Bogeywoman (15 page)

I started for the sixth-floor landing where the elevators were, put my hand on the ward door, and all at once I felt O’s pirate eye pegleg it up my back.
You’re not loving me and me alone the way you promised
, it told me telepathically.
You’re no beauty but you’ll pay
. I looked around reluctantly. This was when I figured it out that O was insanely jealous (I do not speak figuratively, we
were
in the bughouse), and like all insanely jealous people she was clairvoyant. It didn’t take a Sigmund Food—I mean everybody’s dreambox is a cellar full of the stuff, hungers half and whole, lost loves, unobtainable oinks, etc. Now she was peering into my dreambox and sniffing another woman in my life and I was making haste to cut Doctor Zuk out of my thoughts with a can opener. “Emily’s organs are rotting,” I said weakly—but everybody knew that already. “Er, how bout you, O?” “What about me?” she echoed spookily. “You want anything from downstairs?” She didn’t even answer. “How bout a Hollywood Bar?” “I can get what I want myself,” she replied. She was scary but—well I’ll bring her up a cherry snowball I thought—just lemme feed old Emily first.

SNOWBALLS SWEATING IN A
cardboard six-pack, pretzel rods marching across breast pocket like a squadron of cigars, candy bars crackling low in my overalls, soft warm coddies
swinging in a small white bag from my teeth. And one of Dion’s Tareytons fuming away between my knuckles. I had had to ask an intern for a light. Wouldn’t you know, when Emily was ready to eat, it was the world’s lunchtime; the line had stretched from the snack bar to the newspaper kiosk all the way across the lobby. Where had I left my own cigarettes and my 250-wrapper Mr. Peanut lighter? Godzillas sakes—on Emily’s bed—fifty-three minutes ago. The first floor, the second floor sank away, beaten-looking people, broken-off chunks of families, got on and off. Yes I’d lost my perfect fix on Emily’s rescue by funding this expedition with Bug Motels’ candy money, that was a mistake, my fault for flouncing around pretending I was Margaret Meat, but now I was on my way back to her cute-ugly, spindly self.

Then the elevator jerked to perfect blackness and stillness and stopped dead and right away I started to be very very sorry just like O had telepathically said I would. I knew O was at the bottom of it, she had the power—some electrician or maintenance guy or orderly she had oinked, or who was praying to oink her next week—she
had
to stop thinking of men that way. There was an emergency phone in all these elevators. When I felt around for the receiver and pressed it to my ear, O spooky-fluted out of the earpiece: “You ate my heart with ketchup, jewgirl, and now you’re gonna pay,” and hung up. In the black elevator, sweat started to trickle under my dirty bangs. My armpits itched madly. That was when it came back to me, the queer story I’d heard about how O first got to Rohring Rohring. The same old stuff about working the Pratt Street bars from the age of twelve, and busting out her stepfather’s bathroom window where they had locked her in and climbing down the garage roof and never coming back, and ten foster homes and fifteen
shows in juvenile court and three years’ probation later—but what I now remembered was the judge finally kicking her case to Rohring Rohring after she nailed her little foster sister,
who she liked better than anybody
, that was the part I particularly remembered, to the kitchen door with an oyster knife. The little sister had been trying to slip away … Had O thrown the knife like Mary Hartline on
Super Circus?
I wondered uneasily—Mary Hartline who walked upside down on the knives in her hands, her back arched like a bow.

Just then the elevator lurched back into motion, seemed to sink more floors than the hospital had floors, into the sewers beneath Broadway. It grounded like a submarine; I heard it scrape gravel. The doors sprang open, some kind of spotlight beamed into my eyes and I couldn’t see a thing—and then sumpm boinked against the wall behind me. I turned around. The spotlight picked out its edges. A jeweled dagger (probably it was just a garish letter opener filched from one of the royals) stuck there in the padding a second or two and fell to the floor, clunk. I leaned down and picked it up and squinted into the black. “What do you want, O?” “I don’t want nuttin from you,” she spooky-fluted, from a few feet away. “Well, cheese,” I said—I was impressed; the sweat rolled steadily, copiously out of my armpits—“if you don’t end up in the bughouse for life, you could get a job in a circus. Maybe Merlin would even hire you.” I thought better of that. “But for Merlin’s World Tour you’d have to be nonviolent. I don’t think you qualify.” “I could plead insanity if I killed you,” O trilled darkly, out of the darkness. “Besides, I’m still a juvenile. I betcha I’d get off,” she speculated. I tried my best to ignore this line of thought.

“Ain’t you gonna ask me what you did wrong?” O spooky-fluted. “No,” I replied, but on she went. “You said you’d be mine
all mine. I oughta cut your nose right off, you dirty jew bull dagger.” I stared into the blackness, found the gauzy glow of her ratted hair like a frozen eddy in a stream, and imagined her wild raccoony eyes ringed with black, sparkling over my death. This was a side of beauty I’d never seen. Could you sink your face between her momps after she called you that, even if she asked you to? Of course I didn’t know yet exactly what a bull dagger was. “Takes one to know one,” I ventured recklessly, “and anyhow I never said I’d be yours all yours.” “I oughta cut your lying lips off too. You love that skeleton baby—you love her more than me. You sneaked into Emily’s room, you dirty liar.” “You love Emily as much as I do,” I pointed out, gesturing into the blind dark with my bag of coddies, for O was deeply sentimental when she wasn’t throwing knives. “That don’t make me no bull dagger,” she growled. “Maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me,” I croaked out carefully, “what a bull dagger is?”

Sumpm about that was going too far: O bloomed out of darkness, furious, grabbing at my hair and throat and shedding great wet sobs: “Go eat yourself, you jew jasper—” She could throw a knife but not a punch I guess. Or maybe she didn’t really want to hurt me. I held the jeweled letter opener firmly behind my back and let her bite and scratch. Toothmarks on my neck might make Doctor Zuk … vaporized that idea, think of Emily, Emily! My poor see-through princess who even ate for me, I had to see that she truly loved me, loved me more than she loved any of them, and now where was I when she needed me? I had been gone over an hour. Suddenly the lights came up, with a lurch we started to move,
3B, 2B, 1B
, through the basements. O’s face was still in my face, but now we were drenched with fluorescent light. You’d think I wouldn’t be able to see beauty so close up, just hair roots and blackheads and tiny red threads in
the eyeballs, but tears webbed her gunky eyelashes like dew in the grass at night and even her sweat was flowers. When the kiss came it was hot and dry, then hot and wet, it sucked in all bodily terrains, a southwestern national park of a kiss and I forgot to notice if it was any different because the other one kissing had just called me a dirty jew.

We hit L for Lobby and the buttonboard came back to life, flashing red and green and buzzing from every floor, a throttled ping ping ping came from the speaker box and
“… Buzzey, Dr. Buzzey, code green, six-o-seven, stat. Repeat, Personnel, code red, code red, six-o-seven, stat. Dr. Beasley, Doctor Zuk, code green, six-o-seven, stat”
—over and over. We stopped kissing. We stared at each other. We had been in Rohring Rohring long enough to read this sort of audio minestrone with our ears closed. It was
trouble with a patient
and the patient was Emily, it was
fire, fire, fire
and the fire was in Emily’s room.

The elevator stopped, the doors rumbled apart and a bunch of emergency guys of a type I had never seen before, in khaki with long schnozzes of gas masks dangling from their shoulders, trooped on like D-Day and pushed us off and went zooming up the shaft, as we stood there in the lobby blinking at each other. The buttons down the sides of all four elevators were pulsing colors like the dashboard of a spaceship, and so many pings pinging at once I thought
death death
and busted out crying and so did O. “I bet she’s okay,” O said, changing her mind a second later, her eyes huge in their smutty rings, violently sniffing down a sob, for I guess to see me, the Bogeywoman, bawling was almost as scary as death. “She ate a coddy today, innit?—she ain’t ready to die. Just a little smoke in the quipment or sumpm, I betcha.” “I did it, O, it’s my fault—I left my cigs up there with her,” I said, “and my Mr. Peanut lighter.” “Sufferin cheeses,” O
said, her face grave, and didn’t even try to say sumpm to make me feel better. “The stairs,” we both blurted, and ran up them two at a time.

Outside Emily’s room was one of those mob scenes like you always see at a downtown Baltimore fire, where the official standers-around, with their uniforms on and their official autos blocking the street, fold their arms and squint sternly at the unofficial standers-around and make sure the nobodies don’t get close enough to see anything good. The nurses were part of this inner circle—all three Corny Norns, Miss Roper, Miss Mursch, Miss Hageboom. O and I ducked behind a medications cart that somebody had abandoned and lay on our bellies and peered between the shelves of snort-sized dixie cups and through the holes between the nurses. Those gas mask emergency guys were gone, which could be a good sign, but Emily was in trouble or this whole crowd of royals would have drained away in two seconds flat.

Now someone rolled one of those portable curtains around the bed, and looking at this was like watching some pitiful amateur puppet show trying to start, elbows dispiritedly punching cloth, flat rubber soles shuffling at the bottom of the curtain, and now and then some big thing accidentally sticking out, bald head of Dr. Buzzey, muscled bicep in green sleeve of Dr. Beasley, potato-shaped butt of Dr. Schock in her sack dress. Then I heard an exotic, familiar squinch, and taking my chin to the floor I saw, on the far side of the bed, the silver sandals of Doctor Zuk, who had just heavily shifted her weight. I heard, illegibly vibrating, the low tobacco-cured C-string of her voice. She was sort of crooning sumpm. My heart drowned.

“You smell any smoke? See any fire?” I whispered to O. “I see nuttin. I don’t even see Emily. Is she here?” “Sure she’s here,
she’s in the bed or all the royals wouldn’t be crowding around.” “Sumpm smells funny,” O said, and I smelled it too, like a plastic wading pool lying too long in the sun, or the inside of some cheap toy. “That could make you sick to your stomach. Uh-oh, look.” We saw it glint for a second above the curtain—the delicate boom of one of those rolling IV stands, a bit of the bubbling flask.

“O my godzilla,” I said, “sumpm really bad happened.” “At least she ain’t dead,” O said. “Maybe not, but you don’t get six royals including two regular doctors for a sick stomach.” “I don’t see nuttin black from a fire. Maybe it was a false alarm,” O whispered. “Maybe she did get sick from that coddy,” I agreed, suddenly wanting to be optimistic, “I mean real sick, like toe-main poison sick, I had that coddy two days. I always wondered how they can leave those coddies out like that on the counter, no frigerator no nuttin, little fish things on a metal tray no matter how hot it gets, with the flies and that, right in the hospital snack bar, it’s kinda disgusting if you think about it.” “Aw come on, coddies can’t rot, there’s not even no food in them,” O hissed, “well maybe a little potato or sumpm and just the smell of the grease from fried fish but no fish, that’s why they’re so good.” “They could rot,” I said, “one I forgot to eat rotted in my pocket once. Wooo it stunk.” “Nobody never died from eating no coddy,” O whispered firmly. “What’d you leave her your cigarettes for anyway?”

I looked at O. She was lifting the blueblack dip out of her eye as if to stress the clear sound reason of this question. I shook my head. My scheme for getting Emily to eat sounded so dumb to me now I hated to say. But then I remembered she
had
smoked and
had
eaten. My see-through princess loved me best, there was no explaining that. And I knew it was my not coming back that
had done this, whatever it was. I shouldn’t have left her sumpm of mine she could hurt herself with, some flammable dreamboxoline, some poison present. I should have made it back to her somehow—I gazed at O—the trashy pirate’s eye-patch of a dip had slipped down over her eye again—I had to admit I had not just been waylaid, I had fallen. I was too starved to be trusted. I moaned to think of the kiss in the elevator and just then Emily moaned from behind the curtain. My moan died and hers, reedy and quavering, was in the air, rising, faraway but clear, like one wolf howling to another on the next mountain top.

I distinctly heard Doctor Zuk say, “Courage, dear, only little bit more,” and then sumpm sailed out of the curtain and flopped on the linoleum. It was pink, brown, black; charred and wet—I stared, my eyes refused to tell me what it was. “Sufferin cheeses, it’s that ugly thing the nurses give her,” O whispered, and then I recognized it, the
I
CHOCOLATE
bathrobe they had just peeled away from her burned skin like skin. My eyes fixed on the maraschino cherry buttons. They weren’t melted. They looked the same as ever, good enough to eat. “She musta set herself on fire,” O said, deeply impressed, “you think she done it on purpose?”