my own, and that I had, from experience, cause to hope that her scissory legs would cut off his plans at the root. He was after Lou Rae, the fuddy. And he’d broken the wood wizardess’s heart, the cad. O he was popular, Ottie, a walking barbeque fork with a clutch of tines for a face, ha ha, ears like two pink diaphragms, and those funny longitudinal rucks around his mouth, ho ho, the sort of face you can hardly look on without bursting out laughing, I told you I liked him, I had nothing against him, I wasn’t jealous, not that jealous, but there was Willis Marie Bundgus, the woman I was saving for when I grew up, with a face as long as the bus ride home, and this comedian with his peg in one hand and his jackknife in the other and his stick legs poking through the brush towards me and Lou Rae-was she going to whistle for him? I went buggy.

I guess I’d watched too many Saturday serials where Hopalong Cassidy drops onto Bullet from the fiery hayloft of the burning livery stable. When Ottie, whistling, passed under the apple tree I uttered a mad gargle- Keep your mitts off her -and without exactly thinking about it I dropped on his shoulders, boxed his bubblegum-pink ears with my fists, got his skinny neck in a death grip with my skinny thighs, hung upside down gasping Keep your mitts off her and pounding his stomach, and finally I let go with my thighs and plunged to earth, tackling him on the way down. “Whoa, whoa,” he was yelling, “cool it, Bogeywoman, you’re right off your noodle, whaddaya mean, off who?” The funny thing is, I wasn’t mad at him, I swear I wasn’t. It was that dirty rotten Lou Rae I was mad at, who had loved me for twelve and a half minutes and left me, but I wasn’t going to put a hand on her, was I? Lemme die first.

“You’re oinking nuts, Bogeywoman,” Ottie shouted. I rolled around and was about to sink my teeth into his ankle when I accidentally got a good look, through his legs, at the wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus. For a second my eyeballs froze in their molds. This whole time I had been sorta dreaming that I was saving the wood wizardess. I must have thought, if you can call it a thought, that she would be impressed. Then one look at her face and I knew I was in disgrace. It was over. Now I had lost camp, really lost camp, for good. Now they would have to throw me out, banish me, point me forth, shaking their heads and mouthing Get help , yes out of those famous wrought-iron gates with CAMP CHUNKAGUNK YMCA embossed on plates on each granite gate post and Tough Paradise for Girls scrolling overhead.