Bogeywoman (33 page)

“By the lover’s reckoning,” she hisses, “Samovarobad is not far.”

Who are you, who made you, what do you want with me

“All the same, my dear, love is a command and the heart is khan. Finally I am not spoon of your mouth. But I follow this to end of this. Open your eyes.”

I OPENED THEM
. And I guess by the book if there is a book I shoulda made love to her now, I mean she
was
the scary love of my scary life and I never let on I was yellow if I could help it. So I made up my mind to unbutton her—but what happens is her Foofer suit flops open and whaddaya know she’s opened it all up in there herself. Her gnomy whitegreen hands are spreading out the wings of white shirt and under there she’s naked. I lie there looking up at her, wondering what do I do with this, what do I do now

This isn’t a comic book but
kreeech
, right then I heard a sickening scrape. Bone on bone. It was our bottom, I mean the bottom of the People’s Ship
Jenghiz Khan
. “Idiot! donkey!” Zuk exploded, “outcast! What they send me for pestilence, this
runaway of wormy camels and sheep’s eyeball soup who knows no more of sea than I know of taxidermy …” I watched Zuk’s soccer player’s calves storm up the gangway stairs two at a time, she pulled her shirt flaps together and buttoned her pants as she went, and there followed more terrible curses—I couldn’t understand a word of course but I stole up the stairs behind her, the better to take this in.

She stomped up and down with her hands on her hips, yelling bloody murder. What a swashbuckler she was with her glinting slaver’s eye, her rose cravat tied for a sweatband around her brow, and the jagged décolletage of her misbuttoned shirt! One word she sneered over and over—
fazool, fazool, fazool
, as in
pasta
? I realized the word must mean sumpm disgusting in Caramel-Creamistani—then it dawned on me it was the fellow’s name. He stood at pathetic attention with his mouth fixed in that same tooth-baring grin, then suddenly jumped overboard as if to kill himself, one last obedience to her command.

He came up gasping in black water to his chin, bent to the hull and grunted with all his might, but nothing happened. We were stuck. Run aground. I could see one red glowing channel marker a few feet off our stern, just behind us, and a green one like a cartoon serpent’s eye on a pole just in front of us, and then I put it together. We were smack in the middle of the two, right where we oughta be. It was low water—not even the poor drudge’s fault.

Zuk came up and curled her craggy hand around my shoulder—stood cheerfully beside me, panting a bit from all that theatrical wrath. “Kinda hard on that shnook, aren’tcha?” I whispered. “So what you want, Bogey, maybe we too should jump in water, with frogs and snakes, and push?” she loudly whispered back.

What frogs and snakes did she mean? I looked again at the cartoon serpent’s eye on the channel marker and saw it was no cartoon. A viper, real as my foot, hulaed down the pole and splashed into the wet. I saw its bald little skull periscope away, the point of a fan of ripples, and heard other soft splashes all up and down the—good godzilla, we were in some swamp, you could practically reach out and touch it on either side.

At first I thought we must be stuck in some boggy creek off the Choptank, but what about that endless bulldog growl of the engine and the gyroscopic sense I had that we’d sailed south all night? I knew I’d lost track of time in the cabin of the
Jenghiz Khan
but surely a night had gone by—and now that I peered into it, the dark did have some of that dusty velvet grain that meant dawn was on the march. What came after Virginia, if you sailed straight down the bay? The ocean, you’d think, but now I saw with my own eyes that the land had closed in rather than opened out. The walls of a channel straight as a blowgun lay ahead and behind. Steep black banks pressed in, flecked with white things like ghostly shoes, and above them jungle treetops on both sides, every hole chinked with vines, even the purple sky overhead crisscrossed with the necklaces of creepers, and from where I sat in my deck chair and gaped, my head tipped back against Zuk’s arm, a thousand little arabesque spit curls dangled from the silhouetted greenery, a thousand living curlicues which could have been water moccasins and probably were.

“Where in godzillas name are we?”

“You see why I must encourage Fazool.”

“I don’t think that little guy will ever get us out of here all by himself,” I whispered to Zuk, “I better get in the water with him and help him push—I mean I’m dressed for it—where the hump are we going anyway?” “Already Fazool wants to know where
is your shame—Karamul-Karamistan is exceedingly prudish culture, before he comes here he hardly sees face of woman in his life, never mind pupik. I have ordered him not to look at you, I say you are mad daughter of American vice-president and I am save you, for sake of big foreign aid money for Karamul-Karamistan.” “It’s dark,” I argued, “water’s up to here, he doesn’t have to look, just push.” She sighed: “Very sensible, Bogey, but is too late for sensible. I say him you are mad, mad you must be. Anyway, is not just push. Naked in dark water together, this is kind of union.” We leaned together over the rail, elbow to elbow, peering into the glittering, sucking black. “Ach, I think here is case where water is not to be had, therefore washing with dirt is permitted. I go in swamp with snakes and frogs and I push.” She shuddered.

In the end I wouldn’t let Zuk in the swamp without me and Zuk wouldn’t let me in without her, so she tied her rose cravat around Fazool’s eyes—this saved him from corruption—and all three of us were dragging and shoving the
Jenghiz Khan
through the thick soup when it got light enough to see that the water was blood red. And it was true what Zuk had said about being naked in dark water together—frankly I was glad for a chaperone. It made you aware there was hardly any real edge to anything in this world. The water was warm as a bathtub—but even bathtubs pucker your toes and fingers into hungry little fish mouths, so bored and restless is your native goo in its home body I guess, so aching to get out, to suck up to some other body, to pour itself down some hole. And look at it this way, pressing all around you at every other moment is nothing, I mean you think it’s nothing, but actually it’s air, a medium of transfer as tight as a wetsuit. Only here, when it wasn’t air but rich red muck, you felt it and saw it.

And this stuff was oinking alive! Sumpm squirmed out from under my footsole with every cringing step, or bulged between my toes, or spiraled fatly between my thighs, or bumped its blind forehead against my blind belly. Sometimes my foot sank down a foot in the gunk at the bottom and the red swamp closed over my head. Cheese, I came up spluttering, cheese, cheese, a wad of brown leaves in my mouth. If I hadna been up to my ears in the stuff, I’d have been sweating for sheer terror.

And yet in the dark back of my mind I remembered the whole time that, as soon as the
Jenghiz Khan
floated free, it would be me and Madame Zuk alone in the bottom of the boat again, and this time, no getting out of it, it was my turn and nothing but wet skin between us. Her body stretched out before me as wide and brown as Central Asia, as endless and complex, and suddenly swamp water looked okay.

Now and then the
Jenghiz Khan
bobbed loose for a step or two, only to stick again. It was good there was a whole pack of us—six legs pushing and churning up the bottom and about as adept at our work as a buncha water buffalo—cause the snakes and turtles all knew we were coming. All the same it made my jaw grin up with horror, hearing all those unseen spotted and scaly amphibians slap into the soup with us, kerplopping on every side in the vain frantic hope of getting away from us for good, and the rusty chowder can I had to pry off my foot now and then didn’t butter up my nerves any either. Pop bottles rolled under my arches like rungs of sunken ladders. The ghost shoes turned out to be oyster shells as big as hamburger platters. Under the ruby water we saw the wreck of a zinc garbage can, a yellowed, eaten-out water heater waving pink sponges of insulation, a bit of ornate wrought-iron fence that made me think of a country graveyard, and a whole four-burner Roper stove.

And all of a sudden the channel widened out—there was a broad ditch to our right—and we were all treading water. Fazool, who couldn’t swim, almost drowned until Zuk caught hold of one end of the rose cravat. The
Jenghiz Khan
came free. Fazool steered her starboard down the feeder ditch and pretty soon Zuk and I stood dripping in the hold, staring at each other in the dusty morning sunlight that came through the portholes, our bodies spotted all over with red peat flecks, black leaf curd and bog dirt, not even cold.

And now, no more dillydallying! Table spread thyself! To the banquet at hand. “Er, I’m starving to death—got anything to eat on this tub?” “A thousand pardons, my dear. How I can forget, you are young person, like weasel who eats twice her weight in day …” She ransacked drawers and cupboards, and, standing together at the sink, our breasts swinging, or anyway her breasts swinging, we ate with our fingers—there wasn’t a fork—cheerios and vienna sausages, sardines and cocoa puffs and smoked oysters swimming in oil.

She lay naked on the bunk, one hand behind her head, and I sat down beside her. This was it. Zuk was demure enough, or exhausted enough, to close her eyes.

Her body was similar to Central Asia, as I have said, and not young, but age hadn’t ruined it, only made it more dramatic, all its tufted crags and escarpments, the muscle walls hung with moss, folds of tough sod between rock ribs, bristly sedges in the clefts, a certain bareness of the underlying tectonic structures. It was grand, awesome, even gorgeous. So why was I scared to death of it?

No I was not scared of dying—I swear despite her age Zuk was further from death than, say, O. O’s rosebud organs and filigreed sheaths, her silk and satin privacies, were clicking knives all over. And thinking of the other little girlgoyles I had loved,
filles fatales
so to speak: compared to Zuk’s candid Mohawk, Lou Rae Greenrule’s shining snagless bolt of hair from crown to waist had been the glass mountain—go ahead and break your neck on that, Bogeywoman—or once you roll all the way down, go drown yourself in her twat of pale green jello, where no living thing could get a footing. And even my see-through princess Emily, far more than Zuk, was over the hill of no return. Her skeletal purity was way past death, as everybody knew, into Halloween transfiguration.

Unh-unh, it wasn’t death, in Zuk, not prissy choicy maidenly death at all, but coarse old fat old life that was scary. She looked well fed and well used, Doctor Zuk, she looked calloused and grizzled and tough. She looked well manured, like anything would grow in her, and she smelled yeasty, or would have, if she hadn’t cured her hide for thirty years in Byzance, by Rochas. All right, all right, I’d talked myself into it. I’d polished off swamp water, hadn’t I? I was ready. I shut my eyes and held my nose and jumped.

It was easy. By godzilla I should have realized that wild fun for any dolly who’d lived to be as old as Zuk couldn’t be as far away at the end of the labyrinth as mine was. Or she’d be what I was, a raving mental peon until only yesterday, with a gray under-hull of cicatrix, wicker-woven slash by slash, from her elbows to her wrists. (By the way I’ve decided I’m never gonna get these arms fixed. By godzilla I can see it coming: soon I’m gonna be so terrifyingly sane that I’m gonna need some proof I was ever buggy. And you watch, when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself
I won’t even wear long sleeves—
let em see, the bloodsuckers—
well, maybe in January.)

Coming was as easy for Madame Zuk as blinking, or swallowing. Trills like Fats Waller, I’m not lying. That coochie of hers winked at me so hard I thought she was taking my picture with it, and maybe she was. One eerie thing: how her skin was slippery, papery, over the muscle—that was her age I guess—and I swear at times there was no more to making her melt in my fingers than pulling off an ice-cream wrapper.

So madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse was a better woman than I was after all! Then it set in again, the furtive conservatism of the mental patient. Who the hump did she think she was, this big strong woman, this so-called bug repair expert, running off with a bughead, all right, a former bughead, but still, a former bughead not quite eighteen years old? And this was Dr. Gulaim Zuk, who had earned her fame debugging the dreamboxes of youth. The nerve of her, to write about teenage monsters when she’d never even been one! The kind of ease Zuk had wasn’t sumpm you grew up to. Like scratch it was sumpm you got back to, if at all. Doctor Zuk had been spared adolescence. She’d hidden out with her father The Beetle all through his wondrously weird, unspeakably lonely exile in Caramel-Creamistan. And then the Commies had shot him exactly on time—on the eve of her twelfth birthday—so she never had to grow up in front of him, never had to see his disgusted face.

As for me, adolescent ugliness is my natural state. Bogeywoman I was born, fat and stinky, Bogeywoman is my dowry. Course, I admit it, next to the ease of Zuk, my adolescent repulsiveness suddenly looked like sumpm willful, even to me—gargoyles in the belfry—sticking their nauseous tongues out. All the same I was what I was and could not be saved from
myself. For an instant I longed for lobotomy—sure, cut the whole memory bone from the dreambox. Blank me out. But the world had become too beautiful to erase, somehow.

(I could imagine The Beetle first arriving in Caramel-Creamistan—a Yid from the Vistula seeing those camels, asking himself
Where the hump have I landed?
I lay along her body now and whispered
What the hump is this place, I never knew there was a swamp at the end of the bay, tell me where we are or I’ll
 …)

Her body was similar to Central Asia … well, maybe not, but it was nothing like mine. Dew glazed her throat, her forehead. She had had enough. She stopped my hands. I lay along her side, her head rested on the crook of her arm, and two or three hairs burst out of each calamitous pore of her armpit. Hair too lank and outspoken even to curl, it lay there, black wheat. Now that I saw her up close, I understood how she could
look
famous—her face was as huge as a movie screen, her eyes, her nose, her mouth all double the size of mine, you could have driven a Cadillac between those
Thousand and One Nights
’ eyebrows. Never in her life could anyone have called her petite. She was built like a belly dancer, generous, billowing. She had the kind of lobed showy muscle I once read would keep a girl out of the Rockettes—just right for Princess Noor and Her Six Harimettes, however.