Tough Paradise for Girls
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THE BUGHOUSE
I’m the Bogeywoman. Maybe I belonged in the bughouse. Anyway it was Doctor Zuk who got me out, and then the fuddy dreambox mechanics kicked her out right behind me. But first she saved me, and that’s when I lost her-if I ever had her-unless I am her. Am I Zuk?
HOW LOVE GOT ME INTO THE BUGHOUSE
I mean how I ended up at the age of sixteen in the loonie bin, when I wasn’t even buggy.
It happened at Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls. At camp I was always the Bogeywoman, but the true meaning of Bogeywoman only came to me in my sixteenth year, and that’s how I landed in the bughouse. It was a good camp that Merlin found for me and Margaret, a rare camp, a tough camp, but what normal girl goes to camp for nine summers? (Margaret had had it in four.) I was out beyond the White Caps’ rope, doing the dead man’s float, stringbean style. Dangling straight down, I mean. So I was staring not at the sky but at a certain girl also doing the dead man’s float-my Lake Twinny, Yvette Deaux was her name, one of those tall, broad-shouldered French girls from up around Sourhunk Lake, with a small head like an ostrich, handsome, strong, kinda dumb, I didn’t even like her much. I was seeing how her thighs were filaments of neon-green electricity under the lake, and all at once I got the idea I wanted to slide my hand between them. From that moment I saw everything in a different light, murky, as through a dark lake. From then on I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody, and that was the meaning of Bogeywoman.
At Camp Chunkagunk I had been the Bogeywoman ever since I dropped a black snake, during Quiet Hour, through the roof of the counselors’ cabin. I’m the Bogeywoman I rumbled in the chimney hole. I was just a Chipmunk then, age seven. And they had come rushing out into the dappled light, uttering pleased shrieks. See up there! on the roof! It’s that Ursie, Ursie Koderer. And I did not disappoint. I was their toy bad guy, their boygirl, their bogeygirl, no front teeth, smudge on the edge of every camp snapshot, always tearing around under a cracked, white-hot roof of blond hair. I was the Bogeywoman from that day on, even to the Big Bears.
(Big Bears wore their bathing suits strapless-their smooth-muscled shoulders gleamed, their slim rib cages held up their heads like bud vases over those shiny “latex” bathing suits we all wore, one-piece and boned like girdles, the opaline grosgrain plate of themcut mysteriously straight across the upper thigh, the knoll of coochie hidden under that ledge, in deep shadow.)
Then at sixteen I found out my love of Camp Chunkagunk was a hunger. And always had been, I guess, only in the beginning I ate like a bird. Now I saw the same things I had always seen, but I was afraid to leave them alone with me.
(They already had some fluting there, the Big Bears, at the clavicle-and that sunny prickle, a rash like eensy roses climbing up the throat, and half of them had a pigtail, soaked black by lake water, wrapped around it, and drops of water rolling drunkenly into the baby-oiled gulley between their momps under the latex, the iridescent breastplate slipping down just slightly.)
I was a Big Bear now myself. I was an older girl and a so I did not. Was mad to but would not. Lemme die first. Yvette Deaux never even knew. I have always been the boss of my hunger, the chef of my starvation, so to speak. I can read the sign. Does it say DO NOT TOUCH? I don’t touch. I have never (except that once) driven away a scared girl with a stray hand across the border. She’s gotta put a hand on me first.
And she does. That’s why my luck is good. That’s why I’ve had nothing, well, almost nothing, to do with craggy-jawed bus station hags, broken-toothed gym teachers with whistles around their necks, or crewcut WACs. I prefer ladies-like Margaret, my first love. Margaret loved me. Margaret, you might say, trained me to be loved. But I am seldom as shocked by the sheer piggery behind fine fingers and fluted hipbones as anybody would be with old Margaret. Ladies are prone to first touches and second thoughts. I am not a lesbo, they announce, and I say, a?! Whaddaya mean? Me neither-I, er, just kinda like you.
Yes, it’s a tracker’s nightmare, girlgoyle sex, and naturally the great wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus, forgot to leave me a map. A girl floods, to her own surprise, in some forbidden place (like my mouth) and ducks underground. A lizardly muscle, a girl’s love, strong but small. Small but strong. How to get her back? I try to know where she is even when she isn’t here, isn’t mine, that’s wood wiz, but I never was the wood wizardess. Still, there must be sumpm about me, at least at first. At first I had sumpm-even if it put me in the bughouse-with Lou Rae Greenrule.
So. That last summer at camp. The girlgoyle in question. To start with, her hair. Her hair was the kind that requires an engineer of a mother in the wings, or so I had always thought. At P.S. 149, a few girls came to school day after day with heads piled in ringlets sky-high-jiggling towers of them that ambitious moms had whipped up. This mother had taste Merlin regarded as sugary, it is true. We, motherless, were raised to despise that, and so were only distantly covetous-compared to girls in boiled-icing ringlets, Margaret and me were of some third sex and we knew it. Us Merlin’s Suzette swept off to the barbershop once a season, got rid of the stuff. But Lou Rae Greenrule had hair a hundred times more done than any of those girls, and yet her mother was a cockroach of a person in a hard-shell permanent wave and slacks, no ass and a sad little potbelly in front, one shoulder permanently lower than the other from going everywhere she went with her right hand hooked in a six-pack.
Besides the hair she did herself, Lou Rae had amazing breasts for such a small girl, not only real but hard as babies’ heads. You’ll want to know how I found that out. I’m getting to that-how I found out.
Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, had no cabins but double rows of army tents set on high wooden platforms weathered to pearl. Their green tent flaps swung wide of them like wings. You could sit on the spars and yardarms with a sense of nothing under you. Even your swinging feet were too high to kick weeds. Lou Rae dangled here that day on the Big Bear tentline with a stack of flat green leaves like pancakes on her head and a masque of gray mud on her cheeks.
“For the complexion,” she explained, as if there was just one complexion for everybody. “All the Indian maids wore chunkagunk-for the complexion.” “The lost chunkagunk was a food, not a mud,” I objected. “So what?” Lou Rae smiled, “some people eat dirt and anyhow you wash your hair with egg and honey don’t ya? My aunt Lola uses puréed artichokes on her bosom. La beauté’s gotta eat too.” I didn’t answer since I washed my hair with nothing, just steeped it in lake water twice a day. Even now it smelled like a swamp and was a swamp, or anyway the weight of it lay like a wet plaster on the back of my neck.
Lou Rae was holding a mud-smeared bandaid box. I could see where she had dug the dirt out of the packed ground between the tents with a pencil. She was a small, serious person with wine-dark hair and wide lips that looked pale pink next to the dark gray mud.
“But who’s gonna see you?” I asked. I meant we’re at girls’ camp, NO BOYS ALLOWED, for godzillas sake. “Who is seeing me?” said Lou Rae, tipping up one surprisingly thatchy eyebrow. Then my scalp shrank under its wet fur and my ears boiled because she was right. I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. Probably she’d seen herself in the big round pies of my eyes. I was plop in love with her. She had those green leaves scalloping her brow and looked faintly blurry, like an elf maid enlarged by a microscope.
Lou Rae’s mother always brought her and her trunk to camp a couple days late in a Veteran’s Cab all the way from Bangor. Lou Rae went to some second-rate boarding school in Freeport where everyone smoked cigarettes, starting in fourth grade. There was a story around that her father, a Bangor florist, was in jail for burning down his greenhouse, and for taxes. So probably Lou Rae’s brain like mine was some kinda swiss cheese from bugs of worry crawling in and out. But she wasn’t a famously bad girl like me. I mean at Chunkagunk I had my own spot: I was the Bogeywoman, sort of like Frankenstein, but tamed by kind treatment. Unlike Lou Rae I was no beauty at sixteen. I still had those eaves of blond hair, those white-hot roof sheets, but now they hung down in rusty flaps. In my last Upside Down Day camp picture, my smile was only half a smile, because it swung left. I had grated my voice down and pushed it out the side of my mouth, and my big tough talk had left the bag a little torn, which it still is. My nose bulb had bumps like a potato, and a black dot from some KP ketchup fight made a bull’s-eye out of my Adam’s apple.
Yes, it was a good camp that Merlin and Suzette had the sense to send us to. There were no baths so you went in that arctic lake every morning at nine, long before the sun had fought its way through the porridge of clouds. Chunkagunk was cheap and tough, which took care of all the girls you really couldn’t have stomached, and disguised the rest in their beautiful new toughness (except for Lou Rae Greenrule, who had her own kind of toughness). Anyway the girls who went there were Maine girls, innocent and strong, who had no idea that camp was corny. Nothing like the girls at home, club-formers and plotters from the earliest age. Margaret and me were not so clean, both of us being the type who joined girls’ clubs but got kicked out of them. So we were happy among the innocents, at least at first. We were the only Jews: which was nothing new from Merlin and his Suzette. When I think of all the places where we were the only Jews!-Meadowbottom Pool and that Brownie camp on the Magothy where the tidewater river was so thick with sea nettles it looked like egg drop soup, the Ploy Street Children’s Theater, the Cockeysville Equestrian Academy…
I loved Camp Chunkagunk, although I knew that camp was corn. But now I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. My love had a face with sumpm smeared on it. Camp was full of girls. I was the Bogeywoman. How could I just go on braiding gimp lanyards for the girl of my choice?
But Lou Rae loved camp too, for all its corn. If Maine girls were corny without knowing it, Lou Rae Greenrule was exempt from corn, in its midst. In her cheerful serious way, with her nuggety black, unblinking, rather unhuman stare, she dared old Mrs. Doggett to throw her out of camp for not showing up at Lake Sci and Wood Wiz and Evening Pro. Even plunked on a rock in a campfire ring, even in Chunkagunk middy and baggy shorts, Lou Rae was on a whole nuther planet from corn, and she liked it there.
They tented us together, in the last tent of the tentline. Maybe they hoped the Bogeywoman’s fanatical love of camp would suck Lou Rae along behind it, and at first I tried. “Hey, you wouldn’t mooch Evening Pro when Old Doggett is in the middle of the Chunkagunk legend, would ya?”
“Well I already missed part one,” Lou Rae yawned.
“Never mind, I got part one by heart,” said I, “here’s how it goes. The wily rabbit Ableemooch has always been the wily giant Gooskuk’s wood wizard, but far from getting his hoped-for reward of a hundred wampum’s worth of beans and carrots for guiding Gooskuk through the forest, he gets shaken down day after day for his lunch. Every day around noon Gooskuk roars ‘How about some lunch’ and when Ableemooch pipes ‘Me too’ and takes out his little brown bag of sassafras bark, Gooskuk swipes it and gulps it down, and when he’s done he belches gutabervenig, which in Chunkagunk means pretty good. So Ableemooch, thoroughly fed up with this unequal division of mooching, goes to see wily Grandmother Bearsquaw, who agrees to help.
“Grandmother Bearsquaw goes into her cave for a while and knocks around and strains and groans and says hocus pocus in Chunkagunk and comes out again with a ball of sumpm truly disgusting. ‘Ugh, what is it?’ Ableemooch asks. ‘Never mind,’ says Grandmother Bearsquaw, ‘just take it and tomorrow night bring me back what’s left and tell me all that’s happened.’ ‘What do I owe you?’ ‘Nuttin,’ says Grandmother Bearsquaw, ‘there’s plenty more where that came from.’ Ableemooch wonders about that. Maybe it’s a trick, he thinks, usually Grandmother Bearsquaw wants a hundred wampums’ worth of fish or berries or sumpm. Even Gooskuk’ll never eat sumpm so disgusting, and then I’ll probably have to eat it myself, Ableemooch mutters, but he takes it anyway.
“So next day when Gooskuk yells, ‘How about some lunch,’ Ableemooch pulls the small ball of sumpm disgusting out of his pocket… And that’s where Doggett left off. To hear part two, you gotta come to Evening Pro.”
Lou Rae smiled her mysterious smile at me in which her wide lips curved up stealthily at their ends like a canoe and no teeth showed. She sat Indian fashion on her cot, with green Old Maid cards spread all around her like lily pads. “Unh-unh,” she said. “Why not?” “I like having nothing to do.” “Godzillas sake, don’t you want to find out what happens?” “I like it better when you tell me,” Lou Rae said, “after taps. In bed. In the dark.” “What the hump it isn’t even scary,” I said. Lou Rae turned over an Old Maid without saying anything. “What kinda nothing do you do?” I asked. “I count stars.”
When I got back from Evening Pro, Lou Rae was reading Little Lulu under her bedspread with a flashlight. Then that crackly record came on the PA system, it hissed and popped and we covered our ears, then came taps, then somebody grabbed the record off with a screek and it was dark with a hurrying, hard-boiled egg yolk moon high between the tent flaps.
“So next day,” I whispered, “when Gooskuk yells, ‘How about some lunch,’ Ableemooch takes out the small ball of sumpm disgusting. Gooskuk says, ‘Ugh, what’s that?’ ‘It’s my lunch,’ Ableemooch replies and raises his four big upper choppers like he’s gonna eat it, when Gooskuk snatches the ball of sumpm disgusting and takes a little bite. ‘Ugh,’ he says but he chews it and swallows it and pretty soon he takes another bite. And then another and another and another but, funny thing, the ball isn’t getting any smaller. And Gooskuk says, ‘Ugh, ugh, that’s the most disgusting stuff I ever ate, but I can’t stop eating it. Better finish it off.’ And he eats and he eats but the ball never gets any smaller. Finally his belly is about to burst and he says, ‘Please, take it away, Ableemooch, I’ll never swipe your lunch again, I swear.’ So Ableemooch takes it away.
“That night Ableemooch heads for Grandmother Bearsquaw’s den with the ball of sumpm disgusting. Ableemooch is in a good mood and hungry and he thinks to himself, ‘That little ball of food looks disgusting, but it must be kinda good if Gooskuk liked it so much. I’ll take a tiny bite.’ So he does and then he takes another and another and he can’t stop eating it. The ball doesn’t get any smaller and Ableemooch thinks pretty soon his belly is gonna burst. But he knows that Grandmother Bearsquaw will make him pay a million wampums’ worth of corn or berries or sumpm to take the ball of sumpm disgusting away.
“Just then Gooskuk comes walking along and Ableemooch says, ‘Gooskuk, if you’ll take this ball away you can swipe my lunchwhenever you want.’ ‘Okay,’ Gooskuk says, and he does it. And that’s where Doggett left off.” I waited for Lou Rae to say o rats, but she didn’t. “So I figure tomorrow night Gooskuk probably gets hungry and takes a bite of the ball of sumpm disgusting and on and on and back and forth… What do you think?”
The hard-boiled egg yolk moon ploughed into a blue cloud and turned into a pirate ship. Lou Rae sighed desolately and whispered back, “I despise those boring Chunkagunk legends that go on and on and around and around and refuse to end.” “Well, like Gooskuk says, to a silly rabbit the world is what it is, gunk for lunch, over and over. That’s why a brave girlgoyle has to fast someday, to find out what’s for dinner, that is, if she ever wants to eat anything but stewed worms.” “I fast between candy bars,” Lou Rae murmured. It was true she was the pickiest eater at Chunka Chow, and, except for her amazingly big momps, as thin as a birdleg. “Anyway that is the legend of the lost chunkagunk, the magic food of Gooskuk that never runs out or gets any less.” “How repulsive,” said Lou Rae. “Well, yeah, course it is. If it was any good they’d run out of it. But this way nobody starves, not even if they want to.”
The moon hurried on, always in the same place, a whippoorwill sang and we thought this over. “So how does Grandmother Bearsquaw get her ball of food back?” Lou Rae asked. “She doesn’t. There’s always more of that where that came from,” I reminded her. “I know where the lost chunkagunk got lost,” Lou Rae mumbled sleepily. “Where?” I asked, then I heard her lacy snore.
So Doggett tented us together and probably hoped I would drag Lou Rae behind me to Evening Pro and Chunka Chow and Wood Wiz and Lake Sci (and by now I was thinking grimly: Why these bleached-bra Christian girls from Maine have to cuten the entire world with nicknames I don’t know) but exactly the opposite happened. Pretty soon I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody and I wanted to be near Lou Rae. Pretty soon I would rather hang around Lou Rae than please Mrs. Doggett, the excellent old dame with a meringue of white hair on top who ran Camp Chunkagunk from the turret of the lodge. Mrs. Doggett was rarely seen, but she knew everything that went on, and she had shown me her favor. She was top queen and I was bottom girl, I mean I was the Bogeywoman, once wild but now tame. She picked me to be herself on Upside Down Day, let me rule the camp with her long old-fashioned spyglass for a scepter and even dressed me in her lilac crepe, measly in the shoulders, baggy at the waist-she stuffed a towel in the widow’s hump herself. And she went around with a bowl-cut mophead on her head and blue-veined legs sticking out of my camp shorts like columns of Roquefort cheese.
But now I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. All at once camp, which had always been swampy with life for me, thick with acts, canoeing the rich dark lake, tracking the amorous woods, trying to get the eye of the older girls-all at once camp seemed busy and in the way.
This was that morning I had been doing the dead man’s float and suddenly wanted to put my hand between my Lake Twinny’s long green legs, and so found out what a Bogeywoman really was. I was out beyond the White Caps’ rope, swimming with the other White Caps around and around the float farthest out in the cold white lake, careful like never before, lemme drown first, not even to brush another girl’s toe with my finger tips. I thought of Lou Rae: way in, out of sight, Lou Rae was dog-paddling through oyster-purple shallows, tearing them shaggy with her fellow Red Caps, all on the verge of panic, most of them little girls half her age. Then thank godzilla a whistle blew. Lake Sci ended. Our little cove of Missionary Lake emptied. The water flattened to a mirror. A double file of campers snaked slowly up the steep stair cut into the bluff, and at the top two counselors, two older girls as tall as priestesses, let go two drops of alcohol into the ears of two girls one step down. The holes in your ears would open as you walked away, with a furry and satisfying pop.
I looked around for Lou Rae. Usually we met here at the bottom, went up the stairs together and got our ears popped together, but she was gone. I knew she couldn’t have drowned. No Red Cap, however in love with death, could tangle herself in the duck lettuce and drown, for her Lake Twinny would holler and older girls would blow their whistles and in a moment she would be spotted in the cold brown tea washing about everybody’s shins. And even if she had thrown away her Red Cap they would haul her up by her yard of hair. I let go of this beautiful nightmare: No, Lou Rae hadn’t drowned but had given me the slip before I could talk her into going to Wood Wiz. She figured me for some kind of enforcer for Doggett and the wood wizardess-which maybe I was. I felt the blood swarm in my cheeks. I tried to head for the Wood Wiz tracking sand pit but my feet bent like dowsing rods towards Lou Rae. I went to our tent at the end of the tentline.
And that was how I found her, sitting on a spar under a green tent flap with her feet dangling above the weeds. Tell me she wasn’t trying to cook my goose: There wasn’t a blessed thread on her front, except for the grapey bunches of her hair. On her head was that pancake stack of maple leaves, fixed on with bobby pins, and she had two silver dollars of gray mud on her pink cheeks.
Today I knew what I was-to get the eye of the older girls, I ran the fastest when I was watched; when all those eyeballs lightened the air, my feet vibrated like violins. And now my fingers buzzed to find the fairy body under that hair. I put one bitten nail to the mud on her face instead.
“For the complexion,” she explained, in that honking contralto that always took me by surprise-there’s sumpm so touching in a beauty who thinks she needs to be funny. “Even Indian princesses wear the lost chunkagunk-for the complexion.” “Er-are you a princess?” (I wanted to kiss her bare brown foot with the chipped Revlon Candy Apple polish still clinging in patches to three of its five toes. I wanted her to say she’d run the world if I would give it to her, since I could give it to her if she wanted it. I mean, she did run it. She ran mine.)
“No,” she said sadly. She was holding that white metal bandaid box full of mud, with a pencil sticking out of it. We had the last tent in the tentline, miles from any water. I suspected she had spit in the dry dirt in the can or probably even peed in it, half out of laziness, half to ripen its powers. Lou Rae made up religion as she went along.
“You could be my princess,” I said shyly. She looked up at me with curiosity and I saw, the size of a flea, a blond-bearded long-faced billy goat totter on spindly hind legs across the amber clearings of her eyes, chewing a tin can-was that what she saw in me? I shrank into my shoulders. I wished my neck would eat my head, so I could disappear.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m Princess Isabella and you’re my loyal handmaiden Mademoiselle, er, Flotilla. Remember when we sailed our pinnace down Missionary Lake to claim the lost chunkagunk for-for la beauté?”
“O yeah,” I humored her, “that was when we, er, brought torah to the red women.”
“That was the missionary part. This was the cosmetic part.”
“So I forget, did we find the lost chunkagunk?”
“Did we find the lost chunkagunk! Well suppose I tell you this dump was the capital of la beauté, under the czars! Or anyway near it.” And now her voice slid low in her throat and she leaned towards my ear, so that her cascading ringlets and the bare breasts under them grazed my shoulder. “Want me to show you where?”
And that was it, never mind Wood Wiz, off we were going to find the site of the lost chunkagunk. I didn’t even think what dank bower Lou Rae might lead me to, only that we would be alone. If I had known that I would end up losing camp, I might have dragged my feet. Lou Rae had a red bedspread. She cinched it around her with a yellow cinch belt and clapped on a pair of sixty-wrapper white Mr. Peanut sunglasses, and held on tight to her bandaid box (“for samples”) and tucked the pencil bobbing behind her ear. I followed her onto the beaten path between tentlines. Far off at its dusty fork I saw girls doing normal stuff in green camp shorts, but Lou Rae suddenly struck off into the zigzag pine forest on no trail at all. Hot-cheeked, I watched her red bedspread decapitate saplings, drag leaves and sticks, snag on ferns and lasso blackberry spurs with its tendrils.
We went on so long I knew that Wood Wiz must be over. The woods thinned out. We came to a barbed wire fence sagging off a wormy fencepost. On the wrong side (wrong because I knew at once that this was the end of camp) were cows, cows of a pale brown the exact tint of used tea bags, with the same dark melancholy shadings along their edges, ringing their ears and their great brown eyes. I stood and stared at them. They were the most beautiful, the most womanly, cows I had ever seen, and not only because I knew the gnawed-down pasture they stood in could not be camp. It was a forbidden place, and it looked it: the crust was lunar, the cows slender and agile, like enchanted girls, the cattle of some sorceress.
I had never before gone off camp grounds, and of all the rules of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, this was the strictest: she who left camp and got caught would never be let back in. It was a funny feeling even to stand inside camp looking out, as I did every morning waiting for the bugle for Lake Sci, staring across the slate of cold lake at houses the size of dice along its far shore, knowing there were regular people in them, grownups with jobs and diseases, dully eating breakfast. When it finally came, Get in the water you dirty bums on that same scratchy record, the icewater lake was a relief.
Now again I stood looking out: in front of me was a waste dotted with womanly cows, a floodplain toothed with debris and leached down to rock ribs, sharp stumps and gray broken things, and everything thrumming-earth and sky-with a smoky, mossy luster. “Cheese,” I whispered in awe, “what is this place?” “Better get a sample,” said Lou Rae, and bent at my feet to scratch it with her pencil. One maple leaf still dangled from a bobby pin at her forehead. Suppose I had been my sister Margaret, I might have run a hand right then down the long purplish ruffles of her hair, so that she looked up in-pleased or not-surprise just as it slipped past her throat and found the weight of her breasts in their red wrapper.
But I’m not Margaret. Already Lou Rae was prying up the barbed wire on top, and I was holding flat to earth the barbed wire on the bottom. We pushed through. The bedspread signed its name on a barb in a long, lazy red thread. We crossed the meadow, and there on a rise I saw the castle for me and my princess. It was a hollow half-tree as big as a cave, as gray as death, and no dirtier than a kiosk at a city bus stop. Where the core of the stump was rotted away, the pulp had washed out and there was a kind of ledge you could sit on, the two of you pressed in each other’s face like halves of a fruit hacked open but not sliced clean through.
I climbed in. Naturally I never said you come too, but she did and then I could smell her breath, feel the warm twin gusts of her nostrils on my lips. Between my legs came a soft lurch as of a bubble breaking free in the windowed cavity of a carpenter’s level. And my nipples and a hot bull’s-eye around my belly button turned into magnets from the nearness of her, stuck on me and trying to stick on her as well. I decided if she didn’t touch me I would die of it. She said sumpm and I only saw the melted pink jewel of her tongue. I didn’t dare hear her, I was afraid she would ask me why I was blinking my eyes in that stuttering way, yes I was sort of trying to hypnotize her, come to me come to me. “What did you say?” You have to understand how she looked at that moment: wood nymph, her throat and shoulders so greeny white under the grapey bunches of her hair, the round momps so distinct, tiny as she was, inside the split red peel of that damn bedspread, and the big green leaf rakishly starring her forehead. I had to kiss her, and if I were Margaret, I would have, I would have felt myself beaming and believed that her hidden coneyhole was as loud with me as a radio. I would have kissed her and then if she had pushed me away I would have merely hated her and an end to it. But if Margaret loved her, she would have been a boy, and small loss.
Here I was in my tough paradise for girls-no, just now I had crashed or bumbled out of the barbed wire fence of it, on the track of girls who until this summer had been pure as scenery. Nothing you would think of touching, they were, taken together, and this was exactly their spell, so complete, so perfect without me-those Maine girls, their wet ponytails black as tornados and dripping like perfume funnels. And let us not forget, they loved me back. So going to them every summer was dying and going to heaven for me, chaste as a ghost, only I didn’t know I was dead until now, when I came to life on the wrong side of the fence, ugly, starving thing that I was. Fitting that I should be curled in a dead tree like a claw, like a grub, a trilobite.
But I knew my way back. Didn’t I? After all, nobody knew. I wasn’t kicked out of camp just like that. Was I? It wasn’t too late? What did you say? My princess? “I said we’ve lost chunkagunk.” “Not again?” I choked out. “Alas, yes, Flotilla.” It went without saying that she was princess, I horse-faced mademoiselle. Very well, I agree to anything, come to me, kiss me, press your doll-faced momps, those broken-off upside-down champagne glasses, against me or I’ll
She laid a finger on the back of my trembling hand and I thought it safe in a hurry to pick up two of the long chocolate scraps of her hair pooling in my lap and place them in my mouth, for this could only amuse her. I could play I was a walrus, all right I was a walrus and I could eat her hair, which tasted like fried flowers. And it did amuse her, cowbells bouncing down a glass staircase, that was her laughter. “We’ve lost chunkagunk,” she repeated with a tragic sob and I dared to hold her eye with mine, well I may have crossed my eyes a bit to be safe, and muttered around my walrus mustaches: “How shall we make it up to ourselves?” Then her face, already so near, blurred into mine and her pink tongue, which I had been looking at before, slid into my mouth, poked in there surprisingly long and small and alive-
Then I was lost, o a thousand times more lost than she was. Good godzilla the nothing I knew when I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody! Nowadays I know how a girl like Lou Rae operates: Being wooed is meat and drink to the girlgoyle, and sex just spoils her appetite, so she keeps her orders small as sparrows, and if you ask for more-yes, in short, that dirty rotten Lou Rae, she loved me and left me.
But first I carried her away. I had no thoughts, only rose waves, oceans of muscle, she weighed nothing, I carried her off and she let me, and I laid her down between the rock ribs of the clammy meadow whose little grass the cows had gnawed to the bone and I threw myself on top of her. I had no idea what I was doing. I just tore open the red wrapper, my paws sank in up to the elbow and had at her pretty breasts by the handful. Which is how I know how hard they were: hard but alive, hard as a baby’s head. These were the first I ever touched, outside of my own spongy bags, and they were some immortal nymph’s on their way to becoming Elgin marbles. Dayenu! if I had only been content with that, o lord! but I wasn’t, I wasn’t thinking-nowadays I think but back then I wasn’t-so maybe if I had never lifted my fingers from her momps and crossed her belly to the pink nylon panties, her wetness wrapped there like a mouth in cellophane, like suffocating-I peeled that away and my pinky I only wish went up inside her but in fact just brushed the little fin standing there at attention knee-deep in her pond. She screamed bloody murder and of course I froze and remembered where I was. But just then, sumpm slapped me. How can I describe it? A pink thing, a grimy, scratchy, gray-pink thing exactly like a wet seat cushion from a 99-cent movie theater, slapped me softly across the face. Those womanly cows had come over and taken a front seat at my wooing and were getting their tongues in too.
Which is more than I can say for Lou Rae, whose legs had snapped back together like the prongs of a clothespin. She sat upright, just as if a spring had popped somewhere. She was scared, I can see that now, and it wasn’t those cows that had scared her, though she was never one to talk levelly about things of this world and there was a yearling bull in the pasture. She was looking at him, he was looking at us, I was looking at her and she was wearing red-for she had wrapped back up in her red thing as fast as she could yank it out from under me. And now she was rolled in her bedspread tight as a red cigar. “I think we better go back to camp,” she said.
From the hard ground I stared at her, knowing I had lost camp for good now, and would not even have Lou Rae Greenrule for five whole minutes to make good my loss.
I hoped the bull would perforate us both! or maybe at the last moment I would save her: “Come on, Ferdinand,” I encouraged him, “do your worst,” but his fuddy maleness just gave me a cross-eyed look, and turned and walked away. Even if she never told anybody-and what could she tell, in that Venusian Pig Latin she talked, full of lost beauté, ensorcelled princesses and wandering serving maids, that anybody would understand? But I could never believe in my love of camp again: my love was out to get some girl, I was a wolf in evergreen camp shorts and gimp lanyard, looking for live feed I could catch.
Lou Rae had asked me once, as we lay on our cots one starry night waiting for the mosquitos to wail: Did you usta want to be a princess when you grew up? Er, sort of, I said, knowing she had, wanting to draw her nearer to me, though that was Sister Margaret who had had the royal girlgoyle ambitions, not me. But not to boss people, I added sweetly, meanwhile thinking: they want to be princesses, and not even to boss people, what’s wrong with you girls! Did you? said I, and was shocked when I heard a suspicious noise and turned on my flashlight and sure enough her eyes began to puddle up with tears.
She blurted: “I won’t be able to stand it if everything is ugly around me. When I’m a grownup I won’t be able to wear those dogface shoes my mother wears, or look down at my slacks and think wow that belly belongs to me, it’s like an anthill in Africa, and I’ll never be able to sleep in the same bed with some pee-smelling half-dead gramps scribbled all over with iron hair… I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” So she was that kind of girl ya see, mortally afraid of everyday rot, and if I had known what I know now I would have said: Come with me and I’ll never let anything that smells mortal or perishable-certainly not a fuddy male-come near you. But of course I didn’t know it and she wouldn’t have come with me if I had. Probably she had to pass through any number of pretty, feckless boys who went downhill before she became, o, let’s see, what I find in my crystal ball is a one-girl condo cleaning service in Maui in later life, gold lamé smocks she finds at St. Vincent de Paul, paisley slippers and fantastical babushkas:
What is your fortune, my Magic Maid?
My face is my fortune, sir, she said.
Then I can’t marry you, my Magic Maid.
Nobody asked you, sir, she said.
But just now in a cow pasture in Maine, she was flouncing back towards the boundary of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, in that maddening bedspread, springing lightly over the barbed wire fence back into camp, and I followed in a fog, in pig-iron grief. I could hardly lift my cannonball knees, my head lolled on a broken spring, but she was fully recovered. She looked back at me over her shoulder, across her red train, and said: “Bogeywoman-you know what?” “No, what?” I growled. “I know-don’t ask me how I know but I know-you were my wood wizard in another life.”
I narrowed my eyes at her red back. I understood she was throwing me a bone and at the same time explaining away her mysterious but passing attraction to me. O yeah? what life was that? I wanted to sneer. Back when we were both lumpy funguses and nobody had a coneyhole or a frog dangle? I never was one to go for that girlgoyle slumber party drivel about reincarnation-everybody’s souls flying around in beans with bus transfers until they find a new body to land in.
All the same there was sumpm in what she said that made the sweat pop out in oily beads on my forehead. You were my wood wizard in some other life-in other words, her spirit guide from one world to another. And even though she had it upside down, and obviously the red-ragged little hussy was leading me, still she was right about that, I had wound up in some other world than I’d ever meant to. Things only looked the same. I dragged on behind her. I dragged my feet through the blackened leaves of the forest bottom, trying not to track or even see her huge and ridiculous spoor in the stringy humus. But I couldn’t shake the habit of camp so easily. I ached with disgusted, stale hunger. I sensed all hope of her had been marooned on this isle of the lost chunkagunk in a golden past, and now instead of showing me her pretty coochie slick and pink like a little wing of bubblegum, with the spit of expectation sparkling on it, she would reminisce. Of ancient travels with her wood wizard, that wily giant rabbit-hole, the Bogeywoman. Yes I saw it coming, more and more mystical twaddle like this, with her pink Lollipop underpants back on.
I didn’t go crazy yet, that was tomorrow or the next day. First I tried to be back in camp, to love Wood Wiz and Lake Sci, zealously to scrape plates for hog slops in KP and buck up for seconds in raspberry cuss and play my ukulele for Chunka Talent Parade and sing alto in Evening Pro up at the Wig:
She rolls along like a cannonball,
Like a star in its heavenly flight,
And the train I’m on,
She’s the queen of them all,
She’s the streamlined cannonball.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
Now here’s when I really went flooey, broke the dreambox but good. It was Wood Wiz, Tracking-tracking up at the sand pit on the southern edge of camp.
Tracking was the domain of Willis Marie Bundgus, a six-foot Yankee maiden and true wood wizardess, with a great ruffled headpiece of palomino hair like pinewood shavings, and breasts like horns, and a behind as big as a wheelbarrow, which had led me through hemlock forest and cranberry bog and over the Camel’s Needle. Camp is corn, camp is the corniest, but you know you know sumpm when you can look at a few random scratches in dirty rain-pocked sand and see in your mind’s eye not only what small lives have cruised by here in their endless foraging but what dog ate what dog when. Willis Bundgus knew all this and taught me what she could. And therefore I loved Willis Bundgus with a love pure and true, the love of a pilgrim for her saint of perfect action, the love of a slave for the broad back of Harriet Tubman moving through the swamp on a moonless night. But also, I admit it-though I didn’t know it myself yet, it must have been there-with the ace-in-the-hole love of a boygirl, a bogeygirl, for a real woman. It started with Margaret: a big woman, bigger than me, not fat but grand in all her architecture, with a big scary cliff of bosom and a big solid county seat at the bottom of it, has always been my ideal. To be up to a woman like that! Not to go on forever flitting through the underbrush, a skinny wood elf weighed down by virtually no secondaries in the sexual traits department, but menschlike to inherit the world, towns, factories, the fertile plain. Well, that was Willis Bundgus. Not that I saw, at the time, any more than her fine flanks stretching the denim shiny in great twin lobes when she bent over the sand pit and said:
“There was war to the grim death here. Tell us about it, Koderer.”
And I got down on my hands and knees in the sand like she had taught me, and squinted at a few dumb gashes with the low sun buttering them from the other side.
“A pregnant mouse galloped through here and disappeared, but I don’t think anything ate it.”
“Good,” she said in a bored voice.
“Ooooo look here it veered off-probably a chicken hawk passed over-but nothing happened. The sand’s not torn up.”
“Hmmm.”
“Wait-a raccoon-” I crawled around the pit in a spilled alphabet font of starry feet, which had sunk deep. “The old male swung through here and ate up, uh-oh, looks like somebody’s pink dry cleaning ticket.”
“You call that a fight to the bitter end?” Willis drawled.
“Well, somebody didn’t get their dress slacks back.”
“Koderer, Koderer, put your beady eyes on the ground, let the dead talk to you.”
Dead? dead? but then I screwed down my nose and saw the corpses all over the place, everywhere I looked: crumbs of green lacewing, two links, then three more, of a salamander spine, tiny teeth, dry eggs, claws, half a beetle carapace, rust-red frass of the hornworm, a lone whisker sticking out of a bit of snout leather-all that was left of some least weasel the hawk ate-a whole skull the size of a freckle: all this carnage epochs beyond its original disturbance, part of the calm sand itself. You just had to get down there to see from the wreckage what a twenty-table grange hall ham & oyster supper that sand was, what a feast run amok the whole earth was, only how could you tell the eater from the eats? You couldn’t. And what but your own greedy appetite led you out there on the bonewhite tablecloth in the first place, where every passing turkey buzzard could get an eyeful of you? It was a wonder anything ever came out of its hole-and suddenly I saw this: Only merciful hunger blanks out death.
“The whole sand pit’s an oinking boneyard,” I said.
“Good stuff, eh, Bogeywoman?” said Willis, pleased to see my nose touching the ground. The moniker showed I was back in her favor again, and living up to my reputation as girl guide to snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails-her heiress in short.
She had a thing for me, I know she did, and she was woman enough to dish up sumpm for everybody, even if she was supposedly pinned to some carburetorhead from East Millinocket at the time, no doubt the only abner from her high school tall enough to look her in the eye. Wherever she is, I’ll bet by now Willis Marie Bundgus has shucked the denim from those flanks for any number of girlgoyles, though fuddies too of course. She had appetites-I could tell.
This was the second day after that terrible afternoon when Lou Rae Greenrule loved me for twelve and a half minutes and left me, and now I was awake at camp with my blood a-quarrel, with my once sleepy appetites whistling on their haunches like a metropolis of prairie dogs. After lunch, during Quiet Hour, while Lou Rae sat Indian fashion on her red bedspread, playing Old Maid of the Klondike, I lay on my cot, eyes bulging; I swear I could hear the cold and scheming blood swish by my ears, and suddenly I had the idea to go and visit Willis Bundgus.
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.”
IT MEANT EXILE:
(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?)
“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
WHY THE BOGEYWOMAN LETS HER OWN BLOOD:
(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 cometogether, 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:
PVT RD
PERMIT & FEE REQD
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.