Bogeywoman

by Jaimy Gordon

  “Well that’s over,” I said, noticing I was rather superfluous to this conversation myself. I thought I’d better remind her I was a wanted woman. “I’m not going back there even if they say I did murder. It was an accident.”

  “O that,” Suzette said with mild surprise, “I forgot about that-it’s all cleared up-didn’t you see it on TV? Turns out the poor doctor died of an aneurysm, I mean they found out some bubble boist under his heart, you know, where it goes into his stomach? Very unfortunate, the loss of a woild-famous diagnostician and that, but the problem was in his organs, dear, it wasn’t you at all.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said uncomfortably, feeling like the late summer grit blowing across the highway. So Foofer hadn’t died of a broken head or a swallowed pipe-his heart had drowned, drowned in its own blood-while mine had washed up here, bone dry. Between trucks in the parking lot sat the taxicab I’d come in, BLACK-AND-WHITE CAB CO Lizzy City N.C. At the counter the driver pushed the last kink of a glazed doughnut into a moony jowl and studied the Morning Telegraph. Thank godzilla I had found a coupla hundreds crunched down the bottom of Doctor Zuk’s black bag when I snuck back on the Jenghiz Khan. And Zuk’s long white dress shirt in a tree, only a little soggy. And Fazool’s tire-bottomed flip-flops.

  “I should say so,” Suzette replied. “The coppers ransacked this place for a picture of you. Finally they had to settle for some ridiculous four-foot-long megillah with every last girl at Camp Chunkagunk on it. You’re in the back row with some kinda black gunk on your Adam’s apple, what the heck was that stuff? Well anyway dear you were famous. For two days. They blew up that tiny face and plastered it all over the TV screen…”

  “I was famous,” I parroted, in a daze.

  “… right next to your father’s-as if the poor man didn’t have enough trouble. Oi-sula, you wouldn’t believe the hate mail Moilin’s Woild gets! Two big bags full every day, half of it’s fan mail it’s true but the other half, dear god the things they say! Of course the Mung should help with that.”

  “Did you get my Camp Chunkagunk picture back?” I growled.

  “Did I what? God knows, dear, I’m sure I never gave it a thought… Oi-sula, Mrs. Kuchmek from the Juvenile Court has been calling. They’ve got to appoint some sort of, er, adult guardian for you if you’re not going back to the hospital. Somebody has to officially receive you.”

  “Why not you and Merlin?” I said. “Just sign whatever they hand you, I won’t be any trouble, I promise, you’re never even gonna see me, I’ll disappear, I already disappeared, the taxi’s waiting outside…”

  “Mrs. Kuchmek knows I’m flying to Moilin in Manila on Friday, and anyhow your father’s far too well known for you to go around pulling stunts like that. You need an adult to keep an eye on you. What about that woman doctor you ran away from the hospital with, that Zook or Shook or whatever her name was, she seemed interested in you-”

  “Cheese it caused an international scandal already my leaving with Zuk, and besides I thought Merlin thought she was dangerous-”

  “Politics, dear, politics. Anyway by now that’s all blown ovah,” Suzette purred, “nobody cares, dear, as long as you’re all right. You are all right, aren’t you? Do you need any money?”

  “I’m fine,” I muttered.

  “I’m glad you’re out of the mental hospital, that’s no place for you. Call Mrs. Kuchmek will you? So how about that Doctor Zook?”

  “I’ll look into it,” I said.

  “Moilin wants to see you when he’s in Washington in eighteen days.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Any messages for your father?”

  “Nope.”

  “I’ll give him your congratulations.”

  “Give him my congratulations.”

  On the beltway, heading for Route 70 West to Frederick, the cabbie tuned in WBUG “Afternoon Bandstand” and what do you think I hear?

  Bugs Baloney, who’s a phony?

  The fat begins to fry

  Nobody home but the telephony

  Me myself and I.

  Doowop dwop dead

  The blind eat many a fly

  Every slave will have a slave

  Why not you and I?

  “Hey, that’s my song,” I shrieked, “pull over.” The cabbie looked at me in mild alarm. She was a buzz-cut old jasper in an A-1 Auto Body tee shirt with a neck like a tree trunk. “There ain’t no shoulder, hon,” she said, “you fixing to get us kilt?” “I mean, turn off at the first ramp with a pay phone,” I said. So along we go, calmly, another two miles. Meanwhile the Frogman comes on: “This little tune,” he grates, “was written by the Bug Motels’ legendary fugitive girl singer-songwriter Ursie ‘The Bogeywoman’ Koderer. It was recorded live at the bughouse on the Regicide label by our own! Balmer! bughouse band, Dion and the Bug Motels! and zoomed overnight to number two on our charts! This is WBUG! Top! Forty! Mad! Mad! Radio-o-o-o-o!”

  I dialed East Six. Who should pick up the phone but Reginald carpet-nails-in-honey Blanchard himself? He says: “Bug Motels. How we can help you?” “Cheese, is this a bug hospital or a booking agency?” I spluttered. “Bogeywoman! Izzat you? How fast can yall haul ass back to the bughouse? You is no longer persona niggerata round here. The Bug Motels has debuted, they has busted into the big time, you my songwriter and I am your manager.” “What is this Dion and the Bug Motels stuff?” I asked, “you know that silly peacock can’t sing a note.” “Well-lemme tell you how it is-don’t nobody want to look at O’s big as a house self right now. Egbert and Emily best lay back dead in the looks department. And anyhow Egbert’s bailing out-found some gig in a bookstore coffeehouse on Charles Street-how square can you get? So I figure I can sell that pretty-boy face-hump I done already sold it. We got a TV date on WAAM on Friday. Way you at? I come get you.”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  “Get the oink outa here-you be back. This your chance for fame and fortune, girl. All you gotta do in this bughouse is eat and sleep-grease and zee and play that pukelele-I take cay the rest.”

  “Ain’t coming,” I said, “maybe I’ll send you a song now and then.”

  “Aw, you be back afta while. Go on now, take you a bitty vacation. I just glad your ass still kicking. When I hear that Rooski dreambox repair queen come back all alone from that all-night boat ride, I worried you drownded or shot or in the Gulag or sumpm.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, trembling, “what Russki dreambox repair queen do you mean?”

  “I mean that Zook, that lady doctor you run off with. I hear she pass through and pick up her brass booties…”

  I hung up the phone, composed myself and told the cabbie: “Indian Mound Downs. And step on it.”

  SO I WAS FAMOUS for two days, but it wasn’t worth living in the bughouse. The Bug Motels didn’t get far on those five same old songs of course. I used to sit around Track Kitchen Number Two with a ballpoint and the backs of a few greasy menus trying to make up words, but I had left my pukelele behind and, it was funny, now that I was out of the bughouse and mucking stalls for a living, when I cocked open my mouth, flies flew into it instead of word salad and other buggy stuff swimming out. The Bug Motels made a little dough on their one almost big hit on the Regicide label, “Because I Couldn’t Stop for Lunch,” which sold like crazy in Baltimore-but come to find out we owed the whole take to our manager, the Regicide, on account of some contract none of us remembered signing. Bertie still plays in clubs around the city, but only Dion ever made a name for himself bigger than the Bug Motels. Probably you saw him as Big Henry the helpful Indian scout in Little Bughouse on the Prairie. Just enough so some people around Baltimore still ask, from time to time, whatever happened to the Bug Motels. O well, at least O got sumpm out of it all. She got a set of twins: boygirl, blackwhite, buggysane.

  The Bug Motels lost me and in six more months they lost Emily. If I didn’t see my see-through princess before me as I write-yes I mean loyal-to-the-death-by-starvation Emily Nix Pea
body, refusal was her middle name, ex-guts of the Bug Motels, now a fleaweight pony girl galloping thousand-pound horses around the track-I wouldn’t believe it myself. Stranger things haven’t happened, not even to me, although I gotta admit she always held up her end on mission. She was tough even then, in her way, with those little aspirin-tablet muscles already popping up on her pipecleaner arms. Well you should see em now. Margaret kept on saying, “I’ll adopt that little Emily yet. Do you doubt me, Ursula? Don’t you see how an ounce of positive desire is worth a pound of negative regulation in this world? It’ll happen, you watch.” Even so I wouldn’t buy it, not the way I was back then, still dragging around the covert conservatism of the mental patient like a torn wrapper of sticky tinfoil.

  But after I was here a month, I came to see how Margaret got to thinking like that. One month more and I was thinking that way myself. Here at the excremental end of the sport of queens and kings, where once classy horses that no longer win at Pimlico get dumped, the bosses of the world rub shoulders with folks as low as the ground-folks like me, a former mental peon, and Margaret, the sloppy sexy girlfriend of sleazy Tod Novio, Boyfriend Death (now actually Husband Death), and Boyfriend Death’s hotwalker, T-Bone Riley. T-Bone, who was beautiful as Belafonte when he was young, used to be Eleanor Ogden’s favorite groom at Breadbasket Farm before he got a bleeding ulcer from the strain on his dreambox of rubbing Hardtack, a horse worth ten times as much every day as T-Bone would earn in his whole life. Boyfriend Death gave T-Bone the little trailer when we moved into the big one, Eleanor Ogden was grateful for old T-Bone’s sake, the Davies Ogdens are cousins to Eugenia Ogden Rohring who endowed Rohring Rohring, and Eleanor Ogden is on the board of the American Dreambox Institute-and in short, six more months and Emily arrived, carrying a round blue overnight case which contained her pink plastic toilet set, a new Cowboys ’n’ Indians bathrobe the nurses had given her, with plastic buckskin fringes, and a pile of Donald Duck comics, all her possessions in the world.

  “Er, uh, Emily, do you remember Doctor Zuk?” I asked as soon as I could get her alone. “Sure, she was purty and nice,” Emily said, “she took me to the pitcher gallery in my wheelchair one time and showed me all the horse pitchers and the Gyptian mummy, it was a little king, smaller’n me even. And she said when I got rid of those bandages she was gonna buy me a real dress not just a bathrobe, but then she left.” “Did you ever see her come back after that?” I asked. Emily solemnly shook her head unh-unh. “Not even maybe just for a day or sumpm?” Head wagging slowly nunh-unh. “That wasn’t sumpm you just really didn’t want to know or sumpm, was it?” “Unh-unh. I did wanna know, I even ast.” “What’d you ask?” “I ast if she was ever coming back.” “What’d they say?” “She wasn’t never.” “And you never ever heard nuttin more about her?” “Well… one time Miss Mursch said she thought she seen her. She went someplace on a trip. I… I forget where.” “Now, think, Emily. Where?” “I don’t know where. Miss Mursch went somewheres… It was to see the rich people shop. And… and… she saw Doctor Zuk there… shoppin. Sumpm… New sumpm…” “New York?” “I don’t know. I dint ask.” Her little chin began to quiver and I decided it was sumpm I really didn’t want to know.

  I let Emily be. She got the best room in the trailer, the one that looks out over the Cacapon and the horses tripping down the bank to drink. Then she got little black lizard cowboy boots with tooled green lariats and flying yellow pineapples on them, and Margaret gave her our big pony Broomstick, and with her nerve, that was that, stunted anatomy became destiny-she’ll be a jockey before it’s done.

  As for me, the former mental peon, this topsy-turvy racetrack world, this dump of queens and tramps, this sometimey escalator of nobodies to the stars, was a good place to land, but I’m only passing through, or that’s the basic idea. Our mother of sainted trainwreck’s alma mater Belcher College turned me down once they saw on my transcript that I had been bussed to Girls’ Classical every day from the bughouse. And maybe somebody there remembered my name from the Foofer wrongful death case-well, damn em to hump, but what could I expect? It won’t be easy to break into dreambox repair from Paw Paw Community College, but that’s what I by godzilla plan to do. If Doctor Zuk could pull it off in Caramel-Creamistan, then I can do it here. Back to the bughouse, that’s my plan! But only as high commissar of the dump. It’ll happen, you watch.

  In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve decided to stay a Unbeknownst, or anyway unannounced, for the rest of my life. What’s it anybody’s business, anyway? I am what I am, not what you are or they are. That’s why I have to be one-of-a-kind. I don’t dare be a club, for if I were a club I would soon be kicked out of it. I want someone to love, of course, some big woman with fire and la beauté, who’s never known anyone like me before. I expect to find her soon.

  My arms don’t resemble raw meatloaf nowadays. Instead they’re sorta like two slim, egg-dribbled, unbaked loaves of bread-two baguettes of thready, shiny white scar flesh from elbow to pinky. I have to admit they don’t look human. You’d be surprised how few people ask me what happened to them, and when strangers do, either I silently smirk them down, from the dignity of my new mysteriousness, or, practicing to be a dreambox mechanic, I ask them-affecting a vaguely trans-Ural accent-Why is this of interest to you? I think of my arms, in the privacy of my dreambox, as the last sweet vestige of my monsterhood-sorta like the Queen of Sheba’s goose feet, which Solomon glimpsed, to his fright, at the bottom of her gown as she daintily stepped across the floor of mirrors-or the swan-feathered forearm of the sixth brother in the fairy tale, whose left sleeve wasn’t ready when the liberation came. I think of my arms as my monster ticket, you might say, in case the whole world should go the monster way and monstrosity comes into its own. I’ll be there. I’ll be ready.

  The more I think about it, the more I’m sure Zuk’s alive somewhere-Not good but life, as she once said about little Miss Peabody. Sometimes I wonder if her downfall was all some sumptuous piece of theater she staged for my education, or rather for my violent graduation, with no going back. And maybe, though the glamorous madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse could never vulgarly think such a thing, she had had enough of me just when I had had enough of her. Or did we both see that one desert, even one six million square miles, wouldn’t be big enough for the two of us?

  So what if she fooled me? Even if she’s in Paris right now, dining at Chez Maxim on cousin Édouard’s tab, taking in Balenciaga, the spring collection, still she disappeared for me, for me-disappeared royally-she did me that favor. Therefore, she loves me to the end of time. Love is a command and the heart is khan.

  Sometimes when I’m alone in the trailer late at night, when Novio Stables is running a horse in the tenth race and everybody’s there except for me, the phone rings. I pick it up. I hear nothing, just that faint wild sizzle, deep in the earpiece, of the electrical cosmos brooding on itself-but I listen, I listen, and there comes, in due course, that small sedate roll of surf which is human breath. I know who it is. It’s you, isn’t it, I say, you, you-I don’t call her by name, but then I never knew what name to call her. And what the hump would her name be now? Godzilla knows. Madame Doctor? Commissar? Prisoner X? She never says a word, never hangs up, and once I even laid the phone down, ran to T-Bone’s trailer and dialed her old number in Baltimore. Needless to say-life is a dream-it was busy.

  In the cobwebby, dusty old Winnebago, hearing the munching of beasts in the dark through the open portholes, holding the cool receiver in my hand, I felt the small hairs wave on the back of my neck. Then I told myself: this is one last favor she does me, to visit me in this ghostly way, so that I will never want to be with her-to show me, instead of her beautiful face, her other face, deformed, fearful, old-so I’ll be glad I’m on my own. All the same I have her, I am her.

  Finally I hang up the phone and think: It can’t be Zuk. Even if she’s alive, how could she possibly know where I am? Where did she get my number? What could she have to say to me?

>   JAIMY GORDON

  ***

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