Bogeywoman (5 page)

She was always easy to find, and I knew she wouldn’t turn me away. She would be at the Wood Wiz Wigwam, an old one-room smokehouse with some dusty specimens on the ledges, or at the tracking pit just beyond, near the southern edge of camp—in fact a warning wire just touched its far edge. No-woman’s-land. Thirty yards into it a small and dented blue trailer sat on concrete blocks in the woods. I had never been there, of course, but once or twice I had seen Willis talking through its porthole. The camp handyman lived there, Ottie Grayson.

Ottie was six foot four or five and homely. What he looked like was a long fork. He grinned his rubbery face into deep grooves, grinned all day every day, though practically all the work he did about the place required a shovel. True, with that face, as soon as he squinted into the sunlight, he seemed to be yuk-yukking even when he wasn’t. There would be a fresh trench around, say, Nurse’s Bungalow, and Ottie’s head sticking out of it with that smile and big red sunburnt ears under his flat-top, and worst of all, his Adam’s apple jumping around in his neck like a finger trying to poke through a curtain. His ugliness was legendary, even to him: He liked to tell about a blind date he’d once had where he’d whispered to the girl he was a werewolf and at midnight she panicked and threw her shoe at him. Everyone liked him, including me.

Anyhow sometimes Willis talked through the window of
Ottie Grayson’s trailer, sometimes Ottie squatted by Willis’s sand pit. Willis Bundgus liked Ottie, too, but I wasn’t jealous. Ottie was cute-ugly and popular as the camp dog. Mostly he wasn’t around, Ottie; mostly he was down the bottom of some hole with his shovel. But once I had found the two of them belly-flopped in the sand pit, heads together, watching a mud dauber and a grass spider fight to the finish, with Ottie coaching the underdog spider and Willis coolly fixing the terrible odds. “Whatcha guys doing?” I squatted right down between them, never thinking I might be in the way.

When it was all over Willis showed us the paper cell in the eaves of the smokehouse where the wasp was bricking up the numb spider with one of her eggs.

“Ouch. Poor chump,” Ottie said. “You wouldn’t do that to your worst enemy, would you, Bogeywoman?”

“She’s not mad at him,” Willis pointed out.

“She eats him alive and he gets to watch,” Ottie winced.

“A restful end,” Willis said, “but not for the squeamish.”

“Maybe he doesn’t even know it’s him,” I chimed in. “Maybe he feels lighter and lighter and all at once he feels like nothing, I mean he turns into her and that’s what he is, her.”

I remember the two of them looked at me queerly.

But today Willis was missing, though right away I found a fresh print of her big potato foot—as wood wizardess she was the only one at Camp Chunkagunk who was allowed to go barefoot. Behind the print was a crater as though she had braked suddenly and peered at sumpm in the distance and then lost heart and plunked down on her bum and bawled, except that the wood wizardess would never bawl. A few seconds later she had scrambled back up and I could see, from the wrung necks of a couple spurges, that was the way she went. In a hurry. Which
gave me the idea—I would track her. She had scrambled up the back of the sand pit and come out in no-woman’s-land outside of camp. What the hump—this time it was too easy. I resolved to track the great tracker, praying she would be glad to see me. After all she was on the wrong side herself. That I might intrude never even occurred to me.

I kicked off my sneakers and picked up in no time her trademark silent hundred-and-sixty-pound pigeon-toe. Sure enough, she was tracking. Here she tunneled through bearberry, here she made herself small as a pocketbook, all at once—we were even with Grayson’s trailer—she stretched up on her toes and peered in the porthole. Now I began to see a second set of tracks, maybe they’d been there all along but so like hers in the mass of weight they carried and the bassoon-key toeworks I hadn’t noticed. A fuddy’s foot. Ottie. On she padded after him, swifter and swifter now, away from the lake, over a rise and down into a snake’s nest of bramble whips where all I had to do was navigate the channel their hips had already brush-hogged. Here came a broad bank of raspberries she hadn’t even stopped to eat. But—wait—sumpm else had stopped to eat, sumpm more a berry’s size, with dinky fingerjoints born to close fast around the hairy red brain lobes of raspberries. And now I picked up a third track, fairy-footed, girly, its tread hardly denting the ground. Here a small female lounged, stuffing herself with berries, swatting briars out of her long ringletty hair, then all at once fell down on peach-pit kneecaps and tunneled into the bush, and if I was not mistaken—didn’t the red berries tremble?—she was still in there. I saw with a thrill that Willis Marie Bundgus had never detected this party, for just here the wood wizardess had spotted what she was looking for, here she had gone crashing like a rhino through the briars to get to it. Myself I climbed a scabrous
old apple tree on the edge of the trail, and clung there looking down on all three.

I bet you think I was buggy with jealousy. You’ve got it all wrong: at first I was dying to catch those two, Willis and Ottie, in the act, I was ready to crash their picnic and eat the crumbs with the ants, I’d take what I could get. I wanted to be sure that everybody was doing it as soon as they had the chance—those Maine girls most of all, with their sturdy legs, smooth hair and strong teeth, their glass-clear voices singing Old Hundredth and
I never saw a moor
in three-part harmony.

I rubbernecked for a better view. In my dream their shirts had already unwrapped them like a picnic, fluttered down and flattened puffily underneath them. She lay on her back on this billowing tablecloth and clutched Ottie’s ugly head to this nuzzy and that nuzzy, passionately imprisoning his bubblegum ears in her big strong hands, her bare biceps glittering with sweat. He kissed and struggled and all of a sudden gasped for air and sat back on his heels. And in my dream there they were, her wizardly breasts, two lovely round custards, wet and slick, with their brown nipples pointing up like fuses. And,
dayenu!
stop right there, lord. I swear I would have been satisfied.

But no. The two were doing nothing. They sat on a low stump, not even side by side though their shoulders bumped. All their zippers were zippered and snaps snapped and laces laced. I heard Ottie’s voice:

“I mean whatsername, you know the one, sounds like a national park?” he was saying, and he turned kinda boiled pink, then light dove into the woof of his flat-top—he looked sheepishly down at his feet. “The one with the hair? The fairy princess about four foot tall but with real jugs, from the Lower Big Bear line?” (That’s where I close to fell out of my apple tree, for
that could only be one person he was describing. Now I knew who it was in the raspberry bush. Blood surged into my face and it’s a wonder I didn’t jump someone right then.)

“The one with the hair, I mean hair like hot fudge pouring all the way down to her little ice-cream scoop butt, you know the one? The one who thinks she’s in the Land of Nod or Cockayne or somewhere?” I saw sumpm flash in his hands—he was carving a peg with a jackknife. Willis’s hands were tucked away, out of trouble, under her big thighs. “Whose dad’s supposed to be in jail? who lives on Platform 92 with the Bogeywoman and the red bedspread? I think she’s gonna be the one …”

“The one?” Willis said. She glanced up at him and I was shocked at her shipwrecked face—but Ottie was studying his feet.

“Ya mean the only one? For me? Heck, no, I mean the first one,” he said, and laughed, but bashfully, not like a cad, and his ugly-cute face lit up with that thought and the queer greeny light of the woods. “I always figured one of these days even a ugly guy like me would stumble across one of those nymphos you hear about. So I been bracing myself for somebody old and scary, probably one of my buddies’ mothers with cottage cheese thighs and lard lumps hanging out of her girdle, I’d take anything—and who comes along but this little number, whatsername. She’s like a movie star who ate a eat-me pill and shrank down in perfect proportion—you know?” Willis mumbled sumpm or other. “Cheese I’m glad I can talk to you, Bundgus”—he gave her a gentle punch in the shoulder, which was larger than his own, and she smiled a closed smile with a greenish cast.

“What I mean is,” Ottie went on, “for five years now I been wondering if I was ever going to … I’m not the kind who could push a girl to … I’m nineteen years old, I got big ears, a Howdy
Doody face, all the girls want to be my pal and nobody wants to, you know. Only this one, I think she really likes to—anyway, she was sposed to meet me here and—I hope she didn’t get pinched.” “I’ll haul her in myself,” Willis growled. “Aw cmon.” “You could get in a lot of trouble.” “She’s not the type who’d ever tell,” Ottie said, “—ya know I used to think she and the Bogeywoman had some kinda private club together,
NO BOYS ALLOWED
. But yesterday she led me out here when she was sposed to be shooting targets with the Chunkagunk Bowwomen and I got the poison ivy to prove it.” He started fussing with his floppy overalls but then pointed, to my relief, at his bare ankles. There they were, fat crusty white clouds of calamine lotion.

“She said we were looking for some kind of dirt from the lost chunkagunk—what the heck you think she had in mind? Anyhow we were crawling around in the briars, scratching up dirt, and something told me I could kiss her.”
Dirty rotten double-timing Lou Rae
, I wanted to shout. “I swear I could have gone as far as I wanted with her,” Ottie added,
“I think,”—
and Willis asked in a small voice, smiling faintly though the color of white asparagus, “So why didn’t you, Turkeyneck?” “Hey, Bundgus, you’re not mad, are you?” Ottie asked with a hiccup of pleased laughter. “Well—I didn’t push it. Later I coulda kicked myself. Anyhow she promised to meet me here—” “So where is she?” Bundgus inquired. I wanted to rat to the wood wizardess—I was on her side—but of course I said nothing (lemme die first).

“Don’t worry,” Ottie mumbled, “a girl that young, I’m waiting for her to ask me, well not exactly ask but, you know, put a hand on me first, something like that …” He stretched out his long legs in their puffy green overalls and stood up to go. “Hey, I got hogs.” (He meant his KP duty.) “So what brings
you
out
here anyway, Willie?” Willis shook her head miserably and he kicked off through the grass polls and leaf trash, whistling up the trail.

And that’s where I went buggy, right there in the pleasingly anatomical forks of the apple tree, variety Northern Spy. My blood was singing like a chain saw. Never mind that Ottie’s courtship of Lou Rae had come to nothing, like my own, and that I had, from experience, cause to hope that her scissory legs would cut off his plans at the root. He was after Lou Rae, the fuddy. And he’d broken the wood wizardess’s heart, the cad. O he was popular, Ottie, a walking barbeque fork with a clutch of tines for a face, ha ha, ears like two pink diaphragms, and those funny longitudinal rucks around his mouth, ho ho, the sort of face you can hardly look on without bursting out laughing, I told you I liked him, I had nothing against him, I wasn’t jealous, not that jealous, but there was Willis Marie Bundgus, the woman I was saving for when I grew up, with a face as long as the bus ride home, and this comedian with his peg in one hand and his jackknife in the other and his stick legs poking through the brush towards me and Lou Rae—was she going to whistle for him? I went buggy.

I guess I’d watched too many Saturday serials where Hopalong Cassidy drops onto Bullet from the fiery hayloft of the burning livery stable. When Ottie, whistling, passed under the apple tree I uttered a mad gargle—
Keep your mitts off her
—and without exactly thinking about it I dropped on his shoulders, boxed his bubblegum-pink ears with my fists, got his skinny neck in a death grip with my skinny thighs, hung upside down gasping
Keep your mitts off her
and pounding his stomach, and finally I let go with my thighs and plunged to earth, tackling him on the way down. “Whoa, whoa,” he was yelling, “cool it,
Bogeywoman, you’re right off your noodle, whaddaya mean, off who?” The funny thing is, I wasn’t mad at him, I swear I wasn’t. It was that dirty rotten Lou Rae I was mad at, who had loved me for twelve and a half minutes and left me, but I wasn’t going to put a hand on her, was I? Lemme die first.

“You’re oinking nuts, Bogeywoman,” Ottie shouted. I rolled around and was about to sink my teeth into his ankle when I accidentally got a good look, through his legs, at the wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus. For a second my eyeballs froze in their molds. This whole time I had been sorta dreaming that I was saving the wood wizardess. I must have thought, if you can call it a thought, that she would be impressed. Then one look at her face and I knew I was in disgrace. It was over. Now I had lost camp, really lost camp, for good. Now they would have to throw me out, banish me, point me forth, shaking their heads and mouthing
Get help
, yes out of those famous wrought-iron gates with
CAMP CHUNKAGUNK YMCA
embossed on plates on each granite gate post and
Tough Paradise for Girls
scrolling overhead.

Ottie by now had thrown away whittle-peg and jackknife and was wrestling me back. After I saw Willis’s stony face my heart wasn’t in it. He flipped me over and plunked himself on top of me. He got hold of my arms (by then I wasn’t punching or even struggling so it was easy, in fact I held them out to him) and after a bit he let go with one hand, looked over his shoulder at Willis and cranked an invisible pencil sharpener next to his ear, with his finger sticking out for the pencil. “Totally buggy,” he said. “What the heck’s eating her? What’s she doing out here? What’s she got against me?” “You’re on the wrong side, Koderer,” Willis said in a scared, sad voice. “You know what that means.”

(Already in my mind I had fallen back into the world: Upper Meadowbottom Heights Extended, the Jewish suburbs, the girls my age with their panty girdles and orthodontists, sororities and sweet sixteen parties and sanitary belts and beauty salons and college boards—all the girls I knew in Baltimore except the what-went-wrongs, my sister Margaret and me—all those girls rattling their Hutzler’s bags along the white-hot sidewalks of the new shopping centers, moving inside the baffles of their feminine ambitions as their younger selves had traveled in five layers of crinolines or as planets travel in their rings, and no more likely to step out of orbit. Not that I hated those girls. I even saw the possibilities, the tragic possibilities, of some, but they, unlike the Maine girls, shunned me from the outset as no use, in fact a danger, to their own struggles for position. They were Jewish girls, they had programs, they didn’t dare fail. They secreted antibodies for the likes of me, their atomic neutralizers were cut to my shape—if I was stuck among them what would become of me?)