Bogeywoman

her that fatal headstart.

Edouard said: “Perhaps we all know more than we say-? Even you, Miss Koderer?” (On this interrogative note, the gazelles of his eyebrows leaped, sailed, landed.) “My cousin is a remarkable woman, even great. I myself was one of her devoted, ah, students, at one time. But she has made a grave mistake. I don’t mean merely she has had the bad luck to offend her political patrons. This time she has gone too far.”

“She saved my life,” I said.

“She has made a mistake-not only a mistake-the mistake,” Edouard said, “broken not a rule-the rule.”

“For me she always did the right thing.”

“That is beside the point,” said Cousin Edouard. He gazed at me somberly. “My cousin is in disgrace. She sees that now. She has every right to lose herself,” he went on, “in a swamp well suited to that end, indeed I find it a noble choice, a beautiful choice, if this is what she chooses.”

“You mean you think she-o no-o my godzilla-”

I ran after her. That Edouard might hope to lose me in the Dismal right behind her, to turn us monstrous girlfriends into leather boggywomen with one mild wave of his hand-well, I thought of that later, but even that wouldn’t have stopped me at the time. I tracked the fat exclamation points of her silver sandals in the crusted mud.

Madame Zuk I repeat was no sylph but the length of the intervals amazed me. What strength she had with her belly dancer’s bulk, what spring in her silvery heels! The craters of her passing were as legible as puddles after a day of rain-some of them filled right up with swamp water and I saw them shining like stars. So far the trail was easy as pie, the trail was pie, while it lasted, a soft pumpkin-red custard all along the ditch bank. In the scummy water below, rings shed rings where startled reptiles had belly-flopped, and the air was never still-more buzzing, crackling and humming than the black cavity of a telephone. Once a root caught my bare foot and I almost went into the soup myself-my palms printed red dough. Then I winced to think of her running on those things, and pretty soon there it was, the little broken-off silver cone of the first heel, sticking up like a golf tee, and the hop, hop, hop of the other where she had righted herself. Here she tried to go on with no heel but the little nails were poking up into the pad, here was the deep round pock where she stood on her right foot and rocked and swayed and cursed and unbuckled-I calculated the arc and there it hung high in the smilax, one arched silver left sole with no heel, a sliding board for toads.

On she went and never fell and vaulted over trickling cracks in the peat and bore left, jogging along the ditches. We seemed to be in an ever-curving maze screwing down to some core, some center. The smoke that hung waist- high in the whole bog thickened. I coughed and sneezed and blinked back tears, but galloped on, I hoped, at least as fast as Zuk. I figured she had already horrified the rattlers back into their holes with her stampede so I could run faster, but just in case, contrary to the prescriptions of classical wood wizardry, I thrashed through the clumps of greenbriar and tupelo as loud as I could. Zuk’s white shirt caught on this and that-I tore it off and ran naked. Her tracks were so fresh I could almost see them puffing like dough prodded by a finger, and for a while I thought I might be hearing her. Or was that distant rumbly suck, suck, suck my heart?

I was gasping and soon I began to see that pacing round and round my quietroom in the bughouse or playing pukelele all day long with the Bug Motels was no way to get in shape for a life-or-death chase through the Dismal Swamp. The superhuman strength of the mental patient had deserted me. Doctor Zuk on the other hand must have been running 440 hurdles on the sly. You’d think I’d have been more scared what with turf fires all around but-I realize now I was counting on old Zuk to know I was there and save me, if not herself. She’d never lead me into eaten-away peat bogs whose cores fell in, I thought. Or would she?

On and on, her pegleg track (one bare sole, one high-heeled sandal) never flagged. Not even after I saw the first bright dot of blood under the big toe of her bare left foot-I fell to my knees to look at this up close. I panted like a dog. I touched my tongue to her blood just as a fat drop of sweat fell from my nose and washed it away. I was beginning to doubt I’d ever see her again. I crawled to the next drop of blood and the next. Curses upon her, she hadn’t even slowed down yet. How could she go on like this, hobbling gigantically on one high heel like some Oedipus from Vogue?

Suddenly her footprints were everywhere; there seemed to be twice as many as she could possibly need. Was I seeing double? My heart drowned. At least down here where I crawled the smoke was still thin, and even when her tracks were blurred or smeared I could trace their edges with a finger. What if I lost her? What if I had to find my own way out? I realized I’d just been following, following. Some Wood Wiz lost-finder I’d turned out to be!-I’d given not a thought to north, south, east or west, or wind, or hour of day. In hindsight, prickles of sunlight flashed all over the sky, like lights on a spinning top, spiny blobs here, there and everywhere, piercing through rifts in trees. Where the hump was I? Nowhere but on her trail. But I couldn’t give up so I sobbed and crawled on.

And soon I saw sumpm else that sank my heart. Here was why her footprints were blurred and smeared- another set of feet mixed in with hers. I had no idea how long ago I’d started to see them, only that it was long. And maybe I’d counted them out because there was sumpm so repulsive about them, sumpm frightfully plain, deeply dull, sumpm so familiar and disgusting. What was it? I put my nose to them. A faint stink. They were grub-shaped, reticulated, ordinary. What then? That well-known shiny spot, no whorl left, there under the right first metatarsal where Dr. Beasley had dug the plantar wart out-they were mine! my own feet. Good godzilla this meant she had lapped me, we had gone in a circle and were still going, all three of us, two Madame Zuks and now me.

I loped on in despair, sometimes two-legged, sometimes propping myself like an ape with one hand, sometimes down again on all fours. I would never really have her or be her, I would never be the woman that Zuk was, not even in the woods. She had proved that. She had risen brilliantly back into my sky by reducing me to a crawl-at least I could breathe down here, where I richly deserved to be. But she only made sport of me this way for a short stretch. Now her intervals were less. She might be tiring, or maybe just tired of the race. After all she knew she had me beat. From now on she walked straight up on her one high heel at an easy pace, swinging her hips like a woman going home from a swim in the river. A canebrake crowded the bank and afterwards I discerned in the red mud only the footprints of our two old selves, the wild old Zuk and the scared-stiff young Bogeywoman chasing her. The new Zuk had veered off somewhere. The new Bogeywoman had not yet caught up.

She had struck off into the bog on no trail at all. Right away I sank in up to my ankles behind her, and the blackish red peat water hissed and bubbled around my hucklebones like drippings from a steak. It didn’t take a wood wizard-I saw plainly the hole in the honeysuckle where she’d torn it. Aimless, thin salt-and-pepper mist floated out of it. But on its other side dark smoke boiled in great swirling crepe ribbons and bows, and I heard a low roar. I sank exhausted against a cypress stump and stared at its broiled and twisted boll. It had a face like a gargoyle, where an iridescent beetle was crawling. I climbed onto it and as soon as my feet dangled free, Zuk exploded up from the honeysuckle and, showering red water everywhere, shot past me. Somehow I flew at her and got hold of the one silver sandal. “Sorry, dear Bogey-I never mean to harm-” She kicked me hard in the stomach. A wrench and her wet foot popped free. There I was, bunched over my belly, holding her sandal. I tried to say goodbye-oooof, was all that came out. She leaped over a heap of logs into that black smoke and you know the rest. An amphitheater of sparks, a million crumbs of orange flame, rose up behind her, opened like a cape and ate her. Then white steam everywhere.

8

How Love Got Me Out of There

Tuesday I called Merlin’s loft from a coinbox outside the Red Star Diner on Pulaski Highway, as far from the whitecoats and gumshoes as I could stash myself and still make a ten-cent telephone call. I was exhausted, fried and full of myself, puffed up with hot air and looking for a fall like a cheese souffle. I mean I had just lost Zuk, and the old man had come halfway around the world to see me. I wasn’t going to insult him by calling long distance. He should at least think I was hearing out his counsel before I refused to go back to the bughouse.