by Jaimy Gordon
“So you’re really dating the suit of many farts,” I said, “I hope I did kill him.” “You are jealous baby and besides that you are grob, grob, Miss Bogey,” said Zuk coldly. “Is nothing wrong with digestive tract of Dr. Feuffer. Also he is expert in choosing restaurants. Besides, my dear, you should learn ancient tactic to make hospitality obligations with your enemy. I know what I am doing.”
I stared at her, stared, for once, past her self-confidence straight through the holes in her argument, since these were bigger than manholes. “I dunno,” I said, “maybe back in Caramel-Creamistan a lobster dinner is like the Treaty of Versailles but in the U.S. I never heard of nuttin like that.” “Hm,” Zuk reflected, “you can be right… is true he wants to fuck me…” “What!” And who says Camp Chunkagunk for all its corn teaches you nothing about life? “Just cause you’re his favorite dreambox mechanic doesn’t mean he won’t throw you out,” I whispered, “I betcha if he’s alive he’s throwing you out right now.” “Ach,” Zuk said passionately, “I think you are right! What do not mothers bring forth, in this world! I wish his unhappy mother had given birth to an onion.”
“I’m never going back to the bughouse,” I vowed.
She actually clapped her hands. “For you, my bent little chimney, that is good, very good decision. You are funny-looking queer little chimney but smoke comes out straight.” “Probably they’ll try to make me go back now that I did murder.” “Pooo, this is melodrama. Is not so easy to die like in movies, especially with big bunch of nurses all around. Probably they just pull that pipe out like cork, comes big how you say”-she gagged delicately-“and he is life. Big sore throat but life.” She smiled brilliantly. “I am satisfied you make that decision to quit bughouse, Miss Bogey. My time is not lost. Is not for you, such place-is not spoon of your mouth, my dear.”
But then she gazed away and out the window like a spy or dreambox commissar in big trouble, about to be exposed and disgraced or maybe even deported. I had a seasick flash of a rickety jet plane crossing the Urals, with just her on it. She was staring into space across the bare balcony and all at once I realized I had seen her naked at that very window. “Um, er, uh, just one little question about the, er, you know,” I said. “Binoculars? How long has it been going on?” She blinked at me. “Of course I know nothing of what you are talking about,” she said after a time, examining her ugly fingernails. “And don’t want to know,” she added. “Hey, it’s okay for me to do sumpm buggy like that, I’m a mental peon,” I said, “but you’re sposed to be a lofty dreambox mechanic.” She smiled. “Ah! shoemaker goes barefoot, na? and carpenter ties his door shut with shoelace. You think is perfect balance of mind that draws people to this profession? You must grow up, my dear. Anyhow you are not mental patient-no more than I am.” She pointed a craggy finger at me: “And remember this too, little girl. Who has luck and small hole to see what is going on behind garden wall of beloved, be glad and be silent. As they say where I come from, Eat of this behind closed doors.”
Did this mean I was her beloved? Or she was mine? Maybe from Zuk it meant nothing at all. She left the room, tuneless harp of refrigerator shelf, jiggle of bottles, and was back again carrying two small glasses of pee-colored stuff. “Stolat-may you live a hundred years.” She tossed one down. “Ugh, what is it?” “Is very good vwodka-the best-just drink. Or don’t drink, I don’t care. Come, greedy baby, sit next to me.” And she sat.
I sat at the far end of the white sofa and the lure of her presence came swirling around me like a surf. Then it was all undertow dragging me to her. A hum rose in my ears, my blood rushed by, trying to get to her, and my flesh went hot from resisting her current. Her large face was still, that was a kind of trick with her, she smiled the least smile and it surrounded me, a broth, a sea, a weather. I was a potato in the soup of her, no, a piece of soup flesh with bone. I was essential to her, and at the same time I was dissolving in her. “What you are doing?” she said. I was taking my clothes off piece by piece. There weren’t many pieces. “My god, stop this,” she said, clutching her spiky hair and laughing, “they can come at every minute.” Then I was sitting there naked and evening was all around us, breathing on the mosquito net and purpling the open windows. She gazed at me with as much delight as alarm. Finally she said:
“You are not mental patient and now is good, very good, I never was your psychiatrist. Shall I tell you? All my life I have dreamed of a girl like you, fierce, strong, beautiful and sly. Hungry like young blackbird who eats forty times a day. Nerve like one who hangs from rope and washes windows of skyscrapers. Muscle like girl who flies on trapeze in circus. Awake like bandit. A singer, a player of dombro, she comes, she comes like the fourteenth day of the moon. And then reads secret tracks of wild animals in wood. And all the better, Miss Bogey, that you have no mother or father to lick and pet you and bring you soft things to eat. As they say where I come from: Better to be a fox in the mountains than mother’s darling, I speak now of effect on character. A long time I wish to know a child like you. It is feast to look on you. But self-explanatorizing, my dear, I do not touch you.” “You mean never?” I said. It was true she had never touched me, but we two were outcasts now. “Because I am-because-you are young person,” she said, “very young.”
She had been about to say Because I am psychiatrist, but of course that wouldn’t matter unless I was a mental patient, and she had just said-hadn’t she just said?-I was no more mental patient than she was. “I’m not a mental peon anymore,” I said, “maybe I never really was one. I’m almost eighteen years old and I’m not even buggy, you said it yourself, and you never were my dreambox mechanic even if I needed a dreambox mechanic, and I’m not going back to the bughouse, Merlin won’t make me go back to the bughouse if I have any other place to go, so I figure I’m going to Caramel-Creamistan-with you. What the hump did I get better for if I can never have you or be you?” I think I was almost convincing her. Her hand, which kinda reminded me of an old gray root, floated above my knee, but then, bargaining, it turned over: “Of course,” she explained, “if you first touch me…”
This isn’t a comic book, but the blat of the doorbell came right then. “My god, where to hide you,” she whispered. With me stark naked it was too late for the balcony, and never mind that about not touching me-she yanked me by the elbow to my feet and stuffed me into a closet. In the dark I breathed her perfumed coats. By feel I must be in the chilly, shiny folds of a mink and again doubt overtook me: either she was the top Soviet spy of all Caramel-Creamistan or somewhere along the road to Rohring Rohring she had been some rich fuddy’s concubine, or wife.
“Hey, how ya doin, it’s the Regicide” came crackling out of the speaker system. “I am here to tell yall ladies, if yall still there, that Dr. Foofer has done bought it, correctimento the chief of treatment is no more, he dead as your pockabook, and serious heat is collecting to come in your building and beat the bushes for the Bogeywoman. Lucky for yall they set me to watching the lobby. And I hate to tell you, Doctor Zook, but you is persona niggerata round here. O the things they is saying about yall two. Meanwhile they watching the place, you hear, so if yall want out, Tuney and Chug be by the dumpster in fi minute, got that, fi minute, that’s yall only chance.”
I stuck my head out of the closet. “Ask him why he’s sticking his neck out like this,” I whispered, “he doesn’t like either one of us that much.” “Please explain your interest for us,” Doctor Zuk said into the grating. “Do I hear that hard-head Bogeywoman talking up there?” Reginald crackled back, “sassing everybody who tryna help as usual… O sent me, you hear that, Bogeygirl? She want you out the bughouse before she have to cut you and wind up in trouble her own self.” I pushed past Doctor Zuk and hissed into the grating: “You better be good to O, kotex sniffer, or pretty soon she’ll have your hairy onions on a plate.” “Yeah and I butter em and make your mama lick em.” “My mama’s beyond being riled by fuddy onions,” I said, “say, Reg-are you and O really getting married?” Lon
g pause, then: “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.” “Cheese, good luck,” I whispered. “I still take your sister’s phone number,” Reginald added. “Eat hump,” I said. “Fi minutes, ladies. You pay Tuney and Chug good, you hear? Be down they in fi minutes, better make that fo.”
HOW LOVE GOT US OUT OF THERE
“My dear Bogey, now we have big adventure before us. You must rely on me, I know what I am doing in this business of fly away fast. With my father the Beetle I spend half my life escaping, you understand me? You must follow me and what I do you also do. You can follow?” If Zuk wanted to be wood wizardess, I would be her half-pint scout. I nodded. “I come right back,” Zuk slightly panted, kicking off her sandals and dropping her silky dress to the floor as she went. I watched the round pale planets of her buttocks recede, the articulate rather nasty wink of her black string bikini.
I nodded like a sleepwalker. I wasn’t even scared, not yet. A kind of gauze, like mosquito net, a white nuptial dream, had settled over everything. I was eloping with Doctor Zuk. They went south, the Bug Motels would say when they heard, hospital parlance for never coming back. Zuk and me, we were turning into one thing. In a white daze, I plunked down in the hall while I waited and buckled on her silver sandals, sumpm I’d always wanted to do. And clomped up and down a bit. I was amazed how comfy they were-a little big.
She came back buttoning up the vest inside a European fuddy’s pinstripe suit a lot like Foofer’s, only gray. And combing her strong ugly fingers through her hair, which lay flat and gleaming under some kinda gunk. And now she unfolded big square black sunglasses across her face. Her exotic face had always been big, now it was big, fuddy and tough. “Cheese,” I said, “you’re a man. Not even short.”
“Don’t get wrong idea. Is not what you think,” she said. “Sometimes you see I like to go at night in places where women don’t go. Boxing match, for instance. With little help”-she held a fan of grizzled mustache against her upper lip-“nobody gives me trouble.” “Doctor Zuk,” I asked sternly, “are you a spy?” She laughed. “Yes, I am spy-I admit is bad for character, but at least I don’t spy for fatherland-I spy for myself alone. Now, Bogey, we must dress you in big hurry-ach-” She saw her silver sandals on my feet. “How they are ugly, your feet-pfui,” she said, “why I never notice this before, like goat feet…”
What a nerve. It was true my fungoid, chewed-down toenails looked like sumpm that grows on dead people, but I was affronted-here I had bit my tongue all this time about her hands-how about a little polite disregard for the ugliness of youth as for the ugliness of age? “Never mind, naked is best disguise-get in.” From a closet by the front door she rolled one of those lidded trash bins marked PROP HOMEWOOD HOSP MEDICAL RES and the apartment number splashed in red-“Get in, Bogey,” she commanded, and though it reeked of rotten citrus and a No way Jose was rising to my lips, I did it. The elevator wheezed and sank and then she was racing the caddy on its squeaky little wheels down some bumpy floor, then Chug was saying slowly over my head: “Nuh-uh, no suh, no way we ain’t taking no marked hospital garbage bin in this here junk wagon, that’s a major heat-thrower right there even if it don’t have no dead body in it, which it probly do.” “No body,” Doctor Zuk barked, “see for self,” and suddenly the lid flopped up over my head and there was Chug blinking at me in the purple twilight. I clapped my hands over my momps but I guess I should have clapped em over my face. Chug said in a scared voice: “Jesus take me home. It’s the mayor’s daughter.” Tuney looked over the edge and went: “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e… How you figga, Chug?” “I don’t know nothing,” Chug muttered.
Then Zuk did the fuddiest thing of all-one offhand flip of a palm by the hip pocket and she showed, just showed, those boys a roll of lettuce under the street lamp, under the eggplant sky. Bills got forked around so fast I couldn’t see. “Okay, man,” Tuney said, “but no damn trash bin.” They lifted me out by the armpits, silver sandals dangling, and as soon as my feet touched the wagon, I scrambled under a smelly green tarp. Zuk said: “Gentlemen, you will drive to harbor. You will take Broadway to Bank Street to Wolfe Street and when you see water you will drive very slow while I look for boat with name of Jenghiz Khan. When I say stop you stop. Is understood?” “Yessuh,” “Yessuh,” Chug and Tuney said.
And Zuk crawled under there with me. She was packing a squat little doctor’s bag not at all her style. Cowpea clopped off, bells jingling. Under the tarpaulin it was black as a cave and between the sweet straw beneath and the tarry reek on top I was dizzy and itched like crazy. All along my naked body I longed to scratch. The straw poked and Doctor Zuk’s wool suit crawled. “This is torture,” I whispered, “cheese I itch. What if we get stopped? What if we roll over?” “Some follower you have turned out to be,” Zuk grumbled. “What if I get killed? Who are you gonna say I am?” “Who are you?” she said. “In dark you are nobody, I am also nobody, if we are nobody I suppose I may kiss nobody.” And her mouth spread over mine like a jelly, maybe I should say a jellyfish, I dunno-some moisty tasty halfway disgusting thing between definite and infinite. Then I was a cave, mammoth and dark, how could I know what was going on in all of my ends? A bat rocketed down my spine. I think she had me on her finger, turning. The rims burned off one after another. You could throw up from this. Seasick down a spiral chalk drops burning ribs of silverware gutter spill
[“Chug?” “Whuzzup.” “In your opinion what exactly is we took up with here?” “I don’t know nothing. That’s what we gets paid a hundred a piece for, to know nothing. We gets paid good to know nothing, Tuney, so I know nothing.” “Chug?” “Huh?” “You thank she the mayor’s daughter?” “Say what? Hell no she ain’t the mayor’s daughter. I seen the mayor’s daughter in a parade one time, she a boney redhead with chopstick legs and a freckle face and that ain’t her. Ain’t you never see the mayor’s daughter, Tuney? All the goings-on she show up at? this soup kitchen here and them new projects there?” “Nope.” “She ugly like the mayor too.” “Yeah? What he look like?” “You shucking? You ain’t never see the mayor of Baltimore?” “How I’m gonna see the mayor? I don’t get invited to that shit.” “On the TV, brother, where else?” “Can’t use no TV, give me a pain in my head.” “Well, this here ain’t the mayor’s daughter. This some kinda he-she we got here, but you right she somebody’s daughter. Some big banana.” “Huh. Could be you right.” “Sho I’m right. What I really like to know: that jeffrey in the grease-gray suit, who he? I thank this jeff from some foreign place like Turkey where they don’t got no mayor. Over there they got sultans, pry ministers, like that. What I like to know: what this he-she out the bughouse doing with some jeffrey from Turkey? What he want with a bughouse he-she? Got me wool-gathered, Tuney.” “Tell you what, this fella thank he somebody. Gentlemans, you will this way, and gentlemans, you will that way.” “Yeah. He used to running something big, what it is. Them hundred-dollar bills, they clean like a Chinese laundry. Hadda peel em apart. That’s brand-new money he holding.” “Say-you thank this sumpm big? sumpm on the gummint level maybe? They is a war on, ain’t they? What you thank, Chug? Them two heading for the harbor, muss be tryna get out the country. That boat, what they call that boat? Sound like a spy boat to me.” “A spy boat… I be dogged.” “That’s it, Chug, I got it now. They a spy from Turkey and some gummint bigwig’s daughter escaped out the bughouse. The he-she done emptied out the big banana’s safe, it’s all war money in they, and they be booking out the country on a spy boat.” “I be dogged, Tuney. That’s it. Must be it.” “What we gone do about it, Chug?” “We ain’t gone do nothin. I don’t cay nothing bout no Vietnam war. We got paid good. That’s all I know.” “Yeah? We ain’t paid that good if that black bag full of new money. Less us get lost in them little alleyways and boatyards yonder end of Broadway and pull up back the harbor po-lice. Then we ask what else that Turkey spy got in the bag, you dig?”]
“Gentlemen, you find out right now what I have got in bag. So. See for self.” Sumpm about Zuk’s bi
g face, the barbarian sweep of the cheekbones-I wasn’t one bit surprised to see it rise like a moon behind a big gun. A squared-off, down-to-business-looking pistol with black pebbly handgrips-“Just don’t shoot em,” I whispered, “or when they catch us I’ll never get out of the bughouse.” “You must give up that mental peon think, always bughouse bughouse bughouse,” Doctor Zuk snapped. “You will drive straight to end of Wolfe Street, gentlemen. When you see water you will drive very slow, and when I say stop you will stop, all this time without you say one word. Or I shoot you, is it clear?”
She sat grimly in the straw behind the coachbox, her head poking up the tarpaulin like a tentpole. With the grainy gray evening around her, with the straw and the horse and the gun and the filthy canvas over her head she looked like a fugitive from some world war, which she was. “You can drive no faster, gentlemen?” “Cowpea already in high gear,” said Tuney, “for her.” We went on itching and bouncing and clattering over the tar-patched brick until I was sick of the ride to the roots of my teeth, so I had my fill of ayrabbing in the end, and horse and wagon into the bargain. We hobbled over a last set of trolley tracks, the street bent right and the next block ended in the harbor, or rather at a seedy marina on its edge, dock lights on poles, flat black ripples turning on their spindles, little white boats bobbing on black sheeny water-and one of them must be ours.