Bogeywoman (37 page)

Tuesday I called Merlin’s loft from a coinbox outside the Red Star Diner on Pulaski Highway, as far from the whitecoats and gumshoes as I could stash myself and still make a ten-cent telephone call. I was exhausted, fried and full of myself, puffed up with hot air and looking for a fall like a cheese soufflé. I mean I had just lost Zuk, and the old man had come halfway around the world to see me. I wasn’t going to insult him by calling long distance. He should at least think I was hearing out his counsel before I refused to go back to the bughouse.

“Good afternoon, Moilin’s Woi-i-ild.” It was the Flatbush mechanical tweetie bird of the cadaverous vice puppeteer Suzette.

“Is my father there?”

“Oi-sula! Where are you?”

“Never mind that, where’s Merlin?”

“He was on his way,” Suzette said, “we had just checked into the Bangkok Imperial Tiger when the most wonderful thing happened—you’ll never guess.”

“No. I won’t.”

“He got a why-uh that he got the Mung—he had to fly right back to Hong Kong for a press conference. He sent me on ahead.”

“The who?”

“The Vogelkuss Mung Prize for International Understanding Through Art.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a fifty-thousand-dollar prize, dear. Think what Moilin can do with that money. The poor man has expenses like you wouldn’t believe.”

“O I believe it,” I said hastily. In fact I saw what was coming around the bend and, hoping to head it off, I added: “Well let him know I’m not one of em. Not anymore. Oink that.” But too late.

“Like that fancy mental hospital for instance—such greed I never saw! And listen to you, Oi-sula, my goodness, what’s happened to your language in that place? It’s gone downhill since you started slumming around with that bunch of juvenile wards of the court. Frankly I’m glad you’re out of there.”

I had all my arguments in a row—why I shouldn’t, why I wouldn’t, why I couldn’t go back to Rohring Rohring—but somehow they seemed superfluous to this conversation.

“That place was fine for a month or two,” Suzette went on, “and, as I recall, the poisonnel—wasn’t his name Reginald?—was extremely kind. So helpful! But for two years, as a sort of
sleepover boarding school without the school, the place was a little overpriced, don’t you think? I mean, Oi-sula, the bills are breaking your poor father’s back.”

“Well that’s over,” I said, noticing I was rather superfluous to this conversation myself. I thought I’d better remind her I was a wanted woman. “I’m not going back there even if they say I did murder. It was an accident.”

“O that,” Suzette said with mild surprise, “I forgot about that—it’s all cleared up—didn’t you see it on TV? Turns out the poor doctor died of an aneurysm, I mean they found out some bubble boist under his heart, you know, where it goes into his stomach? Very unfortunate, the loss of a woild-famous diagnostician and that, but the problem was in his organs, dear, it wasn’t you at all.”

“That’s a relief,” I said uncomfortably, feeling like the late summer grit blowing across the highway. So Foofer hadn’t died of a broken head or a swallowed pipe—his heart had drowned, drowned in its own blood—while mine had washed up here, bone dry. Between trucks in the parking lot sat the taxicab I’d come in,
BLACK-AND-WHITE CAB CO
Lizzy City N.C
. At the counter the driver pushed the last kink of a glazed doughnut into a moony jowl and studied the
Morning Telegraph
. Thank godzilla I had found a coupla hundreds crunched down the bottom of Doctor Zuk’s black bag when I snuck back on the
Jenghiz Khan
. And Zuk’s long white dress shirt in a tree, only a little soggy. And Fazool’s tire-bottomed flip-flops.

“I should say so,” Suzette replied. “The coppers ransacked this place for a picture of you. Finally they had to settle for some ridiculous four-foot-long megillah with every last girl at Camp Chunkagunk on it. You’re in the back row with some kinda black gunk on your Adam’s apple, what the heck was that stuff?
Well anyway dear you were famous. For two days. They blew up that tiny face and plastered it all over the TV screen …”

“I was famous,” I parroted, in a daze.

“… right next to your father’s—as if the poor man didn’t have enough trouble. Oi-sula, you wouldn’t believe the hate mail
Moilin’s Woild
gets! Two big bags full every day, half of it’s fan mail it’s true but the other half, dear god the things they say! Of course the Mung should help with that.”

“Did you get my Camp Chunkagunk picture back?” I growled.

“Did I what? God knows, dear, I’m sure I never gave it a thought … Oi-sula, Mrs. Kuchmek from the Juvenile Court has been calling. They’ve got to appoint some sort of, er, adult guardian for you if you’re not going back to the hospital. Somebody has to officially receive you.”

“Why not you and Merlin?” I said. “Just sign whatever they hand you, I won’t be any trouble, I promise, you’re never even gonna see me, I’ll disappear, I already disappeared, the taxi’s waiting outside …”

“Mrs. Kuchmek knows I’m flying to Moilin in Manila on Friday, and anyhow your father’s far too well known for you to go around pulling stunts like that. You need an adult to keep an eye on you. What about that woman doctor you ran away from the hospital with, that Zook or Shook or whatever her name was, she seemed interested in you—”

“Cheese it caused an international scandal already my leaving with Zuk, and besides I thought Merlin thought she was dangerous—”

“Politics, dear, politics. Anyway by now that’s all blown ovah,” Suzette purred, “nobody cares, dear, as long as you’re all right. You are all right, aren’t you? Do you need any money?”

“I’m fine,” I muttered.

“I’m glad you’re out of the mental hospital, that’s no place for you. Call Mrs. Kuchmek will you? So how about that Doctor Zook?”

“I’ll look into it,” I said.

“Moilin wants to see you when he’s in Washington in eighteen days.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“Any messages for your father?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll give him your congratulations.”

“Give him my congratulations.”

On the beltway, heading for Route 70 West to Frederick, the cabbie tuned in WBUG “Afternoon Bandstand” and what do you think I hear?

“Hey, that’s my song,” I shrieked, “pull over.” The cabbie looked at me in mild alarm. She was a buzz-cut old jasper in an A-1 Auto Body tee shirt with a neck like a tree trunk. “There ain’t no shoulder, hon,” she said, “you fixing to get us kilt?” “I mean, turn off at the first ramp with a pay phone,” I said. So along we go, calmly, another two miles. Meanwhile
the Frogman comes on: “This little tune,” he grates, “was written by the Bug Motels’ legendary fugitive girl singer-songwriter Ursie ‘The Bogeywoman’ Koderer. It was recorded live at the bughouse on the Regicide label by our own! Balmer! bughouse band, Dion and the Bug Motels! and zoomed overnight to number two on our charts!
This is WBUG! Top! Forty! Mad! Mad! Radio-o-o-o-o!
”

I dialed East Six. Who should pick up the phone but Reginald carpet-nails-in-honey Blanchard himself? He says: “Bug Motels. How we can help you?” “Cheese, is this a bug hospital or a booking agency?” I spluttered. “Bogeywoman! Izzat you? How fast can yall haul ass back to the bughouse? You is no longer persona niggerata round here. The Bug Motels has debuted, they has busted into the big time, you my songwriter and I am your manager.” “What is this Dion and the Bug Motels stuff?” I asked, “you know that silly peacock can’t sing a note.” “Well—lemme tell you how it is—don’t nobody want to look at O’s big as a house self right now. Egbert and Emily best lay back dead in the looks department. And anyhow Egbert’s bailing out—found some gig in a bookstore coffeehouse on Charles Street—how square can you get? So I figure I can sell that pretty-boy face—hump I done already sold it. We got a TV date on WAAM on Friday. Way you at? I come get you.”

“I’m not coming back.”

“Get the oink outa here—you be back. This your chance for fame and fortune, girl. All you gotta do in this bughouse is eat and sleep—grease and zee and play that pukelele—I take cay the rest.”

“Ain’t coming,” I said, “maybe I’ll send you a song now and then.”

“Aw, you be back afta while. Go on now, take you a bitty vacation. I just glad your ass still kicking. When I hear that
Rooski dreambox repair queen come back all alone from that all-night boat ride, I worried you drownded or shot or in the Gulag or sumpm.”

“Excuse me,” I said, trembling, “what Russki dreambox repair queen do you mean?”

“I mean that Zook, that lady doctor you run off with. I hear she pass through and pick up her brass booties …”

I hung up the phone, composed myself and told the cabbie: “Indian Mound Downs. And step on it.”

SO I WAS FAMOUS
for two days, but it wasn’t worth living in the bughouse. The Bug Motels didn’t get far on those five same old songs of course. I used to sit around Track Kitchen Number Two with a ballpoint and the backs of a few greasy menus trying to make up words, but I had left my pukelele behind and, it was funny, now that I was out of the bughouse and mucking stalls for a living, when I cocked open my mouth, flies flew into it instead of word salad and other buggy stuff swimming out. The Bug Motels made a little dough on their one almost big hit on the Regicide label, “Because I Couldn’t Stop for Lunch,” which sold like crazy in Baltimore—but come to find out we owed the whole take to our manager, the Regicide, on account of some contract none of us remembered signing. Bertie still plays in clubs around the city, but only Dion ever made a name for himself bigger than the Bug Motels. Probably you saw him as Big Henry the helpful Indian scout in
Little Bughouse on the Prairie
. Just enough so some people around Baltimore still ask, from time to time, whatever happened to the Bug Motels. O well, at least O got sumpm out of it all. She got a set of twins: boygirl, blackwhite, buggysane.

The Bug Motels lost me and in six more months they lost
Emily. If I didn’t see my see-through princess before me as I write—yes I mean loyal-to-the-death-by-starvation Emily Nix Peabody, refusal was her middle name, ex-guts of the Bug Motels, now a fleaweight pony girl galloping thousand-pound horses around the track—I wouldn’t believe it myself. Stranger things haven’t happened, not even to me, although I gotta admit she always held up her end on mission. She was tough even then, in her way, with those little aspirin-tablet muscles already popping up on her pipecleaner arms. Well you should see em now. Margaret kept on saying, “I’ll adopt that little Emily yet. Do you doubt me, Ursula? Don’t you see how an ounce of positive desire is worth a pound of negative regulation in this world? It’ll happen, you watch.” Even so I wouldn’t buy it, not the way I was back then, still dragging around the covert conservatism of the mental patient like a torn wrapper of sticky tinfoil.

But after I was here a month, I came to see how Margaret got to thinking like that. One month more and I was thinking that way myself. Here at the excremental end of the sport of queens and kings, where once classy horses that no longer win at Pimlico get dumped, the bosses of the world rub shoulders with folks as low as the ground—folks like me, a former mental peon, and Margaret, the sloppy sexy girlfriend of sleazy Tod Novio, Boyfriend Death (now actually Husband Death), and Boyfriend Death’s hotwalker, T-Bone Riley. T-Bone, who was beautiful as Belafonte when he was young, used to be Eleanor Ogden’s favorite groom at Breadbasket Farm before he got a bleeding ulcer from the strain on his dreambox of rubbing Hardtack, a horse worth ten times as much every day as T-Bone would earn in his whole life. Boyfriend Death gave T-Bone the little trailer when we moved into the big one, Eleanor Ogden was grateful for old T-Bone’s sake, the Davies Ogdens are cousins to Eugenia
Ogden Rohring who endowed Rohring Rohring, and Eleanor Ogden is on the board of the American Dreambox Institute—and in short, six more months and Emily arrived, carrying a round blue overnight case which contained her pink plastic toilet set, a new Cowboys ’n’ Indians bathrobe the nurses had given her, with plastic buckskin fringes, and a pile of Donald Duck comics, all her possessions in the world.

“Er, uh, Emily, do you remember Doctor Zuk?” I asked as soon as I could get her alone. “Sure, she was purty and nice,” Emily said, “she took me to the pitcher gallery in my wheelchair one time and showed me all the horse pitchers and the Gyptian mummy, it was a little king, smaller’n me even. And she said when I got rid of those bandages she was gonna buy me a real dress not just a bathrobe, but then she left.” “Did you ever see her come back after that?” I asked. Emily solemnly shook her head unh-unh. “Not even maybe just for a day or sumpm?” Head wagging slowly nunh-unh. “That wasn’t sumpm you just really didn’t want to know or sumpm, was it?” “Unh-unh. I did wanna know, I even ast.” “What’d you ask?” “I ast if she was ever coming back.” “What’d they say?” “She wasn’t never.” “And you never ever heard nuttin more about her?” “Well … one time Miss Mursch said she thought she seen her. She went someplace on a trip. I … I forget where.” “Now, think, Emily.
Where?
” “I don’t know where. Miss Mursch went somewheres … It was to see the rich people shop. And … and … she saw Doctor Zuk there … shoppin. Sumpm … New sumpm …” “New York?” “I don’t know. I dint ask.” Her little chin began to quiver and I decided it was sumpm I really didn’t want to know.