Bogeywoman

Then I can’t marry you, my Magic Maid.

Nobody asked you, sir, she said.

But just now in a cow pasture in Maine, she was flouncing back towards the boundary of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, in that maddening bedspread, springing lightly over the barbed wire fence back into camp, and I followed in a fog, in pig-iron grief. I could hardly lift my cannonball knees, my head lolled on a broken spring, but she was fully recovered. She looked back at me over her shoulder, across her red train, and said: “Bogeywoman-you know what?” “No, what?” I growled. “I know-don’t ask me how I know but I know-you were my wood wizard in another life.”

I narrowed my eyes at her red back. I understood she was throwing me a bone and at the same time explaining away her mysterious but passing attraction to me. O yeah? what life was that? I wanted to sneer. Back when we were both lumpy funguses and nobody had a coneyhole or a frog dangle? I never was one to go for that girlgoyle slumber party drivel about reincarnation-everybody’s souls flying around in beans with bus transfers until they find a new body to land in.

All the same there was sumpm in what she said that made the sweat pop out in oily beads on my forehead. You were my wood wizard in some other life-in other words, her spirit guide from one world to another. And even though she had it upside down, and obviously the red-ragged little hussy was leading me, still she was right about that, I had wound up in some other world than I’d ever meant to. Things only looked the same. I dragged on behind her. I dragged my feet through the blackened leaves of the forest bottom, trying not to track or even see her huge and ridiculous spoor in the stringy humus. But I couldn’t shake the habit of camp so easily. I ached with disgusted, stale hunger. I sensed all hope of her had been marooned on this isle of the lost chunkagunk in a golden past, and now instead of showing me her pretty coochie slick and pink like a little wing of bubblegum, with the spit of expectation sparkling on it, she would reminisce. Of ancient travels with her wood wizard, that wily giant rabbit-hole, the Bogeywoman. Yes I saw it coming, more and more mystical twaddle like this, with her pink Lollipop underpants back on.

I didn’t go crazy yet, that was tomorrow or the next day. First I tried to be back in camp, to love Wood Wiz and Lake Sci, zealously to scrape plates for hog slops in KP and buck up for seconds in raspberry cuss and play my ukulele for Chunka Talent Parade and sing alto in Evening Pro up at the Wig:

She rolls along like a cannonball,

Like a star in its heavenly flight,

And the train I’m on,

She’s the queen of them all,

She’s the streamlined cannonball.

HOW LOVE GOT ME OUT OF THERE

Now here’s when I really went flooey, broke the dreambox but good. It was Wood Wiz, Tracking-tracking up at the sand pit on the southern edge of camp.

Tracking was the domain of Willis Marie Bundgus, a six-foot Yankee maiden and true wood wizardess, with a great ruffled headpiece of palomino hair like pinewood shavings, and breasts like horns, and a behind as big as a wheelbarrow, which had led me through hemlock forest and cranberry bog and over the Camel’s Needle. Camp is corn, camp is the corniest, but you know you know sumpm when you can look at a few random scratches in dirty rain-pocked sand and see in your mind’s eye not only what small lives have cruised by here in their endless foraging but what dog ate what dog when. Willis Bundgus knew all this and taught me what she could. And therefore I loved Willis Bundgus with a love pure and true, the love of a pilgrim for her saint of perfect action, the love of a slave for the broad back of Harriet Tubman moving through the swamp on a moonless night. But also, I admit it-though I didn’t know it myself yet, it must have been there-with the ace-in-the-hole love of a boygirl, a bogeygirl, for a real woman. It started with Margaret: a big woman, bigger than me, not fat but grand in all her architecture, with a big scary cliff of bosom and a big solid county seat at the bottom of it, has always been my ideal. To be up to a woman like that! Not to go on forever flitting through the underbrush, a skinny wood elf weighed down by virtually no secondaries in the sexual traits department, but menschlike to inherit the world, towns, factories, the fertile plain. Well, that was Willis Bundgus. Not that I saw, at the time, any more than her fine flanks stretching the denim shiny in great twin lobes when she bent over the sand pit and said:

“There was war to the grim death here. Tell us about it, Koderer.”

And I got down on my hands and knees in the sand like she had taught me, and squinted at a few dumb gashes with the low sun buttering them from the other side.

“A pregnant mouse galloped through here and disappeared, but I don’t think anything ate it.”

“Good,” she said in a bored voice.

“Ooooo look here it veered off-probably a chicken hawk passed over-but nothing happened. The sand’s not torn up.”

“Hmmm.”

“Wait-a raccoon-” I crawled around the pit in a spilled alphabet font of starry feet, which had sunk deep. “The old male swung through here and ate up, uh-oh, looks like somebody’s pink dry cleaning ticket.”

“You call that a fight to the bitter end?” Willis drawled.

“Well, somebody didn’t get their dress slacks back.”

“Koderer, Koderer, put your beady eyes on the ground, let the dead talk to you.”

Dead? dead? but then I screwed down my nose and saw the corpses all over the place, everywhere I looked: crumbs of green lacewing, two links, then three more, of a salamander spine, tiny teeth, dry eggs, claws, half a beetle carapace, rust-red frass of the hornworm, a lone whisker sticking out of a bit of snout leather-all that was left of some least weasel the hawk ate-a whole skull the size of a freckle: all this carnage epochs beyond its original disturbance, part of the calm sand itself. You just had to get down there to see from the wreckage what a twenty- table grange hall ham & oyster supper that sand was, what a feast run amok the whole earth was, only how could you tell the eater from the eats? You couldn’t. And what but your own greedy appetite led you out there on the bonewhite tablecloth in the first place, where every passing turkey buzzard could get an eyeful of you? It was a wonder anything ever came out of its hole-and suddenly I saw this: Only merciful hunger blanks out death.

“The whole sand pit’s an oinking boneyard,” I said.

“Good stuff, eh, Bogeywoman?” said Willis, pleased to see my nose touching the ground. The moniker showed I was back in her favor again, and living up to my reputation as girl guide to snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails- her heiress in short.

She had a thing for me, I know she did, and she was woman enough to dish up sumpm for everybody, even if she was supposedly pinned to some carburetorhead from East Millinocket at the time, no doubt the only abner from her high school tall enough to look her in the eye. Wherever she is, I’ll bet by now Willis Marie Bundgus has shucked the denim from those flanks for any number of girlgoyles, though fuddies too of course. She had appetites-I could tell.

This was the second day after that terrible afternoon when Lou Rae Greenrule loved me for twelve and a half minutes and left me, and now I was awake at camp with my blood a-quarrel, with my once sleepy appetites whistling on their haunches like a metropolis of prairie dogs. After lunch, during Quiet Hour, while Lou Rae sat Indian fashion on her red bedspread, playing Old Maid of the Klondike, I lay on my cot, eyes bulging; I swear I could hear the cold and scheming blood swish by my ears, and suddenly I had the idea to go and visit Willis Bundgus.

She was always easy to find, and I knew she wouldn’t turn me away. She would be at the Wood Wiz Wigwam, an old one-room smokehouse with some dusty specimens on the ledges, or at the tracking pit just beyond, near the southern edge of camp-in fact a warning wire just touched its far edge. No-woman’s-land. Thirty yards into it a small and dented blue trailer sat on concrete blocks in the woods. I had never been there, of course, but once or twice I had seen Willis talking through its porthole. The camp handyman lived there, Ottie Grayson.

Ottie was six foot four or five and homely. What he looked like was a long fork. He grinned his rubbery face into deep grooves, grinned all day every day, though practically all the work he did about the place required a shovel. True, with that face, as soon as he squinted into the sunlight, he seemed to be yuk-yukking even when he wasn’t. There would be a fresh trench around, say, Nurse’s Bungalow, and Ottie’s head sticking out of it with that smile and big red sunburnt ears under his flat-top, and worst of all, his Adam’s apple jumping around in his neck like a finger