Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon Read Free Book Online Page B

telling
them
that. I liked girls, except for me. And in the wilderness between my hunger and its exception, I sometimes drew maps with no way out on the inside of my forearm with a razor blade. Or anything else sharp I could find. I was seventeen now. I had been in this dump one year, seven months and seven days. I stilldreamed of dirty rotten Lou Rae Greenrule, who loved me and left me, and of the wood wizardess, who turned me in. Sometimes I dreamed I was back at Camp Chunkagunk and having a pretty good time, except for those two ripe pimples I was hiding inside my brassiere, so sore and popping full of yellow cheese they made me want to puke.
    I was safe in the loonie bin, and to make sure I was safe, I kept my mouth shut. Who knew what a bona fide loonie might have to say? So I gave em the silent treatment, I mean all the dreambox mechanics and especially “my” dreambox mechanic, Foofer. For one year, seven months and seven days—not one word. Right smack in the bughouse I was aUnbeknownst To Everybody, or at least I was until that dirty stoolie Margaret wrote sumpm on the back of a greasy menu that Foofer got his hands on—as she knew he would. (
I forgot
, says Margaret. Forgot! I’ll say no more. It doesn’t take a Sigmund Food.)
    But this was before the menu, before Zuk, before I said a single word. Foofer musta thought he’d heard it all, but one year, seven months and seven days of nothing?—I have reason to think he was impressed.
    A state hospital would have rolled me over in a week, but Thomas Hare Rohring and Eugenia O. Rohring Clinic could afford to ponder my case. After all, Merlin was forking over a hundred dollars a day. Merlin felt sick at heart for the mess I was in—he said—but he was having a good year. No way Merlin’s Puppets World Tour could come home from Haiphong, or Penang, or Surabaya, or wherever he was that week, just to nurse me. “And I’d
have
to nurse you,” he threatened, his voice all thready sizzles and crackles on the phone from the bamboo post office of some island campong, “because I sure wouldn’t have the dough to keep you in Rohring Rohring if I came home.”
    I never quite got it how being the wizard of world peaceduring the Vietnam War turned into money for the old man; there couldn’t have been any dough in those two-donkey village squares where Merlin’s Puppets was always mounting the same old show. But sumpm must have turned into sumpm because here I was. Only famous court cases like O and Emily got scholarships to this dump. Anyhow, the way I looked at it, after all those years of feeling left out of the fame part, here I was doing my bit for history by costing Merlin so many dollars a day that he had to stay in Asia and be the bane of Lyndon Bugbane Johnson himself. Now and then I did wonder just what unsavory republic might be putting up the bucks.
    Still, that was a terrifying threat from Merlin:
I’d have to nurse you
 … It meant of course being nursed not by Merlin but by the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette, who’d be flown home from Hanoi or Samovarobad or somewhere for the purpose. Which, shudder, could mean that the theatrical vampiress might one day try to touch me with her creepy whisker-thin hands. And also the idea of home starched my will to stay where I was. I had said—in fact I had hollered, pretty inconveniently if I should ever change my mind—that if they threw me out of Camp Chunkagunk I would never go home. And I didn’t. Not that I had a home to go home to, in the usual sense of the word. But this way
they
wouldn’t slap one together for me, either, with some slave-driving twenty-one-star foster mom out in Harford County, in the pay of the state, with the girls’ dormitory set up in an old chicken house on the family farm and enough “chores” to exhaust an infantry battalion.
    Anyway the social worker wouldn’t hear of me going back to Merlin’s house on Ploy Street all alone, to bounce around like the last beebee in