Bogeywoman

much as it eats. You might suppose I would take this as a caution, but I felt only hungry wonder at sumpm new in the usually boring line of grownups-to be exact, a grown-up woman who had none of the martyred flab and grizzle about her of somebody’s wife, somebody’s ninth-grade teacher, or somebody’s mother.

Bossy as hump, though-you could tell that already. And another thing I noticed right away as I took in the soft gray drapery from her throat to her knees, and the glinting pearl stockings along the blades of the shins and over the curve of the soleus, which was developed like a soccer player’s. As the Bogeywoman, as Merlin’s daughter, as apprentice to the wood wizardess and a slob all my life, I had never paid any attention to clothes. But hers I could tell were beautiful and, sumpm else, they meant money. Her money-it was printed on her whole air like NABISCO on a cracker-a certain kind of authority-yes, a lady dreambox mechanic rolled in her own dough. And for the first time I realized that one day, or not, if I didn’t off myself, I’d have to have some too. Not clothes. Money.

So. Her hands piled with lather, she sat down on O like a kayaker to hold her in place, reached all business through the hole between fill pipe and toilet and soaped the small ears. “Ouch, sufferin cheeses,” O whined and pulled this way and that way. “Relax head,” commanded the weasel, sinking hard fingers in the blond clouds of Mary Hartline hair, and O instantly sort of broke at the stalk of her neck and the headbone dangled there, with the doctor’s other hand guiding the chin, but it was still stuck. “Ch-ch-choleria!” doctor weasel snarled; it was the most terrible curse I had ever heard, and afterwards I could see little beads of her spit pearling O’s forelock. Angrily she got up again, filled her hands with more foam, roughly sideburned O’s cheeks and chin, pompadoured the bloody brow with pinkening scum, screwed the whole head a little bit east like turning a globe and gave it a jerk not altogether gentle. The head popped free. “Sufferin cheeses Emily where’d you find this brutal bitch,” O muttered ungratefully, rubbing her ears and neck, “who da hump is she anyhow?”

There was a thunder of fuddies’ hooves: Bertie and Dion were cheesing it out of the closet and down the hall, in exact accord with Bug Motels’ operational principles, leaving me and O holding the bag. The weasel showed a commendable lack of interest in their existence. She didn’t even look round. I recalled that my Bug Motel’s duty, now that O was free, was to slink out while the slinking was good. O all by herself was famous for stonewalling cops, and royals. I backed gluily towards the door, but thank godzilla, doctor weasel clamped a hand around my ankle in time. “You,” she said, rising up into my face. “Miss Koderer. Please to explain me what is happened.” I blinked. I couldn’t squeal right in front of two other Bug Motels. But I didn’t want the weasel talking to anybody else either. She was no ordinary dreambox mechanic-if she was a dreambox mechanic-and I was just about to ask her again exactly what she was, when old dying hence ethically exempt Emily piped up: “O had a grandma fizzy fit on the floor, she even had whip cream in her mouth like when a dog bites a frog or sumpm.” The weasel turned to O, who sat hunched and rubbing her neck inside the icy billows of her hair, a lit Lucky hanging from her dry lips. “Miss O’Day?” O shrugged and showed the weasel her back. So it came back to me.

“Miss Koderer. This object. You can explain me please for what you want it?” Her voice thrummed lazily on its low string and she touched with a pointed toe the H of laughing gas, then the clown’s nose lying in its loops of red rubber tubing. “I…” I stammered, glad to have her eye on me, but embarrassed to look like a mastermind of dreambox oils powders and gasses in front of her, for I had a hunch what she would think of that. I mean, she was a mysterious, grown-up woman of the world, next to whom even the wood wizardess, Willis Marie Bundgus, looked like a bucktoothed rube. I gasped at my own disloyalty to my first love and for a moment I hated the woman, for how could she ever love my kind, my potato-shaped nose bulb, lips of wornout underpants elastic, body straight as a pencil, rusty hair, hun manners?

“I… had to have sumpm to do in this dump,” I whispered. Until I saw you, I thought. She didn’t smile. I felt her peer through my buggy disguise as through a glass pane; one of her eyebrows arched up mockingly. “How you are called, my dear?” “Bogeywoman,” I said, and O and Emily tittered, because I had never let a dreambox mechanic in on my moniker before. Doctor weasel put out her ugly hand. “Is pleasure,” she said. I stared at the hand floating between us. Then I remembered to take it.

“How… how you are called?” I mimicked her, not only to be fresh to a dreambox adjustor in front of the Bug Motels, though I knew they would be impressed. No, I must have sensed I would have to haggle and track and scheme and beg for every crumb of truth about her as long as I knew her. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Zuk,” she finally said, in her peculiar, salivary accent, sumpm between shook and zook. “Doctor Zuk?” “Zuk,” she repeated, her voice loud and bored, as if she regretted having said so much.

She leaned into Bertie’s closet and laid a finger on the cold pebbly cylinder of laughing gas. “Pfui,” she exclaimed, “unpleasant feeling like skin of dead hairless animal. Here is interesting fact: human beings despise everything hairless-at least I think is true. Pig, snake, legs of chicken, wing of bat, bald head of man, tail of opossum and rat, I wonder why is this? Why they would hate everything bald like themselves?”

“Cause they got taste,” I said-talk about an easy question!

She didn’t answer, but her silvery eyes lit on me for maybe five seconds as though I were the most interesting animal on earth. Then she turned and walked away. And I remember her sleek behind flexing like a fist under the velour, and the pinprick her champagne-flute heels made across my forehead as she went-that was as close as I came to taking her in.

Bertie came creeping back as soon as she was gone. “They didn’t even call the cops,” he said in a hurt voice. “Well, maybe they still will,” I consoled him, “she just left.” “Did she look mad?” “Er, not exactly.” Of course we were too nervous now either to sniff the H or to leave it alone, but a few minutes later Mr. Nurse’s Aide Reggie Blanchard came in without a word-just shot us a scornful look, kiddie D.O.A.P. it said, like the time we five choked down a whole McCormick’s tin of nutmeg between us and all of us puked for an hour but nothing else happened-and rolled the H bomb away. But two minutes later he left in its place a modest little E cylinder on a cart with its twin oxygen tank and gauges and valves and other appurtenances, all in working order, and said, “Yall damn fool huff-heads got fi-teen minutes with this baby and that’s it, so get to work.” We dutifully sat down and huffed, but all the fun had gone out of that mission. I didn’t see any more giant popcorn. Instead I had a vision of Zuk, the international doctor weasel, skiing in her high-heeled sandals on a sort of slag heap of stars. A great dust of stars flew up all around her-she was brilliant, but she was dust, and she was skidding down down down.

3

Miles from Madame Zuk

She was too many stories above me. Love is a girlgoyle’s proper food, or so Margaret always claimed-the other stuff just plumps up your bra size. And O used to say with a yawn that love at least gave a girl a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Well, I met Zuk and the next morning I woke up out of the tar with a seasick lurch and didn’t care whether I lived or died. So she hadn’t worn any rings-so what-no rings is a quirk of fashion, for godzillas sake, not a marital status. Of course she was married, they all were, probably she had, gag, cute children too. And why did I have to snoop around to find out what she had and didn’t have in the nuptial department, bribe Reggie to check for the dreaded family photos on the desk? Because she had pulled cheap rank on me like a prison matron, firing off poisonal questions and not answering any herself. This offended my mental patient’s democratic principles. Was Zuk a better woman than I was? Well, obviously. But for how long? Just for today? Dream on, Bogeywoman- just for today until the end of time.

The logic is always corrupt which answers the question should I live or should I off myself? Other people hang around in it, audible voices in the wall, as if it were a cheap hotel-snoring in its lobby, shaving at its flatulent sinks, smoking in its bed. The figures lie when I weigh in the girlgoyles who’ve turned me down, since, gone as they are, they weigh nothing. On the one hand I know quite well that life is a dream and every face in it nothing but a lesson for the real world to come, I mean the real world that lies wrapped up in this