Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon Read Free Book Online

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 andslightly 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 sendBundgus 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 one 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 onmy 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