Flight to Caramel-Creamistan
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
I ducked into her lobby around an old fuddy with a grocery cart full of clacking empties and ran up nineteen flights of steps towards Doctor Zuk. I could do that in those days without panting, on account of the superhuman strength of the mental patient, which lasted for the first twelve floors at least. On the thirteenth I slowed up, by the eighteenth I was peeking around every stairwell for guys in white coats or gumshoes of any description. On the twentieth floor, her floor, I was so near to going backwards I had to admit what it was. Cops didn’t scare me-I never had any trouble outrunning a fuddy in uniform-but Zuk was scarier. Probably she’s expecting me, I was thinking, and what if she’s naked.
But when I got there she had all her clothes back on, in fact I had never seen her looking better in duds. Course, this was beyond even her everyday beauté, this short black dress of silky stuff with a great cut-out speech balloon across the front, and a diamond choker for a collar. “What are you doing here, Miss Bogey?” she asked me, and I started to wonder how come she always looked, not like your usual Commie bureaucrat in a blue serge suit from Searsiev and Roebuckovsky and baggy cotton hose, but like a Russian spy in the movies, in clothes by Cecil Beaton. How could she dress like Paris if she was raised in an oasis in Outer Hotzeplotz? Maybe she really was top drawer, worth millions to the Kremlin, but if she was the best-dressed spy between Washington and Philadelphia, what was her interest in me?
“What are you doing here, Miss Bogey? You look red in your face like boiled Maine lobster, and what is this in your hand? Is for Zuk?” I looked down-I was still clutching Margaret’s letter. I stuffed it in my overalls. “You don’t know?” I said. She shook her head, perplexed and amused. She didn’t know. I sank onto the sofa-there was nothing in the room but a white sofa, a white coffee table with a bowl of roses on it, and long curtains of white gauze, like mosquito net, stirring at the windows.
“Godzillas sake you look like a movie star,” I said, “what are you so dressed up for?” The boiled Maine lobster was a flagrant hint. “I am engaged to dinner,” she confessed. I barked out a doomed and cynical laugh. “I already married mine,” I said, “what the hump I won’t be marrying anyone else.” “Grow up now, I tell you the truth, Miss Bogey,” she said, “because the gentleman is also psychiatrist at Rohring Rohring and he is coming any minute.” “Is it Foofer?” I said, “don’t worry about it, he’ll be late, very late, late or maybe never.” “Dr. Feuffer is never late,” she said stiffly. “So it is him!-cheese…” I burrowed into the sofa and she stood over me sternly with her arms crossed-she looked like a vexed pastry cook, except for the elegant billows in the cut-out front of her dress. “Greedy baby!” she scolded, “I am glad to see you. Your face is red like big baby but, yes, I am happy you are come. All same we land in big trouble if Dr. Feuffer finds you here. Then my position in clinic is also kaput, yes? and I see nothing more of you unless maybe you move to Soviet Autonomous Republic of Karamul-Karamistan.”
I felt like slapping her. Here she was forking over her address just like that! If she had told me when I first asked her, I would never have started talking to Foofer, I would never have gotten better, and I wouldn’t be in the fix I was in right now.
“You might be going back to Caramel-Creamistan or wherever the hump it is sooner than you think,” I muttered, “and you might be taking me with you.” “What are you talking about? You must hide yourself right away, Miss Bogey. You want to wait here at my place until I come back, then we can talk, but now I show you where to go when Feuffer comes.” She rose and her black skirt whirled and her diamond collar flashed: she was headed wouldn’t ya know it for the balcony.
“Sumpm terrible happened,” I blurted, “with Foofer. It was an accident. He said we couldn’t see each other anymore. He said he was putting me back on Accompanied until they got you out of the way. I think they’re getting rid of you.”
“My dear Miss Bogey, where you get these crazy ideas,” Doctor Zuk said, whirling back around, “rubbish! is rubbish!” But she didn’t look so sure. After all she had been fighting it out for weeks with the old-style strong and silent type dreambox mechanics. Now her face was still but little gold flecks were churning in her eyes, her nostrils flared and in the cut-out O of her dress her bosom rose and fell. And suddenly she stepped across the line. “All right, Miss Bogey, why you say they get rid of me? What do you know?”
I handed over Margaret’s letter. After a time she looked up with a thoughtful face. “Ha, you could be right I am leaving, leaving even the country.” “Sorry,” I said. “I should never have said sumpm to my sister, but cheese, I never thought she’d squeal.” “And what has happened with Feuffer.” “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just pushed his chair over backwards on my way out the door. But when I ran away his eyes were rolled up in his head and he was totally blue.” She tipped up an eyebrow, stuck her bottom lip out skeptically: “Come, he is big healthy man, Dr. Feuffer, a little thing like that, how it would kill him?” “I think he swallowed his pipe.” We looked at each other and suddenly both of us were shrieking with laughter. “Possibly you are not joking,” she finally said. “Is seven-fifteen. Reinhold is never late for dinner.”
“So you’re really dating the suit of many farts,” I said, “I hope I did kill him.” “You are jealous baby and besides that you are grob, grob, Miss Bogey,” said Zuk coldly. “Is nothing wrong with digestive tract of Dr. Feuffer. Also he is expert in choosing restaurants. Besides, my dear, you should learn ancient tactic to make hospitality obligations with your enemy. I know what I am doing.”
I stared at her, stared, for once, past her self-confidence straight through the holes in her argument, since these were bigger than manholes. “I dunno,” I said, “maybe back in Caramel-Creamistan a lobster dinner is like the Treaty of Versailles but in the U.S. I never heard of nuttin like that.” “Hm,” Zuk reflected, “you can be right… is true he wants to fuck me…” “What!” And who says Camp Chunkagunk for all its corn teaches you nothing about life? “Just cause you’re his favorite dreambox mechanic doesn’t mean he won’t throw you out,” I whispered, “I betcha if he’s alive he’s throwing you out right now.” “Ach,” Zuk said passionately, “I think you are right! What do not mothers bring forth, in this world! I wish his unhappy mother had given birth to an onion.”
“I’m never going back to the bughouse,” I vowed.
She actually clapped her hands. “For you, my bent little chimney, that is good, very good decision. You are funny-looking queer little chimney but smoke comes out straight.” “Probably they’ll try to make me go back now that I did murder.” “Pooo, this is melodrama. Is not so easy to die like in movies, especially with big bunch of nurses all around. Probably they just pull that pipe out like cork, comes big how you say”-she gagged delicately-“and he is life. Big sore throat but life.” She smiled brilliantly. “I am satisfied you make that decision to quit bughouse, Miss Bogey. My time is not lost. Is not for you, such place-is not spoon of your mouth, my dear.”
But then she gazed away and out the window like a spy or dreambox commissar in big trouble, about to be exposed and disgraced or maybe even deported. I had a seasick flash of a rickety jet plane crossing the Urals, with just her on it. She was staring into space across the bare balcony and all at once I realized I had seen her naked at that very window. “Um, er, uh, just one little question about the, er, you know,” I said. “Binoculars? How long has it been going on?” She blinked at me. “Of course I know nothing of what you are talking about,” she said after a time, examining her ugly fingernails. “And don’t want to know,” she added. “Hey, it’s okay for me to do sumpm buggy like that, I’m a mental peon,” I said, “but you’re sposed to be a lofty dreambox mechanic.” She smiled. “Ah! shoemaker goes barefoot, na? and carpenter ties his door shut with shoelace. You think is perfect balance of mind that draws people to this profession? You must grow up, my dear. Anyhow you are not mental patient-no more than I am.” She pointed a craggy finger at me: “And remember this too, little girl. Who has luck and small hole to see what is going on behind garden wall of beloved, be glad and be silent. As they say where I come from, Eat of this behind closed doors.”
Did this mean I was her beloved? Or she was mine? Maybe from Zuk it meant nothing at all. She left the room, tuneless harp of refrigerator shelf, jiggle of bottles, and was back again carrying two small glasses of pee-colored stuff. “Stolat-may you live a hundred years.” She tossed one down. “Ugh, what is it?” “Is very good vwodka-the best-just drink. Or don’t drink, I don’t care. Come, greedy baby, sit next to me.” And she sat.
I sat at the far end of the white sofa and the lure of her presence came swirling around me like a surf. Then it was all undertow dragging me to her. A hum rose in my ears, my blood rushed by, trying to get to her, and my flesh went hot from resisting her current. Her large face was still, that was a kind of trick with her, she smiled the least smile and it surrounded me, a broth, a sea, a weather. I was a potato in the soup of her, no, a piece of soup flesh with bone. I was essential to her, and at the same time I was dissolving in her. “What you are doing?” she said. I was taking my clothes off piece by piece. There weren’t many pieces. “My god, stop this,” she said, clutching her spiky hair and laughing, “they can come at every minute.” Then I was sitting there naked and evening was all around us, breathing on the mosquito net and purpling the open windows. She gazed at me with as much delight as alarm. Finally she said:
“You are not mental patient and now is good, very good, I never was your psychiatrist. Shall I tell you? All my life I have dreamed of a girl like you, fierce, strong, beautiful and sly. Hungry like young blackbird who eats forty times a day. Nerve like one who hangs from rope and washes windows of skyscrapers. Muscle like girl who flies on trapeze in circus. Awake like bandit. A singer, a player of dombro, she comes, she comes like the fourteenth day of the moon. And then reads secret tracks of wild animals in wood. And all the better, Miss Bogey, that you have no mother or father to lick and pet you and bring you soft things to eat. As they say where I come from: Better to be a fox in the mountains than mother’s darling, I speak now of effect on character. A long time I wish to know a child like you. It is feast to look on you. But self-explanatorizing, my dear, I do not touch you.” “You mean never?” I said. It was true she had never touched me, but we two were outcasts now. “Because I am-because-you are young person,” she said, “very young.”
She had been about to say Because I am psychiatrist, but of course that wouldn’t matter unless I was a mental patient, and she had just said-hadn’t she just said?-I was no more mental patient than she was. “I’m not a mental peon anymore,” I said, “maybe I never really was one. I’m almost eighteen years old and I’m not even buggy, you said it yourself, and you never were my dreambox mechanic even if I needed a dreambox mechanic, and I’m not going back to the bughouse, Merlin won’t make me go back to the bughouse if I have any other place to go, so I figure I’m going to Caramel-Creamistan-with you. What the hump did I get better for if I can never have you or be you?” I think I was almost convincing her. Her hand, which kinda reminded me of an old gray root, floated above my knee, but then, bargaining, it turned over: “Of course,” she explained, “if you first touch me…”
This isn’t a comic book, but the blat of the doorbell came right then. “My god, where to hide you,” she whispered. With me stark naked it was too late for the balcony, and never mind that about not touching me-she yanked me by the elbow to my feet and stuffed me into a closet. In the dark I breathed her perfumed coats. By feel I must be in the chilly, shiny folds of a mink and again doubt overtook me: either she was the top Soviet spy of all Caramel-Creamistan or somewhere along the road to Rohring Rohring she had been some rich fuddy’s concubine, or wife.
“Hey, how ya doin, it’s the Regicide” came crackling out of the speaker system. “I am here to tell yall ladies, if yall still there, that Dr. Foofer has done bought it, correctimento the chief of treatment is no more, he dead as your pockabook, and serious heat is collecting to come in your building and beat the bushes for the Bogeywoman. Lucky for yall they set me to watching the lobby. And I hate to tell you, Doctor Zook, but you is persona niggerata round here. O the things they is saying about yall two. Meanwhile they watching the place, you hear, so if yall want out, Tuney and Chug be by the dumpster in fi minute, got that, fi minute, that’s yall only chance.”
I stuck my head out of the closet. “Ask him why he’s sticking his neck out like this,” I whispered, “he doesn’t like either one of us that much.” “Please explain your interest for us,” Doctor Zuk said into the grating. “Do I hear that hard-head Bogeywoman talking up there?” Reginald crackled back, “sassing everybody who tryna help as usual… O sent me, you hear that, Bogeygirl? She want you out the bughouse before she have to cut you and wind up in trouble her own self.” I pushed past Doctor Zuk and hissed into the grating: “You better be good to O, kotex sniffer, or pretty soon she’ll have your hairy onions on a plate.” “Yeah and I butter em and make your mama lick em.” “My mama’s beyond being riled by fuddy onions,” I said, “say, Reg-are you and O really getting married?” Long pause, then: “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.” “Cheese, good luck,” I whispered. “I still take your sister’s phone number,” Reginald added. “Eat hump,” I said. “Fi minutes, ladies. You pay Tuney and Chug good, you hear? Be down they in fi minutes, better make that fo.”
HOW LOVE GOT US OUT OF THERE
“My dear Bogey, now we have big adventure before us. You must rely on me, I know what I am doing in this business of fly away fast. With my father the Beetle I spend half my life escaping, you understand me? You must follow me and what I do you also do. You can follow?” If Zuk wanted to be wood wizardess, I would be her half-pint scout. I nodded. “I come right back,” Zuk slightly panted, kicking off her sandals and dropping her silky dress to the floor as she went. I watched the round pale planets of her buttocks recede, the articulate rather nasty wink of her black string bikini.
I nodded like a sleepwalker. I wasn’t even scared, not yet. A kind of gauze, like mosquito net, a white nuptial dream, had settled over everything. I was eloping with Doctor Zuk. They went south, the Bug Motels would say when they heard, hospital parlance for never coming back. Zuk and me, we were turning into one thing. In a white daze, I plunked down in the hall while I waited and buckled on her silver sandals, sumpm I’d always wanted to do. And clomped up and down a bit. I was amazed how comfy they were-a little big.
She came back buttoning up the vest inside a European fuddy’s pinstripe suit a lot like Foofer’s, only gray. And combing her strong ugly fingers through her hair, which lay flat and gleaming under some kinda gunk. And now she unfolded big square black sunglasses across her face. Her exotic face had always been big, now it was big, fuddy and tough. “Cheese,” I said, “you’re a man. Not even short.”
“Don’t get wrong idea. Is not what you think,” she said. “Sometimes you see I like to go at night in places where women don’t go. Boxing match, for instance. With little help”-she held a fan of grizzled mustache against her upper lip-“nobody gives me trouble.” “Doctor Zuk,” I asked sternly, “are you a spy?” She laughed. “Yes, I am spy-I admit is bad for character, but at least I don’t spy for fatherland-I spy for myself alone. Now, Bogey, we must dress you in big hurry-ach-” She saw her silver sandals on my feet. “How they are ugly, your feet-pfui,” she said, “why I never notice this before, like goat feet…”
What a nerve. It was true my fungoid, chewed-down toenails looked like sumpm that grows on dead people, but I was affronted-here I had bit my tongue all this time about her hands-how about a little polite disregard for the ugliness of youth as for the ugliness of age? “Never mind, naked is best disguise-get in.” From a closet by the front door she rolled one of those lidded trash bins marked PROP HOMEWOOD HOSP MEDICAL RES and the apartment number splashed in red-“Get in, Bogey,” she commanded, and though it reeked of rotten citrus and a No way Jose was rising to my lips, I did it. The elevator wheezed and sank and then she was racing the caddy on its squeaky little wheels down some bumpy floor, then Chug was saying slowly over my head: “Nuh-uh, no suh, no way we ain’t taking no marked hospital garbage bin in this here junk wagon, that’s a major heat-thrower right there even if it don’t have no dead body in it, which it probly do.” “No body,” Doctor Zuk barked, “see for self,” and suddenly the lid flopped up over my head and there was Chug blinking at me in the purple twilight. I clapped my hands over my momps but I guess I should have clapped em over my face. Chug said in a scared voice: “Jesus take me home. It’s the mayor’s daughter.” Tuney looked over the edge and went: “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e… How you figga, Chug?” “I don’t know nothing,” Chug muttered.
Then Zuk did the fuddiest thing of all-one offhand flip of a palm by the hip pocket and she showed, just showed, those boys a roll of lettuce under the street lamp, under the eggplant sky. Bills got forked around so fast I couldn’t see. “Okay, man,” Tuney said, “but no damn trash bin.” They lifted me out by the armpits, silver sandals dangling, and as soon as my feet touched the wagon, I scrambled under a smelly green tarp. Zuk said: “Gentlemen, you will drive to harbor. You will take Broadway to Bank Street to Wolfe Street and when you see water you will drive very slow while I look for boat with name of Jenghiz Khan. When I say stop you stop. Is understood?” “Yessuh,” “Yessuh,” Chug and Tuney said.
And Zuk crawled under there with me. She was packing a squat little doctor’s bag not at all her style. Cowpea clopped off, bells jingling. Under the tarpaulin it was black as a cave and between the sweet straw beneath and the tarry reek on top I was dizzy and itched like crazy. All along my naked body I longed to scratch. The straw poked and Doctor Zuk’s wool suit crawled. “This is torture,” I whispered, “cheese I itch. What if we get stopped? What if we roll over?” “Some follower you have turned out to be,” Zuk grumbled. “What if I get killed? Who are you gonna say I am?” “Who are you?” she said. “In dark you are nobody, I am also nobody, if we are nobody I suppose I may kiss nobody.” And her mouth spread over mine like a jelly, maybe I should say a jellyfish, I dunno-some moisty tasty halfway disgusting thing between definite and infinite. Then I was a cave, mammoth and dark, how could I know what was going on in all of my ends? A bat rocketed down my spine. I think she had me on her finger, turning. The rims burned off one after another. You could throw up from this. Seasick down a spiral chalk drops burning ribs of silverware gutter spill
[“Chug?” “Whuzzup.” “In your opinion what exactly is we took up with here?” “I don’t know nothing. That’s what we gets paid a hundred a piece for, to know nothing. We gets paid good to know nothing, Tuney, so I know nothing.” “Chug?” “Huh?” “You thank she the mayor’s daughter?” “Say what? Hell no she ain’t the mayor’s daughter. I seen the mayor’s daughter in a parade one time, she a boney redhead with chopstick legs and a freckle face and that ain’t her. Ain’t you never see the mayor’s daughter, Tuney? All the goings-on she show up at? this soup kitchen here and them new projects there?” “Nope.” “She ugly like the mayor too.” “Yeah? What he look like?” “You shucking? You ain’t never see the mayor of Baltimore?” “How I’m gonna see the mayor? I don’t get invited to that shit.” “On the TV, brother, where else?” “Can’t use no TV, give me a pain in my head.” “Well, this here ain’t the mayor’s daughter. This some kinda he-she we got here, but you right she somebody’s daughter. Some big banana.” “Huh. Could be you right.” “Sho I’m right. What I really like to know: that jeffrey in the grease-gray suit, who he? I thank this jeff from some foreign place like Turkey where they don’t got no mayor. Over there they got sultans, pry ministers, like that. What I like to know: what this he-she out the bughouse doing with some jeffrey from Turkey? What he want with a bughouse he-she? Got me wool-gathered, Tuney.” “Tell you what, this fella thank he somebody. Gentlemans, you will this way, and gentlemans, you will that way.” “Yeah. He used to running something big, what it is. Them hundred-dollar bills, they clean like a Chinese laundry. Hadda peel em apart. That’s brand-new money he holding.” “Say-you thank this sumpm big? sumpm on the gummint level maybe? They is a war on, ain’t they? What you thank, Chug? Them two heading for the harbor, muss be tryna get out the country. That boat, what they call that boat? Sound like a spy boat to me.” “A spy boat… I be dogged.” “That’s it, Chug, I got it now. They a spy from Turkey and some gummint bigwig’s daughter escaped out the bughouse. The he-she done emptied out the big banana’s safe, it’s all war money in they, and they be booking out the country on a spy boat.” “I be dogged, Tuney. That’s it. Must be it.” “What we gone do about it, Chug?” “We ain’t gone do nothin. I don’t cay nothing bout no Vietnam war. We got paid good. That’s all I know.” “Yeah? We ain’t paid that good if that black bag full of new money. Less us get lost in them little alleyways and boatyards yonder end of Broadway and pull up back the harbor po-lice. Then we ask what else that Turkey spy got in the bag, you dig?”]
“Gentlemen, you find out right now what I have got in bag. So. See for self.” Sumpm about Zuk’s big face, the barbarian sweep of the cheekbones-I wasn’t one bit surprised to see it rise like a moon behind a big gun. A squared-off, down-to-business-looking pistol with black pebbly handgrips-“Just don’t shoot em,” I whispered, “or when they catch us I’ll never get out of the bughouse.” “You must give up that mental peon think, always bughouse bughouse bughouse,” Doctor Zuk snapped. “You will drive straight to end of Wolfe Street, gentlemen. When you see water you will drive very slow, and when I say stop you will stop, all this time without you say one word. Or I shoot you, is it clear?”
She sat grimly in the straw behind the coachbox, her head poking up the tarpaulin like a tentpole. With the grainy gray evening around her, with the straw and the horse and the gun and the filthy canvas over her head she looked like a fugitive from some world war, which she was. “You can drive no faster, gentlemen?” “Cowpea already in high gear,” said Tuney, “for her.” We went on itching and bouncing and clattering over the tar-patched brick until I was sick of the ride to the roots of my teeth, so I had my fill of ayrabbing in the end, and horse and wagon into the bargain. We hobbled over a last set of trolley tracks, the street bent right and the next block ended in the harbor, or rather at a seedy marina on its edge, dock lights on poles, flat black ripples turning on their spindles, little white boats bobbing on black sheeny water-and one of them must be ours.
“So,” said Zuk, crawling out from under the tarp. “I think maybe I take you gentlemen along with us on People’s Ship Jenghiz Khan for quiet holiday.” I stuck my head out and looked at her in disbelief. She stood on the wagon, the gun at her waist awkwardly poking out her Foofer-style jacket. “Why you wanna take us with yall?” Tuney inquired, “thank yall get sumpm outa somebody? She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, we so lowdown our own mamas pay yall to take us. If we had mamas.” “Yall be stuck with us,” Chug said gravely.
“It’s sumpm to think about,” I said.
“Good, gentlemen. Then we say farewell.” Madame Zuk was no cheapskate. The black water glittered behind her, the wind buffeted her sideburns, and there sat Chug and Tuney, each turning over, worriedly, another hundred-dollar bill. “For health insurance, is clear?” Zuk patted the bulge under her pinstripe. “We don’t know nothing bout nothing,” Chug and Tuney agreed. Then and only then Zuk crooked a finger at me, I jumped off the wagon and we hoofed it up the gangplank.
FLIGHT TO CARAMEL-CREAMISTAN
Maybe it’s what I should have expected of the navy of a Soviet Autonomous Region of gray grass and red sand, five thousand miles from the sea in any direction. The tub bobbing on ruffles of dirty foam was either a dilapidated yacht or a gussied-up oyster boat. Its scaly white paint job showed up in the dock lights as some mineral strain of psoriasis. The deck in its widest part was so low any wave at all would roll over it. The pilot or swabby was shorter than me and threw back his shoulders at silly attention at the end of the gangplank. Besides Doctor Zuk, who was only half, he was the first Caramel-Creamistani I had ever laid eyes on, so I took a good look. Despite his height he was a ferocious-looking fellow with a white shirt, military epaulettes and black sunglasses, a big round head with glittering hair, massive chest, little bow legs under white shorts, and a mustache draped like a Moghul arch. A cigarette dangled from one side of it, and now and then the harbor lights picked out his big square teeth, as white as chiclets. He seemed to be baring them. Doctor Zuk barked some words at him in Caramel-Creamistani as we passed and he threw his cigarette away. I must say she was worse than Merlin, even, for bossing around cheeky menials.
The engine thudded spongily and we shoved off. I pressed my nose to a porthole but Zuk sat in the dark cabin with her back to me and gazed gloomily into space. We sailed southeast, towards the bay and away from the harbor, and surprisingly fast the garble of factories and shipyards and choked-up strands of lights on bridges and moving traffic was slipping away behind us, and the question arose, where could we be going? Where does the old bay lead? I had a feeling right from the start that Zuk and I were going all the way south, south beyond Annapolis where you walk out a mile and are still in warm salt soup up to your shins, south beyond the Choptank, beyond Fishing Creek and the oyster dumps of Crisfield, south beyond Misty of Chincoteague and Seastar, south beyond Tangier Sound and the Rappahannock, south to the end of the bay. If I’d known how far I could get from humid longing in a single night, how far from dandelions spurting through cracked sidewalks and sickly pigeons pecking the dust in hot parks-if I’d known how far a girlgoyle could get from sticky heartsore Baltimore in one long night on the Chesapeake, I’d have struck out long ago in Merlin’s rubber dinghy. I’d have blown it up and dropped it over the crumbling concrete seawall on Light Street. That’s what I was thinking.
“Where’d you say we were going?” I asked Zuk, though she hadn’t said. And still didn’t say, just sat there in the dark cabin smoking a Gypsygirl and staring at a black porthole. Probably sorry she ever met me. “Er, Madame Zuk-” I said to her back. “You will be so kind to swallow that madame or choke on it,” she growled. “I’m sorry if I lost you your job,” I said, “I’m sorry if I got you deported…” “Why you are saying this? Because I don’t laugh? Because I am sad? Is never wrong to be little bit sad. Every day is wedding day of somebody, funeral of somebody.” She didn’t look round. She was miles away, wearing her distance like a poisonous atmosphere, a lethal perfume. She kept her back to me, as if to turn her eyes on me would kill us both.
I could understand. I’d always known her beauty was the space between us. Now that the space had closed I was stuck with looking at myself. I had nothing but her sandals on, and didn’t like my feet in them any more than she did. I stared with savory disgust at my cheese-white legs, my flaky knees which looked sandpapered, the convict stubble growing in where my pubic hair used to be. “I still don’t get it why naked is the best disguise,” I said. “Why naked is best disguise,” Zuk echoed, “hmmm, is good question. Why did I think this? Naked is best disguise for you not me, but why? So I can’t stop? Yes that is it: So I don’t go back. How I can ever explain to somebody why runaway girl, former mental patient, has no clothes? Is hopeless. Therefore now we go on together to end, no matter what.”
So that explained it. I was her doom. They went south. We were going on, to some end or other. Our engine growled like a bulldog, dragging us down the wrinkled bay, towards the Bay Bridge, under it, beyond. What was down there? I was her doom, how humiliating. “Wait a minute, a famous dreambox mechanic like you, you can get a job anytime, can’t you?-you are famous, aren’tcha?” I needed her to be up there with Margaret Meat, Karen Honey and Ruth Beandip, so I could be sure I couldn’t hurt her in any way. For how could she save me if I had ruined her? And then too, staring into the sun of her glamour I wouldn’t see that black spiderweb strung from thigh to thigh…
“I’m sorry if I ruined your life,” I whispered. “Stop boasting, my dear, and anyhow, my life is not so easy ruined. Ach, choleria, I am a little bored of this Foodian experiment anyway,” she sighed. “In my country is not so bad, you know, since I am Foodian Mental Science Unity Institute of whole Karamul-Karamistan. If I have nose full one day of Eatipus complex I say all right is enough, what it matters? Self-explanatorizing that everybody wants to eat somebody. Tell us something we don’t know, tell us something we don’t see with own eyes, or better yet, gentlemen, don’t tell us nothing! Shut up! Shut your muzzles!” She crushed out one Gitane and briskly lit another.
“Cheese, if you’re so famous and got the top job in Mental Science in Caramel-Creamistan, why’d you ever leave?”
“Don’t be silly girl, everybody wants to leave Karamul-Karamistan. This is why you murder for top job like that, so maybe you can find way out. My uncle Nadir Suleymenov, finance secretary of Mrs. Khazarolova, arrange whole Unity Institute of Foodian Mental Science for me, so I can live. Family of my mother, Suleymenov-Suleymenians, they are not modern people. All same they know better than to give me to husband. They know me from child, they know what I live through with my father the Beetle. They don’t marry me to Karamistani man. They don’t want catastrophe in henhouse.” She smiled. “So they find way for me to live. And also when it comes to new Institute of Mental Science, I think, better Gulaim Zuk than Karamistani psychoanalyst next in line, my cousin Dr. Usman Saidbaevich Suleymenov, supposed orthodox Foodian who made his praktikum on Giant Wheel in Prater with pretty yellow-haired barmaid from Carinthia. Of course so soon as I am Commissar of Mental Science and have little money and diplomatic passport, I want to leave Karamul-Karamistan like everybody else. So I go to Paris and write my little book…”
“Are you gonna write about me now?” I asked. “I have already write about you,” she said, annoyed, “you are monster, no?” “You mean I’m just another teenager…” This was worse, even, than being a Unbeknownst To Everybody. “Lemme die first,” I said. “You want own book like Food’s Dora?” Zuk said wearily. “You must leave this mental peon think behind you. Write your own book, Bogey.
“So. In Paris I write my book…” “It’s a rotten book,” I said. “Even so,” Zuk smiled. “Book gets for me fellowship at Rohring Rohring. And you know from there, yes? At Rohring Rohring, everything doesn’t turn out so good. Supervising psychiatrists don’t like my special relation with Miss Bogey-even though they admit she is getting better. I say to them, so Miss Bogey gets the idea she is something special, so what? What’s so geferlich? Then old-style dreambox analysts like Feuffer yell at me I am naïf, I am careless-I yawn at this. They say, what if everybody did it? I say, what if nobody did it? But what is use of explain. To one who understands not, elephant trumpets in vain. Ach, these power-hungry Foodians, these Cossacks of mental science in Sigmund Food beards, you think if they really understand what is man they are humble like bug inside themselves, but is it so?”
“Cheese, you don’t exactly radiate self-doubt yourself,” I muttered. “Hoopla, I agree, but I am only Zuk. I don’t take any idea so dead serious like that. I don’t hang on for life. Maybe now I try something new-like they say, mouse with one hole is quick snatch”-and one of her ugly hands shot out, pounced on a thing of air and wrung its neck. “I am interested for new career, something with gorgeous clothes maybe, or real Karamistani restaurant. And you know is true, without one lover is kicked out of doors, a new lover comes not to our divan…” She turned her face to me at last and gave me a brilliant smile. Her mood seemed to have reversed. She was buoyant, even giddy. “But you’d be a beginner,” I said uneasily, “just a nobody, when now you’re famous.” “Only little famous,” she shrugged. “You must have realized my family has money-a little money-like yours. I don’t start from nowhere, from nothing.” She put her ugly hand on my hand.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
“Um, er, uh, tell me about Caramel-Creamistan. Sumpm. A little,” I stammered. “Later.” Out of the blueblack swimming dark the planes of her large face pointed this way and that like a turban of crossed scimitars, like some kind of opera headdress flashing, sumpm from Aida. My head drowned.
“First I will look at every part of you and not even touch you.”
And now my time was up, here she immaculately rearranged me, I mean I don’t know how she did it, as far as I can remember I never felt those gnarly fingers at all, but I found myself lying flat on the grimy bunk under her hands like a baby being changed, and the dim planchette of her palm drifting, floating, above me. All my beauty was the invisible tracks over desert between us, the rubbed-out thread suddenly shining with the electricity of my baffled hunger. Or was it the thin moonlight of her neglect that picked out the footpaths?
“Desert of Kyzl Kum is beautiful,” she whispered, “if you like empty. No tree, no house. Where does anybody live you ask? Nowhere, nobody, you think, then you come over hill, there is yurta same color as weeds of ground, and another, and another. Red crack sand, pink dust, gray-pink hills, soft rolling, next and next, everything empty. Maybe small bunch pines along top of hill, or little bit thorn, maybe, in fold where spring is, like hair in folds of girl of trouble age. Beautiful if you like hard, beautiful if you like empty. No house, no road, and tomorrow every yurta is vanished away, not even rag or half-burnt lump of dung in grass. And then old people say, in red desert of Kyzl Kum only bones point way to Samovarobad.”
The bones of her face-those crossed scimitars-pointed to outer space, and, I don’t know, maybe I was asleep, the turban fell apart like an eggshell and then it was the boat we rocked in. Going south.
Whereupon sumpm really queer happened, I mean I fell into a hole pitch-blueblack and I was crawling around in my own body, which I knew because of tryna get out, every nerve sat up and pulled on its burnt-out light cord and sparked, and what I saw, it was like everywhere there was some sort of unarrived light running loose in the blue vein dark, spilt skim blue milk of, or moonlight, fingers of, picking out trails up my itchy capillaries, or stringing neon beads up the nerve trunks, shooting pearlized baby-blue plastic popbeads up my privatemost, some coming together with a pop, some popping apart
All this time I’m literally under her hand, without ever landing her white palm clambers like a spy airplane over the corrugations of fat and bone drawing some kinda hot spark, good godzilla I’m lighting up all over, I’m a circuit board, a little hot and seasick I shut my eyes and the queer thing is that’s me I’m seeing, far down below lit up like the twinkling spiderweb of a desert town seen from the air at night. And then I’m prowling myself in a creaking taxi up trashy backstreets or zooming up and down my own lymphatic ducts, my golden noggin light glowing, my meter ticking like crazy
[Where are you Doctor Zuk? I don’t even see your face, just now and then your hands and even they are sumpm else, a plectrum or maybe-a knife and fork?]
“What I should do with boygirl like you, eh? so young, so reckless, unbranded like donkey who knows not the world-so silly, so never-from-home-so shayn.”
Whereupon sumpm even queerer happened, now I’m mining my own tunnels, tracking inside myself for the lost chunkagunk, I’m blipping out of my own miner’s hat, lozenges of light torpedoing down and up the personal plumbing, so many melting pills of exploratory, medicinal light, surging up the gut gutters into the armbone legbone headbone like in the old aspirin ads and now I’m mining myself with baby-blue gunpowder, creepy-crawling up the gulley, pouring a trail out of the chewed-off corner of the TNT sack, and now the little fin of flame hisses over the rocks into the mine anyone still in there o my godzilla I wait BLAM I rain down sizzling
How to get out, follow the lost chunkagunk, track the blue moldy crumb of, through the black woods on my scalp, between my legs, peck them out of the hairy roots shudder of horrified pleasure until all completely hopelessly lost pitch blue black
“Poor dear, you have learned what I know, love is calamity to the head,” Madame Zuk whispers.
You are a leviathan, even your kiss is like a house fell on me
“By the lover’s reckoning,” she hisses, “Samovarobad is not far.”
Who are you, who made you, what do you want with me
“All the same, my dear, love is a command and the heart is khan. Finally I am not spoon of your mouth. But I follow this to end of this. Open your eyes.”
I OPENED THEM. And I guess by the book if there is a book I shoulda made love to her now, I mean she was the scary love of my scary life and I never let on I was yellow if I could help it. So I made up my mind to unbutton her-but what happens is her Foofer suit flops open and whaddaya know she’s opened it all up in there herself. Her gnomy whitegreen hands are spreading out the wings of white shirt and under there she’s naked. I lie there looking up at her, wondering what do I do with this, what do I do now
This isn’t a comic book but kreeech, right then I heard a sickening scrape. Bone on bone. It was our bottom, I mean the bottom of the People’s Ship Jenghiz Khan. “Idiot! donkey!” Zuk exploded, “outcast! What they send me for pestilence, this runaway of wormy camels and sheep’s eyeball soup who knows no more of sea than I know of taxidermy…” I watched Zuk’s soccer player’s calves storm up the gangway stairs two at a time, she pulled her shirt flaps together and buttoned her pants as she went, and there followed more terrible curses-I couldn’t understand a word of course but I stole up the stairs behind her, the better to take this in.
She stomped up and down with her hands on her hips, yelling bloody murder. What a swashbuckler she was with her glinting slaver’s eye, her rose cravat tied for a sweatband around her brow, and the jagged décolletage of her misbuttoned shirt! One word she sneered over and over-fazool, fazool, fazool, as in pasta? I realized the word must mean sumpm disgusting in Caramel-Creamistani-then it dawned on me it was the fellow’s name. He stood at pathetic attention with his mouth fixed in that same tooth-baring grin, then suddenly jumped overboard as if to kill himself, one last obedience to her command.
He came up gasping in black water to his chin, bent to the hull and grunted with all his might, but nothing happened. We were stuck. Run aground. I could see one red glowing channel marker a few feet off our stern, just behind us, and a green one like a cartoon serpent’s eye on a pole just in front of us, and then I put it together. We were smack in the middle of the two, right where we oughta be. It was low water-not even the poor drudge’s fault.
Zuk came up and curled her craggy hand around my shoulder-stood cheerfully beside me, panting a bit from all that theatrical wrath. “Kinda hard on that shnook, aren’tcha?” I whispered. “So what you want, Bogey, maybe we too should jump in water, with frogs and snakes, and push?” she loudly whispered back.
What frogs and snakes did she mean? I looked again at the cartoon serpent’s eye on the channel marker and saw it was no cartoon. A viper, real as my foot, hulaed down the pole and splashed into the wet. I saw its bald little skull periscope away, the point of a fan of ripples, and heard other soft splashes all up and down the-good godzilla, we were in some swamp, you could practically reach out and touch it on either side.
At first I thought we must be stuck in some boggy creek off the Choptank, but what about that endless bulldog growl of the engine and the gyroscopic sense I had that we’d sailed south all night? I knew I’d lost track of time in the cabin of the Jenghiz Khan but surely a night had gone by-and now that I peered into it, the dark did have some of that dusty velvet grain that meant dawn was on the march. What came after Virginia, if you sailed straight down the bay? The ocean, you’d think, but now I saw with my own eyes that the land had closed in rather than opened out. The walls of a channel straight as a blowgun lay ahead and behind. Steep black banks pressed in, flecked with white things like ghostly shoes, and above them jungle treetops on both sides, every hole chinked with vines, even the purple sky overhead crisscrossed with the necklaces of creepers, and from where I sat in my deck chair and gaped, my head tipped back against Zuk’s arm, a thousand little arabesque spit curls dangled from the silhouetted greenery, a thousand living curlicues which could have been water moccasins and probably were.
“Where in godzillas name are we?”
“You see why I must encourage Fazool.”
“I don’t think that little guy will ever get us out of here all by himself,” I whispered to Zuk, “I better get in the water with him and help him push-I mean I’m dressed for it-where the hump are we going anyway?” “Already Fazool wants to know where is your shame-Karamul-Karamistan is exceedingly prudish culture, before he comes here he hardly sees face of woman in his life, never mind pupik. I have ordered him not to look at you, I say you are mad daughter of American vice-president and I am save you, for sake of big foreign aid money for Karamul-Karamistan.” “It’s dark,” I argued, “water’s up to here, he doesn’t have to look, just push.” She sighed: “Very sensible, Bogey, but is too late for sensible. I say him you are mad, mad you must be. Anyway, is not just push. Naked in dark water together, this is kind of union.” We leaned together over the rail, elbow to elbow, peering into the glittering, sucking black. “Ach, I think here is case where water is not to be had, therefore washing with dirt is permitted. I go in swamp with snakes and frogs and I push.” She shuddered.
In the end I wouldn’t let Zuk in the swamp without me and Zuk wouldn’t let me in without her, so she tied her rose cravat around Fazool’s eyes-this saved him from corruption-and all three of us were dragging and shoving the Jenghiz Khan through the thick soup when it got light enough to see that the water was blood red. And it was true what Zuk had said about being naked in dark water together-frankly I was glad for a chaperone. It made you aware there was hardly any real edge to anything in this world. The water was warm as a bathtub-but even bathtubs pucker your toes and fingers into hungry little fish mouths, so bored and restless is your native goo in its home body I guess, so aching to get out, to suck up to some other body, to pour itself down some hole. And look at it this way, pressing all around you at every other moment is nothing, I mean you think it’s nothing, but actually it’s air, a medium of transfer as tight as a wetsuit. Only here, when it wasn’t air but rich red muck, you felt it and saw it.
And this stuff was oinking alive! Sumpm squirmed out from under my footsole with every cringing step, or bulged between my toes, or spiraled fatly between my thighs, or bumped its blind forehead against my blind belly. Sometimes my foot sank down a foot in the gunk at the bottom and the red swamp closed over my head. Cheese, I came up spluttering, cheese, cheese, a wad of brown leaves in my mouth. If I hadna been up to my ears in the stuff, I’d have been sweating for sheer terror.
And yet in the dark back of my mind I remembered the whole time that, as soon as the Jenghiz Khan floated free, it would be me and Madame Zuk alone in the bottom of the boat again, and this time, no getting out of it, it was my turn and nothing but wet skin between us. Her body stretched out before me as wide and brown as Central Asia, as endless and complex, and suddenly swamp water looked okay.
Now and then the Jenghiz Khan bobbed loose for a step or two, only to stick again. It was good there was a whole pack of us-six legs pushing and churning up the bottom and about as adept at our work as a buncha water buffalo-cause the snakes and turtles all knew we were coming. All the same it made my jaw grin up with horror, hearing all those unseen spotted and scaly amphibians slap into the soup with us, kerplopping on every side in the vain frantic hope of getting away from us for good, and the rusty chowder can I had to pry off my foot now and then didn’t butter up my nerves any either. Pop bottles rolled under my arches like rungs of sunken ladders. The ghost shoes turned out to be oyster shells as big as hamburger platters. Under the ruby water we saw the wreck of a zinc garbage can, a yellowed, eaten-out water heater waving pink sponges of insulation, a bit of ornate wrought-iron fence that made me think of a country graveyard, and a whole four-burner Roper stove.
And all of a sudden the channel widened out-there was a broad ditch to our right-and we were all treading water. Fazool, who couldn’t swim, almost drowned until Zuk caught hold of one end of the rose cravat. The Jenghiz Khan came free. Fazool steered her starboard down the feeder ditch and pretty soon Zuk and I stood dripping in the hold, staring at each other in the dusty morning sunlight that came through the portholes, our bodies spotted all over with red peat flecks, black leaf curd and bog dirt, not even cold.
HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE
And now, no more dillydallying! Table spread thyself! To the banquet at hand. “Er, I’m starving to death-got anything to eat on this tub?” “A thousand pardons, my dear. How I can forget, you are young person, like weasel who eats twice her weight in day…” She ransacked drawers and cupboards, and, standing together at the sink, our breasts swinging, or anyway her breasts swinging, we ate with our fingers-there wasn’t a fork-cheerios and vienna sausages, sardines and cocoa puffs and smoked oysters swimming in oil.
She lay naked on the bunk, one hand behind her head, and I sat down beside her. This was it. Zuk was demure enough, or exhausted enough, to close her eyes.
Her body was similar to Central Asia, as I have said, and not young, but age hadn’t ruined it, only made it more dramatic, all its tufted crags and escarpments, the muscle walls hung with moss, folds of tough sod between rock ribs, bristly sedges in the clefts, a certain bareness of the underlying tectonic structures. It was grand, awesome, even gorgeous. So why was I scared to death of it?
No I was not scared of dying-I swear despite her age Zuk was further from death than, say, O. O’s rosebud organs and filigreed sheaths, her silk and satin privacies, were clicking knives all over. And thinking of the other little girlgoyles I had loved, filles fatales so to speak: compared to Zuk’s candid Mohawk, Lou Rae Greenrule’s shining snagless bolt of hair from crown to waist had been the glass mountain-go ahead and break your neck on that, Bogeywoman-or once you roll all the way down, go drown yourself in her twat of pale green jello, where no living thing could get a footing. And even my see-through princess Emily, far more than Zuk, was over the hill of no return. Her skeletal purity was way past death, as everybody knew, into Halloween transfiguration.
Unh-unh, it wasn’t death, in Zuk, not prissy choicy maidenly death at all, but coarse old fat old life that was scary. She looked well fed and well used, Doctor Zuk, she looked calloused and grizzled and tough. She looked well manured, like anything would grow in her, and she smelled yeasty, or would have, if she hadn’t cured her hide for thirty years in Byzance, by Rochas. All right, all right, I’d talked myself into it. I’d polished off swamp water, hadn’t I? I was ready. I shut my eyes and held my nose and jumped.
It was easy. By godzilla I should have realized that wild fun for any dolly who’d lived to be as old as Zuk couldn’t be as far away at the end of the labyrinth as mine was. Or she’d be what I was, a raving mental peon until only yesterday, with a gray under-hull of cicatrix, wicker-woven slash by slash, from her elbows to her wrists. (By the way I’ve decided I’m never gonna get these arms fixed. By godzilla I can see it coming: soon I’m gonna be so terrifyingly sane that I’m gonna need some proof I was ever buggy. And you watch, when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself I won’t even wear long sleeves-let em see, the bloodsuckers-well, maybe in January.)
Coming was as easy for Madame Zuk as blinking, or swallowing. Trills like Fats Waller, I’m not lying. That coochie of hers winked at me so hard I thought she was taking my picture with it, and maybe she was. One eerie thing: how her skin was slippery, papery, over the muscle-that was her age I guess-and I swear at times there was no more to making her melt in my fingers than pulling off an ice-cream wrapper.
So madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse was a better woman than I was after all! Then it set in again, the furtive conservatism of the mental patient. Who the hump did she think she was, this big strong woman, this so-called bug repair expert, running off with a bughead, all right, a former bughead, but still, a former bughead not quite eighteen years old? And this was Dr. Gulaim Zuk, who had earned her fame debugging the dreamboxes of youth. The nerve of her, to write about teenage monsters when she’d never even been one! The kind of ease Zuk had wasn’t sumpm you grew up to. Like scratch it was sumpm you got back to, if at all. Doctor Zuk had been spared adolescence. She’d hidden out with her father The Beetle all through his wondrously weird, unspeakably lonely exile in Caramel-Creamistan. And then the Commies had shot him exactly on time-on the eve of her twelfth birthday-so she never had to grow up in front of him, never had to see his disgusted face.
As for me, adolescent ugliness is my natural state. Bogeywoman I was born, fat and stinky, Bogeywoman is my dowry. Course, I admit it, next to the ease of Zuk, my adolescent repulsiveness suddenly looked like sumpm willful, even to me-gargoyles in the belfry-sticking their nauseous tongues out. All the same I was what I was and could not be saved from myself. For an instant I longed for lobotomy-sure, cut the whole memory bone from the dreambox. Blank me out. But the world had become too beautiful to erase, somehow.
(I could imagine The Beetle first arriving in Caramel-Creamistan-a Yid from the Vistula seeing those camels, asking himself Where the hump have I landed? I lay along her body now and whispered What the hump is this place, I never knew there was a swamp at the end of the bay, tell me where we are or I’ll…)
Her body was similar to Central Asia… well, maybe not, but it was nothing like mine. Dew glazed her throat, her forehead. She had had enough. She stopped my hands. I lay along her side, her head rested on the crook of her arm, and two or three hairs burst out of each calamitous pore of her armpit. Hair too lank and outspoken even to curl, it lay there, black wheat. Now that I saw her up close, I understood how she could look famous-her face was as huge as a movie screen, her eyes, her nose, her mouth all double the size of mine, you could have driven a Cadillac between those Thousand and One Nights’ eyebrows. Never in her life could anyone have called her petite. She was built like a belly dancer, generous, billowing. She had the kind of lobed showy muscle I once read would keep a girl out of the Rockettes-just right for Princess Noor and Her Six Harimettes, however.
Fazool shrieked and we poked our heads above the gangway stairs. We both saw it: a black bear about as tall as me stood up to look at us, then polkaed away across the bog, his fat little bowlegs splashing.
“Say, got any bears up there in Caramel-Creamistan?” I whispered. “And what about disgust? Weren’t you ever, like, sick-to-your-stomach disgusted with love-the whole twenty-dish ham & chicken potpie firehall supper? And where the hump are we anyhow?”
“You know, one thing people know how to do in Karamistan. This is eat. Sit, talk, eat. September in Samovarobad is paradise, thirty degrees and everybody eating melons from morning till night. But most of all, meat. Is meat culture. Twenty kilometers out of city in red hills, is nothing to find but meat. Sit on carpet, soon some woman brings in great bowl or plate: all meat, naked boiled meat. And you see everything of this meat. Is anatomy lab for sheep. You see every part of sheep, whole stomach, testicles, big steaming heap intestines, and from middle of puddle two whole sheep eyeballs look up at you. My god what makes that scream like crazy woman?”
“O that’s an American Barred and Bedraggled Owl. You’ll never see it-it’s probably in that tangle of black gum trees. Before we get there it’ll go flapping off to the next thicket. Ya know what it says?-I mean what everybody says it says-Who who who, who cooks for you?” “Ah! Is very good question. And what is answer?” I shook my head. “Answer of course is You do. Answer every time, You do you do you do.
“Alas, I tire of ever the same dish. The world too stays not in a oneness of changelessness. And who would say which is more beautiful, night unveiling to day? or day unveiling to night? Either way, veiling or unveiling, the world is beautiful as a houri.”
“Say, where the hump are we again?” I asked for the hump-teenth time, “and where’d you say we were going?”
“I eat all foods. I eat meat, fish, kasha, apricots. I particularly like feast dish of Karamul-Karamistan, which is baby camel stuffed with goat, goat stuffed with six hens, each hen stuffed with twelve eggs in nest of parsley, and all this roasted on spit through twenty-four hours…”
“Holy godzilla did you see that? A giant pig just jumped up from the mud bank right there between the cypress knees and trotted into the bush. Cheese, look at the bald spot-that’s where it was wallowing. Where the hump is this place and where are we headed? [Sniff, sniff.] Ya know I know it sounds perverse when there’s water water everywhere, but I swear I smell smoke…”
“Speaking of smoke, speaking of meat, what you suppose is feast day game of men in all Karamul-Karamistan? I tell you. Is kind of crazy polo with carcass of sheep. First they cut throat, like that, kr-r-r-ch. Then they race around like crazy on strong little ponies, and tear sheep apart with bare hands. Who has biggest piece at end, wins.”
“Wins what? Cheese, there goes another pig, with big black spots. You see any farms? See any peanut fields? Must be a pig gone wild, I mean, you know, a feral pig. What the hump is this godzilla forsaken place?”
Outside the portholes, thorny-vine and creepy-briar shot straight up the tree trunks, fifty sixty feet in the air. Bulrushes brushed peacefully by, then, rat-a-tat-tat on the Jenghiz Khan, a canebrake was playing our bottom like a snare drum. Doctor Zuk stuck her head out the gangway. I stuck mine out next to hers. “Where the hump-” “Hush, Bogey. Make like you speak no English. Do like Fazool, whatever he does, you do it too. Hallo-o-o-o!” she shouted. Fazool grinned his square grin and waved. Zuk waved. I waved. A streaky tin roof swam into view, then a Nehi Orange Crush sign, its orange weathered to that shy flamingo that pleases me best of all colors. On the bank a galvanized steel privy sailed by, its door banging in the wind.
“Hey what is this place?” Then I saw sumpm like thick pink cellophane-a bulge of peat water gushing over a slimy spillway. And before I knew it I was tilted back like in a roller coaster. Holy godzilla, a winch was hauling the Jenghiz Khan up a coupla boat rails. A Popeye-looking fuddy in khakis was working it. I read a sign on a shack, UNITED STATES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS. I was on the point of yelling Help me I been kidnapped, when I remembered I hadn’t been kidnapped, I’d been saved. “Where the hump are we or I’ll scream,” I screamed. Luckily the winch chasing over the metal frets was loud as a Gatling gun, and nobody heard me, not even myself.
Then a red lake was opening out in front of us as far as the eye could see. “Wow, how the hump did that get here? What-” “Hush-only little while longer now,” Zuk said. Fazool steered the Jenghiz Khan left along the shore. “You, Bogey, keep eye open like owl for Ditch Number 19. Ditches don’t have signs like streets so is important, very important, you watch and count.”
The lake: red like the bilge that laps the toilet bowl the first day you’re on the rag-and a few cypress knees sticking out of it like hairy upside-down carrots. “So what about The Beetle?” I dared to whisper (I had never asked about her father before.) “I figure he grew up eating kreplach in Plock or somewhere, just like my Zayde Schapiro…”
“Ah, you speak of Mr. Zuk,” she replied stiffly. “What means this-kreplach?” She made a face. “Mr. Zuk was champion fencer at Jagiellonian University. Son of famous doctor of geophysics from Warsaw. He wrote not only in Yiddish-sometimes in Polish, sometimes French. Even before start of war, even before Polish Communists die in Russia, is over with him and communism. He trusted nobody. Karamul-Karamistan you know is never spoon of his mouth. Even in Karamul-Karamistan, for eleven years we are running. He is at home nowhere, and that temporarily saved his neck. Place of safety, place of danger-I am accustomed to flux of this, perhaps I even like it. In Karamul-Karamistan I learn to eat every kind of food. I learn to watch all night from rock in desert while in tent Mr. Zuk write stories which nobody now reads. Mr. Zuk is thin like walking stick. Mr. Zuk never liked much to eat but he eats whatever his benefactor gives to eat. But I-I like to eat.”
“Don’t I smell smoke?” I said, “isn’t that smoke floating in the trees?”
“And now I tell you disgusting. You know what is kumiss? Liquor from mare’s milk. Don’t make ugly face, is good, very good, like vwodka and yogurt mix, and good for you, but sometimes we are in nomad village, kumiss is bring in to drink inside great bag of raw skin, one meter wide, and, Bogey, hair of horse still grows on inside part of bag, and plenty islands of black hair are swimming in kumiss. Pfui. And one time, bag, it bubbles too much inside, and just when we drink, whole thing blows up, bloomps! in hair, nose, eye, everything. Disgusting.” Her creamy laughter.
“That’s the eighteenth little creek we passed…”
“Is good.”
So now we were off the lake and nosing up another skimpier ditch, parting reeds and yellow scum and scraping bottom, and all of a sudden we’re smack in the middle of a big fat smoke ring, tunneling down the tonsils of it, visibility is the hole, that’s all, in this great white doughnut of smoke…
Zuk didn’t seem to notice. “Is not far now,” she murmured. “Hey-” [sniff, sniff] “I don’t just smell fire, I even see it…”
Fazool shrieked again and splashing out of the thick white smoke came a small black cow, with a nose like a wet black charcoal filter, and twisted horns where you looked for antlers. In deerlike arcs the cow launched herself and her freckled udder across the stream, trailing garlands of honeysuckle. “What the hump is this queer place?” I burst out, “I’m no mental peon, I can take it. I can take it if you can take it. We’re almost there, now come on, tell me where we are.”
“You are right, Bogey. We are deep in Great Dismal Swamp. We go to remote hunting lodge of my cousin, Édouard Suleymenian, vice consul for trade in America of Karamul-Karamistan. Édouard will help.”
“Chee-e-e-e-ese, the Dismal Swamp, I always wanted to go there, in a creepy sorta way, try tracking in the ruby-red peat bog, ever since Willis Marie Bundgus, the wood wizardess, told me it was the northern limit of the water moccasin, cheese,” and I began to tremble all over to think I had been wading up to my chin in the snaky soup.
“These little peat fires” [cough, cough] “they are as nothing, they happen every day in low water in August, dark of moon” [cough, cough]. Is very beautiful at night, that red ring of fire in bog, you see? Ranger men come put them out. Now and then, is true, ranger disappears in swamp. Crust falls in, bloomps, like top of meat pie under spoon, yes? and poor fireman falls into burning peat and we never see him no more…”
IN THE HUNGER DESERT
The hunting shack of cousin Édouard, second vice consul (department of sheep exchange) of Caramel-Creamistan to the United States of America, had a warped and wavy tin roof like an old broiler pan, and needed paint. Well, perhaps it didn’t need paint so much as never had any. Paint was a citified notion hardly known in the Dismal, judging by the few dumps we’d passed. The shack was built of silvery planks and stood on not too crooked stilts on the shore of Ditch 19. The sagging front porch screens had a greenish cast, and all around the front door, curious perches for birds seemed to have sprouted-antlers, as it turned out, of every shape, but all kinda pipsqueak, nailed up as they were without the heads they grew on, godzilla be thanked.
All told, an unassuming den of classic fudd, according to your Baedeker. So I wasn’t allowing for much of a spectacle from Cousin Édouard. In fact I was thinking that, after Madame Zuk, a soldierly old fuddy with a firm paunch and grizzled sideburns would be a relief-a modest, dignified sportsman, that was the ticket, given to colorless oaths, politely indifferent to women but a mean hand with a frypan full of fliers-I mean, how many fantasticoes dare we hope, or rather must we dread, from any one family?
Zuk buckled on her silver sandals, I borrowed her shirt, and together we staggered up the dock. The screen door opened and there was Cousin Édouard-I tried not to gape. “My godzilla it’s Yul Brynner in Anastasia,” I whispered in her ear, and she laughed a nervous laugh that caused me to narrow my eyes at her-just what was going on here? I swear I saw it all in one second flat: He was old, maybe thirty, and beautiful, and bald as a mahogany finial, but not as old as Zuk. These cousins knew each other well! I could smell it, they were ancient lovers, and I knew which was which. I figured she had introduced him under the Ottoman Empire to the same black arts she had lately shown me.
In fact he looked like her, the same giant-sized eyes, nose, cheekbones-so beautiful he was grotesque-the same Mongol flash, but with black ficus of body hair at the wrists and throat of his pale green shirt. He was a little shorter than Zuk, and he worried, that was what really made me stare: the bare notion of a worried Zuk. He had her beauty, he was younger and an international playboy to boot, around 16,000 miles out of my league, but his face was nicked here and there with a fretfulness quite unknown to madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse. Was he scared-scared, possibly, of Zuk? Well, who wasn’t? Maybe her fumy dangers had affected more than his growth. And sumpm else I saw right away: he wasn’t all that glad to see us. He was worried. I saw it before she did, even before he quieted his dogs, two ringletted spaniels, and held out his arms to us and smiled courteously and bowed us in. And said over my head to Zuk: “Very interesting-the blond hair-and soulful, belligerent face, like some orphan boy from a film-some movie of Dickens maybe?-Oliver Twist I think.”
Zuk pushed me firmly forward. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped. As I stumbled by he caught my hand and pressed it to his lips-not some sleazy fakeroo but a real kiss that left a wet spot. His lips were big beautifully molded Levantine numbers, with that sorta blue tattoo of a banished mustache gleaming faintly above them. I noticed he held my hand a little longer than was strictly necessary-could be he was scoping my scars, all bazillion threads of them that looked like carded plastic fishing line in that light. But of course an international playboy doesn’t say a wrong word at a moment like that. “Come in, ladies, sit down…” And then, like Zuk back at her place, he was off and clanking around in the icebox-brought in three little glasses and the vwodka. I choked mine down.
Coupla paragraphs to be filled in later about his guns and knives, a whole wall of em. Bear rugs, raccoon lampshades, ocelot headrests-you get the picture. Ruffs of brown feathers tacked up on the bias-just the wingspreads, no stuffed voodoo turkeys with empty glass eyes. Cousin Édouard ate the meat and didn’t pay the taxidermist, I guess. But there was a sweet smell of violence and rot about the place, as though carcasses were hanging in the guestroom. He did know his way around a frypan full of dead fish: they came out to the front porch headless, cockle-shaped and gritty with golden meal. I ate six or seven. And then, sitting in the rusty lawnchairs, we got down to business.
“Édouard, is good to see you. I need little help from you.” “Tell me, have you two women really sailed all night in that clumsy oyster boat? What nerve you have, Gulaim.” “Why, what is to fear?” He shook his head. “Is very good thing, Édouard, your boat is in Baltimore for paint-sorry to commandeer, but we must stay in front of police.” “Good god, Gulaim…” His hand rose vaguely to his forehead. “Don’t you wish sometimes to live a quiet life? And my god what a genius must be that kokpar player Fazool who until one year ago never saw the sea. It’s a miracle you have not got lost or run aground, Gulaim. Or been stopped by police, or the Coast Guard.” “Actually Fazool must get out and push Jenghiz Khan for one mile of low water at Currigunk Landing-extremely tiresome but then Bogey has beautiful idea we will jump in snake-filled canal and push with him.” Zuk leaned back contentedly, smoking one of Édouard’s cigarettes, wagging a crossed foot in its silver sandal, looking sultry and piratical in sopping rolled-up pinstripe trousers and nothing but the wet pinstripe vest over her momps, with one button buttoned.
“How original… I am glad at last to see Miss Koderer with my own eyes-the famous Bogeywoman, yes?” I couldn’t help smiling at this proof of far report. Zuk smiled too. “And what you think-she is not what I have said?-a charming monster? You have noticed her latissimus dorsi and her strange quick foot like goat foot?”
“Miss Koderer,” Édouard bent towards me, “may I ask to what is owing the prodigious leather of your fingertips?” I opened my mouth to talk but Zuk beat me to it: “She plays every day kidney-shaped hospital utility basin with orthopedic brace for neck, and strings of catgut sutures-she can play as beautiful as the moon. You would like to hear?” “She has pleased the moon,” Édouard said smoothly, “she is under no obligation to the stars.” “Anyhow I didn’t bring my pukelele,” I reminded them.
“Ah! quel dommage! In any event I hope you ladies will be at home in the Dismal. You may want to canoe the ditches-I have a good Wild Duck, consider it at your service. Do take care not to fall through the turf into burning peatholes.” “Fire is bad this year?” “No more than usual,” he shrugged, “only usual is bad enough. Canebrake rattlers are pouring into the ditch all night-do keep your eyes open. You may have the blue room, as soon as Fazool fetches the, ah, hanging game out to the lean-to. Dinner is at nine…
“But perhaps you two will wish to ‘haunt the moonlit bog’, as the poet says, like those tragic lovers of old who met ‘by firefly lamp’ and paddled off ‘through many a fen, where the serpent feeds’-or was that the runaway slave? Saprelotte, I can never keep those two straight-pardon, I’m only a lowly diplomat, not an artiste like you two ladies. Surely one of you knows?”
“What’s he talking about?” I whispered to Zuk, who shook her head. “And I trust you will have a good holiday in my swamp,” he went on, “-until Tuesday. But then, ladies. Then-you see-”
“What, Édouard? What is Tuesday?” Zuk asked casually, but I saw her craggy knuckles whiten on the rust-speckled arms of her chair.
“Tuesday is four days from today, Gulaim. This is the least possible time I calculate it will take certain parties, with gracious but snail-paced help from my consulate, to track you two to my cabin. Before they come, with no margin for mistakes-you must be gone from here,” Cousin Édouard said with sudden firmness, looking from one of us to the other.
“What you mean we must leave from here? But this is what we hope,” Zuk said, “and not for Tuesday-already for today. So soon as you can fix papers we want to fly together to Samovarobad. You understand, Édouard? Bogey is ready for start new life in Karamul-Karamistan.”
“My dear Gulaim, do you realize what you are saying? You propose to kidnap an American child and take her out of the country.” “Kidnap? She has begged me to take her. Bogeywoman is no child,” Zuk said, “in certain ways Bogeywoman is older than I am old.” “I believe you,” said Édouard drily. “Nevertheless: not only a child, that is, a legal minor, but a mentally ill child, and a patient under your care in the hospital that invited you to the United States, after delicate diplomatic proceedings with the Soviet Autonomous Republic of Karamul-Karamistan. And not only a child, Gulaim, but a female child-that is bad-and female as you yourself are female-that is worse. You have perhaps forgotten that you are still a diplomatic representative of a Soviet government and there is a war on. Are you prepared to be an outlaw-and not only an outlaw, Gulaim, but a female degenerate-in an international incident?”
“I care nothing for that,” Zuk said, “I spit at it, I yawn at it, and so does Miss Bogey. You must explain him yourself, Bogey,” she elbowed me, “anyway you know me, Édouard, they cannot make rein for my forehead. I will never leave my Bogeywoman.”
“Gulaim, do you remember when you needed travel permission to the United States and diplomatic portfolio and the rest? I arranged this for you-all of it. Now you want to wreck my good name with yours. Is it right to ask this? Keep in mind, cousin, when the hungry lies with the hungry, a meal is not born. At least, as things are now, should Karamul-Karamistan have troubles-plague or famine or war-we are in a position to, ah, transfer nationality if necessary, as long as we are here, if we have committed no crime. But if you must do this thing, soon neither of us will have liberty or property so much as an onion. You will be as one whom seven seas have vomited up-either a stateless person or in prison.”
“Pfui-Édouard, you are hysterical, like young girl with pimple on nose, eh? You think whole world talks of nothing but your pimple. Where you get this idea that somebody cares so much what happens to Bogeywoman? Who is watching? Her family hears she has vanished forever, maybe they make small fuss but privately we know they dance and make holiday. For god sake, tell him yourself, Bogey.”
Certainly it was high time I said sumpm-I sat there dumb as a goat carcass while they dragged me back and forth, me, a pawn in international affairs and in family politics too, among the Schapiro-Koderers on the one side and the Suleymenov-Suleymenians on the other. Probably I should have felt small, small like one of those Hershey kiss-shaped markers from Sorry or some other game, but to tell you the truth I felt big, bigger than yesterday, bigger all the time. In fact I had never had such a good time in my life and was trying to figure out why.
“Her family,” Édouard replied. “Her family is her father, I believe-Merlin of Merlin’s World Tour, yes? A theatrical personage, famous, some would say notorious, for his antiwar puppet theater. Presently somewhere in Southeast Asia…” “Famous is only big help for us, you see?” Zuk said impatiently, “this is not a mother, to weep and tear hair over girl for reason she has nothing better to do. Here is my point: Her father neglects her, he hardly knows she is life, he lets them keep her prisoner in Rohring Rohring Clinic and she is not buggy, well, no more buggier than she should be, a girl her age…”
“Ahem,” I said weakly, “sorry to interrupt, but it’s an honor to be neglected by Merlin on the grounds of world peace.” “Ah! Thank you for this contribution, Miss Koderer,” Édouard said with a tiny bow, “it is poignant. I wonder if you-either of you-has any idea where Merlin of Merlin’s World Tour is today?-even as we speak?”
Zuk and I looked at each other, dumbfounded and alarmed. I said: “Don’t tell me-just leave it to that wizardly Merlin to be in Caramel-Creamistan right now. Probably staying in the president’s private palace or sumpm. Curses! The Divine Melvin has gotta have all the love in the world for himself and can’t leave two crumbs for somebody else.” I rolled my eyes in disgust. “He is with Mrs. Khazarolova?” Zuk asked, whitening under her mossy tan. I saw that if Zuk’s fantastic past had somehow swallowed me up in the last few days, no less had my ridiculous and clumsy destiny overtaken her, so that she was not even properly skeptical to hear that my old man might have turned up in the mansion of her boss, the premier of Caramel-Creamistan, Mrs. Khazarolova herself. “Choleria-he is with her?” she almost choked.
“No, no-such a coincidence, like something in a storybook, I don’t ask you to credit,” Édouard replied with a smile. “Not quite. All the same!-Merlin is, in fact, a great favorite of Mrs. Khazarolova. Possibly you know that he performed at l’Oase in Samovarobad as her guest last spring?” We didn’t know. Édouard leaned over to offer us a plate of fig newtons. I took five. Zuk stared at the plate without seeing.
“Let me put the entire case in perspective for you,” Édouard went on. “Rohring Rohring Psychiatric Clinic of course contacted Merlin’s American agent as soon as Miss Koderer was missed. The agent reached Merlin somewhere in Cambodia, via Hanoi. Merlin, hearing of the involvement of a Karamul-Karamistani doctor in the case, thought of his great friendship with Mrs. Khazarolova, and wired Mrs. Khazarolova, via Hanoi, requesting her assistance. Ladies, you must bear in mind that Merlin is at this moment the best-loved American in all Soviet Central Asia. What commissar, petty or great, would not fall over her feet to please him?
“And so I have my orders straight from Mrs. Khazarolova, and you, Gulaim, may be sure you have yours as well. Your diplomatic passport is temporarily revoked. You are recalled to Karamul-Karamistan at once.”
“Very good, is exactly what I want, and the rest will be business of nobody but me. You can fix papers for the girl?”
“Gulaim, you cannot think of bringing the child. I must inform you, you are greatly mistaken in the level of interest you attribute to her father. Merlin is at this moment flying to Washington, from Hanoi, via Bangkok, Moscow and New York. He has canceled engagements for a fortnight. This is Friday. I don’t see how he can arrive in Baltimore before Sunday or Monday. He means, of course, to see his daughter Ursula. He presumes she will be back in custody by that time. He sends her a message.” Édouard handed me a yellow consulate teletype. There was a half page of minestrone in some whirly alphabet and then it read: OKAY, URSIE, YOU’VE GOTTEN MY ATTENTION. I’M COMING. MERLIN.
“Of all the cheek!” I said, handing it to Zuk. “He thinks I did it just to roast his oysters, when I’d finally managed to forget his existence completely.”
“Ursula, you must listen carefully,” said Cousin Édouard. “Your father is coming chiefly to shield you from legal responsibility in the matter of the death of internationally known psychiatrist Reinhold Feuffer. You need this protection, do you understand? But as for the other psychiatrist in the case, whom he knows only as Doctor Zuk, the Visiting Youth Psychiatry Fellow from Karamul-Karamistan, who apparently left with his daughter-Merlin says he is ‘studying the situation.’ I believe this means that if you are back in hospital by Tuesday and have done yourself no harm in the meantime, the matter may be overlooked. So you see, dear ladies, for the good of both of you, there can be no question of sustaining this holiday beyond Tuesday next. If you try to enter Karamul-Karamistan together, even supposing you can get papers and a plane, you, my cousin, will be detained, and Miss Koderer returned at once to United States. And both of you will be in a great deal of trouble.”
“Choleria, you think after what I have lived through already in this life I am scared before that little trouble? God he closes one gate and opens a thousand. To get away from Red Army robots and old-style Foodian analysts, nothing is too much. We can come down into desert of Kyzl Kum from Pamirs, or airplane of certain friend of mine can drop us in desert, other old friend can find us with horses in chosen place. I know every rock and water spring, for years we can live like queens with old comrades of my father in Hunger Steppe of Betpak-Dala, where nobody dares even come for look. You think I have hidden in desert all those years with Der Kaifer for nothing? Like you in swamp is Zuk in Hunger Desert.”
Édouard shrugged. “Very well, Gulaim. If you are determined to become the wild woman of Betpak-Dala with your small and lost American friend, two stateless persons running like mice in the desert from rock to rock as long as you last, who am I to say no? When you must flee border police in winter, I hope Der Kaifer’s old comrades will loan you the fleetest of snow camels. And who knows? Border militia are not so assiduous, especially when the bouran is blowing. Or they may be bribed with-for example-a case of Coca-Cola. Of course you may be jailed,” Édouard pointed out, “or shot.”
“Shot!” I whispered. “If I am arrested, if I am lost, dead, kaput, Bogeywoman can hide in this or that aool for short time with old friends. In eleven more months Bogeywoman is grown woman, free, she can do like she wants.” “Dead!” I whispered, “kaput!” “She will return to Baltimore alone by camel, I suppose?” Édouard inquired. “Sure, make joke, have fun,” Zuk said scornfully, “still Bogeywoman does not go back to bughouse on Tuesday.” “Hey, what the hump,” I said uneasily, thinking of Madame Zuk’s buzzard-picked rib cage sticking out of pink sand, “Rohring Rohring ain’t so bad. I can get outa there anytime, you know I can.” “Like you said it yourself,” Zuk reminded me, “now you are dangerous person. Is not so easy to escape from every-fifteen-minute checks in quietroom.” “Merlin won’t leave me stuck in lockup once he sees I’m okay.” “You are sure? He is ready for give up career to watch over you? If not, he must find somebody…”
I had no answer to that. In fact it was just how I’d landed in Rohring Rohring in the first place. I could choose, back then: the ritzy private bughouse or the juvenile authorities. This time, there was a feast of possibilities, by comparison. The Hunger Steppe stretched to the end of the world, relieved only by the shadow of a trudging snow camel. Or-as long as I was here-the Dismal Swamp lay at my feet, trickling and bubbling, soft enough to swallow me up.
“Let the girl go to her father,” Édouard advised, “and fly home, Gulaim. If you do it now, Mrs. Khazarolova can still be managed. Probably she will even send you back to the West. After all, so few Karamul-Karamistanis are known in the great world-you, and that singer of destan who went to Paris, what’s-his-name, and Kurbangaev, the ovine icterologist. I can’t think-good god, Gulaim-”
Zuk had produced the big black gun with the pebbled grips. Her baggy knuckle was hooked around the trigger like serious business and her hand very faintly shook. “Papers,” she said. “You can fix papers, Édouard, I know you can fix.”
“Pull yourself together, my dear,” Édouard said grimly. “You can do what you like! I will arrange tickets and papers, if this is what you choose. I am trying to give you sound counsel, that is all. Perhaps neither of us will work again. But the person with whom you must talk sits next to you. The girl herself! She looks-not so sure, you see? She has forgot to eat her cakes, though she greedily took half a dozen of them. She looks dazed. She is maybe not ready to carry a carbine all day long in saddle and sleep on it by night in a yurt. She hardly knows where she is right now-how will she do in the desert of Kyzl Kum?”
“You make mistake,” Zuk said, “she is expert tracker, and brave like funambule in circus. Bogey, what you say?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Must I go to the Hunger Desert with Doctor Zuk? I was afraid so. But it wasn’t exactly the red desert I feared, whose terrors would soon be joys. I saw myself thundering off in the pink dust on a Kazakh pony, my heels flapping. I’d probably get the hang of it soon enough, I thought-if Zuk could do it, I could. No, it was madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse who worried me: to be so inescapably tied to her at the other end of the world, to be so close to Madame Zuk as to be one thing. I don’t know why: some sort of hunger for difference had set in.
And yet-no joke-I owed her my life! Even she didn’t know how truly in pawn to her I was, right down to my scarred old skin. How could I refuse to let her save it now? But I no longer needed saving. I had never been so happy, not even at Camp Chunkagunk when I didn’t know I loved girls yet, when Lou Rae Greenrule and I used to come out of the lake together and get our ears popped together at the top of the stone stair.
No, even now, when I thought I might end up a heap of bones in the desert of Kyzl Kum, I was never so happy in my life. I had Doctor Zuk. She had thrown away her safety for me, her job, her country, even her fame. I knew I must never leave her, and yet-what could be queerer-I no longer had to have her. I had her. I was her. I had swallowed her. I had become her. True, I didn’t quite have the whole megillah down yet, the beauty, the style, the clothes. But Zuk was inside me, as sure as my liver or spleen. She would give me lessons.
And if I had her, if I was her, I could have anyone, as she could have anyone. And maybe it would even be true to say that now I was, or at least I was becoming, what I had thought she was. Now that I was her, maybe there was really only one of us-me. Now that I had her, I understood she was not quite the woman I had thought she was at first. She was arrogant-sometimes when she scolded Fazool I found myself thinking: the old bag! She was shaky, wild, even a little mad. Definitely mental. After all, she had thrown herself away on me, on me! But I could never leave her-to leave her would be base, unworthy of her, that is, of me. Now that I had her, I had to have her. At least until we’d both had enough.
“So, Bogey. What do you say?” I opened my mouth and closed it again. “She says nothing. No words come out of her. Édouard. Édouard, I think maybe-I think you are right.” Zuk sat up very straight in the rusty lawnchair. The gun banged onto the table. Édouard smoothly lifted it away. “She is not ready for Betpak-Dala,” Zuk announced. “She is young,” he said. “I was young,” Zuk said gloomily, “you were young.” Édouard replied in Caramel-Creamistani I guess, and they went on whispering back and forth, looking at me, and at each other, and back to me, ardent, long-suffering, resigned, like dream parents from some other world-until I felt left out. “I’ll go,” I said. “I need rest,” Zuk said, “I need think,” but then she gathered herself up in her wet trousers and began to pace the porch floor.
“I wanted to fly to Karamul-Karamistan for her. Not for me,” came that voice cured in the smoke of Mongol firepots. “Of course,” Édouard said. “Me I have seen enough face of camel, like huge malignant peanut, for all my life.” “I quite agree.” “I have sat on hairy kilim on floor more than enough. I have eat kprpuz and kavun until I am sick. If I never wear wadded cotton khalat again in life is too soon.” “Much too soon,” Édouard echoed. “But Bogey is monster, not girl: she cares nothing if clothes make her fat like sausage-you should see what she has on for clothes when I first meet her.” “I can imagine,” Édouard said gravely, eyeing my mildewed shirttails.
“For Bogey, everything new is food for mind, so she can forget harsh exile from summer camp, and dead psychiatrist with broken head. I want to give her country where she is daughter of moon and where she can eat karpuz and hundred melons more from dawn to dark, so long as she rides with Zuk and knows no men. And for her I think is easy. But maybe is not so easy.” “It is not so easy,” said Édouard. You are a leviathan, I thought, even your kiss is like a house fell on me. “I can do it,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll go.”
“What you really say,” Zuk observed, looking shrewdly at me with her pond-green eyes-but from a distance, for she was back on a cloud-bonneted peak with Margaret Meat on her left hand and Sigmund Food on her right-“what you really say is I am like some great roc from sky, I have swooped down and take you away and swallow you.” “More like a house fell over on me,” I peeped, trying to make it sound like just a shack, not a house, but then I could see that, as long as the truth was going to come out, maybe a giant roc was best.
“Yes, I am catastrophe in henhouse-like you tell me once,” she said with bitter pride. “You are one hump of a catastrophe, you are,” I admitted, “but you saved my life. You’re the only real monster I know. I wouldn’t have got better for anybody else.” “They will put you back in bughouse, if you don’t come with me,” she warned. “O no they won’t. They’ll try, but I’m never going back to Rohring Rohring-well maybe later when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself. You’re everything to me,” I told her truthfully, “only… only…” “Only you don’t want everything no more,” she said, “you want only little bit.” It was half true, just half, but I didn’t answer. I loved her reproaches and studied to deserve them.
“Now I must think, must find new way,” she panted to Édouard, or to herself, drawing herself clear of me again with a swirl of air and sumpm silver flashing. She paced a couple times more up and down the rotten porch-Édouard’s spaniels, regarding this tumult of legs, shrank away under the table. All at once she banged through the screen door and ran headlong down the dock to shore. Trotted along the mud bank a ways and disappeared into the blackgreen wall of the woods. The last thing I saw was one white calf flickering in the creepers. Then nothing. I jumped up.
“Please sit down. Do not fear for my cousin. God’s gate is her gate,” Édouard assured me, through the snake charmer’s oboe of his large and perfect nose. “Let her go. She knows the swamp. She knows what these woods are.” He raised his two hands, lazily invoking peace, not really caring whether it came or not. I narrowed my eyes at his beautiful-ugly face, but instead of running after her, I listened to him, shifting foot to foot-which was what gave her that fatal headstart.
Édouard said: “Perhaps we all know more than we say-? Even you, Miss Koderer?” (On this interrogative note, the gazelles of his eyebrows leaped, sailed, landed.) “My cousin is a remarkable woman, even great. I myself was one of her devoted, ah, students, at one time. But she has made a grave mistake. I don’t mean merely she has had the bad luck to offend her political patrons. This time she has gone too far.”
“She saved my life,” I said.
“She has made a mistake-not only a mistake-the mistake,” Édouard said, “broken not a rule-the rule.”
“For me she always did the right thing.”
“That is beside the point,” said Cousin Édouard. He gazed at me somberly. “My cousin is in disgrace. She sees that now. She has every right to lose herself,” he went on, “in a swamp well suited to that end, indeed I find it a noble choice, a beautiful choice, if this is what she chooses.”
“You mean you think she-o no-o my godzilla-”
I ran after her. That Édouard might hope to lose me in the Dismal right behind her, to turn us monstrous girlfriends into leather boggywomen with one mild wave of his hand-well, I thought of that later, but even that wouldn’t have stopped me at the time. I tracked the fat exclamation points of her silver sandals in the crusted mud.
Madame Zuk I repeat was no sylph but the length of the intervals amazed me. What strength she had with her belly dancer’s bulk, what spring in her silvery heels! The craters of her passing were as legible as puddles after a day of rain-some of them filled right up with swamp water and I saw them shining like stars. So far the trail was easy as pie, the trail was pie, while it lasted, a soft pumpkin-red custard all along the ditch bank. In the scummy water below, rings shed rings where startled reptiles had belly-flopped, and the air was never still-more buzzing, crackling and humming than the black cavity of a telephone. Once a root caught my bare foot and I almost went into the soup myself-my palms printed red dough. Then I winced to think of her running on those things, and pretty soon there it was, the little broken-off silver cone of the first heel, sticking up like a golf tee, and the hop, hop, hop of the other where she had righted herself. Here she tried to go on with no heel but the little nails were poking up into the pad, here was the deep round pock where she stood on her right foot and rocked and swayed and cursed and unbuckled-I calculated the arc and there it hung high in the smilax, one arched silver left sole with no heel, a sliding board for toads.
On she went and never fell and vaulted over trickling cracks in the peat and bore left, jogging along the ditches. We seemed to be in an ever-curving maze screwing down to some core, some center. The smoke that hung waist-high in the whole bog thickened. I coughed and sneezed and blinked back tears, but galloped on, I hoped, at least as fast as Zuk. I figured she had already horrified the rattlers back into their holes with her stampede so I could run faster, but just in case, contrary to the prescriptions of classical wood wizardry, I thrashed through the clumps of greenbriar and tupelo as loud as I could. Zuk’s white shirt caught on this and that-I tore it off and ran naked. Her tracks were so fresh I could almost see them puffing like dough prodded by a finger, and for a while I thought I might be hearing her. Or was that distant rumbly suck, suck, suck my heart?
I was gasping and soon I began to see that pacing round and round my quietroom in the bughouse or playing pukelele all day long with the Bug Motels was no way to get in shape for a life-or-death chase through the Dismal Swamp. The superhuman strength of the mental patient had deserted me. Doctor Zuk on the other hand must have been running 440 hurdles on the sly. You’d think I’d have been more scared what with turf fires all around but-I realize now I was counting on old Zuk to know I was there and save me, if not herself. She’d never lead me into eaten-away peat bogs whose cores fell in, I thought. Or would she?
On and on, her pegleg track (one bare sole, one high-heeled sandal) never flagged. Not even after I saw the first bright dot of blood under the big toe of her bare left foot-I fell to my knees to look at this up close. I panted like a dog. I touched my tongue to her blood just as a fat drop of sweat fell from my nose and washed it away. I was beginning to doubt I’d ever see her again. I crawled to the next drop of blood and the next. Curses upon her, she hadn’t even slowed down yet. How could she go on like this, hobbling gigantically on one high heel like some Oedipus from Vogue?
Suddenly her footprints were everywhere; there seemed to be twice as many as she could possibly need. Was I seeing double? My heart drowned. At least down here where I crawled the smoke was still thin, and even when her tracks were blurred or smeared I could trace their edges with a finger. What if I lost her? What if I had to find my own way out? I realized I’d just been following, following. Some Wood Wiz lost-finder I’d turned out to be!-I’d given not a thought to north, south, east or west, or wind, or hour of day. In hindsight, prickles of sunlight flashed all over the sky, like lights on a spinning top, spiny blobs here, there and everywhere, piercing through rifts in trees. Where the hump was I? Nowhere but on her trail. But I couldn’t give up so I sobbed and crawled on.
And soon I saw sumpm else that sank my heart. Here was why her footprints were blurred and smeared-another set of feet mixed in with hers. I had no idea how long ago I’d started to see them, only that it was long. And maybe I’d counted them out because there was sumpm so repulsive about them, sumpm frightfully plain, deeply dull, sumpm so familiar and disgusting. What was it? I put my nose to them. A faint stink. They were grub-shaped, reticulated, ordinary. What then? That well-known shiny spot, no whorl left, there under the right first metatarsal where Dr. Beasley had dug the plantar wart out-they were mine! my own feet. Good godzilla this meant she had lapped me, we had gone in a circle and were still going, all three of us, two Madame Zuks and now me.
I loped on in despair, sometimes two-legged, sometimes propping myself like an ape with one hand, sometimes down again on all fours. I would never really have her or be her, I would never be the woman that Zuk was, not even in the woods. She had proved that. She had risen brilliantly back into my sky by reducing me to a crawl-at least I could breathe down here, where I richly deserved to be. But she only made sport of me this way for a short stretch. Now her intervals were less. She might be tiring, or maybe just tired of the race. After all she knew she had me beat. From now on she walked straight up on her one high heel at an easy pace, swinging her hips like a woman going home from a swim in the river. A canebrake crowded the bank and afterwards I discerned in the red mud only the footprints of our two old selves, the wild old Zuk and the scared-stiff young Bogeywoman chasing her. The new Zuk had veered off somewhere. The new Bogeywoman had not yet caught up.
She had struck off into the bog on no trail at all. Right away I sank in up to my ankles behind her, and the blackish red peat water hissed and bubbled around my hucklebones like drippings from a steak. It didn’t take a wood wizard-I saw plainly the hole in the honeysuckle where she’d torn it. Aimless, thin salt-and-pepper mist floated out of it. But on its other side dark smoke boiled in great swirling crepe ribbons and bows, and I heard a low roar. I sank exhausted against a cypress stump and stared at its broiled and twisted boll. It had a face like a gargoyle, where an iridescent beetle was crawling. I climbed onto it and as soon as my feet dangled free, Zuk exploded up from the honeysuckle and, showering red water everywhere, shot past me. Somehow I flew at her and got hold of the one silver sandal. “Sorry, dear Bogey-I never mean to harm-” She kicked me hard in the stomach. A wrench and her wet foot popped free. There I was, bunched over my belly, holding her sandal. I tried to say goodbye-oooof, was all that came out. She leaped over a heap of logs into that black smoke and you know the rest. An amphitheater of sparks, a million crumbs of orange flame, rose up behind her, opened like a cape and ate her. Then white steam everywhere.