Bogeywoman

called bug repair expert, running off with a bughead, all right, a former bughead, but still, a former bughead not quite eighteen years old? And this was Dr. Gulaim Zuk, who had earned her fame debugging the dreamboxes of youth. The nerve of her, to write about teenage monsters when she’d never even been one! The kind of ease Zuk had wasn’t sumpm you grew up to. Like scratch it was sumpm you got back to, if at all. Doctor Zuk had been spared adolescence. She’d hidden out with her father The Beetle all through his wondrously weird, unspeakably lonely exile in Caramel-Creamistan. And then the Commies had shot him exactly on time-on the eve of her twelfth birthday-so she never had to grow up in front of him, never had to see his disgusted face.

As for me, adolescent ugliness is my natural state. Bogeywoman I was born, fat and stinky, Bogeywoman is my dowry. Course, I admit it, next to the ease of Zuk, my adolescent repulsiveness suddenly looked like sumpm willful, even to me-gargoyles in the belfry-sticking their nauseous tongues out. All the same I was what I was and could not be saved from myself. For an instant I longed for lobotomy-sure, cut the whole memory bone from the dreambox. Blank me out. But the world had become too beautiful to erase, somehow.

(I could imagine The Beetle first arriving in Caramel-Creamistan-a Yid from the Vistula seeing those camels, asking himself Where the hump have I landed? I lay along her body now and whispered What the hump is this place, I never knew there was a swamp at the end of the bay, tell me where we are or I’ll…)

Her body was similar to Central Asia… well, maybe not, but it was nothing like mine. Dew glazed her throat, her forehead. She had had enough. She stopped my hands. I lay along her side, her head rested on the crook of her arm, and two or three hairs burst out of each calamitous pore of her armpit. Hair too lank and outspoken even to curl, it lay there, black wheat. Now that I saw her up close, I understood how she could look famous-her face was as huge as a movie screen, her eyes, her nose, her mouth all double the size of mine, you could have driven a Cadillac between those Thousand and One Nights’ eyebrows. Never in her life could anyone have called her petite. She was built like a belly dancer, generous, billowing. She had the kind of lobed showy muscle I once read would keep a girl out of the Rockettes-just right for Princess Noor and Her Six Harimettes, however.

Fazool shrieked and we poked our heads above the gangway stairs. We both saw it: a black bear about as tall as me stood up to look at us, then polkaed away across the bog, his fat little bowlegs splashing.

“Say, got any bears up there in Caramel-Creamistan?” I whispered. “And what about disgust? Weren’t you ever, like, sick-to-your-stomach disgusted with love-the whole twenty-dish ham & chicken potpie firehall supper? And where the hump are we anyhow?”

“You know, one thing people know how to do in Karamistan. This is eat. Sit, talk, eat. September in Samovarobad is paradise, thirty degrees and everybody eating melons from morning till night. But most of all, meat. Is meat culture. Twenty kilometers out of city in red hills, is nothing to find but meat. Sit on carpet, soon some woman brings in great bowl or plate: all meat, naked boiled meat. And you see everything of this meat. Is anatomy lab for sheep. You see every part of sheep, whole stomach, testicles, big steaming heap intestines, and from middle of puddle two whole sheep eyeballs look up at you. My god what makes that scream like crazy woman?”

“O that’s an American Barred and Bedraggled Owl. You’ll never see it-it’s probably in that tangle of black gum trees. Before we get there it’ll go flapping off to the next thicket. Ya know what it says?-I mean what everybody says it says-Who who who, who cooks for you?” “Ah! Is very good question. And what is answer?” I shook my head. “Answer of course is You do. Answer every time, You do you do you do.

“Alas, I tire of ever the same dish. The world too stays not in a oneness of changelessness. And who would say which is more beautiful, night unveiling to day? or day unveiling to night? Either way, veiling or unveiling, the world is beautiful as a houri.”

“Say, where the hump are we again?” I asked for the hump-teenth time, “and where’d you say we were going?”

“I eat all foods. I eat meat, fish, kasha, apricots. I particularly like feast dish of Karamul-Karamistan, which is baby camel stuffed with goat, goat stuffed with six hens, each hen stuffed with twelve eggs in nest of parsley, and all this roasted on spit through twenty-four hours…”

“Holy godzilla did you see that? A giant pig just jumped up from the mud bank right there between the cypress knees and trotted into the bush. Cheese, look at the bald spot-that’s where it was wallowing. Where the hump is this place and where are we headed? [Sniff, sniff.] Ya know I know it sounds perverse when there’s water water everywhere, but I swear I smell smoke…”

“Speaking of smoke, speaking of meat, what you suppose is feast day game of men in all Karamul-Karamistan? I tell you. Is kind of crazy polo with carcass of sheep. First they cut throat, like that, kr-r-r- ch. Then they race around like crazy on strong little ponies, and tear sheep apart with bare hands. Who has biggest piece at end, wins.”

“Wins what? Cheese, there goes another pig, with big black spots. You see any farms? See any peanut fields? Must be a pig gone wild, I mean, you know, a feral pig. What the hump is this godzilla forsaken place?”

Outside the portholes, thorny-vine and creepy-briar shot straight up the tree trunks, fifty sixty feet in the air. Bulrushes brushed peacefully by, then, rat-a-tat-tat on the Jenghiz Khan, a canebrake was playing our bottom like a snare drum. Doctor Zuk stuck her head out the gangway. I stuck mine out next to hers. “Where the hump-” “Hush, Bogey. Make like you speak no English. Do like Fazool, whatever he does, you do it too. Hallo-o-o-o!” she shouted. Fazool grinned his square grin and waved. Zuk waved. I waved. A streaky tin roof swam into view, then a Nehi Orange Crush sign, its orange weathered to that shy flamingo that pleases me best of all colors. On the bank a galvanized steel privy sailed by, its door banging in the wind.

“Hey what is this place?” Then I saw sumpm like thick pink cellophane-a bulge of peat water gushing over a slimy spillway. And before I knew it I was tilted back like in a roller coaster. Holy godzilla, a winch was hauling the Jenghiz Khan up a coupla boat rails. A Popeye-looking fuddy in khakis was working it. I read a sign on a shack, UNITED STATES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS. I was on the point of yelling Help me I been kidnapped, when I remembered I hadn’t been kidnapped, I’d been saved. “Where the hump are we or I’ll scream,” I screamed. Luckily the winch chasing over the metal frets was loud as a Gatling gun, and nobody heard me, not even myself.

Then a red lake was opening out in front of us as far as the eye could see. “Wow, how the hump did that get here? What-” “Hush-only little while longer now,” Zuk said. Fazool steered the Jenghiz Khan left along the shore. “You, Bogey, keep eye open like owl for Ditch Number 19. Ditches don’t have signs like streets so is important, very important, you watch and count.”

The lake: red like the bilge that laps the toilet bowl the first day you’re on the rag-and a few cypress knees sticking out of it like hairy upside-down carrots. “So what about The Beetle?” I dared to whisper (I had never asked about her father before.) “I figure he grew up eating kreplach in Plock or somewhere, just like my Zayde Schapiro…”

“Ah, you speak of Mr. Zuk,” she replied stiffly. “What means this-kreplach?” She made a face. “Mr. Zuk was champion fencer at Jagiellonian University. Son of famous doctor of geophysics from Warsaw. He wrote not only in Yiddish-sometimes in Polish, sometimes French. Even before start of war, even before Polish Communists die in Russia, is over with him and communism. He trusted nobody. Karamul-Karamistan you know is never spoon of his mouth. Even in Karamul-Karamistan, for eleven years we are running. He is at home nowhere, and that temporarily saved his neck. Place of safety, place of danger-I am accustomed to flux of this, perhaps I even like it. In Karamul- Karamistan I learn to eat every kind of food. I learn to watch all night from rock in desert while in tent Mr. Zuk write stories which nobody now reads. Mr. Zuk is thin like walking stick. Mr. Zuk never liked much to eat but he eats whatever his benefactor gives to eat. But I-I like to eat.”

“Don’t I smell smoke?” I said, “isn’t that smoke floating in the trees?”

“And now I tell you disgusting. You know what is kumiss? Liquor from mare’s milk. Don’t make ugly face, is good, very good, like vwodka and yogurt mix, and good for you, but sometimes we are in nomad village, kumiss is bring in to drink inside great bag of raw skin, one meter wide, and, Bogey, hair of horse still grows on inside part of bag, and plenty islands of black hair are swimming in kumiss. Pfui. And one time, bag, it bubbles too much inside, and just when we drink, whole thing blows up, bloomps! in hair, nose, eye, everything. Disgusting.” Her creamy laughter.

“That’s the eighteenth little creek we passed…”