Free Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon Page A

she’d let me do whatever I
    The elevator doors shuffled open and Bertie sang, “Oink me, it
is
an H. Holy godzilla, look at that motha.”
    And I peeked out of our sheets at the thing. It sat on a stainless steel dolly in a row of dowdy linen bins, a Nike among Miss Muffets. It had been many times slicked over with paint but still had a rough, psoriatic crumb to its blue enamel that made me loath to touch it. It was like sumpm left to rust in a marine junkyard because it might explode—and yet it did resemble somebody’s mother: five feet high, all the power in the bosom and shoulders, some sort of undersized glass-faced gauge where the head should be—a meter instead of a dreambox, isn’t that just like a mother? Well what do I know, never having had one since I was two.
    “Come on, Ursie. O, you stay put—make like you’re paralyzed or sumpm. Perfect.” Bertie and I stood side by side, lookingdown fascinated at O’s big eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling—two Caribbean portholes ringed with stove black, in each of which a blind dab of fluorescent light floated. “I do a good coma, don’t I,” she said, and we both jumped.
    Bertie grabbed the H around the waist, tipped but couldn’t lift the thing. I laughed. “Okay, Koderer, you do it,” he grunted. Then panic whited out his face: “Cheese it—the Regicide!” And suddenly the H was rocking like a bowling pin on its heel. Bertie dove into one laundry bin and I took the next one down the line, and pretty soon we heard the swat, swat of Reggie Blanchard’s tennis-racket-sized white rubber-soled hospital loafers on the linoleum.
    “Lady O! How ya doing. You be up here scouting again for that doper cat? What did that eight ball ever do for you?”
    Comatose. Not a blink. A drapette of the highest principles was O, stand-up to the final hour, a stone stoic even though we both knew that Bertie would have swapped either one of us, or both, to the hoods or the cops in a minute for eight ounces of Saigon gage or anything else really hard to get.
    Our Reginald was an artistic-looking tea-colored negro whose beautifully molded lips had ambiguous and unsettling punctuation marks at the corners of them. He wore a little W.E.B. Du Bois goatee as sharp as a tack, and his poison-honey eyes were cruel. I mean it was the way he saw the world. Really he’d rather save you than sell you, but first he checked the price.
    “What’s your hustle today, sweetheart? Coma! All dummied up! Ain’t talking to the Reg! Ain’t you the one,” he saxophoned. “Old O, if she can’t say sumpm nice, she don’t say nothing, is that it? I hear you! Been had your messed-up brain taken right out, huh? Well it was nothing but trouble anyway. Tell you this, sweetheart. You the best-looking empty they ever had up here, you know that? And as I know you are a schooled younglady, down with all games, and I desire a word with you, Ima give that coma my special cure—scope the gangway first, make sure nobody ain’t coming—okay now Ima turn that coma over to Doctor Blanchard for his patented guaranteed coma process—”
    Things went quiet, too quiet, and, since my laundry bin had no peephole, I had to periscope up through the twisted towels and damp pajamas to see what was going on—and got my head up just in time to see the dirty dog lying on top of her.
    With my record I bet you think I jumped right in there on top of them, punching and kicking. Well, I was a Bug Motel now, and not only a Bug Motel, a Bug Motel
on mission
. I stayed put. Over Reggie’s shoulder, O narrowed her eyes at me warningly, and I obeyed. O half growled, half giggled, and finally she clawed Reggie’s back with her black raspberry fingernails. “Hey, Lady O, there you is. This coma is defunct, you cured, I Dr. Reggie done cured your bug-eyed self, or was you shucking the whole time? You? Not you! But anyhow you back with the living. I missed you, baby. Now sit up. Gimme some sugar.”
    O sat up with a