Bogeywoman

was awfully quiet, for him-not a word about my see-through princess, which made me sure the news was bad. “I guess Emily’s dead, isn’t she,” I finally asked. “No, she still hanging on by that litta bitty thread she specialize in.” “Will she be okay?” “Depend what you mean by okay. They say she probly live awhile.” “She’ll have bad scars, won’t she.” “Hmmmm. I reckon this won’t improve her looks none. Won’t mess up her social life, though, since she never had no social life.” “What do you mean?” I said uneasily, “everybody loves Emily.” “You blee that, I sell you the B &O, cheap.” “I’ll take it,” I said. “I bet you do, you hard-head know-it-all.

“You know,” Reg said, “I use to think you smarter than them everyday nuts, but now I see you worse than all them others. You want to do what everybody here do, only worser. You tryna make like them damn fools who can’t help theyself. This here a hospital, girl, not a nut contest. Why you don’t get with the program stead of copycatting them genu-wine coo-yanns who don’t know no better?” “All the same you oinked her,” I said. “What you talking bout? I know O from the corner. We come up together. O like a sister to me.” “Yeah, well, plenty of guys oink their sister,” I observed, “that’s the main thing you hear around this rotten bughouse, about all the girls whose brothers oinked them, in fact O didn’t need any more brothers to oink her, she already had two or three or I forget how many.” “I see you gone twist every subject round back to me like I was the one in the bughouse. I see you gone do just what you want to anyhow, you hard-head ragmop. If you want to oink them two lowdown dirty street pirates for a bag of rags, a bucket of oats and a pony ride, you belong in this place.”

“I wish I was with those ayrabbers right now,” I said, sticking my chin out. “Them ain’t ayrabbers,” Reggie said, “they junkers. You just junk to them, you understand me? It ain’t personal. You shut the door on they kind, they take your doorknob and the bricks out your wall, they take the marble off your stoop till you got no stoop, if your dog bark they take your dog, and if you get a fence, they take your fence and sell it at the scrap yard and the padlock with it. They a plague of locusts, you hear me?” I laughed. “I wish I was with them,” I said. “Go on, go with them. Next time they get popped they be glad to let you take the rap.” “So? How much worse can jail be than the bughouse?” “Even simple as you is, you know better’n that.” And I did: If I went to jail there would be no gamboling by the sleepy guard at the front entrance, for instance, just because old Lopes wasn’t in the mood that day to shake up his mashed potato and gravy lunch.

Then again I wondered if jail might not be a less embarrassing place than Rohring Rohring to come down with a social disease. And all at once I pictured what I’d done today, remembered that warm heavy hand at the back of my neck, and felt a strange sensation at the bottom of my gut, sumpm like a hot green wind in the kishkes.

“Say, you’re not going to snitch on me to Foofer for the sex part, are you?” I asked Reggie, “you know I can’t talk about sumpm private like sex with these farty old dreambox mechanics.” Reg shook his head sadly at me. His eyes said, Am I a rat and they ain’t even no money in it? He was not a rat for fun. But having been reminded he said: “You lucky if you ain’t pick up some vanilla disease from them junkers. You know them don’t bath from year to year and they ladyfriends is the fi dolla stand-up kind in the men’s toilet.”

Sickness swept over me then, rose like a cloud of pea-green smoke from my stomach to my head, probably the first symptom of a social disease, and dizzily, cigarette in hand, I sat down on the pavement of the traffic isle, hard. “If that happen you won’t need me to snitch to no Foofer, you be running to that sawbones so fast to beat your nose from falling off in your cheerios.” Reginald smiled down at me. “I don’t care,” I snapped, “lemme die before I tell Foofer.” “If your nose fall off, he figga it out for hisself.” The Regicide squatted down beside me but I turned my back on him and blew smoke out my nose angrily like a dragon. “Anyhow they say the brain go first. Probably you won’t even know by then who you telling what.” “Then I won’t care anyway, will I,” I seethed.

“Say, you lookin sick, Bogeywoman,” Reg observed. “You got them little balls of sweat all over your forehead. Why you ain’t taken off that fool hotdog jacket from Carlin’s Park? You ain’t sawed up them arms again, is it?”

I didn’t answer. I sprawled there on strike with my legs sticking out in front of me and the plastic bag with the pink party dress in it on my lap. Since I wasn’t going to look at either Reg, or Rohring Rohring, or the ayrabbers’ stable, I had to hold my neck at a funny angle, from which all I could see was the combed-out skeins of streetcar and electric wires, bouncing like circus tightropes when the pigeons landed on them. “Why’d you come looking for me anyway?” I whined, “you don’t even like me as compared say to Emily or O.” Yes I was fishing, I hate to admit it, but in my weakened condition I was sentimental. After Tuney T. Turpentine, Escrow, indifference to my person had temporarily lost its charm. The Regicide put me squarely in my place: “Yeah, I prefer the womens, you got that right,” he agreed. “They say I have a certain professional touch with the female mental patients. Anyhow I do like them girls, young ones, old ones, long, small, all.”

“I’m a girlgoyle, I mean I got just as many x chromosomes as the rest of em,” I growled. “Sho is, sho is. Sho you a girl, Ursie,” he said carefully, like talking to a mental patient, “sho you a girl but you got the manners of a chained-up dog. Like you ain’t had nothing but pencils to eat for a week. It ain’t personal, I seen worse, you just not my type.” “So why didn’t you leave me with the ayrabbers?” I said bitterly, “that Chug guy would’ve been glad to oink me.” “Hell’s bells, girl, I find somebody better than that to oink you if that’s what you want, come to that, I oink you myself. Maybe I don’t like you but I don’t hate you.” “Just keep your hands off the mental patients,” I hissed. “That’s what I’m talking bout, girl, that’s what you is, a mental patient. I use to think you smart but now I see you don’t have the sense to come in out the rain. You don’t know how many pea beans make five. You don’t have the sense God gave a nanny goat. You the type climb on the metal clothesline pole to see which way the storm be passing. You ain’t got the motherwit to track a rhino in four foot of snow. You don’t know which way you at, girl. You couldn’t get there if I put you there.” “I’m glad O and Emily are models of common sense,” I said. “No but they got they certain little girly ways.”

I decided never to speak to this fuddy again. However, there are slanders that cannot be passed over in silence. I added icily: “As a matter of fact I’m an expert tracker, thank you.” This was an empty brag when you thought of someone like the wood wizardess, but I was sure I was the best they had around here. “Yeah? Then how come you can’t find nobody in this whole wide world to love and kiss your smart-ass self?” “How do you know I can’t?” I said, and we snarled at each other, all pretense of mutual regard temporarily laid aside.

“How’d you find me, anyway?” I asked, “why’d you bother?” “I ain’t find you. That Rooski dreambox fixer, whassaname, we call her the ice queen, she see you. Musta been pinking out the window and see you run across Broadway to the ayrabbers’ barn.” “You mean Zuk?” “Shook, Zook, sumpm like that.” “She sent you?” I asked in rapture.

Reginald shook his head disgustedly. “Ain’t East Six a locked ward, she want to know? I tell her it is and it ain’t. What means is and what means ain’t, answer to me immediately, she say. Must think she the queen or sumpm. I tell her all the wards is officially closed, only in the daytime we don’t lock but East Five and the quietrooms. She holla back, Ain’t we spose to keep track of these patients? And her nose joint jump so high, like it’s walking on her eyebrows. I see a patient disappear in that stable over there, she say, this a very troubled young woman who don’t have the brains of a pissant.” “She said that?” “Sumpm like that. Custody-ain’t that your lookout, Mr. Blanchard? she say. What I’m gonna say? It ain’t my lookout? So I come get you.”

“She was worried about me,” I whispered in a moony daze. The hot gray city and the red brick bughouse disappeared; I seemed to be gazing into the crystal ball of my fate. “I ain’t said that. I never see her go down and play in no Broadway traffic to haul your ass back here her hinkty self.” “There’s probably some law against dreambox mechanics crossing the street to chase after patients,” I said dreamily. “Hmmm, I don’t think the Rooski dreambox fixer got patients like the regular docs in this joint. She like a VIP. She writing a book or sumpm. They give her the keys to the castle. I tell you what! She turn up everywhere like ants at a all-day picnic. Think she the queen or sumpm. Answer to me immediately. Don’t they have no democracy down they in Costa Rica?” “I thought you said Russia.” “Russia, Costa Rica, some cockamamie place where they talk funny and think the homeboys got bones in they noses.” “She is the queen,” I said, “I call her madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse.” “You see a hoss under that old bird? You best tell Foofer.” Reggie slitted his eyes at me, but I smiled back sweetly. Now that Doctor Zuk was worried about me, I could afford to be generous. “She ain’t no queen of mine,” he grumbled, “this a free country.”

AMONG THE ROYALS

Reggie opened royal office number 709-DR. DEWEY, it said, though Doughy Dewey was long gone-and gave me a little shove from behind. Then the door closed at my back, didn’t slam exactly but fell shut with the dreadful huff of absolute monarchy, followed by a small digestive munch of hardware. The door had locked itself behind me. In my honor? And there she sat under her crown of spiky hair, twirling a golden pencil on the blotter. At last it was just the two of us, face to face: I, the Bogeywoman, and she, Doctor Zuk-Madame Zuk.