Bogeywoman

loan you the fleetest of snow camels. And who knows? Border militia are not so assiduous, especially when the bouran is blowing. Or they may be bribed with-for example-a case of Coca-Cola. Of course you may be jailed,” Edouard pointed out, “or shot.”

“Shot!” I whispered. “If I am arrested, if I am lost, dead, kaput, Bogeywoman can hide in this or that aool for short time with old friends. In eleven more months Bogeywoman is grown woman, free, she can do like she wants.” “Dead!” I whispered, “kaput!” “She will return to Baltimore alone by camel, I suppose?” Edouard inquired. “Sure, make joke, have fun,” Zuk said scornfully, “still Bogeywoman does not go back to bughouse on Tuesday.” “Hey, what the hump,” I said uneasily, thinking of Madame Zuk’s buzzard-picked rib cage sticking out of pink sand, “Rohring Rohring ain’t so bad. I can get outa there anytime, you know I can.” “Like you said it yourself,” Zuk reminded me, “now you are dangerous person. Is not so easy to escape from every-fifteen-minute checks in quietroom.” “Merlin won’t leave me stuck in lockup once he sees I’m okay.” “You are sure? He is ready for give up career to watch over you? If not, he must find somebody…”

I had no answer to that. In fact it was just how I’d landed in Rohring Rohring in the first place. I could choose, back then: the ritzy private bughouse or the juvenile authorities. This time, there was a feast of possibilities, by comparison. The Hunger Steppe stretched to the end of the world, relieved only by the shadow of a trudging snow camel. Or-as long as I was here-the Dismal Swamp lay at my feet, trickling and bubbling, soft enough to swallow me up.

“Let the girl go to her father,” Edouard advised, “and fly home, Gulaim. If you do it now, Mrs. Khazarolova can still be managed. Probably she will even send you back to the West. After all, so few Karamul-Karamistanis are known in the great world-you, and that singer of destan who went to Paris, what’s-his- name, and Kurbangaev, the ovine icterologist. I can’t think-good god, Gulaim-”

Zuk had produced the big black gun with the pebbled grips. Her baggy knuckle was hooked around the trigger like serious business and her hand very faintly shook. “Papers,” she said. “You can fix papers, Edouard, I know you can fix.”

“Pull yourself together, my dear,” Edouard said grimly. “You can do what you like! I will arrange tickets and papers, if this is what you choose. I am trying to give you sound counsel, that is all. Perhaps neither of us will work again. But the person with whom you must talk sits next to you. The girl herself! She looks-not so sure, you see? She has forgot to eat her cakes, though she greedily took half a dozen of them. She looks dazed. She is maybe not ready to carry a carbine all day long in saddle and sleep on it by night in a yurt. She hardly knows where she is right now-how will she do in the desert of Kyzl Kum?”

“You make mistake,” Zuk said, “she is expert tracker, and brave like funambule in circus. Bogey, what you say?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Must I go to the Hunger Desert with Doctor Zuk? I was afraid so. But it wasn’t exactly the red desert I feared, whose terrors would soon be joys. I saw myself thundering off in the pink dust on a Kazakh pony, my heels flapping. I’d probably get the hang of it soon enough, I thought-if Zuk could do it, I could. No, it was madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse who worried me: to be so inescapably tied to her at the other end of the world, to be so close to Madame Zuk as to be one thing. I don’t know why: some sort of hunger for difference had set in.

And yet-no joke-I owed her my life! Even she didn’t know how truly in pawn to her I was, right down to my scarred old skin. How could I refuse to let her save it now? But I no longer needed saving. I had never been so happy, not even at Camp Chunkagunk when I didn’t know I loved girls yet, when Lou Rae Greenrule and I used to come out of the lake together and get our ears popped together at the top of the stone stair.

No, even now, when I thought I might end up a heap of bones in the desert of Kyzl Kum, I was never so happy in my life. I had Doctor Zuk. She had thrown away her safety for me, her job, her country, even her fame. I knew I must never leave her, and yet-what could be queerer-I no longer had to have her. I had her. I was her. I had swallowed her. I had become her. True, I didn’t quite have the whole megillah down yet, the beauty, the style, the clothes. But Zuk was inside me, as sure as my liver or spleen. She would give me lessons.

And if I had her, if I was her, I could have anyone, as she could have anyone. And maybe it would even be true to say that now I was, or at least I was becoming, what I had thought she was. Now that I was her, maybe there was really only one of us-me. Now that I had her, I understood she was not quite the woman I had thought she was at first. She was arrogant-sometimes when she scolded Fazool I found myself thinking: the old bag! She was shaky, wild, even a little mad. Definitely mental. After all, she had thrown herself away on me, on me! But I could never leave her-to leave her would be base, unworthy of her, that is, of me. Now that I had her, I had to have her. At least until we’d both had enough.

“So, Bogey. What do you say?” I opened my mouth and closed it again. “She says nothing. No words come out of her. Edouard. Edouard, I think maybe-I think you are right.” Zuk sat up very straight in the rusty lawnchair. The gun banged onto the table. Edouard smoothly lifted it away. “She is not ready for Betpak-Dala,” Zuk announced. “She is young,” he said. “I was young,” Zuk said gloomily, “you were young.” Edouard replied in Caramel- Creamistani I guess, and they went on whispering back and forth, looking at me, and at each other, and back to me, ardent, long-suffering, resigned, like dream parents from some other world-until I felt left out. “I’ll go,” I said. “I need rest,” Zuk said, “I need think,” but then she gathered herself up in her wet trousers and began to pace the porch floor.

“I wanted to fly to Karamul-Karamistan for her. Not for me,” came that voice cured in the smoke of Mongol firepots. “Of course,” Edouard said. “Me I have seen enough face of camel, like huge malignant peanut, for all my life.” “I quite agree.” “I have sat on hairy kilim on floor more than enough. I have eat kprpuz and kavun until I am sick. If I never wear wadded cotton khalat again in life is too soon.” “Much too soon,” Edouard echoed. “But Bogey is monster, not girl: she cares nothing if clothes make her fat like sausage-you should see what she has on for clothes when I first meet her.” “I can imagine,” Edouard said gravely, eyeing my mildewed shirttails.

“For Bogey, everything new is food for mind, so she can forget harsh exile from summer camp, and dead psychiatrist with broken head. I want to give her country where she is daughter of moon and where she can eat karpuz and hundred melons more from dawn to dark, so long as she rides with Zuk and knows no men. And for her I think is easy. But maybe is not so easy.” “It is not so easy,” said Edouard. You are a leviathan, I thought, even your kiss is like a house fell on me. “I can do it,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll go.”

“What you really say,” Zuk observed, looking shrewdly at me with her pond-green eyes-but from a distance, for she was back on a cloud-bonneted peak with Margaret Meat on her left hand and Sigmund Food on her right-“what you really say is I am like some great roc from sky, I have swooped down and take you away and swallow you.” “More like a house fell over on me,” I peeped, trying to make it sound like just a shack, not a house, but then I could see that, as long as the truth was going to come out, maybe a giant roc was best.

“Yes, I am catastrophe in henhouse-like you tell me once,” she said with bitter pride. “You are one hump of a catastrophe, you are,” I admitted, “but you saved my life. You’re the only real monster I know. I wouldn’t have got better for anybody else.” “They will put you back in bughouse, if you don’t come with me,” she warned. “O no they won’t. They’ll try, but I’m never going back to Rohring Rohring-well maybe later when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself. You’re everything to me,” I told her truthfully, “only… only…” “Only you don’t want everything no more,” she said, “you want only little bit.” It was half true, just half, but I didn’t answer. I loved her reproaches and studied to deserve them.

“Now I must think, must find new way,” she panted to Edouard, or to herself, drawing herself clear of me again with a swirl of air and sumpm silver flashing. She paced a couple times more up and down the rotten porch- Edouard’s spaniels, regarding this tumult of legs, shrank away under the table. All at once she banged through the screen door and ran headlong down the dock to shore. Trotted along the mud bank a ways and disappeared into the blackgreen wall of the woods. The last thing I saw was one white calf flickering in the creepers. Then nothing. I jumped up.

“Please sit down. Do not fear for my cousin. God’s gate is her gate,” Edouard assured me, through the snake charmer’s oboe of his large and perfect nose. “Let her go. She knows the swamp. She knows what these woods are.” He raised his two hands, lazily invoking peace, not really caring whether it came or not. I narrowed my eyes at his beautiful-ugly face, but instead of running after her, I listened to him, shifting foot to foot-which was what gave