Bogeywoman

tomorrow night Gooskuk probably gets hungry and takes a bite of the ball of sumpm disgusting and on and on and back and forth… What do you think?”

The hard-boiled egg yolk moon ploughed into a blue cloud and turned into a pirate ship. Lou Rae sighed desolately and whispered back, “I despise those boring Chunkagunk legends that go on and on and around and around and refuse to end.” “Well, like Gooskuk says, to a silly rabbit the world is what it is, gunk for lunch, over and over. That’s why a brave girlgoyle has to fast someday, to find out what’s for dinner, that is, if she ever wants to eat anything but stewed worms.” “I fast between candy bars,” Lou Rae murmured. It was true she was the pickiest eater at Chunka Chow, and, except for her amazingly big momps, as thin as a birdleg. “Anyway that is the legend of the lost chunkagunk, the magic food of Gooskuk that never runs out or gets any less.” “How repulsive,” said Lou Rae. “Well, yeah, course it is. If it was any good they’d run out of it. But this way nobody starves, not even if they want to.”

The moon hurried on, always in the same place, a whippoorwill sang and we thought this over. “So how does Grandmother Bearsquaw get her ball of food back?” Lou Rae asked. “She doesn’t. There’s always more of that where that came from,” I reminded her. “I know where the lost chunkagunk got lost,” Lou Rae mumbled sleepily. “Where?” I asked, then I heard her lacy snore.

So Doggett tented us together and probably hoped I would drag Lou Rae behind me to Evening Pro and Chunka Chow and Wood Wiz and Lake Sci (and by now I was thinking grimly: Why these bleached-bra Christian girls from Maine have to cuten the entire world with nicknames I don’t know) but exactly the opposite happened. Pretty soon I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody and I wanted to be near Lou Rae. Pretty soon I would rather hang around Lou Rae than please Mrs. Doggett, the excellent old dame with a meringue of white hair on top who ran Camp Chunkagunk from the turret of the lodge. Mrs. Doggett was rarely seen, but she knew everything that went on, and she had shown me her favor. She was top queen and I was bottom girl, I mean I was the Bogeywoman, once wild but now tame. She picked me to be herself on Upside Down Day, let me rule the camp with her long old-fashioned spyglass for a scepter and even dressed me in her lilac crepe, measly in the shoulders, baggy at the waist-she stuffed a towel in the widow’s hump herself. And she went around with a bowl-cut mophead on her head and blue- veined legs sticking out of my camp shorts like columns of Roquefort cheese.

But now I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. All at once camp, which had always been swampy with life for me, thick with acts, canoeing the rich dark lake, tracking the amorous woods, trying to get the eye of the older girls-all at once camp seemed busy and in the way.

This was that morning I had been doing the dead man’s float and suddenly wanted to put my hand between my Lake Twinny’s long green legs, and so found out what a Bogeywoman really was. I was out beyond the White Caps’ rope, swimming with the other White Caps around and around the float farthest out in the cold white lake, careful like never before, lemme drown first, not even to brush another girl’s toe with my finger tips. I thought of Lou Rae: way in, out of sight, Lou Rae was dog-paddling through oyster-purple shallows, tearing them shaggy with her fellow Red Caps, all on the verge of panic, most of them little girls half her age. Then thank godzilla a whistle blew. Lake Sci ended. Our little cove of Missionary Lake emptied. The water flattened to a mirror. A double file of campers snaked slowly up the steep stair cut into the bluff, and at the top two counselors, two older girls as tall as priestesses, let go two drops of alcohol into the ears of two girls one step down. The holes in your ears would open as you walked away, with a furry and satisfying pop.

I looked around for Lou Rae. Usually we met here at the bottom, went up the stairs together and got our ears popped together, but she was gone. I knew she couldn’t have drowned. No Red Cap, however in love with death, could tangle herself in the duck lettuce and drown, for her Lake Twinny would holler and older girls would blow their whistles and in a moment she would be spotted in the cold brown tea washing about everybody’s shins. And even if she had thrown away her Red Cap they would haul her up by her yard of hair. I let go of this beautiful nightmare: No, Lou Rae hadn’t drowned but had given me the slip before I could talk her into going to Wood Wiz. She figured me for some kind of enforcer for Doggett and the wood wizardess-which maybe I was. I felt the blood swarm in my cheeks. I tried to head for the Wood Wiz tracking sand pit but my feet bent like dowsing rods towards Lou Rae. I went to our tent at the end of the tentline.

And that was how I found her, sitting on a spar under a green tent flap with her feet dangling above the weeds. Tell me she wasn’t trying to cook my goose: There wasn’t a blessed thread on her front, except for the grapey bunches of her hair. On her head was that pancake stack of maple leaves, fixed on with bobby pins, and she had two silver dollars of gray mud on her pink cheeks.

Today I knew what I was-to get the eye of the older girls, I ran the fastest when I was watched; when all those eyeballs lightened the air, my feet vibrated like violins. And now my fingers buzzed to find the fairy body under that hair. I put one bitten nail to the mud on her face instead.

“For the complexion,” she explained, in that honking contralto that always took me by surprise-there’s sumpm so touching in a beauty who thinks she needs to be funny. “Even Indian princesses wear the lost chunkagunk-for the complexion.” “Er-are you a princess?” (I wanted to kiss her bare brown foot with the chipped Revlon Candy Apple polish still clinging in patches to three of its five toes. I wanted her to say she’d run the world if I would give it to her, since I could give it to her if she wanted it. I mean, she did run it. She ran mine.)

“No,” she said sadly. She was holding that white metal bandaid box full of mud, with a pencil sticking out of it. We had the last tent in the tentline, miles from any water. I suspected she had spit in the dry dirt in the can or probably even peed in it, half out of laziness, half to ripen its powers. Lou Rae made up religion as she went along.

“You could be my princess,” I said shyly. She looked up at me with curiosity and I saw, the size of a flea, a blond-bearded long-faced billy goat totter on spindly hind legs across the amber clearings of her eyes, chewing a tin can-was that what she saw in me? I shrank into my shoulders. I wished my neck would eat my head, so I could disappear.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m Princess Isabella and you’re my loyal handmaiden Mademoiselle, er, Flotilla. Remember when we sailed our pinnace down Missionary Lake to claim the lost chunkagunk for-for la beaute?”

“O yeah,” I humored her, “that was when we, er, brought torah to the red women.”

“That was the missionary part. This was the cosmetic part.”

“So I forget, did we find the lost chunkagunk?”

“Did we find the lost chunkagunk! Well suppose I tell you this dump was the capital of la beaute, under the czars! Or anyway near it.” And now her voice slid low in her throat and she leaned towards my ear, so that her cascading ringlets and the bare breasts under them grazed my shoulder. “Want me to show you where?”

And that was it, never mind Wood Wiz, off we were going to find the site of the lost chunkagunk. I didn’t even think what dank bower Lou Rae might lead me to, only that we would be alone. If I had known that I would end up losing camp, I might have dragged my feet. Lou Rae had a red bedspread. She cinched it around her with a yellow cinch belt and clapped on a pair of sixty-wrapper white Mr. Peanut sunglasses, and held on tight to her bandaid box (“for samples”) and tucked the pencil bobbing behind her ear. I followed her onto the beaten path between tentlines. Far off at its dusty fork I saw girls doing normal stuff in green camp shorts, but Lou Rae suddenly struck off into the zigzag pine forest on no trail at all. Hot-cheeked, I watched her red bedspread decapitate saplings, drag leaves and sticks, snag on ferns and lasso blackberry spurs with its tendrils.

We went on so long I knew that Wood Wiz must be over. The woods thinned out. We came to a barbed wire fence sagging off a wormy fencepost. On the wrong side (wrong because I knew at once that this was the end of camp) were cows, cows of a pale brown the exact tint of used tea bags, with the same dark melancholy shadings along their edges, ringing their ears and their great brown eyes. I stood and stared at them. They were the most beautiful, the most womanly, cows I had ever seen, and not only because I knew the gnawed-down pasture they stood in could not be camp. It was a forbidden place, and it looked it: the crust was lunar, the cows slender and agile, like enchanted girls, the cattle of some sorceress.

I had never before gone off camp grounds, and of all the rules of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, this was the strictest: she who left camp and got caught would never be let back in. It was a funny feeling even to stand inside camp looking out, as I did every morning waiting for the bugle for Lake Sci, staring across the slate of cold lake at houses the size of dice along its far shore, knowing there were regular people in them, grownups with jobs and diseases, dully eating breakfast. When it finally came, Get in the water you dirty bums on that same scratchy record, the icewater lake was a relief.