Bogeywoman

by Jaimy Gordon

  But O passed and anyhow Bertie never quite opened his hand to leggo the apparatus-instead he gave a lecture demonstration. He impaled the red nose mask on a pinky and pointed to the tube the laughing gas went through. He fingered in a nasty way a little red nub of valve hanging next to it: “Know what this is for? Huh? Everybody listening? No, you don’t know what this is for. Oxygen which we don’t have, sidekicks, so don’t go too long without breathing.” And then he showed us, and Dion tried it, and Emily touched her little nose to it, and Bertie showed us again. And while he was busy showing us, O leaned over to me:

  “I ain’t no bull dagger,” she whispered.

  It’s a good thing I didn’t know what a bull dagger was, I mean I was the Bogeywoman, the toughest girl possible, but I’d never talked knowingly to another in my life, and Bull Dagger sounded to me sort of like a character from Oliver Twist, so I figured it was sumpm to do with parting fuddies from their bankrolls and I said, “That’s okay. I know you’re not,” although I knew she was. “I’d do it for you, though,” she let go a hot gust of some kind of spirits in my ear. I stared at her. Now I thought she was saying she had oinked Reggie for me and I was scared it might be true. “Don’t you do sumpm like that for me.” She squinted back suspiciously out of her huge, raccoony eyes and said, “Ain’t you one?” “Hump no.” “So how come you did me like that?” “Huh?” “Under the sheets.”

  I was beginning to see my mistake and I felt the sweat glittering on my temples, which was sheer fear of being found out. “I didn’t do you like that,” I hissed, “you did me like that.” She thought this over. She didn’t go for it. “I oughta kill you for lying,” she spooky-fluted, “but I’d still do it for you,” she offered again, sorta fiercely, “because I like you better, you ain’t like a fuddy, you ain’t like nobody, but then you have to be mine, you colly?” “Yours?” “Mine. All mine. M-I-N-E mine.”

  I was looking, just looking, at that gleaming, half-cracked, poison bait in her slightly crossed eyes, and Bertie put the red pig mask in my hand and I buried my nose in it just to get away from that look. I needed her so bad, or let’s say I needed someone so bad, I was going to say yes now and pay later whatever the bill was, I mean who cared, I was in the bughouse, what worse could happen. She could kill me lit up my dreambox, and I almost remembered that story about just how O got into Rohring Rohring, but even so I was going to say yes if what happened next hadn’t happened-I mean if Zuk hadn’t come out of nowhere to save me.

  Anyhow those giant popcorn balls were sailing by, ball by huge slow ball, and I said I wonder why this is fun and Emily, refusal was her middle name, said Maybe it’s not fun, and O, who’d been skipping the gas and pulling now and then on a little two-ounce snort bottle of white rum I think it was or maybe peppermint schnapps, snatched the red gas mask and stared at me balefully and buried her nose in the thing like it was the last rose of summer. And never came up for air again. We all looked at each other, helpless doomed looks were going around like yawns, and the next thing we knew she was thrashing about in Bertie’s tennis rackets and shoes and Marvel comics and 45’s, having a convulsion.

  “Cheese, what are we gonna do?” cried Emily. (Because she was eleven years old and Miss Dying Popularity, Emily was exempt from the laissez faire of Bug Motels in trouble.) The rest of us looked blank. “Aaaannh, she’ll come out of it,” Bertie crooned at last, delicately unhooking O’s fine blue fingers from the red rubber mask and hose and ferrying the appliance from her small nose to his big one, a princely triangle, shiny and freckled like a blintz.

  O’s teeth were still chattering but some little bubbles that stuck to her lips showed me she was breathing, or trying to, and I remembered from Lake Sci at Camp Chunkagunk that you’re supposed to make sure the girl’s tongue isn’t stuck in her throat and there’s no plug of Double Bubble in there and she didn’t go down chewing her noseclips. (As if any tough girl in paradise, any girl whose life was worth saving, would wear noseclips!) And so I leaned over and slid two fingers through her lips, and felt around the wet satin of her mouth and over the faint callous of her tongue-which was a lot like kissing, kissing without being kissed first, and right in front of the Bug Motels too. And then I bumped along the backs of her teeth and the ridges of her palate-it seemed like everything was where it ought to be, but somehow I couldn’t stop.

  And wherever she was, maybe she thought it was kissing too. (Maybe O dreamed she was lying washed up on the scratchy pebble beach at Fort Smallwood, where she once saw a drowned black girl whose bathing suit was gone, and her raspberry lips wrinkled up like a kiss that hurt, and somebody had draped a white towel across her crotch like a label they forgot to fill out.) Anyhow all of a sudden her teeth clamped down hard, so hard on my fingers I wanted to howl out loud and I could hear myself howling, far far away. But I didn’t want to scare her and of course I wasn’t howling in front of the Bug Motels, lemme die first. Finally her eyes popped wide open inside their blackened portholes and maybe she saw me, maybe she didn’t-“Sufferin cheeses,” she shrieked, at least spitting out my fingers, and leaped halfway up and threw herself with one great hand-puppet flop out of Bertie’s private closet and into Bertie’s private bathroom, and somehow her head got stuck fast, face up, between the toilet and the lead pipe that filled the tank.

  And now she screamed bloody murder, and soon she really was bleeding from banging her head over and over against that pipe, bong bong bong. Emily superfluously screeched: “She’s bleeding, she’s bleeding, can’t none of you guys see she’s B-L-E-A-T-I-N-G bleeding”-I’ll never forget her spelling it like a lamb. “I’m getting a royal,” she threatened. “Don’t do that,” said Bertie smoothly, “we can take care of this-hey, easy, O, easy, be cool, don’t jump around.”

  Dion tried to hold O steady-for after her shriek I wouldn’t have laid a hand on her again for a million dollars, lemme die first-and I stared at her long white throat and the flawless prow of her chin underneath (where I had a coupla black wires even then) and those flying drops of blood spattering the wall where she kept banging her forehead on the bolt that holds the tank to the toilet. Finally she held still.

  Her neck stiff, her eyeballs swiveling around the room, she spooky-fluted: “Sufferin cheeses, Ursie! What the hump happened?” She looked at me pleadingly. “Could I please talk to O in private?” I said. “Like dat’s gonna help!” objected Dion delicately, “like you can muscle her dreambox outa dere all by yourself.” “Get out,” I shrieked and they finally went. After all they only had eight feet to travel back to Bertie’s private closet, where they had the whole H bomb of laughing gas to console them-and I kicked the door shut between us and the boys and said into O’s ear:

  “We shouldna fed you to the Regicide.” “Aaaa who gives a gum wrapper,” she muttered. She wouldn’t meet my eye and suddenly I could tell she’d lost her way for love-didn’t I know the signs?-and of all people, right now it was me she loved. She loved me a little, that automatically put me above her, made me her boss or was it her pimp-I mean she’d take from the others and give to me-that was the way she thought. The tears were sliding backwards down her temples into her hair. And I was even more scared of her, like hanging by my fingernails, but kinda touched. “Gimme a smoke out my pocket, would ya?” she spooky-fluted. “Reggie gave me his Luckies, ya want one?” I thought it would be, er, unchristian, not that I pass myself off as a christian, not to smoke her swag, I mean the half a battered pack she’d picked up for herself, feeding herself to the Regicide. I stuck a coupla towels behind her head, pronged two fingers into the side pocket of her skirt-her hipbone stuck up like a rock in a harbor-and worked the Luckies out. I lit one for each of us. We smoked in worried silence. I mean, her head was still stuck all this time in the toilet pipe. Brown blood matted the pale floss at her hairline.

  I thought I could smell the hot blue smoke on her that blows in your gills whenever you even kiss, never mind oink, somebody for a practical reason. I was trying to think of a way to artist
ically make her feel better, feel sumpm, when I was almost too scared to touch her. “Er, is it any fun, oinking a guy like the Regicide?” She shrugged. “Reggie ain’t so bad,” she said. “Him and me go way back. A lot of these fuddies won’t give you carfare to welfare. Reg, if he’s got two dollars you got one.” I smiled half-heartedly. She had to stop thinking of men that way. “Here’s the hump about Reginald,” she went on, “you never come first with him, ya see. You’re one bitch, he’s probly got five or six bitches, maybe even ten or a dozen bitches. He’s like the mayor of the bitches of Reggieville and you just get one vote. He’ll even tell you that very reasonable: He’ll run your life for you if you want him to, but you’re only gonna get one vote in Reggieville. The general good of Reggieville comes first, he says. He’s gotta keep peace among the bitches, ya see.” I nodded.

  “Say, Ursie. You’re the only girl I’d do it with. But I don’t exactly think of you as a girl.” Again I smiled crookedly. I didn’t dare ask her what, exactly, she thought of me as. “I don’t want to run your life,” I said. “Hey, why not?” she spooky-fluted with a spooky smile, “ain’t it fun to run somebody’s life?” “I don’t even like to run the vacuum cleaner,” I hastily lied. For I wouldn’t mind one bit running everyone’s life, and then I could tell them to run the vacuum cleaner. It was just O poisonally I was scared to boss around. Frankly I didn’t think she’d listen.

  “Let’s kiss, Ursie.” She closed her eyes halfway and stuck out her tongue a little. Her head was nicely framed in the toilet pipe, wreathed in and out with tongues of platinum hair. My heart started to gong Charlie Chan style, but I thought twice. I mean her forehead was still bleeding a little and the other three Bug Motels, who were probably listening, might throw open the door-it was quiet in there, too quiet, but every now and then Dion yelled out Hurry up in there you lesbos with a whoop of goofy laughter.

  So I thought twice. But I had been starving too long. She waggled that pink goldfish of a tongue and said, “Come on, Ursie. Kiss.” “Right now?” I said. “Sure.” “You got nowhere to put your head.” “So lie down on top of me.” Wincing for her, but panting like a guilty dog I lay down on top of her body in its tight peel of black and pink. And since I was literally wincing, my lips curling back in animal dread from my teeth, in went her tongue as smooth as a letter opener. O my oasis-silk crossed the border, pepper oil, dried apricots, olives, tokay, how long we went on trading like this at the water hole I don’t know, not long, when

  “Gorgeous, stupid youths-perhaps you can explain me what is the difficulty?” Came into my ears for the first time that voice, that slow, scraping violoncello of a voice, melodious against the smoke of a hundred thousand Gypsygirl cigarettes. I pitched a bit to the right to see who it was, my hand still on O’s keel-puncturing hipbone. The door had opened above us, and here was Emily dragging help by the arm after all-a stranger, a woman, probably a doctor, long necked, muscular, her gray springy hair convict-cropped, her handsome face not young. No spring chicken but a silvery winter weasel-right away I thought of Mustela erminea.

  I should have been horrified, considering that I was still a Unbeknownst To Everybody. Above all no dreambox mechanic should get wind-the nerve of these royals, butting into my private life, not to mention my death, if I should choose to off myself, with the rent here as steep as it was and the grub just eatable-and if any royal should ask me flat out, I’d never talk (lemme die first). Well, the woman observing me was clearly a royal, but of some novel and dazzling subspecies that mixed me up-and I ask myself, could I have been falling in love with Zuk already?

  But she was a royal, so an excuse for lying on top of O could not be far away, here it was: “Thank godzilla you came,” I panted, with Camp Chunkagunk earnest. “I couldn’t have held up her head another minute. I got her loose as far as her ears,” and I bent out those small translucent cockleshells like a medical exhibit. “Maybe we could vaseline em.”

  The newcomer stood between the two open doors of Bertie’s private bathroom and private closet, running her fingers through her spiky hair, looking back and forth from the H of laughing gas to the two shrimpy and sheepish boy worshippers kneeling at its foot among the smelly shoes and tennis balls, and on to the two girlgoyles lying en sandwich with their tongues lately in each other’s mouths, one of them with her head wrapped in the toilet pipe. She wore a soft and clinging dress of sumpm pearly gray-coulda been weasel pelt. And now she began laughing, slowly, low in her throat, in a kind of disbelief. “From where you kids organize this thing?”-pointing at the H. No one said anything for a rather long time, then Bertie: “Found it.” “Where you found it?” Shifty eyes, skating round and round behind his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, no reply. “Come, tell me, what room you got it? I don’t punish, I want be sure you don’t screw up anesthesia of somebody.” “It was loose,” Bertie assured her. She snorted. “Yes, I believe you-far too much loose articles around this rich like Rockefeller hospital. So. You gave it good home. And job. But you are sure it wasn’t already employed and you liberated…?” “It was down on three. On the landing.” She nodded her approval.

  Now she turned her attention to the girlgoyles on the bathroom floor. Actually I might as well not have been there for all the attention the woman paid to me. She took over. She knelt down to O with a decisive squeak of her high-heeled sandals.

  “This is very lovely girl,” she said, with thrilling irrelevance for a dreambox mechanic, looking curiously at the face she found between her hands. Her hands were ugly, clean and square, with gnawed-down fingernails and no rings. “Too much maquillage around the eyes, I show you better way later, my dear, if you remind me. How in hell you got here anyway,” she murmured, but uninterrogatively, and parted the hair a little with her fingertips to look. “These-are-nothing, little punchholes all under hair, except here maybe could use one stitch, later will be just little white star at hairline, quite pretty I think.”

  Haven’t we gone about far enough with the royal commentary on the mental patient’s beauté? “Say, are you a dreambox adjustor or what?” I blurted. “Why you want to know that, my dear?” she said without turning around, “a minute ago you are glad to see me, no? You want to help?-find me soap. How you gorgeous stupid youths live without soap?”

  It was true we Bug Motels were a by and large soapless society, but I flew to my private bathroom and pried away, from the center of the mirror, a hockey puck of orange Dial I had stuck there long ago so I wouldn’t have to look at my nose. “Here it is,” I panted. “Is good work.” She let go of O’s dreambox, which banged against the pipe. “Sufferin cheeses,” O said through her teeth, “get me outa here.” “I’ll hold her headbone,” I offered, “I’m strong as a little French horse and I got experience.” At that the woman stopped dead on her way to the sink and looked over, not at O, at me, at me! with sudden interest, her face at an odd tilt, one eye asquint. Involuntarily my hand stole to my nose. Maybe sumpm was hanging off it. “You are Ursula Koderer,” she divined. “Um, er, uh…” But why prevaricate? Some little bit of fame had evidently stuck to me behind my back. “Yeah,” I said, slitting my eyes at her, feeling a happy, cozy little glow of suspicion, “so what if I am?”

  But already she was at the sink with her back to me, rubbing up a lather, and I eyeballed the busy jiggle of her muscular buttocks with conscious impudence. “Sufferin cheeses, hurry up,” O croaked. I crawled over to the toilet and took her dreambox by the ears, without even seeing, this time, how bloody, how pretty-that quick, the silver weasel had taken over.

  And then that personage herself elbowed me out of the way, carrying mounds of foam. “O yeah, the old soap trick, why didn’t I think of that?” I muttered. “Because is too easy. You are heroical type,” she explained in that scratchy, ironical contralto that, as long as I knew her, refused to hurry itself for any calamity. “You climb pear tree, leap over wall, maybe break neck, without first to try gate. Charming, I know this type well.” “Whaddaya mean? What do yo
u know about me,” I said, unable to give her up so soon, but she had gone on to more important stuff and steadfastly ignored me.

  I studied her from behind. She was more tall than short, more fleshy than boney, and she seemed to be as fit as a soldier in the field, though with those gnarled hands and that gray spiky pelt on her head you could say she looked her age, whatever her age was-sumpm between thirty and sixty. Only the Abominable Snowman could have put his hands around that waist but she was long and lithe in the spine and the back of the neck, with a sturdy compact derrière that worked up and down like twin pistons as she energetically lathered O’s ears, and again I thought of the elegant and voracious lines of a winter weasel or a mink that for the sheer fun of it kills ten times as much as it eats. You might suppose I would take this as a caution, but I felt only hungry wonder at sumpm new in the usually boring line of grownups-to be exact, a grown-up woman who had none of the martyred flab and grizzle about her of somebody’s wife, somebody’s ninth-grade teacher, or somebody’s mother.

  Bossy as hump, though-you could tell that already. And another thing I noticed right away as I took in the soft gray drapery from her throat to her knees, and the glinting pearl stockings along the blades of the shins and over the curve of the soleus, which was developed like a soccer player’s. As the Bogeywoman, as Merlin’s daughter, as apprentice to the wood wizardess and a slob all my life, I had never paid any attention to clothes. But hers I could tell were beautiful and, sumpm else, they meant money. Her money-it was printed on her whole air like NABISCO on a cracker-a certain kind of authority-yes, a lady dreambox mechanic rolled in her own dough. And for the first time I realized that one day, or not, if I didn’t off myself, I’d have to have some too. Not clothes. Money.