Bogeywoman

who had just heavily shifted her weight. I heard, illegibly vibrating, the low tobacco-cured C-string of her voice. She was sort of crooning sumpm. My heart drowned.

“You smell any smoke? See any fire?” I whispered to O. “I see nuttin. I don’t even see Emily. Is she here?” “Sure she’s here, she’s in the bed or all the royals wouldn’t be crowding around.” “Sumpm smells funny,” O said, and I smelled it too, like a plastic wading pool lying too long in the sun, or the inside of some cheap toy. “That could make you sick to your stomach. Uh-oh, look.” We saw it glint for a second above the curtain-the delicate boom of one of those rolling IV stands, a bit of the bubbling flask.

“O my godzilla,” I said, “sumpm really bad happened.” “At least she ain’t dead,” O said. “Maybe not, but you don’t get six royals including two regular doctors for a sick stomach.” “I don’t see nuttin black from a fire. Maybe it was a false alarm,” O whispered. “Maybe she did get sick from that coddy,” I agreed, suddenly wanting to be optimistic, “I mean real sick, like toe-main poison sick, I had that coddy two days. I always wondered how they can leave those coddies out like that on the counter, no frigerator no nuttin, little fish things on a metal tray no matter how hot it gets, with the flies and that, right in the hospital snack bar, it’s kinda disgusting if you think about it.” “Aw come on, coddies can’t rot, there’s not even no food in them,” O hissed, “well maybe a little potato or sumpm and just the smell of the grease from fried fish but no fish, that’s why they’re so good.” “They could rot,” I said, “one I forgot to eat rotted in my pocket once. Wooo it stunk.” “Nobody never died from eating no coddy,” O whispered firmly. “What’d you leave her your cigarettes for anyway?”

I looked at O. She was lifting the blueblack dip out of her eye as if to stress the clear sound reason of this question. I shook my head. My scheme for getting Emily to eat sounded so dumb to me now I hated to say. But then I remembered she had smoked and had eaten. My see- through princess loved me best, there was no explaining that. And I knew it was my not coming back that had done this, whatever it was. I shouldn’t have left her sumpm of mine she could hurt herself with, some flammable dreamboxoline, some poison present. I should have made it back to her somehow-I gazed at O-the trashy pirate’s eye-patch of a dip had slipped down over her eye again-I had to admit I had not just been waylaid, I had fallen. I was too starved to be trusted. I moaned to think of the kiss in the elevator and just then Emily moaned from behind the curtain. My moan died and hers, reedy and quavering, was in the air, rising, faraway but clear, like one wolf howling to another on the next mountain top.

I distinctly heard Doctor Zuk say, “Courage, dear, only little bit more,” and then sumpm sailed out of the curtain and flopped on the linoleum. It was pink, brown, black; charred and wet-I stared, my eyes refused to tell me what it was. “Sufferin cheeses, it’s that ugly thing the nurses give her,” O whispered, and then I recognized it, the I CHOCOLATE bathrobe they had just peeled away from her burned skin like skin. My eyes fixed on the maraschino cherry buttons. They weren’t melted. They looked the same as ever, good enough to eat. “She musta set herself on fire,” O said, deeply impressed, “you think she done it on purpose?”

“Listen. I gotta go in there,” I said, “I promised her I’d come back-with these-” I pulled the oil-spotted bag of coddies out of the bib of my overalls. I’d been lying on them. “I gotta show her. I told her I could get in there anytime and I always could.” I gave O a deep, deep look, all the way to the black bottoms of her black-ringed eyes, sorta trying to hypnotize her to come around. I mean, I fell and was a half-baked person but she fell too and was a dangerous person, and she wasn’t even truly buggy, no more than I was. “I’ll help you,” she said.

And without waiting another second, she did-jumped up and sleepwalked (I do a good coma, don’t I?) in her gold lame ballet slippers, straight for the doorway of Emily’s room, sticking her arms out in front of her like the night of the living dead and chanting “High rat a dreambutton flirty eat a job” or some other line of comic-book buggy. It wouldn’t have convinced a Bug Motel or anyone who really knew her, but the nurses, Hageboom, Roper and Mursch, swooped down on her like buzzards and flapped away with her and I belly-crawled across the hall to Emily’s door and ducked under the curtain with the coddy bag in my teeth.

They grabbed me as soon as I jumped up but I was ready for them and wrapped my arms and legs around the metal bed corner and yelled, “Look, Em, I got it.” But of course as soon as I opened my mouth the coddy bag fell onto Emily with a plump. I can only thank godzilla she didn’t scream when the coddy bag touched her or I’d have died of shame. Why didn’t she scream? She looked so strange, so shiny, such an odd waxed paper color, but what did I expect? She was naked I think but lay in a sort of black rubber wrapper full of foam, like a spittlebug in a leaf, with her little white throat just showing. She must have had plenty of morphine or sumpm. I guess they were getting ready to move her. She looked up dreamily, she was awake, half-awake, she saw me and smiled that queer bug smile on top of her rotten bucked teeth and I’m ashamed to say I cared more about that than if she would live. “It’s me, the Bogeywoman. I was here,” I said, “don’t forget.”

All this while the royals had been pulling on the back of my overalls and now my arms and legs turned gimp and let go of the bed. I slumped down on the floor and bawled. It was too steep a fall. I had barely had time to conceive of myself as a dreambox mechanic before I had as good as killed somebody. Besides, I loved my see-through princess and was afraid I would never see her again. How much could one little body take? I buried my face in my hands, but in the dark I kept seeing old Emily resolutely igniting the bottom of that cheesy I CHOCOLATE bathrobe, so I opened my eyes again. After a moment I became aware I was looking at sumpm dreadfully familiar. It was my Mr. Peanut cigarette lighter, lying in the wrinkled, venous hand of Doctor Zuk. (Her hands were pretty shockingly decrepit, the one part of her that looked her age.)

She was holding it so only I would see it, but see it I must, since it was all of five inches from my nose. In fact in my first operatic rush of recognition I feared she would set my hair on fire, or singe my face. I knew I deserved it. She towered above me, peering down at me with an undetached queenly rigor that was totally untypical of the average dreambox mechanic at Rohring Rohring, and besides setting off a little alarm in the covert conservatism that’s a part of every mental patient, she was scaring me to death. Her nylons glowed electrically on top of those soccer player’s shins and calves. I had the sensation I was clinging to her chiseled kneecaps, although I was just kneeling there, doing no such thing, and nobody else would have even noticed except-I was convinced-Doctor Zuk- Madame Zuk-herself. Her I clearly saw considering whether to kick me off of her ankles into the gutter. “What you think you are doing?” she hissed, and if Emily hadn’t been lying there, I could tell she would be shouting. “What you can mean with this unacceptable behavior that might further injure your friend? Unacceptable! Unacceptable!” she spat. “Please will you be my dreambox mechanic?” I blurted. “I know it’s my fault that Emily lit herself on fire. I don’t care if I live or die, in fact I hope I do die if you won’t be my dreambox mechanic.” She stared down at me. She was not as tall as she looked, but now she seemed to duck her head to keep from butting the ceiling. “You are thinking to kill yourself? The world will go on without you, you know, Miss Bogeywoman. Now, please to get out immediately,” she said. Her ugly, ringless hand pointed me to the door.

4

Fallen Among Ayrabbers

It wasn’t a daring escape. O well, daring would have been wasted on Rohring Rohring, which was as leaky as a kitchen colander. Hypothetically, the lobby guards knew us mental patients by sight and were ready to nab us if we made a run for it. In fact Lopes was watching me as I dashed past his desk but made up his mind-I saw a movement of his lower jaw like someone setting down a grocery bag with a plump-that this was nothing to risk a heart attack for. After all we Bug Motels were always running around wild. We had the liberty of the lobby and the elevators, the cafeteria, gift shop and snack bar, and of the courtyard where we played tennis on the doctors’ courts. And although we were supposed to wait for our pint-sized school bus in the morning and get off it again at night only on that little yellow-striped island of concrete on Broadway, next to the trolley tracks and across from the ayrabbers’ barn, still Lopes knew we had nobody but wicked Reginald to guide us, out there on the wickedest of wicked streets. And in fact every day we surveyed the whores and pimps, junkies, stewies, smokies and stuffies who treaded by for any new faces, and meanwhile we longed to be the ayrabbers who came jingling out of the barn