Bogeywoman

kick weeds. Lou Rae dangled here that day on the Big Bear tentline with a stack of flat green leaves like pancakes on her head and a masque of gray mud on her cheeks.

“For the complexion,” she explained, as if there was just one complexion for everybody. “All the Indian maids wore chunkagunk-for the complexion.” “The lost chunkagunk was a food, not a mud,” I objected. “So what?” Lou Rae smiled, “some people eat dirt and anyhow you wash your hair with egg and honey don’t ya? My aunt Lola uses pureed artichokes on her bosom. La beaute’s gotta eat too.” I didn’t answer since I washed my hair with nothing, just steeped it in lake water twice a day. Even now it smelled like a swamp and was a swamp, or anyway the weight of it lay like a wet plaster on the back of my neck.

Lou Rae was holding a mud-smeared bandaid box. I could see where she had dug the dirt out of the packed ground between the tents with a pencil. She was a small, serious person with wine-dark hair and wide lips that looked pale pink next to the dark gray mud.

“But who’s gonna see you?” I asked. I meant we’re at girls’ camp, NO BOYS ALLOWED, for godzillas sake. “Who is seeing me?” said Lou Rae, tipping up one surprisingly thatchy eyebrow. Then my scalp shrank under its wet fur and my ears boiled because she was right. I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. Probably she’d seen herself in the big round pies of my eyes. I was plop in love with her. She had those green leaves scalloping her brow and looked faintly blurry, like an elf maid enlarged by a microscope.

Lou Rae’s mother always brought her and her trunk to camp a couple days late in a Veteran’s Cab all the way from Bangor. Lou Rae went to some second-rate boarding school in Freeport where everyone smoked cigarettes, starting in fourth grade. There was a story around that her father, a Bangor florist, was in jail for burning down his greenhouse, and for taxes. So probably Lou Rae’s brain like mine was some kinda swiss cheese from bugs of worry crawling in and out. But she wasn’t a famously bad girl like me. I mean at Chunkagunk I had my own spot: I was the Bogeywoman, sort of like Frankenstein, but tamed by kind treatment. Unlike Lou Rae I was no beauty at sixteen. I still had those eaves of blond hair, those white-hot roof sheets, but now they hung down in rusty flaps. In my last Upside Down Day camp picture, my smile was only half a smile, because it swung left. I had grated my voice down and pushed it out the side of my mouth, and my big tough talk had left the bag a little torn, which it still is. My nose bulb had bumps like a potato, and a black dot from some KP ketchup fight made a bull’s-eye out of my Adam’s apple.

Yes, it was a good camp that Merlin and Suzette had the sense to send us to. There were no baths so you went in that arctic lake every morning at nine, long before the sun had fought its way through the porridge of clouds. Chunkagunk was cheap and tough, which took care of all the girls you really couldn’t have stomached, and disguised the rest in their beautiful new toughness (except for Lou Rae Greenrule, who had her own kind of toughness). Anyway the girls who went there were Maine girls, innocent and strong, who had no idea that camp was corny. Nothing like the girls at home, club-formers and plotters from the earliest age. Margaret and me were not so clean, both of us being the type who joined girls’ clubs but got kicked out of them. So we were happy among the innocents, at least at first. We were the only Jews: which was nothing new from Merlin and his Suzette. When I think of all the places where we were the only Jews!-Meadowbottom Pool and that Brownie camp on the Magothy where the tidewater river was so thick with sea nettles it looked like egg drop soup, the Ploy Street Children’s Theater, the Cockeysville Equestrian Academy…

I loved Camp Chunkagunk, although I knew that camp was corn. But now I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. My love had a face with sumpm smeared on it. Camp was full of girls. I was the Bogeywoman. How could I just go on braiding gimp lanyards for the girl of my choice?

But Lou Rae loved camp too, for all its corn. If Maine girls were corny without knowing it, Lou Rae Greenrule was exempt from corn, in its midst. In her cheerful serious way, with her nuggety black, unblinking, rather unhuman stare, she dared old Mrs. Doggett to throw her out of camp for not showing up at Lake Sci and Wood Wiz and Evening Pro. Even plunked on a rock in a campfire ring, even in Chunkagunk middy and baggy shorts, Lou Rae was on a whole nuther planet from corn, and she liked it there.

They tented us together, in the last tent of the tentline. Maybe they hoped the Bogeywoman’s fanatical love of camp would suck Lou Rae along behind it, and at first I tried. “Hey, you wouldn’t mooch Evening Pro when Old Doggett is in the middle of the Chunkagunk legend, would ya?”

“Well I already missed part one,” Lou Rae yawned.

“Never mind, I got part one by heart,” said I, “here’s how it goes. The wily rabbit Ableemooch has always been the wily giant Gooskuk’s wood wizard, but far from getting his hoped-for reward of a hundred wampum’s worth of beans and carrots for guiding Gooskuk through the forest, he gets shaken down day after day for his lunch. Every day around noon Gooskuk roars ‘How about some lunch’ and when Ableemooch pipes ‘Me too’ and takes out his little brown bag of sassafras bark, Gooskuk swipes it and gulps it down, and when he’s done he belches gutabervenig, which in Chunkagunk means pretty good. So Ableemooch, thoroughly fed up with this unequal division of mooching, goes to see wily Grandmother Bearsquaw, who agrees to help.

“Grandmother Bearsquaw goes into her cave for a while and knocks around and strains and groans and says hocus pocus in Chunkagunk and comes out again with a ball of sumpm truly disgusting. ‘Ugh, what is it?’ Ableemooch asks. ‘Never mind,’ says Grandmother Bearsquaw, ‘just take it and tomorrow night bring me back what’s left and tell me all that’s happened.’ ‘What do I owe you?’ ‘Nuttin,’ says Grandmother Bearsquaw, ‘there’s plenty more where that came from.’ Ableemooch wonders about that. Maybe it’s a trick, he thinks, usually Grandmother Bearsquaw wants a hundred wampums’ worth of fish or berries or sumpm. Even Gooskuk’ll never eat sumpm so disgusting, and then I’ll probably have to eat it myself, Ableemooch mutters, but he takes it anyway.

“So next day when Gooskuk yells, ‘How about some lunch,’ Ableemooch pulls the small ball of sumpm disgusting out of his pocket… And that’s where Doggett left off. To hear part two, you gotta come to Evening Pro.”

Lou Rae smiled her mysterious smile at me in which her wide lips curved up stealthily at their ends like a canoe and no teeth showed. She sat Indian fashion on her cot, with green Old Maid cards spread all around her like lily pads. “Unh-unh,” she said. “Why not?” “I like having nothing to do.” “Godzillas sake, don’t you want to find out what happens?” “I like it better when you tell me,” Lou Rae said, “after taps. In bed. In the dark.” “What the hump it isn’t even scary,” I said. Lou Rae turned over an Old Maid without saying anything. “What kinda nothing do you do?” I asked. “I count stars.”

When I got back from Evening Pro, Lou Rae was reading Little Lulu under her bedspread with a flashlight. Then that crackly record came on the PA system, it hissed and popped and we covered our ears, then came taps, then somebody grabbed the record off with a screek and it was dark with a hurrying, hard-boiled egg yolk moon high between the tent flaps.

“So next day,” I whispered, “when Gooskuk yells, ‘How about some lunch,’ Ableemooch takes out the small ball of sumpm disgusting. Gooskuk says, ‘Ugh, what’s that?’ ‘It’s my lunch,’ Ableemooch replies and raises his four big upper choppers like he’s gonna eat it, when Gooskuk snatches the ball of sumpm disgusting and takes a little bite. ‘Ugh,’ he says but he chews it and swallows it and pretty soon he takes another bite. And then another and another and another but, funny thing, the ball isn’t getting any smaller. And Gooskuk says, ‘Ugh, ugh, that’s the most disgusting stuff I ever ate, but I can’t stop eating it. Better finish it off.’ And he eats and he eats but the ball never gets any smaller. Finally his belly is about to burst and he says, ‘Please, take it away, Ableemooch, I’ll never swipe your lunch again, I swear.’ So Ableemooch takes it away.

“That night Ableemooch heads for Grandmother Bearsquaw’s den with the ball of sumpm disgusting. Ableemooch is in a good mood and hungry and he thinks to himself, ‘That little ball of food looks disgusting, but it must be kinda good if Gooskuk liked it so much. I’ll take a tiny bite.’ So he does and then he takes another and another and he can’t stop eating it. The ball doesn’t get any smaller and Ableemooch thinks pretty soon his belly is gonna burst. But he knows that Grandmother Bearsquaw will make him pay a million wampums’ worth of corn or berries or sumpm to take the ball of sumpm disgusting away.

“Just then Gooskuk comes walking along and Ableemooch says, ‘Gooskuk, if you’ll take this ball away you can swipe my lunch whenever you want.’ ‘Okay,’ Gooskuk says, and he does it. And that’s where Doggett left off.” I waited for Lou Rae to say o rats, but she didn’t. “So I figure