Free Bogeywoman by Jaimy Gordon Page B

sigh and swung her legs side-saddle off the gurney so her gold lamé ballet slippers dangled. She patted her big hair, curled back her bony shoulders, planted hands on hips, pointed her nuzzies professionally and said: “Hey Reg. What’s uptown?”
    “Welcome back, baby. Nothing much. Same old three-six-nine. Say, what yall crazies looking for down here on three? Wyncha let me take cay it for yall? I wear a white suit but I ain’t the heat. I knew you from the world, don’t forget that, sweetheart. What was you prospecting for?”
    The Blue Bomb stood fifteen feet from them, but Reg had no interest in dentist D.O.A.P.
    “You,” she said. “Unh-huh. Huckly buck,” Reg said, pleasedjust the same. “Let’s you and me go somewhere. Outasight,” O spooky-fluted in his ear, and her scuffed-up gold lamé ballet slippers plinked onto the linoleum. He forgot about our mission. “Hey, baby, I hear you,” and next their assorted big and little soft shoes slapped away together down the corridor. I surfaced among the towels in time to see Reginald poke his keys into some door marked NO ADMITTANCE halfway down the hall. And the two of them disappeared behind it.
    I wished on Reggie Blanchard all the violent deaths of Pennsylvania Avenue whence he had come. Like I said, he’d sooner save you than sell you, though he looked at the price tag first. But here he was, a royal, well anyway a royal flunky, oinking a mental peon—for an old-time street hustler like himself he had no mercy. He didn’t think O could be harmed by doing it in a mop closet. And neither did O. I smelled sumpm rotten in the whole deal, but after all, we were in the bughouse. To be mentally hygienic or even nosily parental was just not done among the mental patients, and especially not among the Bug Motels. Besides, oinking on her feet, for small change or even in swap for that good old dreamboxoline, in barroom toilets and phone booths and back entrances, was O’s official problem:
she had to stop thinking of men that way
. We Bug Motels had a hands-off nose-out policy towards all official problems, and as for what we really thought—we didn’t think it.
    It did flash on me that O was about to peddle herself in a broom closet
for us
, the Bug Motels on mission: that is, just to clear the coast for a giant tank of laughing gas—and I resolved then and there not to sniff one sniff or laugh one laugh of the stuff, at least not until O forgave me for letting her. Then again I never believed for a minute that O might not forgive me for letting her. And another thing: none of us, not even Bertie, put thatold dreamboxoline—by which I mean assorted dreambox oils, drops, gasses and powders—higher on the list of daily necessaries than O did, although she herself might go easy on the purple dots or the mushrooms—never on the bottle, however. Already I could picture her holding that red clown’s nose of an N 2 O mask, with its nostrils-of-pig outvalve, to one of our faces after another, while she swigged from her own little half-pint of peppermint schnapps. The feast of sumpm for everybody, that was what O liked when she was Mary Hartline, that and the clear swill she was swilling, vodka or schnapps, screech or moonshine, whatever one of her boyfriends had organized for her that day. Now she was Mary Hartline on
Super Circus
holding out those goldfish bowls full of coins to our fat fists, only the pennies nickels and quarters had turned into laughing gas, and never mind where she got it (really
she had to stop thinking of men that way
).
    Well, anyhow, from here on, with O and the Regicide taken up elsewhere, it was easy. Though the thing must have weighed two hundred pounds, all I had to do was tip that great mother H up against the gurney while Bertie held the cart rollers in place, and hoist her with one big hoist, and tuck her in, and climb back into bed with her. In the dark, under the covers, she was buxom and stately and cold. She had no nipples to