trying to poke through a curtain. His ugliness was legendary, even to him: He liked to tell about a blind date he’d once had where he’d whispered to the girl he was a werewolf and at midnight she panicked and threw her shoe at him. Everyone liked him, including me.
Anyhow sometimes Willis talked through the window of Ottie Grayson’s trailer, sometimes Ottie squatted by Willis’s sand pit. Willis Bundgus liked Ottie, too, but I wasn’t jealous. Ottie was cute-ugly and popular as the camp dog. Mostly he wasn’t around, Ottie; mostly he was down the bottom of some hole with his shovel. But once I had found the two of them belly-flopped in the sand pit, heads together, watching a mud dauber and a grass spider fight to the finish, with Ottie coaching the underdog spider and Willis coolly fixing the terrible odds. “Whatcha guys doing?” I squatted right down between them, never thinking I might be in the way.
When it was all over Willis showed us the paper cell in the eaves of the smokehouse where the wasp was bricking up the numb spider with one of her eggs.
“Ouch. Poor chump,” Ottie said. “You wouldn’t do that to your worst enemy, would you, Bogeywoman?”
“She’s not mad at him,” Willis pointed out.
“She eats him alive and he gets to watch,” Ottie winced.
“A restful end,” Willis said, “but not for the squeamish.”
“Maybe he doesn’t even know it’s him,” I chimed in. “Maybe he feels lighter and lighter and all at once he feels like nothing, I mean he turns into her and that’s what he is, her.”
I remember the two of them looked at me queerly.
But today Willis was missing, though right away I found a fresh print of her big potato foot-as wood wizardess she was the only one at Camp Chunkagunk who was allowed to go barefoot. Behind the print was a crater as though she had braked suddenly and peered at sumpm in the distance and then lost heart and plunked down on her bum and bawled, except that the wood wizardess would never bawl. A few seconds later she had scrambled back up and I could see, from the wrung necks of a couple spurges, that was the way she went. In a hurry. Which gave me the idea-I would track her. She had scrambled up the back of the sand pit and come out in no-woman’s-land outside of camp. What the hump-this time it was too easy. I resolved to track the great tracker, praying she would be glad to see me. After all she was on the wrong side herself. That I might intrude never even occurred to me.
I kicked off my sneakers and picked up in no time her trademark silent hundred-and-sixty-pound pigeon-toe. Sure enough, she was tracking. Here she tunneled through bearberry, here she made herself small as a pocketbook, all at once-we were even with Grayson’s trailer-she stretched up on her toes and peered in the porthole. Now I began to see a second set of tracks, maybe they’d been there all along but so like hers in the mass of weight they carried and the bassoon-key toeworks I hadn’t noticed. A fuddy’s foot. Ottie. On she padded after him, swifter and swifter now, away from the lake, over a rise and down into a snake’s nest of bramble whips where all I had to do was navigate the channel their hips had already brush-hogged. Here came a broad bank of raspberries she hadn’t even stopped to eat. But-wait-sumpm else had stopped to eat, sumpm more a berry’s size, with dinky fingerjoints born to close fast around the hairy red brain lobes of raspberries. And now I picked up a third track, fairy-footed, girly, its tread hardly denting the ground. Here a small female lounged, stuffing herself with berries, swatting briars out of her long ringletty hair, then all at once fell down on peach-pit kneecaps and tunneled into the bush, and if I was not mistaken-didn’t the red berries tremble?-she was still in there. I saw with a thrill that Willis Marie Bundgus had never detected this party, for just here the wood wizardess had spotted what she was looking for, here she had gone crashing like a rhino through the briars to get to it. Myself I climbed a scabrous old apple tree on the edge of the trail, and clung there looking down on all three.
I bet you think I was buggy with jealousy. You’ve got it all wrong: at first I was dying to catch those two, Willis and Ottie, in the act, I was ready to crash their picnic and eat the crumbs with the ants, I’d take what I could get. I wanted to be sure that everybody was doing it as soon as they had the chance-those Maine girls most of all, with their sturdy legs, smooth hair and strong teeth, their glass-clear voices singing Old Hundredth and
I rubbernecked for a better view. In my dream their shirts had already unwrapped them like a picnic, fluttered down and flattened puffily underneath them. She lay on her back on this billowing tablecloth and clutched Ottie’s ugly head to this nuzzy and that nuzzy, passionately imprisoning his bubblegum ears in her big strong hands, her bare biceps glittering with sweat. He kissed and struggled and all of a sudden gasped for air and sat back on his heels. And in my dream there they were, her wizardly breasts, two lovely round custards, wet and slick, with their brown nipples pointing up like fuses. And,
But no. The two were doing nothing. They sat on a low stump, not even side by side though their shoulders bumped. All their zippers were zippered and snaps snapped and laces laced. I heard Ottie’s voice:
“I mean whatsername, you know the one, sounds like a national park?” he was saying, and he turned kinda boiled pink, then light dove into the woof of his flat-top-he looked sheepishly down at his feet. “The one with the hair? The fairy princess about four foot tall but with real jugs, from the Lower Big Bear line?” (That’s where I close to fell out of my apple tree, for that could only be one person he was describing. Now I knew who it was in the raspberry bush. Blood surged into my face and it’s a wonder I didn’t jump someone right then.)
“The one with the hair, I mean hair like hot fudge pouring all the way down to her little ice-cream scoop butt, you know the one? The one who thinks she’s in the Land of Nod or Cockayne or somewhere?” I saw sumpm flash in his hands-he was carving a peg with a jackknife. Willis’s hands were tucked away, out of trouble, under her big thighs. “Whose dad’s supposed to be in jail? who lives on Platform 92 with the Bogeywoman and the red bedspread? I think she’s gonna be the one…”
“The one?” Willis said. She glanced up at him and I was shocked at her shipwrecked face-but Ottie was studying his feet.
“Ya mean the only one? For me? Heck, no, I mean the first one,” he said, and laughed, but bashfully, not like a cad, and his ugly-cute face lit up with that thought and the queer greeny light of the woods. “I always figured one of these days even a ugly guy like me would stumble across one of those nymphos you hear about. So I been bracing myself for somebody old and scary, probably one of my buddies’ mothers with cottage cheese thighs and lard lumps hanging out of her girdle, I’d take anything-and who comes along but this little number, whatsername. She’s like a movie star who ate a eat-me pill and shrank down in perfect proportion-you know?” Willis mumbled sumpm or other. “Cheese I’m glad I can talk to you, Bundgus”-he gave her a gentle punch in the shoulder, which was larger than his own, and she smiled a closed smile with a greenish cast.
“What I mean is,” Ottie went on, “for five years now I been wondering if I was ever going to… I’m not the kind who could push a girl to… I’m nineteen years old, I got big ears, a Howdy Doody face, all the girls want to be my pal and nobody wants to, you know. Only this one, I think she really likes to-anyway, she was sposed to meet me here and-I hope she didn’t get pinched.” “I’ll haul her in myself,” Willis growled. “Aw cmon.” “You could get in a lot of trouble.” “She’s not the type who’d ever tell,” Ottie said, “-ya know I used to think she and the Bogeywoman had some kinda private club together, NO BOYS ALLOWED. But yesterday she led me out here when she was sposed to be shooting targets with the Chunkagunk Bowwomen and I got the poison ivy to prove it.” He started fussing with his floppy overalls but then pointed, to my relief, at his bare ankles. There they were, fat crusty white clouds of calamine lotion.
“She said we were looking for some kind of dirt from the lost chunkagunk-what the heck you think she had in mind? Anyhow we were crawling around in the briars, scratching up dirt, and something told me I could kiss her.”
“Don’t worry,” Ottie mumbled, “a girl that young, I’m waiting for her to ask me, well not exactly ask but, you know, put a hand on me first, something like that…” He stretched out his long legs in their puffy green overalls and stood up to go. “Hey, I got hogs.” (He meant his KP duty.) “So what brings
And that’s where I went buggy, right there in the pleasingly anatomical forks of the apple tree, variety Northern
