Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

Ottie by now had thrown away whittle-peg and jackknife and was wrestling me back. After I saw Willis’s stony face my heart wasn’t in it. He flipped me over and plunked himself on top of me. He got hold of my arms (by then I wasn’t punching or even struggling so it was easy, in fact I held them out to him) and after a bit he let go with one hand, looked over his shoulder at Willis and cranked an invisible pencil sharpener next to his ear, with his finger sticking out for the pencil. “Totally buggy,” he said. “What the heck’s eating her? What’s she doing out here? What’s she got against me?” “You’re on the wrong side, Koderer,” Willis said in a scared, sad voice. “You know what that means.”

IT MEANT EXILE:

(Already in my mind I had fallen back into the world: Upper Meadowbottom Heights Extended, the Jewish suburbs, the girls my age with their panty girdles and orthodontists, sororities and sweet sixteen parties and sanitary belts and beauty salons and college boards-all the girls I knew in Baltimore except the what-went-wrongs, my sister Margaret and me-all those girls rattling their Hutzler’s bags along the white-hot sidewalks of the new shopping centers, moving inside the baffles of their feminine ambitions as their younger selves had traveled in five layers of crinolines or as planets travel in their rings, and no more likely to step out of orbit. Not that I hated those girls. I even saw the possibilities, the tragic possibilities, of some, but they, unlike the Maine girls, shunned me from the outset as no use, in fact a danger, to their own struggles for position. They were Jewish girls, they had programs, they didn’t dare fail. They secreted antibodies for the likes of me, their atomic neutralizers were cut to my shape-if I was stuck among them what would become of me?)

“Why were you spying on us? What’s wrong with you, Koderer, are you sick?” Willis Bundgus reached in and laid a cool hand on my forehead. “Have you been eating or drinking something queer?” God gimme an excuse , Merlin’s Suzette used to say-I almost laughed at the tailor-made excuse my buckskin-fringed goddess was handing me. (Bundgus of course was innocent of the so-called human sciences. She’d probably never even heard of Sigmund Food-none of that sticky stuff for her.) I saw my chance. “I ate a funny-looking mushroom,” I blurted, exploding my chance to atoms by overdoing it-no tracker would ever eat a funny-looking mushroom. “I fell on it with my mouth open,” I tacked on lamely. “My god she tried to kill herself,” Willis hollered, “we have to get her to Nurse’s Bung right away.” Since I was quiet now, Ottie rolled off me to help me to my feet-and I forked up his jackknife out of the tuft of iron grass where it had fallen, and slashing air with it, so he backed off, and making, I seem to recall, some kinda wordless noise-howling, bawling, sumpm along those lines-I ran off into the woods.

It meant exile -and now I hastened to forget what I knew, which wasn’t much, of Wood Wiz Lost-Finding, and I was lost in the woods. I hadn’t stolen Ottie’s knife as essential tool number 3 of emergency wood wizardry, although it was. I had no intention of cutting willow rod stanchions or leafy roofing for a lean-to. No, it was myself I intended to cut-not kill, mind you, only cut-which brings me to the question of

WHY THE BOGEYWOMAN LETS HER OWN BLOOD:

(Note well I was not your typical Badgirl capital B: I was the Bogeywoman, whereas classical Badgirl was Margaret, age fourteen, fifteen, with a Pall Mall usurping the notch of a cherry coke straw in her lips and dangling from her white lipstick at the bus stop [transfer from Meadowbottom Circle to Number 5 Slade Avenue]. Somebody’s bubby in a babushka limps by and sighs, “Oi, so young!” Badgirl doesn’t turn her head, gives her at most a sidewise sullen glance from half-lowered lids. Badgirl got her period at thirteen, threw out the stiffened panties in a park garbage can, thumbed a tampax up there-it was murder for a week-and didn’t tell Suzette, who’d have made it occasion for a boring speech. Badgirl used to carry an abortionist’s telephone number-it was in D.C.-in her wallet, penciled on a corner of her first Social Security card, which she hadn’t lost yet. But this miniature toughgirl has emotions-like me in the woods. This is where Badgirl and Bogeywoman come together, age 14, 15, 16, in that overbubbling cauldron of the heart. So much they have to spill some when they think of-well maybe think isn’t quite the word for it-that I could go crazy was churning in my dreambox, that I was going to die, that everyone was going to die, that the black drain of time was already sucking down my lazy worthless life and I would never possess any more of it than this torn-up, dirty-sudsy, offensive fluid, my eye staring coldly out at the chunk-loaded river going by-waves of hunger and disgust-that I would never love anyone, that no one would ever love me but still I wanted them in my gorge gullet snatch hole craw wanted to eat them alive before they had a chance to eat me or, worse, look at me, see what I was and run)

Ottie kept that jackknife sharp, wouldn’t you know it. I staggered through deep shade on no trail, weeping and slicing a very fine grid as I went, a plan for a good camp, a tough camp, for girls, on the fish-white underbelly of my forearm-so fine it took some time before the Chipmunks’ cottage, the Lower Big Bear line, the Upper Big Bear line, waterfront, archery field and chapel all filled up with blood and ran together. By then rags of pink sky winked at me between branches overhead-twilight over the lake. They were throwing me out-in all my life I had shown for twelve and a half minutes what I really was and already they were throwing me out. Okay I was out of camp but I would never go home, I decided that right then.

And, funny, there was no use hiding in the woods either: old Bundgus was such an ace tracker that she’d find me as soon as she could catch me, for all I had over her draft horse flanks was speed.

I turned west from the lake, shambling in a straight line, leaking blood that I knew she’d see, knowing I should come to a tar road and I did-one that looked squeezed out of a tube and slightly flattened. Its blacktop lay a couple inches above the lips of the ditches and there were queer signs:

PVT RD

PERMIT & FEE REQD

The tar was new and aromatic as the pinewoods. Now the main thing was not to drip or scuff or leave any track. My right arm with the good camp, the tough camp, for girls scratched on the white inside of it was barely tacky now, not dripping, but I couldn’t look at it-not that the smear of blood was so disgusting-more monumentally embarrassing, like that Polaroid Merlin took of me in my crib the first time it dawned on me what my own turds were good for and I worked off my diaper and finger-painted them all over the wall. Her first artistic productions Merlin wrote in the album. Probably I was still whimpering a little. All the same I felt light, light in the head, as though I had bled away a snakebite. I yanked off my Camp Chunkagunk jersey and rolled it around my arm, there, that was better. Stood up straight. Now to go the way my naked momps were pointing me. I looked down at them. They’re kinda duck-footed: one said north, one said south.

Willis Marie Bundgus would expect me to go north, light out for the bog country and the Canada border. Opportunity lay that way; as a schooled tracker I would find sumpm to eat, or if I was really determined to off myself there were funny-looking mushrooms everywhere. In fact hazards abounded, fertile danger a-plenty in the bog country: if a bear didn’t eat me, they might find me in a thousand years, a self-made bog woman- Boggywoman -intact in the peat, forever young though tough and red as a Western saddle. That thought alone would send Bundgus crashing through the cranberry bogs in search of my hide before I sank and the juniper water tanned me forever. Yes, a smart scout would head north. Therefore I could outwit Bundgus (and myself) by turning south. Back to camp. And so I did. I set off south, sobbing from time to time, bare-bosomed, glancing around slyly whenever I remembered to, careful not to kick so much as a stone. Okay, I was buggy. I thought this a reasonable plan.