Fallen Among Ayrabbers
It wasn’t a daring escape. O well, daring would have been wasted on Rohring Rohring, which was as leaky as a kitchen colander. Hypothetically, the lobby guards knew us mental patients by sight and were ready to nab us if we made a run for it. In fact Lopes was watching me as I dashed past his desk but made up his mind-I saw a movement of his lower jaw like someone setting down a grocery bag with a plump-that this was nothing to risk a heart attack for. After all we Bug Motels were always running around wild. We had the liberty of the lobby and the elevators, the cafeteria, gift shop and snack bar, and of the courtyard where we played tennis on the doctors’ courts. And although we were supposed to wait for our pint-sized school bus in the morning and get off it again at night only on that little yellow-striped island of concrete on Broadway, next to the trolley tracks and across from the ayrabbers’ barn, still Lopes knew we had nobody but wicked Reginald to guide us, out there on the wickedest of wicked streets. And in fact every day we surveyed the whores and pimps, junkies, stewies, smokies and stuffies who treaded by for any new faces, and meanwhile we longed to be the ayrabbers who came jingling out of the barn across the way behind their swayback nags. Small wonder Lopes had given us up for lost.
As for these horses, even if they were the world’s ugliest, with feet like laundry irons and drooping underlips as hairy as catfish, still they were horses and even to the seen-it-all Bug Motels, such an ancient career as horse and wagon and a load of vegetables seemed a romantic occupation, even movie starry-where else but the movies did you see a horse and wagon nowadays? The ayrabbers’ horses clopped up one street and down another with the frail rigidity of elderly mental patients. They knew the way. If the way changed, say, the street was torn away down to its brick sewer line, old Broomstick wouldn’t pull the wagon straight into the hole-he wasn’t blind-but he would stand there till tomorrow. Till he starved. Till somebody saved him, led him home to his bucket of oats and flake of hay. We could tell the horses were low beasts and the ayrabbers the lowest of the low, lower even than mental patients-dusty black wretches with caved-in chests and a few mossy crooked tombstones for teeth, even the young ones.
All the same we Bug Motels put ayrabbers, not that we knew any poisonally, up there with movie stars-in a way one end of the social ladder was as good as the other. The important thing was to live at the far end, where one more step and you fell off into nothing. Like the ayrabbers’ nags, we Bug Motels knew the way. We saw that yawning hole, the grownup world of work we weren’t ready for. For all our separate frenzies we were standing at the edge of it staring in, until we starved.
And funny how the Bug Motels, city slickers one and all, each dreamed themselves into movies of some kinda golden days gone by. Sometimes Dion got sick of Nino, his tailor, running his life and he said: “Who I really wanna be is the wild man of Druid Hill Park, hide in the bushes all day and let the lions and monkeys out of their cages at night and run around wit em.” “Ya mean naked?” “Nuttin but my hairy legs and froggies, man.” Emily was a saint in some Dark Ages nunnery living on communion wafers and dew, Bertie loved hashish because he wanted to wander around in humble disguise all night like the Caliph of Baghdad and his trusty wazir whassizname in The Arabian Nights, O was the beautiful slave girl who walked upside down on the golden daggers in her hands. And I always had this pipe dream of trekking with Broomstick, my nag, up the grassy median strip of the New Jersey Turnpike. Not that I wished to show off in my buckskins to the millions who travel that road. No, it was the only way I knew to get to New York City, which in turn was the only way I more or less knew to get to Camp Chunkagunk. I figured I could sleep over at Grandma Schapiro’s and tie Broomstick up in Central Park. After that I wasn’t so sure of the road.
I had probably killed my see-through princess, and Doctor Zuk, Madame Zuk, had bawled out my monster carelessness from high up on her horse-snorting greengold sparks from her nostrils, bareback, spume of silvery hair, spangled brassiere. And had refused to be my dreambox mechanic-would not even look down my rabbit hole, though I had clung to her ankles and begged. And now I would never have her or be her. My face hot as a frying pan for shame, swearing never to return, I bolted out the main entrance of Rohring Rohring, right under the bored nose of Lopes, the PM guard, and-maybe I was dreaming of Broomstick-ran across six lanes of traffic and four silver staves of trolley tracks, to the wide-open doors of the ayrabbers’ barn.
It was cool, dark and dusty inside, the dust dancing in great blocks in front of the open doors, and the perfume of horse manure lifting the air like a leaven, rich and tingling. Still halfblind from sunlight I walked in deeper and peered into the stalls one after the other. I was looking for Broomstick, for a nose to stroke, for some dumb creature to love me, but the cubicles were all empty though they reeked of horse piss that never dried. The straw bedding, what little there was of it on the wet cement, clung to itself in sweaty cowlicks. When I stuck my head over each gate, no Broomstick but a sharp slap of ammonia-tears sprang into my eyes. The water buckets were oily swamps of whatever had fallen in them. They stank.
Well it ain’t the Rohring Rohring of horse hospitals, I mumbled to myself-more like some horror behind the workhouse in a Dickens novel. To think old Broomstick shlepped all day, up street down street, to come home to this. The workhouse loomed blackly in front of me as it often had, the world of grownups: Doing what you didn’t like from one end of the day to the other, then shoving some unappetizing thing in your mouth, then falling exhausted into the sack. This made grownups mean and ugly before they got old, and they took it out on the young, except for Merlin of course and the rare other escapee like madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse. I knew I would not escape. I might as well weep on the neck of some pitiful nag, some circus reject like myself. Or I might become an ayrabber. If I were an ayrabber, a movie star yet the lowest of the low, I’d be good to my Broomstick, we’d be a legendary pair, known the length and breadth of Monument Street if not the New Jersey Turnpike. So where was Broomstick when I needed him? Didn’t these beasts get a day or a week off, to say nothing of a year seven months eight days, when they were sick or lame? No-one stumble and straight to the knacker. Of course you could hardly say with some of these fruit-wagon horses what was walking and what was stumbling. With some you would have said, to look at them and their eyes full of flies, they had died in their traces.
It was sumpm like being a Unbeknownst To Everybody all your life: was it life if you didn’t notice when you died, and went right on shlepping? I was a higher being: I could know my own misery, ergo I could off myself.
And just then I came to the last stall and found myself eye to eye with an animal after all. She was a big brown mare, and filthy, great clots of hairy manure hanging in her mane and crosshatching her rump, and besides that, the meanest-looking equine I ever hope to see. Not that I discerned behind her sneering lips, as yet, those teeth as long and playful as piano keys-all right at first I wasn’t properly wary, never mind that face, I still hoped to love her and scratch between her ears-but I did note that she wasn’t the dull resigned workhorse I was expecting, head drooping from withers like a soup spoon in a tired hand. I did note the possibly sinister intent with which she looked down the long brown barrel of her nose at me, as if using the thug’s bump in the middle of it as a sight.
“Probably I got sumpm in here you could eat,” I mumbled, feeling through my overall pockets for a Sugar Baby or a Pez or sumpm. She arched her neck, tucked her chin and rolled her cough-syrup-colored eyes. I found a linty green lifesaver, put it on the palm of my hand and thought about sticking it out. “So, how come you’re off work today?” I asked her cautiously. “Sick? Lame? Tired of it all? Heh-heh. Er, not confined to the quietroom for any… violent acts I hope?” She eyed me from those lowered pools of Robitussin. For some reason she seemed to be hissing. And suddenly she did a strange and hideous thing: she reared a little, the lips rolled up on those yellow piano key teeth and they crashed down hard against the gate of her stall. She made a noise like dishwater down a drainpipe, a sort of backwards belch, the air rushing in, not out, with a great froggy croak. Then she just stood there, gazing out of the bottoms of her eyes, looking bad, dazed and satisfied-like a mental patient who’s thinking she’s really done it this time with that old dreamboxoline, while she’s still vaporously elated and just a little wild and woozy, before she pukes up her guts or jumps out the window.
Cheese maybe you’re sick after all I said, and that was when I so unwisely put out my hand. She swooped around sideways and bull-dogged the meat of my right bicep right through my Camp Chunkagunk Tough Paradise for Girls sweatshirt. Then either I jumped four feet in the air, or she threw back her head with her teeth still clamped in my shoulder and yanked me off the ground. Anyway I remember dangling as if from a nail. I’m the Bogeywoman, needless to say on the way down I gave her a left hook to the right eye that sent her scrabbling to the back of her stall, where she sort of crouched, as much as a horse can crouch.
I realized that this of a drayhorse, this imposter vegetarian, was only coiling for her next strike and I stepped back as it came. I felt the mighty snap of her long teeth against my breastbone but as it happened only my sweatshirt and the brass-buttoned bib of my overalls got caught. I heard them rip. This time as she sawed away at my duds, I brought my two fists down on her ears, and when she lurched away, Tough Paradise For Girls flapping from her jaws, I felt a sickening relief. I was free but I was also naked, or anyway half-naked: my momps were open to the world. I was alive, but what if I ever cared to leave this dump? I could hardly stay in an ayrabbers’ barn for the rest of my life.
Not only was my chest bare, there was also that small matter of the graph inscribed by razor blade, in claustrophobic detail, on my forearms this morning, the complete record in blood of my debate with Madame Zuk-in her absence, of course-on whether I should live or die. Now that my sweatshirt was kaput, it was out in the open-what excitable people might take for a botched suicide-as if the Bogeywoman, once bent on offing herself, would ever use a technique so merely artistic and irresolute, as if I hadn’t long ago mapped out all the fifth-floor windows without bars and unscreened balconies on my daily and weekly rounds. I liked for example the mezzanine in the sky-painted dome of the Enoch Pratt Free Central Library, a straight shot to the stone floor, though for a sure thing you’d have to put your hands in your pockets and dive headfirst. I liked the long gullet of stairwell of the Mathieson Building, thirty-four vertiginous stories. The Washington Monument, 228 steps up, had an iron grating, but in ninth grade I could still wiggle by it and probably I could even now, if I lost ten pounds.
I stood well back from the stall door, my overalls down around my ankles, breathing hard and locked in a staring duel with this monster to whom I’d offered only love. The ears I’d boxed were still flattened in fury against her head. In a way I liked her all the more now that I saw in her a marooned and exasperated individualist like myself. What ungettable thing was she hungry for, I wondered, and blushed for my puny and insulting green lifesaver. I cringed to think I’d had to punch her in the eye, the great rolling right eye which she was winking now like a boxer in need of a plaster. I knew how she felt. Tough titty that she couldn’t know me… Then again, who knew what she knew? “I’m the Bogeywoman,” I whispered, and, to help her over any gaps in her education, I pointed at myself. I was a sight to make a mother weep, good thing I had no mother. On the round pad of my bicep was a full equine dental impression in red and blue, four inches across; farther down, my forearms were crusted with brown blood, and fuzzy on top of that with a pale gray fungal growth of sweatshirt fleece.
Broomstick was unimpressed, or anyway she relapsed into that queer sewing motion from foreleg to foreleg, full of crammed-in violence. Then suddenly down they came again like a clanging portcullis, the piano key teeth on the stall gate and the belch of a drainpipe sucking air in the wrong direction. “Godzillas sake what’s eating you girl!” I asked her, and heard from above me a weird juicy chortle in reply, “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” somebody’s laugh that slimied up the feminine pronoun by sucking it over bare wet gums-an embarrassing noise that seemed in the family with Broomstick’s belch, but human. I looked up and saw a face sniggering down at me from a hayloft. I yanked up my overalls and tried to make out this person.
It was a fuddy in a mustache, primly clipped. He was undersized down to his bones, and he had all over a kind of fallen-in spruceness and good looks, of the finger-artist type-piano tuner, radio repairman, or pickpocket. A miniature, dandefied, mahogany brown fuddy, then, but old: When he sniggered, his jaw had that collapsed frogginess at the corners, like an old doctor’s bag, that comes of having no teeth, or hardly any. He leaned on an elbow at the edge of the hayloft, his chin in his hand, his shirt-cuff shiny black with gold threads in it, one foot dangling over the edge in a glittering black reptile pump, with a rhinestone horseshoe over the toes.
“Ahem, is this your horse?” “Maybe this my horse and maybe she ain’t, what you gimme to know?” The big brown mare banged her teeth on the gate again and sucked in air with a fearsome croak. “What’s wrong with her?” “She common.” “Excuse me?” “She hungry.” “Hungry! Why don’t you give her sumpm to eat?” The fellow stared down at me, like who was I to ask. “Ain’t feel like it,” he finally said. “What! Why not?” “What she ever did for me, that old cow Cowpea, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” he chortled to himself, and now I saw he had two gold teeth left in his mouth.
“What’s so funny?” I had to ask after a time. “Has I said sumpm was funny? I never hear nobody round here say nothing was funny, young woman, lessen maybe you mean Cowpea here be acting like she seent a ghost cause you done show her your ugly chest. What you wanna scare my horse for? Oughta call the po-lice on you, bare nekkid like you is. But I take pity on you, I do bidness with you, for a nucka note I give you some very fine threads…”
He was fixing me in his little eyes and right away I got this queer feeling that I was turning into a five-dollar bill, with the face of Abraham Lincoln printed on my belly button. Some people have noses that can find a crumb of cheese in the dark, a Bushman’s eyes can pick out the lost sisters of the Pleiades without a telescope, and I got that magical mercury in my veins for detecting whatever somebody thinks I am, especially when it’s nothing. Sumpm about that grin with its ravaged neatness and two gold teeth in front told me this fuddy was more indifferent to me poisonally than anyone I’d ever met. Not that I was a Unbeknownst to him, I was Unbeknownst to him, period; when he looked at me he saw a bill, a five-dollar bill, or nothing. I was transfixed.
“Say, are you an ayrabber?” “Maybe I is and maybe I ain’t. Who want to know?” “I bet she works like a dog for you-the horse I mean.” “Maybe she do and maybe she don’t.” “She tried to take a bite outa me. You oughta feed her.” “I feed her. I feed her if you gimme a nucka. Gimme a nucka to feed her, young woman, I take cay it.” “A nickel?” “Fi dollar. You got fi dollar on you?” “I, er, uh, I forgot my wallet,” I muttered, “but… I can get it. You feed her and I’ll, er, pay you later.” “Later! What you ever did for me, young woman? You come in here and tell me who I be and what I feed, you thank you better’n somebody, muss be rich, muss be the mayor’s daughter. I tell you what. You gimme fi dolla to feed Cowpea here and I give you sumpm to cover up that ugly chest. You so ugly my glass eye broke, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e. Wonder could it make a poor man blind looking at sumpm like that. You need sumpm to cover yourself up, for the good of the public. That could scare a rattlesnake off a rock, looking at sumpm like that…”
“So quit staring at em if they’re so ugly,” I said. “They comical, that’s why I look at em, wooo, them is bad enough but say what is that white cottony mess sticking on you arms, look like some kinda mold that grow on dead people…” “None of your beeswax,” I said through my teeth, “anyhow you got a nerve, what’s your name?”-borrowing Merlin’s voice for zeroing in on cheeky menials, bellhops who won’t hop, private secretaries who blab all over. The ayrabber stared me down sideways again: “My name bop de bop,” he said, “where your money at? Check yourself, young woman, you ain’t decent. Gimme a nucka I get you a nice pink dress and stomps to go with it.”
Now, one of my ancient beefs with fuddies, from rubes to slickers, from Merlin to Foofer to this ayrabber here, has been the tendency of this brotherhood to advise me on my clothes. “You owe me that pitiful dress,” I therefore hollered, “cause your horse ate my shirt. I’ll take it for nuttin! which is what I got, nuttin… cause you owe me… though I’d… er… prefer a pair of pants… if you got em…” I trailed off at the sight of his lip curling back from his two gold teeth in a sneer.
“O you would like a pair of pawnties,” he echoed in falsetto. “O you would like some nice silk draws… Well I fancies eye-talian vines myself but I don’t get em. Who is you to get em? Muss be the mayor’s daughter. What you gimme for a nice pair green work pants hardly broke in seffa little old bloodstain in the, er, uh, groin era?” “You peeled em off somebody’s dead body I bet,” I said, beginning to understand the type of person I was dealing with. “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, nemmind where I got em, that’s a professional secret,” and just then Cowpea brought her choppers down, thwack, on the wooden gate again and sucked air with the noise of a python being throttled. And after she was through doing that she tossed herself like a banana peel on the cement floor and paddled her legs in the air. Come to think of it, I don’t remember any slinky ribs sticking out of Cowpea, or protruding clothes-hanger haunches either, in fact she looked pretty well fed. All the same:
“Are you gonna feed this horse and gimme some clothes?” “Soon’s you good for a nucka.” “What was that name?” I asked haughtily (Merlin’s voice). “You been forgot my name already, young woman?” (Had he told me his name? I racked my dreambox.) “Who you thank you is? Muss be the mayor’s daughter or somebody.” “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you my name if you tell me yours.” “You do what? You gimme what? What you want my name for? Way you leave your name at? Muss thank you somebody, thank Ima give you my name. What you ever did for me, young woman? Muss be the mayor’s daughter or somebody.”
“Ahem, I am… er… the Princessa Abrahama Lincona. And you sir are…?
“Mr. Tuney T. Turpentine, Escrow. Where my nucka, young woman?”
“Charmed I’m sure.” I sank down on a gray straw bale in exhaustion. He was stronger than me, this little ayrabber, I would have liked to cheat him out of his name or beat him for the pink dress or make him feed his horse or sumpm, anything, but because of his indifference to me I was stymied. He had the most complete immunity to me of any human I’d met who had actually bothered to spoon me to his lips-
And that’s how I knew what I had fallen into here, a humble soup that was boiling me down to a five-dollar bill, to pay God back for Emily, whether she lived or died. “Say,” I said, “gimme a pair of pants, I don’t care how big, I’ll roll em up, or even a dress and I’ll leave you my shoes, see, and I’ll be back in five minutes with five dollars, I swear I will.” Tuney peered down at my shoes. “I wouldn’t touch them raggedy shoes if you gave me fi dolla, go head, gimme fi dolla and find out. Fi dolla on the barrelhead, young woman, ante up or I never tell you who you is. Say, you ain’t have to buy a pig in a poke”-he crawled off into the darkness of the loft-“I show you what I got.” He dragged into view a box overbrimming with clothes, marked in red letters:
UNLAWFUL TO TAMPER WITH THIS BOX
PROPERTY OF THE SALVATION ARMY
– and hung over the edge wrinkled green work pants, and a purple satin warmup jacket from Carlin’s Park Ice Rink, lavishly ripped in the armpit. “They you is, mayor’s daughter, one nucka note buy you all that.” “You stole that stuff,” I pointed out, “why should I give you good money for it?” “I ain’t the one walking round nekkid,” Tuney pointed out. “You better give me sumpm out of that box,” I threatened, “or I’ll… I’ll rat to the Salvation Army. And the SPAC. And the cops, and tell em your horse ate my duds…” “Say, I invite you in this barn, young woman? I guess you bettern somebody, you the mayor’s daughter, can go any way-at you want. Well I got news for you, you trespassing, ain’t you see that sign on the door, NO WOMENS ALLOWED? Why you thank they ain’t no womens in this barn? Case you ignorant, which I see you is, lemme tell you it’s certain places way-at for science reasons it ain’t right for womens to go. Can’t have no stanky womens in no horse barn, horses sniff that stank and they go wild, what happens then be your own lookout, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e.” “Whaddaya mean, Cowpea’s a girlgoyle just like me,” I barked, feeling all the same the blood rise in my cheeks, “and what was that highly suspicious last name again?” I asked frostily (Merlin’s voice). “What you gimme to know that?” he said but then he announced proudly: “Turpentine. Tuney T. Turpentine, Escrow.” “Turpentine? What the hump kinda name is that?”
“Cause that alley rat so starved he eat the paint off you wall, ho ho ho,” came another voice, and I turned to see a stockier, fuddier man standing there, dusty black like a noon shadow on a dirt road, bald head not very well lidded in a pinchfront houndstooth stingy brim a bit too small for it, and heavy jowls hanging down under. Also a straight dense mustache across his upper lip like a piece of electrical tape. “Say there, Chug, what’s kicking,” Tuney asked him, and he replied: “Same old same old, just like yesday. This your new partner? She do you any good?” “Sho is, sho is, she do everything for me, and very tasty too.” “What yall got for me today? Cash for your trash.” “Ain’t been out, Chug. Can’t pay the nut and you know that Itchy so tight, he scream he so tight. He want to see fi dolla or no horse, no wagon.” “Aw Itchy front you a horse if he think you square. You musta stiffed him. You back drankin that screech?” “Unh-unh,” Tuney said. Chug shook his head in puzzlement. “Well I know you ain’t tomcatting,” he sighed.
Now it all fell into place. “I get it-he’s a homo,” I said, pottishly calling the kettle black. “Naw, what it is, Tuney too cheap to run after wimmins,” Chug said, “this sucka so cheap he steal the nuckas from his dead gramma’s eyes, ho ho ho.” “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” Tuney joined in, “I don’t waste no wimmins on my lowdown self. I ain’t one of you hoppagrass here-today niggers. Soon’s I have a old lady I sublet her ass.” “Ain’t you say this young lady do everything for you?” “Everything I let her. Right now I ain’t got fi dolla for a wagon and she for rent.” “What you say to that, young lady?” “Well…” I cleared my throat, not exactly sure what I was getting into here. “Five dollars, some clothes and feed Cowpea,” I said without conviction. “Who Cowpea?” Chug said, looking at me strangely. “This Cowpea,” Tuney explained, “my horse, you know how hungry she get-this young woman taken pity on her.” “This horse here? This Ugga! Ugga be hungry all right. Hungry for human blood…”
“So what you say, Chug? This all I got today-a nucka-note to you, brother, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” Tuney pointed down at me, and Chug joined right in, a long, slow, sticky “Ho ho ho ho. This lamb? Where her mother? I don’t know if I can trim a gal that skinny. She go long with it?” “Sho is, sho is. She want to see old Cowpea greasing, don’t you, young woman? Her mama far far away,” Tuney said, “in Californ-eye-ay.” “My mother’s dead,” I corrected, “I’m… without funds at the moment.” “Cheap,” Tuney pointed out, “fi dolla to you and she can have these dry goods here, she owe me a Abe for the lot.”
“Are you two ayrabbers?” I asked Chug. Compared to Tuney, he seemed like an honest sort. “We junkers,” Chug replied. “We junk.”
But then he was looking hard at me, blinking his heavy-lidded honey-yellow eyes. “Say, this a he-she?” he asked suddenly. “Aw who can say with these june-eye delinquents, all them got that greasy straight hair in a ponytail and no chest up front. She ain’t far long enough yet to tell. What difference do it make?” “You sho this down with you, young lady?” “I’m ready,” I said. “Ima give you fi dolla, you hear?” Chug said kindly, “you do what you want with it, pay this fool or not, don’t make me no nemmind.” “It’s a old mattress over they in stall nine,” Tuney assisted discreetly. I closed my eyes and followed Chug’s slow scraping step through the straw.
I was ready to swap guessing for knowing and to join O in the pot where teenage girls get hard-boiled, to expose my flesh on that cold Alp where Heidi herself grows hard as a year-old kaiser roll and learns to think of all men, even her dear old fuddy Opa, in that way. I deserved it for burning Emily, I’d have said yes to anything, even five cents. But I didn’t want to look around, for fear of busting out in hives and puking. After I stumbled over a concrete block and like to busted my shin I opened my eyes a crack and then it wasn’t so bad: a bum’s hideout, the mattress an old navigational map of stains, seasick archipelagos of bodily effluvia on blue-ticking latitudes and longitudes, a pink plastic portable radio with chipped case in the straw, a bucket in the corner to pee in, haybales for a living room suite.
After four or five minutes Tuney piped up: “Well, bro? What’s going on?” “Not much,” Chug growled. “What’s wrong? Your wagon done broke down?” “Can’t get in her.” “Aw go on, Chug, she ugly but she ain’t that ugly. I guarantee it, under them stank clothes it’s as good a thang as ever said good morning to a slop jar.” “She froze up like a bad drain, that’s what.” “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, you not the man you was, Chug, they it is.”
“You inex-spare-inced?” Chug whispered to me, “you got your cherry?” “Never mind, it’s just in the way,” I hissed back. I had thought this would be easy, all I had to do was hold my nose and jump, gravity or sumpm would do the rest and tomorrow or next week I could tell O I was as lost as she was. “That’s okay, baby, I don’t want it,” Chug said, rearing back so his wide gingerdough belly rose over me like a moon and his open brown work pants made like a bread-basket in his lap. “Wait, gimme a chance,” I started to protest, when I felt his big, dry, warm hand at the back of my neck. And next I knew my eye was going down and that thing was coming up, that thing sticking out of the bottom of his belly like a cute-ugly valve, or not so much cute-ugly as an eighth world wonder of ugliness, and I opened my mouth and resolved to be Marie Splendini walking over Niagara Falls on a tightrope and not lose my nerve or gag.
Well-that’s what I was worth, now that I had burned up Emily. Back in Rohring Rohring I had cost a hundred dollars a day-anyhow that’s what Merlin had to pay the dreambox mechanics to keep me there, and I got my candy and coddy allowance on top of that. Out here I was worth five bucks, and I’d have taken five cents and a bucket of oats for Cowpea. I was low as a cockroach now, as a cockroach I saw the world as food, and I was food myself. Five bucks’ worth-a cockroach doesn’t finick. I ate what I saw, what saw me ate me. Where the tablecloth never relents, you eat till you die. I ate. I gagged. I ate.
Chug pulled his pants up and at the sound of the zipper, Tuney called out from his loft: “How you like that?” “She all right,” Chug said gallantly, “onliest thing I can’t figga what she want with a mean old ugly old mose like you.” “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e…” Tuney liked that. My new clothes came flying over the top of the stall: like-new green work pants, just that one egg-sized bloodstain near the fly, and the torn purple satin warmup jacket from the burned-down old ice rink at Carlin’s Park, whose red lining hung out of the armpit like a tongue. Chug was counting dollars off a frayed roll. “Don’t give that slicka more’n a dolla for that mess, y’hear?” Chug whispered. “You find this here young lady sumpm better than them old rags.” “I got better,” Tuney squeaked, “I got better for her right here, yessir”-a plastic bag came lofting over the stall wall. “It’s a pink party dress in they and high-heel stomps, but if I’s yall I wait till yall’s quit of them crabs yall taking home from that mattress, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, praise jesus! How you like your friend Turpentine? I done turn out the mayor’s daughter and give old Chug the crabs too,” and he exploded in phlegmy snorts of mirth. “You best be jiving bout them crabs,” Chug said without smiling. “Tomorrow will tell, yes it will, yes it will,” Tuney hissed joyously. “I hope you only jiving, nigger, I know way you live at if I pass my old lady crabs.” “Just what exactly are crabs?” I asked, a diadem of cold sweat tightening on my forehead. “You find out,” Tuney promised, “tomorrow will tell.”
“That’s about enough of that,” Chug said, getting to his feet and pulling me to mine with his warm heavy hand. “Whatever home you got, young lady, you best get on home to it. I be sorry for you but now I tell you. You in the wrong line of work. You the sorriest-looking raggedy-ass girl-boy ho I ever see and that white fuzz on you arms scare a hound dog off a gut wagon. Now gone home. Get.”
I waded into those green work pants, rolled the trouser bottoms over four times. Zipped up the jacket. I wasn’t talking to either of these fuddies one word more. It was too hot out for a jacket but at least the sleeves hid my bloody arms and their coating of lint, arms so ugly they had offended these ayrabbers who did not even ayrab-they junked. I was too disgusting for the rubbish dealers of the city themselves. I took up my plastic bag and prepared to depart.
Where was I going? Now I had five bucks and it worried me that Tuney didn’t try to nail down a single dollar of it, just perched up in his loft spluttering those gumfarts that were his toothless laughter. Probably I was going to get a social disease like he said. I put hardly any stock in doctors or dreambox mechanics anymore, but now there went my faith in brochures out the window right after them-brochures like WHO SHOULD I TELL ABOUT MY SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE, and VAGINITIS-WHY ME????-that you found in the office at Girls’ Classical and the lobby at Rohring Rohring and on a rack in Emergency at the hospital next door. How many times had I read in brochures that you couldn’t get a social disease from stuff, no matter how disgusting, not even from waiting-room chairs that were vomiting their batting or pee-sprinkled toilet seats in bus stations-and now suddenly an old mattress was enough to give you crabs. And what the hump was crabs? It sounded worse than a germ, sumpm alive and malevolently aware of you and walking at you sideways, in armies, from city sewers or the junk-choked tidal swamps beyond the harbor.
What was worse, this news made it impossible even to think of going back to the bughouse. Tell them I had a social disease at Rohring Rohring? Inform Foofer, Mursch and Hageboom, and Doctor Zuk? Lemme die first.
“Say there, mayor’s daughter. You got nothing gone on? I take you junkin, for fi dolla.” I could have kissed him. How contagious could I be if Tuney would have me on his junk wagon? The next thing I hear is Cowpea peacefully grinding oats on the other side of the wall, then a bell-studded horse collar jingling. “Fi dolla,” Chug protested, “what she get out of it?” “Ima learn this young woman junking, show her my M.O., ain’t that worth fi dolla? Maybe aft awhile she drag in sumpm good and she make back that fin.” “You oughta leave that child in peace,” Chug grumbled, “you done showed her enough M.O. already.”
Tuney and Cowpea came around the corner and peaceful is not the word for Cowpea once attached to that junk wagon. The devil mare had died in her traces. There were zombie x’s where her red eyeballs used to be. Her head bobbed a little at the bottom of the sliding board of her neck. Somehow her knees went up and down like crude pistons mechanically raising the weight of her feet. “What happened to her?” I said, figuring they had pumped some kinda dope in her. “She just like to go,” Chug said slowly.
I practically bounded into that wagon myself. I was a cockroach and a Unbeknownst To Everybody, a murderer and a disgrace, but I wasn’t dead to the glamour of ayrabbing. It was sumpm like going in the French Foreign Legion. Tuney piled the reins in his lap but didn’t bother to hold them. He slouched down under his fedora, leaned back and whistled around his two gold teeth. Cowpea clopped off towards the great blocks of dust-swimming sunlight up front. Chug walked alongside the wagon advising me: “Don’t you be giving this alley rat one nucka that money, you hear? You gone need that money.” “Tomorrow will tell,” Tuney piped down from the wagon, “you thank you somebody cause you oink the mayor’s daughter. Just remember who turn her out.”
Up front at the Broadway entrance a loiterer leaned in the doorway. The long pencil-thin legs said it was a fuddy; he was wearing white like an intern, or a busboy, but the evening sun behind him turned him black. To this sightseer I would be a junker, a white orphan fallen among ayrabbers and raised by them as their own child. I slouched down next to Tuney and whatever he did I did. I got set to hawk that sidewalk for anything loose like I’d been in a junk wagon all my life.
Then the wagon stopped. “Say there, Nurse Blanchard. How them loonies today? How all them Napoleons and Virgin Marys over there cross the road?” “I about to ask you the same question, Tuney, seeing as the top loonie be over here this afternoon, visiting you.” And a hard hand closed around my upper arm. It was the Regicide, who appeared to be well known in the ayrabbers’ barn. With one swift jerk, he pulled me off the wagon and straightened me on my feet. He was not as gentle as usual and I could tell he was displeased. “This litta Miss Razorblade,” Reggie introduced me to Tuney and Chug with a shake of my arm. “Yall look out she don’t push yall down no third-floor laundry chute. Course she only do her friends like that. Seein as yall strangers, maybe you safe.” Then he said to me with grim cheer: “Ready, Miss Razorblade?”
Chug burst out laughing, ho ho ho. “Way the joke at?” Reginald asked. Chug said: “This slick nigger Turpentine bragging bout how he turn out the mayor’s daughter. Come to find out he turned out a half-growed he-she lunatic from cross the street who only want to feed his horse, ho ho ho. Wait till Itchie hear that.” “So? You the one oinked her,” Tuney said sullenly, “you know I don’t mess with no wimmins.” “I seriously hope yall gentlemens have not taken advantage of this mentally sick teenager,” the Regicide exclaimed, “my, my, how many years yall get for that, with yalls records?”
“I never oink her,” said Chug, “this he-she? It take another kind of freak to figga out how to oink sumpm like that. I never oink her. I pity her.” “That’s what you call that? pitying? I never know you do that pitying with your pants down round your ankles, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” Tuney commented. “I never oink her,” Chug insisted. “I never oink her either,” said Tuney. “You can take her to a doctor,” Chug went on, “she as cherry as Suburban Club Almond Smash, no lie.” “Don’t worry, you guys, I was seventeen in April,” I put in, “I can oink anybody I want.” “You a lie, Princess Razorblade,” Reginald said, shaking me by the arm again, “you know you ain’t but fi’teen years old. Why you want to drag these boys down?” “I’m seventeen and I never said I was princess razorblade either and you know it.” “She say she be princess sumbuddy sumbuddy,” Tunie reported, the dirty snitch. “Them paranoids be the toughest nuts to crack,” Reginald explained, “seeing as they not only think they Jesus, they know how to fake like they don’t think it.” “She thank she Jesus?” Chug asked in alarm. “Well… in her case, Moses,” Reg said. “How about you just oink yourself, Regicide,” I hissed, “I’m going junking with these guys and don’t try to talk me out of it.” “You maybe probly like to go junking with these fools,” Reg said softly, “I don’t put it past you, but I tell you, Princess Razorblade, I don’t figga these gentlemens will take you. I think they done took back. I think they changed they mind.”
I stared at the traitors and my mouth fell open in an O. Yes, here was the O face, the terrible face of a woman wronged, and in some wonderment I felt myself wearing it. In the privacy of my dreambox, I always used to sneer a little when girlgoyles wept over their boyfriends, believing, secretly, that all the girls, and especially my sister Margaret, got what they deserved for putting up with these bullies and fuddies. Now suddenly it dawned on me that the O look went with the territory-you got cow drek on your shoes if you lived in Holland, sand in your shoes if you lived in Arabia, and an O paper-punched on your face if you pinned your hopes to fuddy men and were forever thinking of men that way. For the first time to be a Unbeknownst To Everybody seemed to me a stroke of fortune, even of good fortune, or at least I could see how a girl like O might sometimes envy a freak like me.
Meanwhile, “Unh-unh,” “No sir,” “No way,” “No Princess Moses Razorblade on my junk wagon,” Tuney and Chug were muttering. “Cheese, you guys are scared of a measly mental patient? When I was the mayor’s daughter you weren’t backing out.” Chug and Tuney looked at each other. “Mayor’s daughter sumpm different,” Chug announced gravely. “Mayor’s daughter can cay for herself,” Tuney agreed. “Anyhow I don’t got to worry bout the mayor’s daughter,” Chug continued. “No more’n she worry bout me,” Tuney added.
“I’m never speaking to either of you again,” I said.
Chug and Tuney looked at each other again and, “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” “Ho ho ho ho,” laughed a little sheepishly. “You just make that a promise and we be satisfied,” Tuney said.
“Come on now, litta Miss Razorblade.” I wrenched my arm away from Reggie but followed him toward the street.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
“Them is two raidin lootin thievin evildoin niggers through and through, what got no more civilization between the two of em than a pair of wrong-matched snakes,” Reggie fussed as soon as we were out of hearing. “You really lay your body down for them two?” He shuddered. “Your taste so low you could mine coal in it.” “What’s wrong with coal?” I replied testily, “I needed the money. Besides, what’s good enough for O is good enough for me. I can be as hard as O, you watch”-and I cut him a richly signifying look. But he didn’t catch the poisonal tilt of my remark. “That girl got to stop thinking bout menfolks that way,” he observed piously. “Not counting you I guess,” I said. “Huh? what you said?” “I know you oinked her in the broom closet, you hypocrite. I shoulda snitched on you.” “I never oinked no mental patient, and if I did she was sane at the time,” Reg said blandly.
We were crossing the yellow-striped traffic isle on Broadway where we Bug Motels waited for our dinky school bus every morning, and out of habit Reginald reached in his pocket, pulled us each out a Lucky and flashed his pearl-encrusted Madame Dunhill lighter, and there we loitered and smoked in the purplish haze of evening. Reggie was awfully quiet, for him-not a word about my see-through princess, which made me sure the news was bad. “I guess Emily’s dead, isn’t she,” I finally asked. “No, she still hanging on by that litta bitty thread she specialize in.” “Will she be okay?” “Depend what you mean by okay. They say she probly live awhile.” “She’ll have bad scars, won’t she.” “Hmmmm. I reckon this won’t improve her looks none. Won’t mess up her social life, though, since she never had no social life.” “What do you mean?” I said uneasily, “everybody loves Emily.” “You blee that, I sell you the B &O, cheap.” “I’ll take it,” I said. “I bet you do, you hard-head know-it-all.
“You know,” Reg said, “I use to think you smarter than them everyday nuts, but now I see you worse than all them others. You want to do what everybody here do, only worser. You tryna make like them damn fools who can’t help theyself. This here a hospital, girl, not a nut contest. Why you don’t get with the program stead of copycatting them genu-wine coo-yanns who don’t know no better?” “All the same you oinked her,” I said. “What you talking bout? I know O from the corner. We come up together. O like a sister to me.” “Yeah, well, plenty of guys oink their sister,” I observed, “that’s the main thing you hear around this rotten bughouse, about all the girls whose brothers oinked them, in fact O didn’t need any more brothers to oink her, she already had two or three or I forget how many.” “I see you gone twist every subject round back to me like I was the one in the bughouse. I see you gone do just what you want to anyhow, you hard-head ragmop. If you want to oink them two lowdown dirty street pirates for a bag of rags, a bucket of oats and a pony ride, you belong in this place.”
“I wish I was with those ayrabbers right now,” I said, sticking my chin out. “Them ain’t ayrabbers,” Reggie said, “they junkers. You just junk to them, you understand me? It ain’t personal. You shut the door on they kind, they take your doorknob and the bricks out your wall, they take the marble off your stoop till you got no stoop, if your dog bark they take your dog, and if you get a fence, they take your fence and sell it at the scrap yard and the padlock with it. They a plague of locusts, you hear me?” I laughed. “I wish I was with them,” I said. “Go on, go with them. Next time they get popped they be glad to let you take the rap.” “So? How much worse can jail be than the bughouse?” “Even simple as you is, you know better’n that.” And I did: If I went to jail there would be no gamboling by the sleepy guard at the front entrance, for instance, just because old Lopes wasn’t in the mood that day to shake up his mashed potato and gravy lunch.
Then again I wondered if jail might not be a less embarrassing place than Rohring Rohring to come down with a social disease. And all at once I pictured what I’d done today, remembered that warm heavy hand at the back of my neck, and felt a strange sensation at the bottom of my gut, sumpm like a hot green wind in the kishkes.
“Say, you’re not going to snitch on me to Foofer for the sex part, are you?” I asked Reggie, “you know I can’t talk about sumpm private like sex with these farty old dreambox mechanics.” Reg shook his head sadly at me. His eyes said, Am I a rat and they ain’t even no money in it? He was not a rat for fun. But having been reminded he said: “You lucky if you ain’t pick up some vanilla disease from them junkers. You know them don’t bath from year to year and they ladyfriends is the fi dolla stand-up kind in the men’s toilet.”
Sickness swept over me then, rose like a cloud of pea-green smoke from my stomach to my head, probably the first symptom of a social disease, and dizzily, cigarette in hand, I sat down on the pavement of the traffic isle, hard. “If that happen you won’t need me to snitch to no Foofer, you be running to that sawbones so fast to beat your nose from falling off in your cheerios.” Reginald smiled down at me. “I don’t care,” I snapped, “lemme die before I tell Foofer.” “If your nose fall off, he figga it out for hisself.” The Regicide squatted down beside me but I turned my back on him and blew smoke out my nose angrily like a dragon. “Anyhow they say the brain go first. Probably you won’t even know by then who you telling what.” “Then I won’t care anyway, will I,” I seethed.
“Say, you lookin sick, Bogeywoman,” Reg observed. “You got them little balls of sweat all over your forehead. Why you ain’t taken off that fool hotdog jacket from Carlin’s Park? You ain’t sawed up them arms again, is it?”
I didn’t answer. I sprawled there on strike with my legs sticking out in front of me and the plastic bag with the pink party dress in it on my lap. Since I wasn’t going to look at either Reg, or Rohring Rohring, or the ayrabbers’ stable, I had to hold my neck at a funny angle, from which all I could see was the combed-out skeins of streetcar and electric wires, bouncing like circus tightropes when the pigeons landed on them. “Why’d you come looking for me anyway?” I whined, “you don’t even like me as compared say to Emily or O.” Yes I was fishing, I hate to admit it, but in my weakened condition I was sentimental. After Tuney T. Turpentine, Escrow, indifference to my person had temporarily lost its charm. The Regicide put me squarely in my place: “Yeah, I prefer the womens, you got that right,” he agreed. “They say I have a certain professional touch with the female mental patients. Anyhow I do like them girls, young ones, old ones, long, small, all.”
“I’m a girlgoyle, I mean I got just as many x chromosomes as the rest of em,” I growled. “Sho is, sho is. Sho you a girl, Ursie,” he said carefully, like talking to a mental patient, “sho you a girl but you got the manners of a chained-up dog. Like you ain’t had nothing but pencils to eat for a week. It ain’t personal, I seen worse, you just not my type.” “So why didn’t you leave me with the ayrabbers?” I said bitterly, “that Chug guy would’ve been glad to oink me.” “Hell’s bells, girl, I find somebody better than that to oink you if that’s what you want, come to that, I oink you myself. Maybe I don’t like you but I don’t hate you.” “Just keep your hands off the mental patients,” I hissed. “That’s what I’m talking bout, girl, that’s what you is, a mental patient. I use to think you smart but now I see you don’t have the sense to come in out the rain. You don’t know how many pea beans make five. You don’t have the sense God gave a nanny goat. You the type climb on the metal clothesline pole to see which way the storm be passing. You ain’t got the motherwit to track a rhino in four foot of snow. You don’t know which way you at, girl. You couldn’t get there if I put you there.” “I’m glad O and Emily are models of common sense,” I said. “No but they got they certain little girly ways.”
I decided never to speak to this fuddy again. However, there are slanders that cannot be passed over in silence. I added icily: “As a matter of fact I’m an expert tracker, thank you.” This was an empty brag when you thought of someone like the wood wizardess, but I was sure I was the best they had around here. “Yeah? Then how come you can’t find nobody in this whole wide world to love and kiss your smart-ass self?” “How do you know I can’t?” I said, and we snarled at each other, all pretense of mutual regard temporarily laid aside.
“How’d you find me, anyway?” I asked, “why’d you bother?” “I ain’t find you. That Rooski dreambox fixer, whassaname, we call her the ice queen, she see you. Musta been pinking out the window and see you run across Broadway to the ayrabbers’ barn.” “You mean Zuk?” “Shook, Zook, sumpm like that.” “She sent you?” I asked in rapture.
Reginald shook his head disgustedly. “Ain’t East Six a locked ward, she want to know? I tell her it is and it ain’t. What means is and what means ain’t, answer to me immediately, she say. Must think she the queen or sumpm. I tell her all the wards is officially closed, only in the daytime we don’t lock but East Five and the quietrooms. She holla back, Ain’t we spose to keep track of these patients? And her nose joint jump so high, like it’s walking on her eyebrows. I see a patient disappear in that stable over there, she say, this a very troubled young woman who don’t have the brains of a pissant.” “She said that?” “Sumpm like that. Custody-ain’t that your lookout, Mr. Blanchard? she say. What I’m gonna say? It ain’t my lookout? So I come get you.”
“She was worried about me,” I whispered in a moony daze. The hot gray city and the red brick bughouse disappeared; I seemed to be gazing into the crystal ball of my fate. “I ain’t said that. I never see her go down and play in no Broadway traffic to haul your ass back here her hinkty self.” “There’s probably some law against dreambox mechanics crossing the street to chase after patients,” I said dreamily. “Hmmm, I don’t think the Rooski dreambox fixer got patients like the regular docs in this joint. She like a VIP. She writing a book or sumpm. They give her the keys to the castle. I tell you what! She turn up everywhere like ants at a all-day picnic. Think she the queen or sumpm. Answer to me immediately. Don’t they have no democracy down they in Costa Rica?” “I thought you said Russia.” “Russia, Costa Rica, some cockamamie place where they talk funny and think the homeboys got bones in they noses.” “She is the queen,” I said, “I call her madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse.” “You see a hoss under that old bird? You best tell Foofer.” Reggie slitted his eyes at me, but I smiled back sweetly. Now that Doctor Zuk was worried about me, I could afford to be generous. “She ain’t no queen of mine,” he grumbled, “this a free country.”
AMONG THE ROYALS
Reggie opened royal office number 709-DR. DEWEY, it said, though Doughy Dewey was long gone-and gave me a little shove from behind. Then the door closed at my back, didn’t slam exactly but fell shut with the dreadful huff of absolute monarchy, followed by a small digestive munch of hardware. The door had locked itself behind me. In my honor? And there she sat under her crown of spiky hair, twirling a golden pencil on the blotter. At last it was just the two of us, face to face: I, the Bogeywoman, and she, Doctor Zuk-Madame Zuk. She rose on her high-heeled sandals, tilted her head and gazed at me but said nothing for some minutes. I believe she was taking in my outfit.
It was the same old office of all the royals, long as a railroad flat, with a jute doormat like a penal haircut and a gray umbrella stand, an ancient desk up front and a couch and two easy chairs in back by the windows. The windows, I could see from here, looked out over Broadway all right, down to the ayrabbers’ barn. But the office had been purged of its last resident, Dr. Dewey. (I had seen Doughy Dewey on tennis court matters once-he had owned a set of botanical etchings.) The nakedness of the place supported the foreign guest theory of Zuk-where in Outer Hotzeplotz was she from, with that accent?-as did, in a way, the desk shaggy with papers, as though she had to erupt into emptiness somewhere. O, there was one mysterious object: a pair of what looked like genuine Eskimo mukluks, fixed to a base and bronzed over, squaw-chewed leather, slumping ankles, crisscross thongs and all. This object sat in one corner like a trashcan, and as I stared at it, a cockroach the size of a Tonka toy poked its head out of the left shin and looked around.
I stared at the mukluks, Zuk stared at me and finally she asked me: “You are iceskater or bricklayer? Or fire swallower is also possible?” “Er, uh, I’m a brick swallower, if you wish to know the truth,” I said. She smiled at that, so I bumbled on: “May I please ask where the hump you’re from?” You may not. Her smile flattened to glass, she stared down at me with the remote grandeur of the pyramids until I shrank to a coolie and pretended I didn’t know myself.
“Please to roll up your sleeves, Miss Bogeywoman,” she directed. “Do I have to?” “Not at all. I telephone for medical emergency.” She placed her hand on the phone, I hastily pushed up my sleeves. She took hold of my two wrists, turned them up and surveyed their undersides, the rusty cuts furred by sweatshirt lint, with a look of mild distaste.
“For why you are drawing these pictures in blood?” she asked, pronouncing it bla-a-a-a-d, like someone in a vampire movie. “It’s a graph,” I reported sheepishly, “the columns got sorta messed up.” “Why you don’t use copybook if you are interested for mathematics?” Doctor Zuk inquired crisply, “this way three weeks go by, you have no record, nothing, well, very ugly arm of course, but nothing useful for science.” “Don’t worry, I got a record-up here,” I said, tapping my greasy forehead with my finger.
“A record of what, if you please?” Zuk asked. “A kinda debate I was having with myself and, and”-I knew better than to get poisonal-“and a higher being, so to speak-about whether a person should be, er, uh, sumpm or nuttin… that is, live or die.” “Ah. And who is win this debate?” “Well, see, that’s where I got stuck. If she wins I’m sumpm, but only if I turn into her. If I win, I stay me and then I end up nuttin. Either way I’m nuttin… It doesn’t seem right.” “Why it doesn’t seem right? You don’t feel you are nothing?” “That’s one thing about being a mess. All those slimy organs in the soup, everything sloshing around like too many matzo balls-I get the urge to spill sumpm…” “So. You spill your bla-a-a-a-d.” I nodded. “After you have spilled your bla-a-a-a-d, then what you feel?” I thought this over. “Seasick,” I said, “but lighter. And then I am the Bogeywoman.” “Seasick I understand,” Zuk said, “but help me, Bogeywoman I am not follow.” “So people just look at me and think, cheese, if she did that to herself-! Better not get her in a corner. Probably she’d eat me alive.”
“Ah.” She drew down my purple satin sleeves with a snap. I remembered her soaping O’s head, when it was stuck in the toilet pipe, in a manner roughly maternal. How much tenderness could I hope to corner for my bush league self-mutilations?
“You will have ugly scars from this.” “Cheese,” I said, “how much uglier can I get?” “Take care, your mouth to god’s ear,” Doctor Zuk said, “you should see some monsters I have seen in villages where no doctor comes, and all of them pretty children once, loved by their mothers. Besides, you are not ugly. This is rubbish and you know is rubbish. You look like, like Greek boy, perhaps.” The aspect was in the air, buzzing like the fluorescent lights. “I ain’t no fuddy boy,” I said, “lemme die first.”
Doctor Zuk suddenly held out to me my 250-wrapper Mr. Peanut lighter. I took it and put it in my pocket. “Why you have run away?” she asked. I shrugged. Life will go on without you she had kindly pointed out, and offing myself had lost its charm for another day. Anyhow if I croaked I might have to lie in the hospital morgue next to Emily, which would scare a person to death if they weren’t dead already. I thought of Emily’s drinking-water-blue, unaccusing eyes, not quite closed but fixed forever in disappointment because Ursie never came back-“It’s just I thought I’d killed her,” I muttered. “You will be glad to hear it: Miss Peabody is not good, but life,” Zuk said, in a clucking, practical tone that almost made me laugh. “This is most I can tell you. Anyhow we have something else to talk, yes?” “We do?” I wished to get it over with so I said: “I guess you mean what I did to Emily.” “No. Not Miss Peabody.” Zuk was patient; her gnarled fingers moved like a spider over every inch of her pale throat as if counting the tiny wrinkles. She wanted me to guess again, but I was stumped. “Miss Bogeywoman-you like if I call you Miss Bogeywoman?” “Just Bogeywoman,” I said, but that was too democratic for her.
“Miss Bogeywoman, I want you should explain me something. Let us sit down.” She led me to the chairs in the back of the room. She lit a Gitane. “Now. Why you want I should be your psychiatrist?” she asked in a gravelly voice. “What put this idea in your head?”
So that was it. How had I ever had the nerve to ask? “You look like somebody who’d be interesting to talk to, that’s all,” I mumbled. “I think you are saying you want to talk. Yes? That is what I hear?” “Well, not to just anybody,” I said. Didn’t she see the pressure I was under? If I had a claim to fame in this dump it was my one year, seven months and eight days of silence-going on nine. And my dreambox mechanic was Foofer, the world-famous diagnostician-probably the best known doc in the place. Word of this had gotten around, we all knew the royals had case supervisions and case retreats, case manhattans, case hardenings and case bakeoffs, case jousts, summits, progresses and councils of war. I narrowed my eyes at her: Could she be Foofer’s Injun scout? The thought that they might be in cahoots, that her special interest in me might be for Foofer’s sake, filled me with such bilious jealousy I almost puked.
“I’m never going to talk to Foofer, in case that’s what you’re after. You might as well forget it, I ain’t talking to that fuddy till I buy my frozen Milky Ways in hell. In other words never ever.” “Good. Okay. Then please, Miss Bogeywoman, you will explain me the difference between somebody you want for talk and somebody you will never ever talk?”
I curled a chunk of oily hair on a finger. “Ahem. I got certain private business which I would never discuss with a fuddy dreambox mechanic. Hey, it’s none of his beeswax, he’d just tell Merlin and don’t tell me he wouldn’t, I know he would. Merlin chose him and I know these famous fuddies, they’re all in the same club.” “So it is nothing that Dr. Feuffer has done or said, but whom he will tell?” “It’s nuttin he said cause he hardly says nuttin.” “Maybe you are angry at him he doesn’t say more?” I just shrugged. “What you would like him to say?” I glared at her. “I have get the feel,” Zuk said, “you don’t like Dr. Feuffer no matter what he says. Is fair to call this a pree-judice?” I stared at Zuk and suddenly I saw straight into her dreambox, as through the peephole of a diorama. I wouldn’t talk to Foofer cause Foofer was a fuddy-that’s what she was driving at-cause Foofer was a hairy-onions, a grizzle-bearded, frog-dangled male. She was right of course, but I wasn’t telling them that-lemme die first.
“You think it’s cause he’s a fuddy-well you’re wrong. Even if he was Margaret Meat I wouldn’t like him,” I sneered, “under the circumstances.” “Ah! Not even… Margaret…!” she exploded softly, as if she knew Margaret Meat poisonally. (Suddenly I was sure-my heart drowned-she did know Margaret Meat poisonally.) “Why do we have to talk about Foofer, anyway?” I muttered, “like I said, all these famous fuddies play in the same band, and speaking of bands, that’s the main reason: Even if I wanted to say sumpm to Foofer, now I never could, because my rock band, I mean the Bug Motels, is watching me. I’m famous for not talking to my dreambox mechanic. So now the only way I can talk is if I get a brand-new dreambox mechanic. And soon’s I saw you I knew it oughta be you.”
Doctor Zuk sank her fingers into her spiky hair and scratched energetically. “So-is important for you to be famous for something, like your father is famous,” she said. “How do you know he’s famous?” Her eyebrows flew up. “You have just said so!” “Yeah well I thought you might at least have to ask who the hump Merlin is…” “I can ask, if you wish me…?” I narrowed my eyes at her. Of course she knew who Merlin was, they all did: wasn’t he one of Baltimore’s three television ambassadors to the world, along with Miss Sally of Romper Room and Doctor Tom the chimpanzee from This Is Your Zoo? Of course she knew! Even in the steaming borscht jungles of Russian Costa Rica, the village TV set was tuned to Merlin’s World. And he was the tragic one of the trio, the one with the wife who died in the trainwreck-probably Zuk knew that too-and she was famous herself-good godzilla they were all in on it!
“Let’s just drop it about Merlin,” I fumed, “I’m not talking to Foofer and that’s it.” “Good, is okay,” Zuk said, with a sly smile, “only explain me, if you can, what is big difference between Dr. Zuk and Dr. Feuffer? Listen, my dear, I tell you big secret. Dr. Feuffer is famous doctor, not me. I come many thousand miles for work and study with Dr. Feuffer. Every psychiatrist of adolescence wants to be Dr. Feuffer. I want to be Dr. Feuffer. What is big bloody difference between me and Dr. Feuffer?” “Maybe you need glasses,” I suggested. “Ach! So that is big difference-how I look?” she gushed-because of course madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse knew exactly that she was beautiful and more than beautiful, she was counting on that. “This is the answer? I am look different from Dr. Feuffer, and this is why you want me, not him?”
“Cheese,” I said, staring hard at the floor for this lie, “you don’t look that different from Foofer. You’re both old.” There, that shut her up. I stole a glance at her. Her crackly old lips were pursed. But then I had to come crawling back or maybe lose her altogether. “Course, you do got sumpm on Foofer. A little sumpm that everybody needs every once in a while. I mean a little of, er, uh, la beauté. Not much,” I added carefully, “but that’s what I need, some old person who’s got la beauté. Some old person to talk to who’s got la beauté like, like a piece of the lost chunkagunk, so I can stand to live to be old-cause what the hump, maybe, just maybe, I’ll turn out to be her not me.”
“The lost-excuse me, what it is?” Like I said, Doctor Zuk had a thousand cracks around her lips-she was beautiful but she looked maybe forty fifty years old-and they all cracked deeper on contact with the lost chunkagunk. “You have make up this word?” “Not exactly,” I said. “Choleria, English already has water from seventy-two valleys,” she muttered, “how I will learn if patients make up words as they go…”
“All I mean is, that’s why I need you instead of Foofer. Cause he reminds me of a fart, his walk is a fart for instance, his itchy brown suit is all puffy with hot farts and, and-” (Doctor Zuk’s face turned oddly stony and I saw she was getting disgusted with me) “-and farts are good, you need farts I know but I already got plenty of farts,” I hurried on weakly. “Enough,” she cut me off, “I am not interested to hear insults of Dr. Feuffer. These are matters to talk to Dr. Feuffer himself.” “But, see, you remind me of… of a silver weasel, which is sumpm I don’t have and never was…” “Weasel,” she said suspiciously, “please explain me what is weasel?”
This time I thought I knew my way through the woods. “It’s an animal, their spines are very elastic, you notice that right away. They look long on account of their backs though none of em are all that big-and they always seem like girlgoyles to me probably cause they’re so graceful and agile, but they’re ferocious. Give her a chance, a weasel kills lots more than she could ever eat-like the wood wizardess used to say, A weasel is a catastrophe in a henhouse!”-(this had gone all wrong; I could see I had better say sumpm to fix it)-“and-and she has a really nice coat-that turns silver in the winter.”
After a time Zuk said drily: “Is possibly true I am, what you say, catastrophe in henhouse.” “Don’t worry,” I said, sweating, “plenty of henhouses need a catastrophe.” “And who is, excuse me, wood wizardess?” “Course you wouldn’t know the wood wizardess-the greatest tracker of all time, Willis Marie Bundgus,” I cleared my throat, for somehow this name alone didn’t sound sufficient to her greatness, “of, er, Millinocket Falls, Maine.” Doctor Zuk acknowledged her fame-a slight bow with the chin-and then I saw to my amazement a faint twitch in the pond-green irises-could she be… jealous?
“So you want me for psychiatrist-and weasel.” She smiled a little coldly. “Have you never thought maybe the right one to ask for this, even if you don’t like-is Dr. Feuffer?” “I can’t believe you’re still trying to get me to talk to that old fart.” “Listen and maybe you understand, little bird with big mouth. Why I should care if you talk to Dr. Feuffer, if you don’t care? Now I make advice to you because you are grown-up woman. First you will have big problem because you are run away and cut your arms again. Big problem, but even big problem will pass. Then, if is something you want, talk to Feuffer, give him that-you want go back to school? You want neighborhood pass? city-solo? You want me for psychiatrist? This place is howyousay pushover for intelligent nut like you.”
My heart was thudding cause now I saw she wanted me for a patient. “I don’t know,” I said, “they might throw me outa the Bug Motels…” “That is rubbish and you know is rubbish.” “Anyhow I already talked to Foofer,” I hastened to add, “I’ve said around, lemme see, two hundred words to Foofer by now-depends if you count hello good bye as two words or three. Once he said: Ursie, I don’t think you like yourself much. I thought that was pretty smart. Hey, he’s not such a farty old fart after all, that was my first idea, but then I realized godzillas sake you could say that to anybody in the whole rotten bughouse or even the whole world and it would be true. If that’s all there is to being a dreambox mechanic, sign me up.”
“You are saying you would like to be a psychiatrist?” I stared at her. I had never thought of this possibility before, somehow I figured once you landed in the bughouse that disqualified you from ever running the dump, but suddenly I saw it in a different light, like rising to royalty the democratic way, from the bughouse up: “Cheese, why not? I guess so. Sure,” I said.
“Why you would like to be psychiatrist?” “It isn’t exactly that,” I said. “It’s more like-I’d like to be a particular dreambox mechanic. You. I’d like to be you.” “Ah.” I saw the light shift in her eyes, another backswimmer’s twitch in the green pond scum, and then-nothing-the pond froze over, just like that. “We see about that,” she said, “when I am your psychiatrist and sit many hours in front of you and say you what I think, soon I will not be cute weasel anymore, this I promise you.” I looked down at my feet, for certainly this much was true: already she was not as beautiful on her horse as she once had been, she had come down a great way already, or she would not be sitting here throwing her time away on the likes of me.
Had I lost her? She was staring over my head into the night sky as if she were bored, and suddenly she got up, looked at her watch and went to her desk. Had the end already come? Had she become my dreambox mechanic and quit the job again before I ever knew she was mine? In truth I couldn’t even be sure she was a dreambox mechanic. Maybe she was a reporter, or a novelist, or a commissar on mission from some foreign country that was just whipping up bughouses of its own. In which case she was probably that backward land’s most eminent dreambox mechanic, a sort of gypsy queen of the mind-that sounded right, yes, I was sure I’d hit it. “Just tell me one thing, Doctor Zuk, are you a bigwheel dreambox mechanic in Outer Hotzeplotz or what?” I blurted.
With every word she was further away from me. She picked up a pair of tortoiseshell glasses from her desk and balanced them halfway down her nose. “Why it matters for you to know this?” she said coldly. “Already you have foolishly asked me to be your psychiatrist. Now is too late to ask for resume.” “You mean you’re gonna be my dreambox mechanic?” “Come now, Miss Bogeywoman. You know is quite impossible. You have psychiatrist. You have heard of patient changing one psychiatrist for other like used hospital pajama?” “But I’ll see you, won’t I?” She peered at me over the tops of her glasses as if I were very small print. I wanted to swallow myself for asking another bald-headed question, since I knew she never answered one. She stared at me until a cold beam of fear settled in my gizzard-I could tell she was sick to death of me-but in my rotten hand I found one more ace to play.
“I’ll talk to Foofer,” I said. “Is capital idea,” she said, with a tiny grimace of satisfaction. “And pretend he’s you,” I added. Doctor Zuk very slightly colored. At the time I was too green-too inex-spare-inced, as Chug had correctly put it-to know how often mismatched lovers employ that plan, but I sensed that I had struck a nerve. I was frightened to say anything more, and at first Doctor Zuk too was silent. She did not smile but finally she raised a finger whose fingernail, like mine, was bitten to the quick. “Why not?” she sighed. “As people like to say in old country where I come from, when water cannot be found, washing with dirt is permitted. I wish you luck of it.” And she gave me a little nod, then picked up a paper on her desk.
Uneasily I discerned that the interview was at an end, that she was finished with me, wished me out of her sight, in fact, but she didn’t dismiss me. Why not? I thought of backing out the door, remembered that telltale gnash of hardware. I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself by rattling a locked door. But maybe I could hurl myself right through it-that would wake her up. I glanced at it-never mind-ugly arms were one thing, I wasn’t gonna bust my dreambox by bouncing it off a steel plate. My eye fell on the bronze mukluks and all at once I knew, don’t ask me how I knew, she had worn them herself.
There came a knock. I heard a key scrape round the barrel, the door opened a little and Miss Roper and Miss Hageboom put their long faces in the crack. At once I snapped to the whole operation. “Dr. Feuffer is ready for her now,” Miss Roper rat-nibbled. “You were just keeping me busy!” I shouted at Zuk, “I hate your guts!” Doctor Zuk smiled. “Poor poor Miss Bogeywoman,” she said with an odd lilt. “Down there on rocky beach like orphan that seven seas vomit up. Is true no one in wide world wants you? Sob! sob!” “Liar. You like me whether you admit it or not,” I said, “I can tell.” She laughed. “Of course I like you. I even write book about you-My Kid Was Teenage Frankenstein-maybe you like to read?” Then she stepped out of the way and watched the two nurses lead me out, each buzzarding an arm.