by Jaimy Gordon
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.
Though my situation was desperate, I felt better now, no denying it. The blackgreen woods pressed the road between two banks as velvety and private as upholstery. It was falling dark. As long as there was no one to look at me, I kinda liked my bare chest. My arm-I had forgotten that and it wouldn’t hurt on
e bit tomorrow. The tar under my feet was spicy and warm. Its newness glowed like seal fur. A raccoon turd dotted it here and there and I stopped, as I always did, to admire the harlequin scat of that model omnivore-fishbones, corn, a plug of purple finch feathers, all bound together and tinted with the rosy, seed-speckled pleasure of blackberry-and was it one pearl button winking at me? Perhaps they would take me back at camp after all-perhaps they would simply forget, or Willis Marie Bundgus would relent from duty this once, find it unbecoming to her beautiful flesh to hold as rigid as a tent-pole. God give me, not an excuse-a break, an exemption, a liberty, permit, indulgence, one-of-a-kind. For one-of-a-kind, that’s what I by godzilla am, aren’t I? and, God, you made me, you’re stuck with me, at least I’m not contagious. I’m Bogeywoman, a monster not even reproducible as myself, sterile as a mule in that respect, so how about a permit, you owe me sumpm. Or I’ll kill myself, God, you think I won’t? Let me back in camp Make them take me For some reason I recalled at just that moment that on my way from the appletree-top to the ground I had bitten Ottie on the nose with all my might, and I saw the bright blood spritz down the dam of his upper lip, drowning the furrow the Archangel Michael is said to press with a forefinger to make newborn children forget all they know of heaven. I had bitten his nose half off! I trudged on miserably, for the case was hopeless. Then-probably I was sniveling in some manner-I came over a rise, still walking in the middle of the road, and found myself looking down on the Camp Chunkagunk green woodie in a dirt turnaround on the left, a Caribou County police car tilted into the ditch on the right, and, side by side, slowly advancing, walking towards me up the little hill of blacktop, Ottie Grayson and a tall square-jawed policeman. I clamped my arm across my momps; the Camp Chunkagunk jersey dangled down in front of me like a curtain. Thank godzilla it was almost dark by now. I inched backwards.
“Come on, Bogeywoman,” Ottie coaxed in an amiable zookeeper’s voice, he must have thought I was born yesterday, “we’ll take you back to camp. Chicken papa and strawberry cuss for dinner, and square dancing for Evening Pro…”
The Bogeywoman’s appetite ya see was well known. From now on I hate chicken papa, I was thinking, and if I work at it I’ll soon loathe strawberry cuss too: and for the first time in my life I got a flash of why some girlgoyles say no to whatever they give you to eat. All the same I was getting hungry. I narrowed my eyes at Ottie. His nose was big and red and puffy, and looking bigger and redder and puffier the closer he came. “Nothing bad will happen to you,” he said, “I know you must be hungry by now.” “I ain’t hungry,” I said, “and I swear by godzilla Ottie Grayson if you come one step closer I’ll bite your nose clean off.” He stopped and so did the policeman. I whirled around to run and barged smack into Willis Marie Bundgus. Of course she’d circled around behind me stealthy as a weasel. I saw her big brown feet planted in a wrestler’s ready on the blacktop. The wood wizardess always wore that fringed vest like Annie Oakley. Now its tassels trembled. I would have let her take me. I wasn’t going to sock the great Willis Marie Bundgus, and anyhow she stood a foot above me even in a slight crouch. But she backed off. “Where’s your shirt, Koderer?” she said unhappily.
“I swear I’m not buggy, I’m not,” I cried, and then I could feel the fuddies closing in behind me-I spun and threw them everything I had: Sunday Monday and Tuesday punches, knees to grottos, elbows to jawbones, roundhouses, watertowers and terminals, dungspreaders and haymakers, blueflies, blackflies, letter flies. I got nowhere. They didn’t hurt me, but the boys weren’t even trying. They caught my flailing arms and legs one by one and as the trooper steered my hands together for the handcuffs he turned up my arm and tweeted unmelodiously. “What in sam hill is this?” “It’s a map of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls,” I said proudly, “can’t you tell?” “Jesus wept,” the officer said in disgust and packed me into the cruiser.
Since I was half-naked I figured they would throw Willis Marie Bundgus in with me for a chaperone and I could explain. But all I ever saw of her again was one gleam through the back window: Ottie Grayson and Bundgus in the Camp Chunkagunk station wagon, two white faces lit up in the windshield, one a grinning handyman I hereby rub out, one a suffering wood wizardess-I tell you she loved me more than she knew-till they slammed the car door closed.
2
Buggywoman
BUG MOTELS ON MISSION
I was in the bughouse, but I wasn’t hearing angel voices. I wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, through invisible microphones in the toilet. I wasn’t the Virgin Mary. If I found a fat shoelace probably I tied my broken ukulele case together with it instead of trying to dangle from it, by the neck, inside my private closet. And, speaking of that closet, the cockroach I found there, napping in my sad-faced sneaker, was no hallucination but just as real, and just as big, as the Koderer nose on my face. I liked girlgoyles, that was at the bottom of it, but of course I wasn’t telling them that. I liked girls, except for me. And in the wilderness between my hunger and its exception, I sometimes drew maps with no way out on the inside of my forearm with a razor blade. Or anything else sharp I could find. I was seventeen now. I had been in this dump one year, seven months and seven days. I still dreamed of dirty rotten Lou Rae Greenrule, who loved me and left me, and of the wood wizardess, who turned me in. Sometimes I dreamed I was back at Camp Chunkagunk and having a pretty good time, except for those two ripe pimples I was hiding inside my brassiere, so sore and popping full of yellow cheese they made me want to puke.
I was safe in the loonie bin, and to make sure I was safe, I kept my mouth shut. Who knew what a bona fide loonie might have to say? So I gave em the silent treatment, I mean all the dreambox mechanics and especially “my” dreambox mechanic, Foofer. For one year, seven months and seven days-not one word. Right smack in the bughouse I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody, or at least I was until that dirty stoolie Margaret wrote sumpm on the back of a greasy menu that Foofer got his hands on-as she knew he would. (I forgot, says Margaret. Forgot! I’ll say no more. It doesn’t take a Sigmund Food.)
But this was before the menu, before Zuk, before I said a single word. Foofer musta thought he’d heard it all, but one year, seven months and seven days of nothing?-I have reason to think he was impressed.
A state hospital would have rolled me over in a week, but Thomas Hare Rohring and Eugenia O. Rohring Clinic could afford to ponder my case. After all, Merlin was forking over a hundred dollars a day. Merlin felt sick at heart for the mess I was in-he said-but he was having a good year. No way Merlin’s Puppets World Tour could come home from Haiphong, or Penang, or Surabaya, or wherever he was that week, just to nurse me. “And I’d have to nurse you,” he threatened, his voice all thready sizzles and crackles on the phone from the bamboo post office of some island campong, “because I sure wouldn’t have the dough to keep you in Rohring Rohring if I came home.”
I never quite got it how being the wizard of world peace during the Vietnam War turned into money for the old man; there couldn’t have been any dough in those two-donkey village squares where Merlin’s Puppets was always mounting the same old show. But sumpm must have turned into sumpm because here I was. Only famous court cases like O and Emily got scholarships to this dump. Anyhow, the way I looked at it, after all those years of feeling left out of the fame part, here I was doing my bit for history by costing Merlin so many dollars a day that he had to stay in Asia and be the bane of Lyndon Bugbane Johnson himself. Now and then I did wonder just what unsavory republic might be putting up the bucks.
Still, that was a terrifying threat from Merlin: I’d have to nurse you… It meant of course being nursed not by Merlin but by the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette, who’d be flown home from Hanoi or Samovarobad or somewhere for the purpose. Which, shudder, could mean that the theatrical vampiress might one day try to touch me with her creepy whisker-thin hands. And also the idea of home starched my will to stay where I was. I had said-in fact I had hollered, pretty inconveniently if I should ever change my m
ind-that if they threw me out of Camp Chunkagunk I would never go home. And I didn’t. Not that I had a home to go home to, in the usual sense of the word. But this way they wouldn’t slap one together for me, either, with some slave-driving twenty-one-star foster mom out in Harford County, in the pay of the state, with the girls’ dormitory set up in an old chicken house on the family farm and enough “chores” to exhaust an infantry battalion.
Anyway the social worker wouldn’t hear of me going back to Merlin’s house on Ploy Street all alone, to bounce around like the last beebee in a broken puzzle, the only one that hadn’t rolled out the hole yet. Merlin and Suzette were on tour and sister Margaret was off somewhere with that racetrack bum and couldn’t be reached-yes I had given up on old Margaret, for the moment.
To save me from being remanded to the juvenile authorities, a phrase terrifying even to him, Merlin used his connections to get me into Rohring Rohring and sent the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette home from I think it was Fiji, for a week. She packed whatever looked like my stuff in spare packing crates from Merlin’s World Tour and was supposedly going to haul it up six floors to the Adolescent Wing of the bughouse all by herself. But as soon as Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard spotted the skeletal but rich and trashy-looking redhead endangering her fake fingernails on those boxes, he saw fit to saunter out of the supply closet, where he was sneaking a smoke, and carried them for her. And come to think of it that was my first sight of the Regicide, once the crates and I were both upstairs-as he leaned against the supply room door, staring down his Egyptian nose at Suzette’s stony buttocks in a miniskirt, and sliding his hand out of the white pants pocket where he had just stuffed her enormous tip.