Bogeywoman (17 page)

And just then I came to the last stall and found myself eye to eye with an animal after all. She was a big brown mare, and filthy, great clots of hairy manure hanging in her mane and crosshatching her rump, and besides that, the meanest-looking equine I ever hope to see. Not that I discerned behind her sneering lips, as yet, those teeth as long and playful as piano keys—all right at first I wasn’t properly wary, never mind that face, I still hoped to love her and scratch between her ears—but I did note that she wasn’t the dull resigned workhorse I was expecting, head drooping from withers like a soup spoon in a tired hand. I did note the possibly sinister intent with which she looked down the long brown barrel of her nose at me, as if using the thug’s bump in the middle of it as a sight.

“Probably I got sumpm in here you could eat,” I mumbled, feeling through my overall pockets for a Sugar Baby or a Pez or sumpm. She arched her neck, tucked her chin and rolled her cough-syrup-colored eyes. I found a linty green lifesaver, put it on the palm of my hand and thought about sticking it
out. “So, how come you’re off work today?” I asked her cautiously. “Sick? Lame? Tired of it all? Heh-heh. Er, not confined to the quietroom for any … violent acts I hope?” She eyed me from those lowered pools of Robitussin. For some reason she seemed to be hissing. And suddenly she did a strange and hideous thing: she reared a little, the lips rolled up on those yellow piano key teeth and they crashed down hard against the gate of her stall. She made a noise like dishwater down a drainpipe, a sort of backwards belch, the air rushing in, not out, with a great froggy croak. Then she just stood there, gazing out of the bottoms of her eyes, looking bad, dazed and satisfied—like a mental patient who’s thinking she’s really done it this time with that old dreamboxoline, while she’s still vaporously elated and just a little wild and woozy, before she pukes up her guts or jumps out the window.

Cheese maybe you’re sick after all I said, and that was when I so unwisely put out my hand. She swooped around sideways and bull-dogged the meat of my right bicep right through my Camp Chunkagunk
Tough Paradise for Girls
sweatshirt. Then either I jumped four feet in the air, or she threw back her head with her teeth still clamped in my shoulder and yanked me off the ground. Anyway I remember dangling as if from a nail. I’m the Bogeywoman, needless to say on the way down I gave her a left hook to the right eye that sent her scrabbling to the back of her stall, where she sort of crouched, as much as a horse can crouch.

I realized that this
of a drayhorse, this imposter vegetarian, was only coiling for her next strike and I stepped back as it came. I felt the mighty snap of her long teeth against my breastbone but as it happened only my sweatshirt and the brass-buttoned bib of my overalls got caught. I heard them rip. This time as she sawed away at my duds, I brought my two fists down
on her ears, and when she lurched away,
Tough Paradise For Girls
flapping from her jaws, I felt a sickening relief. I was free but I was also naked, or anyway half-naked: my momps were open to the world. I was alive, but what if I ever cared to leave this dump? I could hardly stay in an ayrabbers’ barn for the rest of my life.

Not only was my chest bare, there was also that small matter of the graph inscribed by razor blade, in claustrophobic detail, on my forearms this morning, the complete record in blood of my debate with Madame Zuk—in her absence, of course—on whether I should live or die. Now that my sweatshirt was kaput, it was out in the open—what excitable people might take for a botched suicide—as if the Bogeywoman, once bent on offing herself, would ever use a technique so merely artistic and irresolute, as if I hadn’t long ago mapped out all the fifth-floor windows without bars and unscreened balconies on my daily and weekly rounds. I liked for example the mezzanine in the sky-painted dome of the Enoch Pratt Free Central Library, a straight shot to the stone floor, though for a sure thing you’d have to put your hands in your pockets and dive headfirst. I liked the long gullet of stairwell of the Mathieson Building, thirty-four vertiginous stories. The Washington Monument, 228 steps up, had an iron grating, but in ninth grade I could still wiggle by it and probably I could even now, if I lost ten pounds.

I stood well back from the stall door, my overalls down around my ankles, breathing hard and locked in a staring duel with this monster to whom I’d offered only love. The ears I’d boxed were still flattened in fury against her head. In a way I liked her all the more now that I saw in her a marooned and exasperated individualist like myself. What ungettable thing was
she
hungry for, I wondered, and blushed for my puny and insulting green lifesaver. I cringed to think I’d had to punch her
in the eye, the great rolling right eye which she was winking now like a boxer in need of a plaster. I knew how she felt. Tough titty that she couldn’t know
me
 … Then again, who knew what she knew? “I’m the Bogeywoman,” I whispered, and, to help her over any gaps in her education, I pointed at myself. I was a sight to make a mother weep, good thing I had no mother. On the round pad of my bicep was a full equine dental impression in red and blue, four inches across; farther down, my forearms were crusted with brown blood, and fuzzy on top of that with a pale gray fungal growth of sweatshirt fleece.

Broomstick was unimpressed, or anyway she relapsed into that queer sewing motion from foreleg to foreleg, full of crammed-in violence. Then suddenly down they came again like a clanging portcullis, the piano key teeth on the stall gate and the belch of a drainpipe sucking air in the wrong direction. “Godzillas sake what’s eating you girl!” I asked her, and heard from above me a weird juicy chortle in reply, “
She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
,” somebody’s laugh that slimied up the feminine pronoun by sucking it over bare wet gums—an embarrassing noise that seemed in the family with Broomstick’s belch, but human. I looked up and saw a face sniggering down at me from a hayloft. I yanked up my overalls and tried to make out this person.

It was a fuddy in a mustache, primly clipped. He was undersized down to his bones, and he had all over a kind of fallen-in spruceness and good looks, of the finger-artist type—piano tuner, radio repairman, or pickpocket. A miniature, dandefied, mahogany brown fuddy, then, but old: When he sniggered, his jaw had that collapsed frogginess at the corners, like an old doctor’s bag, that comes of having no teeth, or hardly any. He leaned on an elbow at the edge of the hayloft, his chin in his hand, his shirt-cuff shiny black with gold threads in it, one foot dangling
over the edge in a glittering black reptile pump, with a rhinestone horseshoe over the toes.

“Ahem, is this your horse?” “Maybe this my horse and maybe she ain’t, what you gimme to know?” The big brown mare banged her teeth on the gate again and sucked in air with a fearsome croak. “What’s wrong with her?” “She common.” “Excuse me?” “She hungry.” “Hungry! Why don’t you give her sumpm to eat?” The fellow stared down at me, like who was I to ask. “Ain’t feel like it,” he finally said. “What! Why not?” “What she ever did for me, that old cow Cowpea,
she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
,” he chortled to himself, and now I saw he had two gold teeth left in his mouth.

“What’s so funny?” I had to ask after a time. “Has I said sumpm was funny? I never hear nobody round here say nothing was funny, young woman, lessen maybe you mean Cowpea here be acting like she seent a ghost cause you done show her your ugly chest. What you wanna scare my horse for? Oughta call the
po
-lice on you, bare nekkid like you is. But I take pity on you, I do bidness with you, for a nucka note I give you some very fine threads …”

He was fixing me in his little eyes and right away I got this queer feeling that I was turning into a five-dollar bill, with the face of Abraham Lincoln printed on my belly button. Some people have noses that can find a crumb of cheese in the dark, a Bushman’s eyes can pick out the lost sisters of the Pleiades without a telescope, and I got that magical mercury in my veins for detecting whatever somebody thinks I am, especially when it’s nothing. Sumpm about that grin with its ravaged neatness and two gold teeth in front told me this fuddy was more indifferent to me poisonally than anyone I’d ever met. Not that I was a
Unbeknownst to him, I was Unbeknownst to him, period; when he looked at me he saw a bill, a five-dollar bill, or nothing. I was transfixed.

“Say, are you an ayrabber?” “Maybe I is and maybe I ain’t. Who want to know?” “I bet she works like a dog for you—the horse I mean.” “Maybe she do and maybe she don’t.” “She tried to take a bite outa me. You oughta feed her.” “I feed her. I feed her if you gimme a nucka. Gimme a nucka to feed her, young woman, I take cay it.” “A nickel?” “Fi dollar. You got fi dollar on you?” “I, er, uh, I forgot my wallet,” I muttered, “but … I can get it. You feed her and I’ll, er, pay you later.” “Later! What you ever did for me, young woman? You come in here and tell me who I be and what I feed, you thank you better’n somebody, muss be rich, muss be the mayor’s daughter. I tell you what. You gimme fi dolla to feed Cowpea here and I give you sumpm to cover up that ugly chest. You so ugly my glass eye broke,
she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
. Wonder could it make a poor man blind looking at sumpm like that. You need sumpm to cover yourself up, for the good of the public. That could scare a rattlesnake off a rock, looking at sumpm like that …”

“So quit staring at em if they’re so ugly,” I said. “They comical, that’s why I look at em, wooo, them is bad enough but say what is that white cottony mess sticking on you arms, look like some kinda mold that grow on dead people …” “None of your beeswax,” I said through my teeth, “anyhow you got a nerve, what’s your name?”—borrowing Merlin’s voice for zeroing in on cheeky menials, bellhops who won’t hop, private secretaries who blab all over. The ayrabber stared me down sideways again: “My name bop de bop,” he said, “where your money at? Check yourself, young woman, you ain’t decent. Gimme a nucka I get you a nice pink dress and stomps to go with it.”

Now, one of my ancient beefs with fuddies, from rubes to slickers, from Merlin to Foofer to this ayrabber here, has been the tendency of this brotherhood to advise me on my clothes. “You owe me that pitiful dress,” I therefore hollered, “cause your
horse ate my shirt. I’ll take it for nuttin! which is what I got, nuttin … cause you owe me … though I’d … er … prefer a pair of pants … if you got em …” I trailed off at the sight of his lip curling back from his two gold teeth in a sneer.

“O you would like a pair of pawnties,” he echoed in falsetto. “O you would like some nice silk draws … Well I fancies eye-talian vines myself but I don’t get em. Who is you to get em? Muss be the mayor’s daughter. What you gimme for a nice pair green work pants hardly broke in seffa little old bloodstain in the, er, uh, groin era?” “You peeled em off somebody’s dead body I bet,” I said, beginning to understand the type of person I was dealing with. “
She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
, nemmind where I got em, that’s a professional secret,” and just then Cowpea brought her choppers down, thwack, on the wooden gate again and sucked air with the noise of a python being throttled. And after she was through doing that she tossed herself like a banana peel on the cement floor and paddled her legs in the air. Come to think of it, I don’t remember any slinky ribs sticking out of Cowpea, or protruding clothes-hanger haunches either, in fact she looked pretty well fed. All the same:

“Are you gonna feed this horse and gimme some clothes?” “Soon’s you good for a nucka.” “What was that name?” I asked haughtily (Merlin’s voice). “You been forgot my name already, young woman?” (
Had
he told me his name? I racked my dreambox.) “Who you thank you is? Muss be the mayor’s daughter or somebody.” “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you my name if you tell me yours.” “You do what? You gimme what? What you want my name for? Way you leave your name at? Muss thank you somebody, thank Ima give you my name. What you ever did for me, young woman? Muss be the mayor’s daughter or somebody.”

“Ahem, I am … er … the Princessa Abrahama Lincona. And you sir are …?