Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon Read Free Book Online Page A

they know of heaven. I had bitten his nose half off! I trudged on miserably, for the case was hopeless. Then—probably I was sniveling in some manner—I came over a rise, still walking in the middle of the road, and found myself looking down on the Camp Chunkagunk green woodie in a dirt turnaround on the left, a Caribou County police car tilted into the ditch on the right, and, side by side, slowly advancing, walking towards me up the little hill of blacktop, Ottie Grayson and a tall square-jawed policeman. I clamped my arm across my momps; the Camp Chunkagunk jersey dangled down in front of me like a curtain. Thank godzilla it was almost dark by now. I inched backwards.
    “Come on, Bogeywoman,” Ottie coaxed in an amiable zookeeper’s voice, he must have thought I was born yesterday, “we’ll take you back to camp. Chicken papa and strawberry cuss for dinner, and square dancing for Evening Pro …”
    The Bogeywoman’s appetite ya see was well known. From now on I hate chicken papa, I was thinking, and if I work at it I’ll soon loathe strawberry cuss too: and for the first time in my life I got a flash of why some girlgoyles say no to whatever
they
give you to eat. All the same I was getting hungry. I narrowed my eyes at Ottie. His nose was big and red and puffy, and looking bigger and redder and puffier the closer he came. “Nothing bad will happen to you,” he said, “I know you must be hungry by now.” “I ain’t hungry,” I said, “and I swear by godzilla Ottie Grayson if you come one step closer I’ll bite your nose clean off.” He stopped and so did the policeman. I whirled around to runand barged smack into Willis Marie Bundgus. Of course she’d circled around behind me stealthy as a weasel. I saw her big brown feet planted in a wrestler’s ready on the blacktop. The wood wizardess always wore that fringed vest like Annie Oakley. Now its tassels trembled. I would have let her take me. I wasn’t going to sock the great Willis Marie Bundgus, and anyhow she stood a foot above me even in a slight crouch. But she backed off. “Where’s your shirt, Koderer?” she said unhappily.
    “I swear I’m not buggy, I’m not,” I cried, and then I could feel the fuddies closing in behind me—I spun and threw them everything I had: Sunday Monday and Tuesday punches, knees to grottos, elbows to jawbones, roundhouses, watertowers and terminals, dungspreaders and haymakers, blueflies, blackflies, letter flies. I got nowhere. They didn’t hurt me, but the boys weren’t even trying. They caught my flailing arms and legs one by one and as the trooper steered my hands together for the handcuffs he turned up my arm and tweeted unmelodiously. “What in sam hill is this?” “It’s a map of Camp Chunkagunk,
Tough Paradise for Girls
,” I said proudly, “can’t you tell?” “Jesus wept,” the officer said in disgust and packed me into the cruiser.
    Since I was half-naked I figured they would throw Willis Marie Bundgus in with me for a chaperone and I could explain. But all I ever saw of her again was one gleam through the back window: Ottie Grayson and Bundgus in the Camp Chunkagunk station wagon, two white faces lit up in the windshield, one a grinning handyman I hereby rub out, one a suffering wood wizardess—I tell you she loved me more than she knew—till they slammed the car door closed.

2

Buggywoman
BUG MOTELS ON MISSION
    I was in the bughouse, but I wasn’t hearing angel voices. I wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, through invisible microphones in the toilet. I wasn’t the Virgin Mary. If I found a fat shoelace probably I tied my broken ukulele case together with it instead of trying to dangle from it, by the neck, inside my private closet. And, speaking of that closet, the cockroach I found there, napping in my sad-faced sneaker, was no hallucination but just as real, and just as big, as the Koderer nose on my face. I liked girlgoyles, that was at the bottom of it, but of course I wasn’t