by Jaimy Gordon
“I don’t think that little guy will ever get us out of here all by himself,” I whispered to Zuk, “I better get in the water with him and help him push-I mean I’m dressed for it-where the hump are we going anyway?” “Already Fazool wants to know where is your shame-Karamul-Karamistan is exceedingly prudish culture, before he comes here he hardly sees face of woman in his life, never mind pupik. I have ordered him not to look at you, I say you are mad daughter of American vice-president and I am save you, for sake of big foreign aid money for Karamul-Karamistan.” “It’s dark,” I argued, “water’s up to here, he doesn’t have to look, just push.” She sighed: “Very sensible, Bogey, but is too late for sensible. I say him you are mad, mad you must be. Anyway, is not just push. Naked in dark water together, this is kind of union.” We leaned together over the rail, elbow to elbow, peering into the glittering, sucking black. “Ach, I think here is case where water is not to be had, therefore washing with dirt is permitted. I go in swamp with snakes and frogs and I push.” She shuddered.
In the end I wouldn’t let Zuk in the swamp without me and Zuk wouldn’t let me in without her, so she tied her rose cravat around Fazool’s eyes-this saved him from corruption-and all three of us were dragging and shoving the Jenghiz Khan through the thick soup when it got light enough to see that the water was blood red. And it was true what Zuk had said about being naked in dark water together-frankly I was glad for a chaperone. It made you aware there was hardly any real edge to anything in this world. The water was warm as a bathtub-but even bathtubs pucker your toes and fingers into hungry little fish mouths, so bored and restless is your native goo in its home body I guess, so aching to get out, to suck up to some other body, to pour itself down some hole. And look at it this way, pressing all around you at every other moment is nothing, I mean you think it’s nothing, but actually it’s air, a medium of transfer as tight as a wetsuit. Only here, when it wasn’t air but rich red muck, you felt it and saw it.
And this stuff was oinking alive! Sumpm squirmed out from under my footsole with every cringing step, or bulged between my toes, or spiraled fatly between my thighs, or bumped its blind forehead against my blind belly. Sometimes my foot sank down a foot in the gunk at the bottom and the red swamp closed over my head. Cheese, I came up spluttering, cheese, cheese, a wad of brown leaves in my mouth. If I hadna been up to my ears in the stuff, I’d have been sweating for sheer terror.
And yet in the dark back of my mind I remembered the whole time that, as soon as the Jenghiz Khan floated free, it would be me and Madame Zuk alone in the bottom of the boat again, and this time, no getting out of it, it was my turn and nothing but wet skin between us. Her body stretched out before me as wide and brown as Central Asia, as endless and complex, and suddenly swamp water looked okay.
Now and then the Jenghiz Khan bobbed loose for a step or two, only to stick again. It was good there was a whole pack of us-six legs pushing and churning up the bottom and about as adept at our work as a buncha water buffalo-cause the snakes and turtles all knew we were coming. All the same it made my jaw grin up with horror, hearing all those unseen spotted and scaly amphibians slap into the soup with us, kerplopping on every side in the vain frantic hope of getting away from us for good, and the rusty chowder can I had to pry off my foot now and then didn’t butter up my nerves any either. Pop bottles rolled under my arches like rungs of sunken ladders. The ghost shoes turned out to be oyster shells as big as hamburger platters. Under the ruby water we saw the wreck of a zinc garbage can, a yellowed, eaten-out water heater waving pink sponges of insulation, a bit of ornate wrought-iron fence that made me think of a country graveyard, and a whole four-burner Roper stove.
And all of a sudden the channel widened out-there was a broad ditch to our right-and we were all treading water. Fazool, who couldn’t swim, almost drowned until Zuk caught hold of one end of the rose cravat. The Jenghiz Khan came free. Fazool steered her starboard down the feeder ditch and pretty soon Zuk and I stood dripping in the hold, staring at each other in the dusty morning sunlight that came through the portholes, our bodies spotted all over with red peat flecks, black leaf curd and bog dirt, not even cold.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
And now, no more dillydallying! Table spread thyself! To the banquet at hand. “Er, I’m starving to death-got anything to eat on this tub?” “A thousand pardons, my dear. How I can forget, you are young person, like weasel who eats twice her weight in day…” She ransacked drawers and cupboards, and, standing together at the sink, our breasts swinging, or anyway her breasts swinging, we ate with our fingers-there wasn’t a fork-cheerios and vienna sausages, sardines and cocoa puffs and smoked oysters swimming in oil.
She lay naked on the bunk, one hand behind her head, and I sat down beside her. This was it. Zuk was demure enough, or exhausted enough, to close her eyes.
Her body was similar to Central Asia, as I have said, and not young, but age hadn’t ruined it, only made it more dramatic, all its tufted crags and escarpments, the muscle walls hung with moss, folds of tough sod between rock ribs, bristly sedges in the clefts, a certain bareness of the underlying tectonic structures. It was grand, awesome, even gorgeous. So why was I scared to death of it?
No I was not scared of dying-I swear despite her age Zuk was further from death than, say, O. O’s rosebud organs and filigreed sheaths, her silk and satin privacies, were clicking knives all over. And thinking of the other little girlgoyles I had loved, filles fatales so to speak: compared to Zuk’s candid Mohawk, Lou Rae Greenrule’s shining snagless bolt of hair from crown to waist had been the glass mountain-go ahead and break your neck on that, Bogeywoman-or once you roll all the way down, go drown yourself in her twat of pale green jello, where no living thing could get a footing. And even my see-through princess Emily, far more than Zuk, was over the hill of no return. Her skeletal purity was way past death, as everybody knew, into Halloween transfiguration.
Unh-unh, it wasn’t death, in Zuk, not prissy choicy maidenly death at all, but coarse old fat old life that was scary. She looked well fed and well used, Doctor Zuk, she looked calloused and grizzled and tough. She looked well manured, like anything would grow in her, and she smelled yeasty, or would have, if she hadn’t cured her hide for thirty years in Byzance, by Rochas. All right, all right, I’d talked myself into it. I’d polished off swamp water, hadn’t I? I was ready. I shut my eyes and held my nose and jumped.
It was easy. By godzilla I should have realized that wild fun for any dolly who’d lived to be as old as Zuk couldn’t be as far away at the end of the labyrinth as mine was. Or she’d be what I was, a raving mental peon until only yesterday, with a gray under-hull of cicatrix, wicker-woven slash by slash, from her elbows to her wrists. (By the way I’ve decided I’m never gonna get these arms fixed. By godzilla I can see it coming: soon I’m gonna be so terrifyingly sane that I’m gonna need some proof I was ever buggy. And you watch, when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself I won’t even wear long sleeves-let em see, the bloodsuckers-well, maybe in January.)
Coming was as easy for Madame Zuk as blinking, or swallowing. Trills like Fats Waller, I’m not lying. That coochie of hers winked at me so hard I thought she was taking my picture with it, and maybe she was. One eerie thing: how her skin was slippery, papery, over the muscle-that was her age I guess-and I swear at times there was no more to making her melt in my fingers than pulling off an ice-cream wrapper.
So madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse was a better woman than I was after all! Then it set in again, the furtive conservatism of the mental patient. Who the hump did she think she was, this big strong woman, this so-called bug repair expert, running off with a bughead, all right, a former bughead, but still, a former bughead not quite eighteen years old? And this was Dr. Gulaim Zuk, who had earned her fame debugging the dreamboxes of youth. The nerve of her, to write about teenage monsters when she’d never even been one! The kind of ease Zuk had wasn’t sumpm you grew up to. Like scratch it was sumpm you got back to, if at all.
Doctor Zuk had been spared adolescence. She’d hidden out with her father The Beetle all through his wondrously weird, unspeakably lonely exile in Caramel-Creamistan. And then the Commies had shot him exactly on time-on the eve of her twelfth birthday-so she never had to grow up in front of him, never had to see his disgusted face.
As for me, adolescent ugliness is my natural state. Bogeywoman I was born, fat and stinky, Bogeywoman is my dowry. Course, I admit it, next to the ease of Zuk, my adolescent repulsiveness suddenly looked like sumpm willful, even to me-gargoyles in the belfry-sticking their nauseous tongues out. All the same I was what I was and could not be saved from myself. For an instant I longed for lobotomy-sure, cut the whole memory bone from the dreambox. Blank me out. But the world had become too beautiful to erase, somehow.
(I could imagine The Beetle first arriving in Caramel-Creamistan-a Yid from the Vistula seeing those camels, asking himself Where the hump have I landed? I lay along her body now and whispered What the hump is this place, I never knew there was a swamp at the end of the bay, tell me where we are or I’ll…)
Her body was similar to Central Asia… well, maybe not, but it was nothing like mine. Dew glazed her throat, her forehead. She had had enough. She stopped my hands. I lay along her side, her head rested on the crook of her arm, and two or three hairs burst out of each calamitous pore of her armpit. Hair too lank and outspoken even to curl, it lay there, black wheat. Now that I saw her up close, I understood how she could look famous-her face was as huge as a movie screen, her eyes, her nose, her mouth all double the size of mine, you could have driven a Cadillac between those Thousand and One Nights’ eyebrows. Never in her life could anyone have called her petite. She was built like a belly dancer, generous, billowing. She had the kind of lobed showy muscle I once read would keep a girl out of the Rockettes-just right for Princess Noor and Her Six Harimettes, however.
Fazool shrieked and we poked our heads above the gangway stairs. We both saw it: a black bear about as tall as me stood up to look at us, then polkaed away across the bog, his fat little bowlegs splashing.
“Say, got any bears up there in Caramel-Creamistan?” I whispered. “And what about disgust? Weren’t you ever, like, sick-to-your-stomach disgusted with love-the whole twenty-dish ham & chicken potpie firehall supper? And where the hump are we anyhow?”
“You know, one thing people know how to do in Karamistan. This is eat. Sit, talk, eat. September in Samovarobad is paradise, thirty degrees and everybody eating melons from morning till night. But most of all, meat. Is meat culture. Twenty kilometers out of city in red hills, is nothing to find but meat. Sit on carpet, soon some woman brings in great bowl or plate: all meat, naked boiled meat. And you see everything of this meat. Is anatomy lab for sheep. You see every part of sheep, whole stomach, testicles, big steaming heap intestines, and from middle of puddle two whole sheep eyeballs look up at you. My god what makes that scream like crazy woman?”
“O that’s an American Barred and Bedraggled Owl. You’ll never see it-it’s probably in that tangle of black gum trees. Before we get there it’ll go flapping off to the next thicket. Ya know what it says?-I mean what everybody says it says-Who who who, who cooks for you?” “Ah! Is very good question. And what is answer?” I shook my head. “Answer of course is You do. Answer every time, You do you do you do.
“Alas, I tire of ever the same dish. The world too stays not in a oneness of changelessness. And who would say which is more beautiful, night unveiling to day? or day unveiling to night? Either way, veiling or unveiling, the world is beautiful as a houri.”
“Say, where the hump are we again?” I asked for the hump-teenth time, “and where’d you say we were going?”
“I eat all foods. I eat meat, fish, kasha, apricots. I particularly like feast dish of Karamul-Karamistan, which is baby camel stuffed with goat, goat stuffed with six hens, each hen stuffed with twelve eggs in nest of parsley, and all this roasted on spit through twenty-four hours…”
“Holy godzilla did you see that? A giant pig just jumped up from the mud bank right there between the cypress knees and trotted into the bush. Cheese, look at the bald spot-that’s where it was wallowing. Where the hump is this place and where are we headed? [Sniff, sniff.] Ya know I know it sounds perverse when there’s water water everywhere, but I swear I smell smoke…”
“Speaking of smoke, speaking of meat, what you suppose is feast day game of men in all Karamul-Karamistan? I tell you. Is kind of crazy polo with carcass of sheep. First they cut throat, like that, kr-r-r-ch. Then they race around like crazy on strong little ponies, and tear sheep apart with bare hands. Who has biggest piece at end, wins.”
“Wins what? Cheese, there goes another pig, with big black spots. You see any farms? See any peanut fields? Must be a pig gone wild, I mean, you know, a feral pig. What the hump is this godzilla forsaken place?”
Outside the portholes, thorny-vine and creepy-briar shot straight up the tree trunks, fifty sixty feet in the air. Bulrushes brushed peacefully by, then, rat-a-tat-tat on the Jenghiz Khan, a canebrake was playing our bottom like a snare drum. Doctor Zuk stuck her head out the gangway. I stuck mine out next to hers. “Where the hump-” “Hush, Bogey. Make like you speak no English. Do like Fazool, whatever he does, you do it too. Hallo-o-o-o!” she shouted. Fazool grinned his square grin and waved. Zuk waved. I waved. A streaky tin roof swam into view, then a Nehi Orange Crush sign, its orange weathered to that shy flamingo that pleases me best of all colors. On the bank a galvanized steel privy sailed by, its door banging in the wind.
“Hey what is this place?” Then I saw sumpm like thick pink cellophane-a bulge of peat water gushing over a slimy spillway. And before I knew it I was tilted back like in a roller coaster. Holy godzilla, a winch was hauling the Jenghiz Khan up a coupla boat rails. A Popeye-looking fuddy in khakis was working it. I read a sign on a shack, UNITED STATES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS. I was on the point of yelling Help me I been kidnapped, when I remembered I hadn’t been kidnapped, I’d been saved. “Where the hump are we or I’ll scream,” I screamed. Luckily the winch chasing over the metal frets was loud as a Gatling gun, and nobody heard me, not even myself.
Then a red lake was opening out in front of us as far as the eye could see. “Wow, how the hump did that get here? What-” “Hush-only little while longer now,” Zuk said. Fazool steered the Jenghiz Khan left along the shore. “You, Bogey, keep eye open like owl for Ditch Number 19. Ditches don’t have signs like streets so is important, very important, you watch and count.”
The lake: red like the bilge that laps the toilet bowl the first day you’re on the rag-and a few cypress knees sticking out of it like hairy upside-down carrots. “So what about The Beetle?” I dared to whisper (I had never asked about her father before.) “I figure he grew up eating kreplach in Plock or somewhere, just like my Zayde Schapiro…”
“Ah, you speak of Mr. Zuk,” she replied stiffly. “What means this-kreplach?” She made a face. “Mr. Zuk was champion fencer at Jagiellonian University. Son of famous doctor of geophysics from Warsaw. He wrote not only in Yiddish-sometimes in Polish, sometimes French. Even before start of war, even before Polish Communists die in Russia, is over with him and communism. He trusted nobody. Karamul-Karamistan you know is never spoon of his mouth. Even in Karamul-Karamistan, for eleven years we are running. He is at home nowhere, and that temporarily saved his neck. Place of safety, place of danger-I am accustomed to flux of this, perhaps I even like it. In Karamul-Karamistan I learn to eat every kind of food. I learn to watch all night from rock in desert while in tent Mr. Zuk write stories which nobody now reads. Mr. Zuk is thin like walking stick. Mr. Zuk never liked much to eat but he eats whatever his benefactor gives to eat. But I-I like to eat.”
“Don’t I smell smoke?” I said, “isn’t that smoke floating in the trees?”
“And now I tell you disgusting. You know what is kumiss? Liquor from mare’s milk. Don’t make ugly face, is good, very good, like vwodka and yogurt mix, and good for you,
but sometimes we are in nomad village, kumiss is bring in to drink inside great bag of raw skin, one meter wide, and, Bogey, hair of horse still grows on inside part of bag, and plenty islands of black hair are swimming in kumiss. Pfui. And one time, bag, it bubbles too much inside, and just when we drink, whole thing blows up, bloomps! in hair, nose, eye, everything. Disgusting.” Her creamy laughter.
“That’s the eighteenth little creek we passed…”
“Is good.”
So now we were off the lake and nosing up another skimpier ditch, parting reeds and yellow scum and scraping bottom, and all of a sudden we’re smack in the middle of a big fat smoke ring, tunneling down the tonsils of it, visibility is the hole, that’s all, in this great white doughnut of smoke…
Zuk didn’t seem to notice. “Is not far now,” she murmured. “Hey-” [sniff, sniff] “I don’t just smell fire, I even see it…”
Fazool shrieked again and splashing out of the thick white smoke came a small black cow, with a nose like a wet black charcoal filter, and twisted horns where you looked for antlers. In deerlike arcs the cow launched herself and her freckled udder across the stream, trailing garlands of honeysuckle. “What the hump is this queer place?” I burst out, “I’m no mental peon, I can take it. I can take it if you can take it. We’re almost there, now come on, tell me where we are.”
“You are right, Bogey. We are deep in Great Dismal Swamp. We go to remote hunting lodge of my cousin, Édouard Suleymenian, vice consul for trade in America of Karamul-Karamistan. Édouard will help.”
“Chee-e-e-e-ese, the Dismal Swamp, I always wanted to go there, in a creepy sorta way, try tracking in the ruby-red peat bog, ever since Willis Marie Bundgus, the wood wizardess, told me it was the northern limit of the water moccasin, cheese,” and I began to tremble all over to think I had been wading up to my chin in the snaky soup.
“These little peat fires” [cough, cough] “they are as nothing, they happen every day in low water in August, dark of moon” [cough, cough]. Is very beautiful at night, that red ring of fire in bog, you see? Ranger men come put them out. Now and then, is true, ranger disappears in swamp. Crust falls in, bloomps, like top of meat pie under spoon, yes? and poor fireman falls into burning peat and we never see him no more…”