Bogeywoman (6 page)

“Why were you spying on us? What’s wrong with you, Koderer, are you sick?” Willis Bundgus reached in and laid a cool hand on my forehead. “Have you been eating or drinking something queer?”
God gimme an excuse
, Merlin’s Suzette used to say—I almost laughed at the tailor-made excuse my buckskin-fringed goddess was handing me. (Bundgus of course was innocent of the so-called human sciences. She’d probably never even heard of Sigmund Food—none of that sticky stuff for her.) I saw my chance. “I ate a funny-looking mushroom,” I blurted, exploding my chance to atoms by overdoing it—no tracker would ever eat a funny-looking mushroom. “I fell on it with my mouth open,” I tacked on lamely. “My god she tried to kill herself,” Willis hollered, “we have to get her to Nurse’s Bung right away.” Since I
was quiet now, Ottie rolled off me to help me to my feet—and I forked up his jackknife out of the tuft of iron grass where it had fallen, and slashing air with it, so he backed off, and making, I seem to recall, some kinda wordless noise—howling, bawling, sumpm along those lines—I ran off into the woods.

It meant exile
—and now I hastened to forget what I knew, which wasn’t much, of Wood Wiz Lost-Finding, and I was lost in the woods. I hadn’t stolen Ottie’s knife as essential tool number 3 of emergency wood wizardry, although it was. I had no intention of cutting willow rod stanchions or leafy roofing for a lean-to. No, it was myself I intended to cut—not kill, mind you, only cut—which brings me to the question of

(Note well I was not your typical Badgirl capital B: I was the Bogeywoman, whereas classical Badgirl was Margaret, age fourteen, fifteen, with a Pall Mall usurping the notch of a cherry coke straw in her lips and dangling from her white lipstick at the bus stop [transfer from Meadowbottom Circle to Number 5 Slade Avenue]. Somebody’s bubby in a babushka limps by and sighs, “Oi, so young!” Badgirl doesn’t turn her head, gives her at most a sidewise sullen glance from half-lowered lids. Badgirl got her period at thirteen, threw out the stiffened panties in a park garbage can, thumbed a tampax up there—it was murder for a week—and didn’t tell Suzette, who’d have made it occasion for a boring speech. Badgirl used to carry an abortionist’s telephone number—it was in D.C.—in her wallet, penciled on a corner of her first Social Security card, which she hadn’t lost yet. But this miniature toughgirl has emotions—like me in the woods. This is where Badgirl and Bogeywoman come
together, age 14, 15, 16, in that overbubbling cauldron of the heart. So much they have to spill some when they think of—well maybe
think
isn’t quite the word for it—that I could go crazy was churning in my dreambox, that I was going to die, that everyone was going to die, that the black drain of time was already sucking down my lazy worthless life and I would never possess any more of it than this torn-up, dirty-sudsy, offensive fluid, my eye staring coldly out at the chunk-loaded river going by—waves of hunger and disgust—that I would never love anyone, that no one would ever love me but still I wanted them in my gorge gullet snatch hole craw wanted to eat them alive before they had a chance to eat me or, worse, look at me, see what I was and run)

Ottie kept that jackknife sharp, wouldn’t you know it. I staggered through deep shade on no trail, weeping and slicing a very fine grid as I went, a plan for a good camp, a tough camp, for girls, on the fish-white underbelly of my forearm—so fine it took some time before the Chipmunks’ cottage, the Lower Big Bear line, the Upper Big Bear line, waterfront, archery field and chapel all filled up with blood and ran together. By then rags of pink sky winked at me between branches overhead—twilight over the lake. They were throwing me out—in all my life I had shown for twelve and a half minutes what I really was and already they were throwing me out. Okay I was out of camp but I would never go home, I decided that right then.

And, funny, there was no use hiding in the woods either: old Bundgus was such an ace tracker that she’d find me as soon as she could catch me, for all I had over her draft horse flanks was speed.

I turned west from the lake, shambling in a straight line, leaking blood that I knew she’d see, knowing I should come to a tar road and I did—one that looked squeezed out of a tube and
slightly flattened. Its blacktop lay a couple inches above the lips of the ditches and there were queer signs:

The tar was new and aromatic as the pinewoods. Now the main thing was not to drip or scuff or leave any track. My right arm with the good camp, the tough camp, for girls scratched on the white inside of it was barely tacky now, not dripping, but I couldn’t look at it—not that the smear of blood was so disgusting—more monumentally embarrassing, like that Polaroid Merlin took of me in my crib the first time it dawned on me what my own turds were good for and I worked off my diaper and finger-painted them all over the wall.
Her first artistic productions
Merlin wrote in the album. Probably I was still whimpering a little. All the same I felt light, light in the head, as though I had bled away a snakebite. I yanked off my Camp Chunkagunk jersey and rolled it around my arm, there, that was better. Stood up straight. Now to go the way my naked momps were pointing me. I looked down at them. They’re kinda duck-footed: one said north, one said south.

Willis Marie Bundgus would expect me to go north, light out for the bog country and the Canada border. Opportunity lay that way; as a schooled tracker I would find sumpm to eat, or if I was really determined to off myself there were funny-looking mushrooms everywhere. In fact hazards abounded, fertile danger a-plenty in the bog country: if a bear didn’t eat me, they might find me in a thousand years, a self-made bog woman—
Boggywoman
—intact in the peat, forever young though tough and red as a Western saddle. That thought alone would send
Bundgus crashing through the cranberry bogs in search of my hide before I sank and the juniper water tanned me forever. Yes, a smart scout would head north. Therefore I could outwit Bundgus (and myself) by turning south. Back to camp. And so I did. I set off south, sobbing from time to time, bare-bosomed, glancing around slyly whenever I remembered to, careful not to kick so much as a stone. Okay, I was buggy. I thought this a reasonable plan.

Though my situation was desperate, I felt better now, no denying it. The blackgreen woods pressed the road between two banks as velvety and private as upholstery. It was falling dark. As long as there was no one to look at me, I kinda liked my bare chest. My arm—I had forgotten that and it wouldn’t hurt one bit tomorrow. The tar under my feet was spicy and warm. Its newness glowed like seal fur. A raccoon turd dotted it here and there and I stopped, as I always did, to admire the harlequin scat of that model omnivore—fishbones, corn, a plug of purple finch feathers, all bound together and tinted with the rosy, seed-speckled pleasure of blackberry—and was it one pearl button winking at me? Perhaps they would take me back at camp after all—perhaps they would simply forget, or Willis Marie Bundgus would relent from duty this once, find it unbecoming to her beautiful flesh to hold as rigid as a tent-pole. God give me, not an excuse—a break, an exemption, a liberty, permit, indulgence, one-of-a-kind. For one-of-a-kind, that’s what I by godzilla am, aren’t I? and, God, you made me, you’re stuck with me, at least I’m not contagious. I’m Bogeywoman, a monster not even reproducible as myself, sterile as a mule in that respect, so how about a permit, you owe me
sumpm
. Or I’ll kill myself, God, you think I won’t?
Let me back in camp Make them take me
For some reason I recalled at just that moment that on
my way from the appletree-top to the ground I had bitten Ottie on the nose with all my might, and I saw the bright blood spritz down the dam of his upper lip, drowning the furrow the Archangel Michael is said to press with a forefinger to make newborn children forget all they know of heaven. I had bitten his nose half off! I trudged on miserably, for the case was hopeless. Then—probably I was sniveling in some manner—I came over a rise, still walking in the middle of the road, and found myself looking down on the Camp Chunkagunk green woodie in a dirt turnaround on the left, a Caribou County police car tilted into the ditch on the right, and, side by side, slowly advancing, walking towards me up the little hill of blacktop, Ottie Grayson and a tall square-jawed policeman. I clamped my arm across my momps; the Camp Chunkagunk jersey dangled down in front of me like a curtain. Thank godzilla it was almost dark by now. I inched backwards.

“Come on, Bogeywoman,” Ottie coaxed in an amiable zookeeper’s voice, he must have thought I was born yesterday, “we’ll take you back to camp. Chicken papa and strawberry cuss for dinner, and square dancing for Evening Pro …”

The Bogeywoman’s appetite ya see was well known. From now on I hate chicken papa, I was thinking, and if I work at it I’ll soon loathe strawberry cuss too: and for the first time in my life I got a flash of why some girlgoyles say no to whatever
they
give you to eat. All the same I was getting hungry. I narrowed my eyes at Ottie. His nose was big and red and puffy, and looking bigger and redder and puffier the closer he came. “Nothing bad will happen to you,” he said, “I know you must be hungry by now.” “I ain’t hungry,” I said, “and I swear by godzilla Ottie Grayson if you come one step closer I’ll bite your nose clean off.” He stopped and so did the policeman. I whirled around to run
and barged smack into Willis Marie Bundgus. Of course she’d circled around behind me stealthy as a weasel. I saw her big brown feet planted in a wrestler’s ready on the blacktop. The wood wizardess always wore that fringed vest like Annie Oakley. Now its tassels trembled. I would have let her take me. I wasn’t going to sock the great Willis Marie Bundgus, and anyhow she stood a foot above me even in a slight crouch. But she backed off. “Where’s your shirt, Koderer?” she said unhappily.

“I swear I’m not buggy, I’m not,” I cried, and then I could feel the fuddies closing in behind me—I spun and threw them everything I had: Sunday Monday and Tuesday punches, knees to grottos, elbows to jawbones, roundhouses, watertowers and terminals, dungspreaders and haymakers, blueflies, blackflies, letter flies. I got nowhere. They didn’t hurt me, but the boys weren’t even trying. They caught my flailing arms and legs one by one and as the trooper steered my hands together for the handcuffs he turned up my arm and tweeted unmelodiously. “What in sam hill is this?” “It’s a map of Camp Chunkagunk,
Tough Paradise for Girls
,” I said proudly, “can’t you tell?” “Jesus wept,” the officer said in disgust and packed me into the cruiser.

Since I was half-naked I figured they would throw Willis Marie Bundgus in with me for a chaperone and I could explain. But all I ever saw of her again was one gleam through the back window: Ottie Grayson and Bundgus in the Camp Chunkagunk station wagon, two white faces lit up in the windshield, one a grinning handyman I hereby rub out, one a suffering wood wizardess—I tell you she loved me more than she knew—till they slammed the car door closed.

I was in the bughouse, but I wasn’t hearing angel voices. I wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, through invisible microphones in the toilet. I wasn’t the Virgin Mary. If I found a fat shoelace probably I tied my broken ukulele case together with it instead of trying to dangle from it, by the neck, inside my private closet. And, speaking of that closet, the cockroach I found there, napping in my sad-faced sneaker, was no hallucination but just as real, and just as big, as the Koderer nose on my face. I liked girlgoyles, that was at the bottom of it, but of course I wasn’t telling
them
that. I liked girls, except for me. And in the wilderness between my hunger and its exception, I sometimes drew maps with no way out on the inside of my forearm with a razor blade. Or anything else sharp I could find. I was seventeen now. I had been in this dump one year, seven months and seven days. I still
dreamed of dirty rotten Lou Rae Greenrule, who loved me and left me, and of the wood wizardess, who turned me in. Sometimes I dreamed I was back at Camp Chunkagunk and having a pretty good time, except for those two ripe pimples I was hiding inside my brassiere, so sore and popping full of yellow cheese they made me want to puke.

I was safe in the loonie bin, and to make sure I was safe, I kept my mouth shut. Who knew what a bona fide loonie might have to say? So I gave em the silent treatment, I mean all the dreambox mechanics and especially “my” dreambox mechanic, Foofer. For one year, seven months and seven days—not one word. Right smack in the bughouse I was a
Unbeknownst To Everybody, or at least I was until that dirty stoolie Margaret wrote sumpm on the back of a greasy menu that Foofer got his hands on—as she knew he would. (
I forgot
, says Margaret. Forgot! I’ll say no more. It doesn’t take a Sigmund Food.)