Bogeywoman (11 page)

The newcomer stood between the two open doors of Bertie’s private bathroom and private closet, running her fingers through her spiky hair, looking back and forth from the H of laughing gas to the two shrimpy and sheepish boy worshippers kneeling at its foot among the smelly shoes and tennis balls, and on to the two girlgoyles lying
en sandwich
with their tongues lately in each other’s mouths, one of them with her head wrapped in the toilet pipe. She wore a soft and clinging dress of sumpm pearly gray—coulda been weasel pelt. And now she began laughing, slowly, low in her throat, in a kind of disbelief. “From where you kids organize this thing?”—pointing at the H. No one said anything for a rather long time, then Bertie: “Found it.” “Where you found it?” Shifty eyes, skating round and round behind his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, no reply. “Come, tell me, what room you got it? I don’t punish, I want be sure you don’t screw up anesthesia of somebody.” “It was loose,” Bertie assured her. She snorted. “Yes, I believe you—far too much loose articles around this rich like Rockefeller hospital. So. You gave it good home. And job. But you are sure it wasn’t already employed and you liberated …?” “It was down on three. On the landing.” She nodded her approval.

Now she turned her attention to the girlgoyles on the bathroom floor. Actually I might as well not have been there for all the attention the woman paid to me. She took over. She knelt down to O with a decisive squeak of her high-heeled sandals.

“This is very lovely girl,” she said, with thrilling irrelevance for a dreambox mechanic, looking curiously at the face she found between her hands. Her hands were ugly, clean and square, with gnawed-down fingernails and no rings. “Too much
maquillage
around the eyes, I show you better way later, my dear, if you remind me. How in hell you got here anyway,” she murmured, but uninterrogatively, and parted the hair a little with her fingertips to look. “These—are—nothing, little punchholes all under hair, except here maybe could use one stitch, later will be just little white star at hairline, quite pretty I think.”

Haven’t we gone about far enough with the royal commentary on the mental patient’s beauté?
“Say, are you a dreambox adjustor or what?” I blurted. “Why you want to know that, my dear?” she said without turning around, “a minute ago you are glad to see me, no? You want to help?—find me soap. How you gorgeous stupid youths live without soap?”

It was true we Bug Motels were a by and large soapless society, but I flew to my private bathroom and pried away, from the center of the mirror, a hockey puck of orange Dial I had stuck there long ago so I wouldn’t have to look at my nose. “Here it is,” I panted. “Is good work.” She let go of O’s dreambox, which banged against the pipe. “Sufferin cheeses,” O said through her teeth, “get me outa here.” “I’ll hold her headbone,” I offered, “I’m strong as a little French horse and I got experience.” At that the woman stopped dead on her way to the sink and looked over, not at O, at me,
at me!
with sudden interest, her face at an odd tilt, one eye asquint. Involuntarily my hand stole to my nose. Maybe sumpm was hanging off it. “You are Ursula Koderer,” she divined. “Um, er, uh …” But why prevaricate? Some little bit of fame had evidently stuck to me behind my back. “Yeah,” I said, slitting my eyes at her, feeling a happy, cozy little glow of suspicion, “so what if I am?”

But already she was at the sink with her back to me, rubbing up a lather, and I eyeballed the busy jiggle of her muscular buttocks with conscious impudence. “Sufferin cheeses, hurry up,”
O croaked. I crawled over to the toilet and took her dreambox by the ears, without even seeing, this time, how bloody, how pretty—that quick, the silver weasel had taken over.

And then that personage herself elbowed me out of the way, carrying mounds of foam. “O yeah, the old soap trick, why didn’t I think of that?” I muttered. “Because is too easy. You are heroical type,” she explained in that scratchy, ironical contralto that, as long as I knew her, refused to hurry itself for any calamity. “You climb pear tree, leap over wall, maybe break neck, without first to try gate. Charming, I know this type well.” “Whaddaya mean? What do you know about me,” I said, unable to give her up so soon, but she had gone on to more important stuff and steadfastly ignored me.

I studied her from behind. She was more tall than short, more fleshy than boney, and she seemed to be as fit as a soldier in the field, though with those gnarled hands and that gray spiky pelt on her head you could say she looked her age, whatever her age was—sumpm between thirty and sixty. Only the Abominable Snowman could have put his hands around that waist but she was long and lithe in the spine and the back of the neck, with a sturdy compact derrière that worked up and down like twin pistons as she energetically lathered O’s ears, and again I thought of the elegant and voracious lines of a winter weasel or a mink that for the sheer fun of it kills ten times as much as it eats. You might suppose I would take this as a caution, but I felt only hungry wonder at sumpm new in the usually boring line of grownups—to be exact, a grown-up woman who had none of the martyred flab and grizzle about her of somebody’s wife, somebody’s ninth-grade teacher, or somebody’s mother.

Bossy as hump, though—you could tell that already. And another thing I noticed right away as I took in the soft gray
drapery from her throat to her knees, and the glinting pearl stockings along the blades of the shins and over the curve of the soleus, which was developed like a soccer player’s. As the Bogeywoman, as Merlin’s daughter, as apprentice to the wood wizardess and a slob all my life, I had never paid any attention to clothes. But hers I could tell were beautiful and, sumpm else, they meant money.
Her
money—it was printed on her whole air like
NABISCO
on a cracker—a certain kind of authority—yes, a lady dreambox mechanic rolled in her own dough. And for the first time I realized that one day,
or not, if I didn’t off myself, I’d have to have some too. Not clothes. Money.

So. Her hands piled with lather, she sat down on O like a kayaker to hold her in place, reached all business through the hole between fill pipe and toilet and soaped the small ears. “Ouch, sufferin cheeses,” O whined and pulled this way and that way. “Relax head,” commanded the weasel, sinking hard fingers in the blond clouds of Mary Hartline hair, and O instantly sort of broke at the stalk of her neck and the headbone dangled there, with the doctor’s other hand guiding the chin, but it was still stuck.
“Ch-ch-choleria!”
doctor weasel snarled; it was the most terrible curse I had ever heard, and afterwards I could see little beads of her spit pearling O’s forelock. Angrily she got up again, filled her hands with more foam, roughly sideburned O’s cheeks and chin, pompadoured the bloody brow with pinkening scum, screwed the whole head a little bit east like turning a globe and gave it a jerk not altogether gentle. The head popped free. “Sufferin cheeses Emily where’d you find this brutal bitch,” O muttered ungratefully, rubbing her ears and neck, “who da hump is she anyhow?”

There was a thunder of fuddies’ hooves: Bertie and Dion were cheesing it out of the closet and down the hall, in exact
accord with Bug Motels’ operational principles, leaving me and O holding the bag. The weasel showed a commendable lack of interest in their existence. She didn’t even look round. I recalled that my Bug Motel’s duty, now that O was free, was to slink out while the slinking was good. O all by herself was famous for stonewalling cops, and royals. I backed gluily towards the door, but thank godzilla, doctor weasel clamped a hand around my ankle in time.
“You,”
she said, rising up into my face. “Miss Koderer. Please to explain me what is happened.” I blinked. I couldn’t squeal right in front of two other Bug Motels. But I didn’t want the weasel talking to anybody else either. She was no ordinary dreambox mechanic—if she was a dreambox mechanic—and I was just about to ask her again exactly what she was, when old dying hence ethically exempt Emily piped up: “O had a grandma fizzy fit on the floor, she even had whip cream in her mouth like when a dog bites a frog or sumpm.” The weasel turned to O, who sat hunched and rubbing her neck inside the icy billows of her hair, a lit Lucky hanging from her dry lips. “Miss O’Day?” O shrugged and showed the weasel her back. So it came back to me.

“Miss Koderer. This object. You can explain me please for what you want it?” Her voice thrummed lazily on its low string and she touched with a pointed toe the H of laughing gas, then the clown’s nose lying in its loops of red rubber tubing. “I …” I stammered, glad to have her eye on me, but embarrassed to look like a mastermind of dreambox oils powders and gasses in front of her, for I had a hunch what she would think of that. I mean, she was a mysterious, grown-up woman of the world, next to whom even the wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus, looked like a bucktoothed rube. I gasped at my own disloyalty to my first love and for a moment I hated the woman, for how could
she ever love my kind, my potato-shaped nose bulb, lips of wornout underpants elastic, body straight as a pencil, rusty hair, hun manners?

“I … had to have sumpm to do in this dump,” I whispered.
Until I saw you
, I thought. She didn’t smile. I felt her peer through my buggy disguise as through a glass pane; one of her eyebrows arched up mockingly. “How you are called, my dear?” “Bogeywoman,” I said, and O and Emily tittered, because I had never let a dreambox mechanic in on my moniker before. Doctor weasel put out her ugly hand. “Is pleasure,” she said. I stared at the hand floating between us. Then I remembered to take it.

“How … how you are called?” I mimicked her, not only to be fresh to a dreambox adjustor in front of the Bug Motels, though I knew they would be impressed. No, I must have sensed I would have to haggle and track and scheme and beg for every crumb of truth about her as long as I knew her. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Zuk,” she finally said, in her peculiar, salivary accent, sumpm between
shook
and
zook
. “Doctor Zuk?” “Zuk,” she repeated, her voice loud and bored, as if she regretted having said so much.

She leaned into Bertie’s closet and laid a finger on the cold pebbly cylinder of laughing gas.
“Pfui,”
she exclaimed, “unpleasant feeling like skin of dead hairless animal. Here is interesting fact: human beings despise everything hairless—at least I think is true. Pig, snake, legs of chicken, wing of bat, bald head of man, tail of opossum and rat, I wonder why is this? Why they would hate everything bald like themselves?”

“Cause they got taste,” I said—talk about an easy question!

She didn’t answer, but her silvery eyes lit on me for maybe five seconds as though I were the most interesting animal on earth. Then she turned and walked away. And I remember her sleek
behind flexing like a fist under the velour, and the pinprick her champagne-flute heels made across my forehead as she went—that was as close as I came to taking her in.

Bertie came creeping back as soon as she was gone. “They didn’t even call the cops,” he said in a hurt voice. “Well, maybe they still will,” I consoled him, “she just left.” “Did she look mad?” “Er, not exactly.” Of course we were too nervous now either to sniff the H or to leave it alone, but a few minutes later Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard came in without a word—just shot us a scornful look,
kiddie D.O.A.P
. it said, like the time we five choked down a whole McCormick’s tin of nutmeg between us and all of us puked for an hour but nothing else happened—and rolled the H bomb away. But two minutes later he left in its place a modest little E cylinder on a cart with its twin oxygen tank and gauges and valves and other appurtenances, all in working order, and said, “Yall damn fool huff-heads got fi-teen minutes with this baby and that’s it, so get to work.” We dutifully sat down and huffed, but all the fun had gone out of that mission. I didn’t see any more giant popcorn. Instead I had a vision of Zuk, the international doctor weasel, skiing in her high-heeled sandals on a sort of slag heap of stars. A great dust of stars flew up all around her—she was brilliant, but she was dust, and she was skidding down down down.