Bogeywoman

the half a battered pack she’d picked up for herself, feeding herself to the Regicide. I stuck a coupla towels behind her head, pronged two fingers into the side pocket of her skirt-her hipbone stuck up like a rock in a harbor-and worked the Luckies out. I lit one for each of us. We smoked in worried silence. I mean, her head was still stuck all this time in the toilet pipe. Brown blood matted the pale floss at her hairline.

I thought I could smell the hot blue smoke on her that blows in your gills whenever you even kiss, never mind oink, somebody for a practical reason. I was trying to think of a way to artistically make her feel better, feel sumpm, when I was almost too scared to touch her. “Er, is it any fun, oinking a guy like the Regicide?” She shrugged. “Reggie ain’t so bad,” she said. “Him and me go way back. A lot of these fuddies won’t give you carfare to welfare. Reg, if he’s got two dollars you got one.” I smiled half-heartedly. She had to stop thinking of men that way. “Here’s the hump about Reginald,” she went on, “you never come first with him, ya see. You’re one bitch, he’s probly got five or six bitches, maybe even ten or a dozen bitches. He’s like the mayor of the bitches of Reggieville and you just get one vote. He’ll even tell you that very reasonable: He’ll run your life for you if you want him to, but you’re only gonna get one vote in Reggieville. The general good of Reggieville comes first, he says. He’s gotta keep peace among the bitches, ya see.” I nodded.

“Say, Ursie. You’re the only girl I’d do it with. But I don’t exactly think of you as a girl.” Again I smiled crookedly. I didn’t dare ask her what, exactly, she thought of me as. “I don’t want to run your life,” I said. “Hey, why not?” she spooky-fluted with a spooky smile, “ain’t it fun to run somebody’s life?” “I don’t even like to run the vacuum cleaner,” I hastily lied. For I wouldn’t mind one bit running everyone’s life, and then I could tell them to run the vacuum cleaner. It was just O poisonally I was scared to boss around. Frankly I didn’t think she’d listen.

“Let’s kiss, Ursie.” She closed her eyes halfway and stuck out her tongue a little. Her head was nicely framed in the toilet pipe, wreathed in and out with tongues of platinum hair. My heart started to gong Charlie Chan style, but I thought twice. I mean her forehead was still bleeding a little and the other three Bug Motels, who were probably listening, might throw open the door-it was quiet in there, too quiet, but every now and then Dion yelled out Hurry up in there you lesbos with a whoop of goofy laughter.

So I thought twice. But I had been starving too long. She waggled that pink goldfish of a tongue and said, “Come on, Ursie. Kiss.” “Right now?” I said. “Sure.” “You got nowhere to put your head.” “So lie down on top of me.” Wincing for her, but panting like a guilty dog I lay down on top of her body in its tight peel of black and pink. And since I was literally wincing, my lips curling back in animal dread from my teeth, in went her tongue as smooth as a letter opener. O my oasis-silk crossed the border, pepper oil, dried apricots, olives, tokay, how long we went on trading like this at the water hole I don’t know, not long, when

“Gorgeous, stupid youths-perhaps you can explain me what is the difficulty?” Came into my ears for the first time that voice, that slow, scraping violoncello of a voice, melodious against the smoke of a hundred thousand Gypsygirl cigarettes. I pitched a bit to the right to see who it was, my hand still on O’s keel- puncturing hipbone. The door had opened above us, and here was Emily dragging help by the arm after all-a stranger, a woman, probably a doctor, long necked, muscular, her gray springy hair convict-cropped, her handsome face not young. No spring chicken but a silvery winter weasel-right away I thought of Mustela erminea.

I should have been horrified, considering that I was still a Unbeknownst To Everybody. Above all no dreambox mechanic should get wind-the nerve of these royals, butting into my private life, not to mention my death, if I should choose to off myself, with the rent here as steep as it was and the grub just eatable-and if any royal should ask me flat out, I’d never talk (lemme die first). Well, the woman observing me was clearly a royal, but of some novel and dazzling subspecies that mixed me up-and I ask myself, could I have been falling in love with Zuk already?

But she was a royal, so an excuse for lying on top of O could not be far away, here it was: “Thank godzilla you came,” I panted, with Camp Chunkagunk earnest. “I couldn’t have held up her head another minute. I got her loose as far as her ears,” and I bent out those small translucent cockleshells like a medical exhibit. “Maybe we could vaseline em.”

The newcomer stood between the two open doors of Bertie’s private bathroom and private closet, running her fingers through her spiky hair, looking back and forth from the H of laughing gas to the two shrimpy and sheepish boy worshippers kneeling at its foot among the smelly shoes and tennis balls, and on to the two girlgoyles lying en sandwich with their tongues lately in each other’s mouths, one of them with her head wrapped in the toilet pipe. She wore a soft and clinging dress of sumpm pearly gray-coulda been weasel pelt. And now she began laughing, slowly, low in her throat, in a kind of disbelief. “From where you kids organize this thing?”-pointing at the H. No one said anything for a rather long time, then Bertie: “Found it.” “Where you found it?” Shifty eyes, skating round and round behind his round little-boy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, no reply. “Come, tell me, what room you got it? I don’t punish, I want be sure you don’t screw up anesthesia of somebody.” “It was loose,” Bertie assured her. She snorted. “Yes, I believe you-far too much loose articles around this rich like Rockefeller hospital. So. You gave it good home. And job. But you are sure it wasn’t already employed and you liberated…?” “It was down on three. On the landing.” She nodded her approval.

Now she turned her attention to the girlgoyles on the bathroom floor. Actually I might as well not have been there for all the attention the woman paid to me. She took over. She knelt down to O with a decisive squeak of her high-heeled sandals.

“This is very lovely girl,” she said, with thrilling irrelevance for a dreambox mechanic, looking curiously at the face she found between her hands. Her hands were ugly, clean and square, with gnawed-down fingernails and no rings. “Too much maquillage around the eyes, I show you better way later, my dear, if you remind me. How in hell you got here anyway,” she murmured, but uninterrogatively, and parted the hair a little with her fingertips to look. “These-are-nothing, little punchholes all under hair, except here maybe could use one stitch, later will be just little white star at hairline, quite pretty I think.”

Haven’t we gone about far enough with the royal commentary on the mental patient’s beaute? “Say, are you a dreambox adjustor or what?” I blurted. “Why you want to know that, my dear?” she said without turning around, “a minute ago you are glad to see me, no? You want to help?-find me soap. How you gorgeous stupid youths live without soap?”

It was true we Bug Motels were a by and large soapless society, but I flew to my private bathroom and pried away, from the center of the mirror, a hockey puck of orange Dial I had stuck there long ago so I wouldn’t have to look at my nose. “Here it is,” I panted. “Is good work.” She let go of O’s dreambox, which banged against the pipe. “Sufferin cheeses,” O said through her teeth, “get me outa here.” “I’ll hold her headbone,” I offered, “I’m strong as a little French horse and I got experience.” At that the woman stopped dead on her way to the sink and looked over, not at O, at me, at me! with sudden interest, her face at an odd tilt, one eye asquint. Involuntarily my hand stole to my nose. Maybe sumpm was hanging off it. “You are Ursula Koderer,” she divined. “Um, er, uh…” But why prevaricate? Some little bit of fame had evidently stuck to me behind my back. “Yeah,” I said, slitting my eyes at her, feeling a happy, cozy little glow of suspicion, “so what if I am?”

But already she was at the sink with her back to me, rubbing up a lather, and I eyeballed the busy jiggle of her muscular buttocks with conscious impudence. “Sufferin cheeses, hurry up,” O croaked. I crawled over to the toilet and took her dreambox by the ears, without even seeing, this time, how bloody, how pretty-that quick, the silver weasel had taken over.

And then that personage herself elbowed me out of the way, carrying mounds of foam. “O yeah, the old soap trick, why didn’t I think of that?” I muttered. “Because is too easy. You are heroical type,” she explained in that scratchy, ironical contralto that, as long as I knew her, refused to hurry itself for any calamity. “You climb pear tree, leap over wall, maybe break neck, without first to try gate. Charming, I know this type well.” “Whaddaya mean? What do you know about me,” I said, unable to give her up so soon, but she had gone on to more important stuff and steadfastly ignored me.

I studied her from behind. She was more tall than short, more fleshy than boney, and she seemed to be as fit as a soldier in the field, though with those gnarled hands and that gray spiky pelt on her head you could say she looked her age, whatever her age was-sumpm between thirty and sixty. Only the Abominable Snowman could have put his hands around that waist but she was long and lithe in the spine and the back of the neck, with a sturdy compact derriere that worked up and down like twin pistons as she energetically lathered O’s ears, and again I thought of the elegant and voracious lines of a winter weasel or a mink that for the sheer fun of it kills ten times as