Bogeywoman (4 page)

She laid a finger on the back of my trembling hand and I thought it safe in a hurry to pick up two of the long chocolate scraps of her hair pooling in my lap and place them in my mouth, for this could only amuse her. I could play I was a walrus, all right I was a walrus and I could eat her hair, which tasted like fried flowers. And it did amuse her, cowbells bouncing down a glass staircase, that was her laughter. “We’ve lost chunkagunk,” she repeated with a tragic sob and I dared to hold her eye with mine, well I may have crossed my eyes a bit to be safe, and muttered around my walrus mustaches: “How shall we make it up to ourselves?” Then her face, already so near, blurred into mine and her pink tongue, which I had been looking at before, slid into my mouth, poked in there surprisingly long and small and alive—

Then I was lost, o a thousand times more lost than she was.
Good godzilla the nothing I knew when I was a
Unbeknownst To Everybody! Nowadays I know how a girl like Lou Rae operates: Being wooed is meat and drink to the girlgoyle, and sex just spoils her appetite, so she keeps her orders small as sparrows, and if you ask for more—yes, in short, that dirty rotten Lou Rae, she loved me and left me.

But first I carried her away. I had no thoughts, only rose waves, oceans of muscle, she weighed nothing, I carried her off and she let me, and I laid her down between the rock ribs of the clammy meadow whose little grass the cows had gnawed to the bone and I threw myself on top of her. I had no idea what I was doing. I just tore open the red wrapper, my paws sank in up to the elbow and had at her pretty breasts by the handful. Which is how I know how hard they were: hard but alive, hard as a baby’s head. These were the first I ever touched, outside of my own spongy bags, and they
were
some immortal nymph’s on their way to becoming Elgin marbles.
Dayenu!
if I had only been content with that, o lord! but I wasn’t, I wasn’t thinking—nowadays I think but back then I wasn’t—so maybe if I had never lifted my fingers from her momps and crossed her belly to the pink nylon panties, her wetness wrapped there like a mouth in cellophane, like suffocating—I peeled that away and my pinky I only wish went up inside her but in fact just brushed the little fin standing there at attention knee-deep in her pond. She screamed bloody murder and of course I froze and remembered where I was. But just then, sumpm slapped me. How can I describe it? A pink thing, a grimy, scratchy, gray-pink thing exactly like a wet seat cushion from a 99-cent movie theater, slapped me softly across the face. Those womanly cows had come over and taken a front seat at my wooing and were getting their tongues in too.

Which is more than I can say for Lou Rae, whose legs had
snapped back together like the prongs of a clothespin. She sat upright, just as if a spring had popped somewhere. She was scared, I can see that now, and it wasn’t those cows that had scared her, though she was never one to talk levelly about things of this world and there
was
a yearling bull in the pasture. She was looking at him, he was looking at us, I was looking at her and she was wearing red—for she had wrapped back up in her red thing as fast as she could yank it out from under me. And now she was rolled in her bedspread tight as a red cigar. “I think we better go back to camp,” she said.

From the hard ground I stared at her, knowing I had lost camp for good now, and would not even have Lou Rae Greenrule for five whole minutes to make good my loss.

I hoped the bull would perforate us both! or maybe at the last moment I would save her: “Come on, Ferdinand,” I encouraged him, “do your worst,” but his fuddy maleness just gave me a cross-eyed look, and turned and walked away. Even if she never told anybody—and what could she tell, in that Venusian Pig Latin she talked, full of lost beauté, ensorcelled princesses and wandering serving maids, that anybody would understand? But I could never believe in my love of camp again: my love was out to get some girl, I was a wolf in evergreen camp shorts and gimp lanyard, looking for live feed I could catch.

Lou Rae had asked me once, as we lay on our cots one starry night waiting for the mosquitos to wail:
Did you usta want to be a princess when you grew up? Er, sort of
, I said, knowing she had, wanting to draw her nearer to me, though that was Sister Margaret who had had the royal girlgoyle ambitions, not me.
But not to boss people
, I added sweetly, meanwhile thinking: they want to be princesses, and not even to boss people, what’s wrong with you girls!
Did you?
said I, and was shocked when I heard
a suspicious noise and turned on my flashlight and sure enough her eyes began to puddle up with tears.

She blurted: “I won’t be able to stand it if everything is ugly around me. When I’m a grownup I won’t be able to wear those dogface shoes my mother wears, or look down at my slacks and think wow that belly belongs to me, it’s like an anthill in Africa, and I’ll never be able to sleep in the same bed with some pee-smelling half-dead gramps scribbled all over with iron hair … I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” So she was that kind of girl ya see, mortally afraid of everyday rot, and if I had known what I know now I would have said:
Come with me and I’ll never let anything that smells mortal or perishable—certainly not a fuddy male—come near you
. But of course I didn’t know it and she wouldn’t have come with me if I had. Probably she had to pass through any number of pretty, feckless boys who went downhill before she became, o, let’s see, what I find in my crystal ball is a one-girl condo cleaning service in Maui in later life, gold lamé smocks she finds at St. Vincent de Paul, paisley slippers and fantastical babushkas:

But just now in a cow pasture in Maine, she was flouncing back towards the boundary of Camp Chunkagunk,
Tough Paradise for Girls
, in that maddening bedspread, springing lightly over the barbed wire fence back into camp, and I followed in a fog, in pig-iron grief. I could hardly lift my cannonball knees, my head lolled on a broken spring, but she was fully
recovered. She looked back at me over her shoulder, across her red train, and said: “Bogeywoman—you know what?” “No, what?” I growled. “I know—don’t ask me how I know but I know—you were my wood wizard in another life.”

I narrowed my eyes at her red back. I understood she was throwing me a bone and at the same time explaining away her mysterious but passing attraction to me.
O yeah? what life was that?
I wanted to sneer.
Back when we were both lumpy funguses and nobody had a coneyhole or a frog dangle?
I never was one to go for that girlgoyle slumber party drivel about reincarnation—everybody’s souls flying around in beans with bus transfers until they find a new body to land in.

All the same there was sumpm in what she said that made the sweat pop out in oily beads on my forehead.
You were my wood wizard in some other life
—in other words, her spirit guide from one world to another. And even though she had it upside down, and obviously the red-ragged little hussy was leading me, still she was right about that, I had wound up in some other world than I’d ever meant to. Things only looked the same. I dragged on behind her. I dragged my feet through the blackened leaves of the forest bottom, trying not to track or even see her huge and ridiculous spoor in the stringy humus. But I couldn’t shake the habit of camp so easily. I ached with disgusted, stale hunger. I sensed all hope of her had been marooned on this isle of the lost chunkagunk in a golden past, and now instead of showing me her pretty coochie slick and pink like a little wing of bubblegum, with the spit of expectation sparkling on it, she would reminisce. Of ancient travels with her wood wizard, that wily giant rabbit-hole, the Bogeywoman. Yes I saw it coming, more and more mystical twaddle like this, with her pink Lollipop underpants back on.

I didn’t go crazy yet, that was tomorrow or the next day. First I tried to be back in camp, to love Wood Wiz and Lake Sci, zealously to scrape plates for hog slops in KP and buck up for seconds in raspberry cuss and play my ukulele for Chunka Talent Parade and sing alto in Evening Pro up at the Wig:

Now here’s when I really went flooey, broke the dreambox but good. It was Wood Wiz, Tracking—tracking up at the sand pit on the southern edge of camp.

Tracking was the domain of Willis Marie Bundgus, a six-foot Yankee maiden and true wood wizardess, with a great ruffled headpiece of palomino hair like pinewood shavings, and breasts like horns, and a behind as big as a wheelbarrow, which had led me through hemlock forest and cranberry bog and over the Camel’s Needle. Camp is corn, camp is the corniest, but you know you know sumpm when you can look at a few random scratches in dirty rain-pocked sand and see in your mind’s eye not only what small lives have cruised by here in their endless foraging but what dog ate what dog when. Willis Bundgus knew all this and taught me what she could. And therefore I loved Willis Bundgus with a love pure and true, the love of a pilgrim for her saint of perfect action, the love of a slave for the
broad back of Harriet Tubman moving through the swamp on a moonless night. But also, I admit it—though I didn’t know it myself yet, it must have been there—with the ace-in-the-hole love of a boygirl, a
bogeygirl
, for a real woman. It started with Margaret: a big woman, bigger than me, not fat but grand in all her architecture, with a big scary cliff of bosom and a big solid county seat at the bottom of it, has always been my ideal. To be up to a woman like that! Not to go on forever flitting through the underbrush, a skinny wood elf weighed down by virtually no secondaries in the sexual traits department, but menschlike to inherit the world, towns, factories, the fertile plain. Well, that was Willis Bundgus. Not that I saw, at the time, any more than her fine flanks stretching the denim shiny in great twin lobes when she bent over the sand pit and said:

“There was war to the grim death here. Tell us about it, Koderer.”

And I got down on my hands and knees in the sand like she had taught me, and squinted at a few dumb gashes with the low sun buttering them from the other side.

“A pregnant mouse galloped through here and disappeared, but I don’t think anything ate it.”

“Good,” she said in a bored voice.

“Ooooo look here it veered off—probably a chicken hawk passed over—but nothing happened. The sand’s not torn up.”

“Hmmm.”

“Wait—a raccoon—” I crawled around the pit in a spilled alphabet font of starry feet, which had sunk deep. “The old male swung through here and ate up, uh-oh, looks like somebody’s pink dry cleaning ticket.”

“You call that a fight to the bitter end?” Willis drawled.

“Well, somebody didn’t get their dress slacks back.”

“Koderer, Koderer, put your beady eyes on the ground, let the dead talk to you.”

Dead? dead? but then I screwed down my nose and saw the corpses all over the place, everywhere I looked: crumbs of green lacewing, two links, then three more, of a salamander spine, tiny teeth, dry eggs, claws, half a beetle carapace, rust-red frass of the hornworm, a lone whisker sticking out of a bit of snout leather—all that was left of some least weasel the hawk ate—a whole skull the size of a freckle: all this carnage epochs beyond its original disturbance, part of the calm sand itself. You just had to get down there to see from the wreckage what a twenty-table grange hall ham & oyster supper that sand was, what a feast run amok the whole earth was, only how could you tell the eater from the eats? You couldn’t. And what but your own greedy appetite led you out there on the bonewhite tablecloth in the first place, where every passing turkey buzzard could get an eyeful of you? It was a wonder anything ever came out of its hole—and suddenly I saw this: Only merciful hunger blanks out death.

“The whole sand pit’s an oinking boneyard,” I said.

“Good stuff, eh, Bogeywoman?” said Willis, pleased to see my nose touching the ground. The moniker showed I was back in her favor again, and living up to my reputation as girl guide to snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails—her heiress in short.

She had a thing for me, I know she did, and she was woman enough to dish up sumpm for everybody, even if she was supposedly pinned to some carburetorhead from East Millinocket at the time, no doubt the only abner from her high school tall enough to look her in the eye. Wherever she is, I’ll bet by now Willis Marie Bundgus has shucked the denim from those flanks for any number of girlgoyles, though fuddies too of course. She had appetites—I could tell.

This was the second day after that terrible afternoon when
Lou Rae Greenrule loved me for twelve and a half minutes and left me, and now I was awake at camp with my blood a-quarrel, with my once sleepy appetites whistling on their haunches like a metropolis of prairie dogs. After lunch, during Quiet Hour, while Lou Rae sat Indian fashion on her red bedspread, playing Old Maid of the Klondike, I lay on my cot, eyes bulging; I swear I could hear the cold and scheming blood swish by my ears, and suddenly I had the idea to go and visit Willis Bundgus.