Bogeywoman

light in the head, as though I had bled away a snakebite. I yanked off my Camp Chunkagunk jersey and rolled it around my arm, there, that was better. Stood up straight. Now to go the way my naked momps were pointing me. I looked down at them. They’re kinda duck-footed: one said north, one said south.

Willis Marie Bundgus would expect me to go north, light out for the bog country and the Canada border. Opportunity lay that way; as a schooled tracker I would find sumpm to eat, or if I was really determined to off myself there were funny-looking mushrooms everywhere. In fact hazards abounded, fertile danger a-plenty in the bog country: if a bear didn’t eat me, they might find me in a thousand years, a self-made bog woman- Boggywoman-intact in the peat, forever young though tough and red as a Western saddle. That thought alone would send Bundgus crashing through the cranberry bogs in search of my hide before I sank and the juniper water tanned me forever. Yes, a smart scout would head north. Therefore I could outwit Bundgus (and myself) by turning south. Back to camp. And so I did. I set off south, sobbing from time to time, bare-bosomed, glancing around slyly whenever I remembered to, careful not to kick so much as a stone. Okay, I was buggy. I thought this a reasonable plan.

Though my situation was desperate, I felt better now, no denying it. The blackgreen woods pressed the road between two banks as velvety and private as upholstery. It was falling dark. As long as there was no one to look at me, I kinda liked my bare chest. My arm-I had forgotten that and it wouldn’t hurt one bit tomorrow. The tar under my feet was spicy and warm. Its newness glowed like seal fur. A raccoon turd dotted it here and there and I stopped, as I always did, to admire the harlequin scat of that model omnivore-fishbones, corn, a plug of purple finch feathers, all bound together and tinted with the rosy, seed-speckled pleasure of blackberry-and was it one pearl button winking at me? Perhaps they would take me back at camp after all-perhaps they would simply forget, or Willis Marie Bundgus would relent from duty this once, find it unbecoming to her beautiful flesh to hold as rigid as a tent-pole. God give me, not an excuse-a break, an exemption, a liberty, permit, indulgence, one-of-a-kind. For one- of-a-kind, that’s what I by godzilla am, aren’t I? and, God, you made me, you’re stuck with me, at least I’m not contagious. I’m Bogeywoman, a monster not even reproducible as myself, sterile as a mule in that respect, so how about a permit, you owe me sumpm. Or I’ll kill myself, God, you think I won’t? Let me back in camp Make them take me For some reason I recalled at just that moment that on my way from the appletree-top to the ground I had bitten Ottie on the nose with all my might, and I saw the bright blood spritz down the dam of his upper lip, drowning the furrow the Archangel Michael is said to press with a forefinger to make newborn children forget all they know of heaven. I had bitten his nose half off! I trudged on miserably, for the case was hopeless. Then-probably I was sniveling in some manner-I came over a rise, still walking in the middle of the road, and found myself looking down on the Camp Chunkagunk green woodie in a dirt turnaround on the left, a Caribou County police car tilted into the ditch on the right, and, side by side, slowly advancing, walking towards me up the little hill of blacktop, Ottie Grayson and a tall square-jawed policeman. I clamped my arm across my momps; the Camp Chunkagunk jersey dangled down in front of me like a curtain. Thank godzilla it was almost dark by now. I inched backwards.

“Come on, Bogeywoman,” Ottie coaxed in an amiable zookeeper’s voice, he must have thought I was born yesterday, “we’ll take you back to camp. Chicken papa and strawberry cuss for dinner, and square dancing for Evening Pro…”

The Bogeywoman’s appetite ya see was well known. From now on I hate chicken papa, I was thinking, and if I work at it I’ll soon loathe strawberry cuss too: and for the first time in my life I got a flash of why some girlgoyles say no to whatever they give you to eat. All the same I was getting hungry. I narrowed my eyes at Ottie. His nose was big and red and puffy, and looking bigger and redder and puffier the closer he came. “Nothing bad will happen to you,” he said, “I know you must be hungry by now.” “I ain’t hungry,” I said, “and I swear by godzilla Ottie Grayson if you come one step closer I’ll bite your nose clean off.” He stopped and so did the policeman. I whirled around to run and barged smack into Willis Marie Bundgus. Of course she’d circled around behind me stealthy as a weasel. I saw her big brown feet planted in a wrestler’s ready on the blacktop. The wood wizardess always wore that fringed vest like Annie Oakley. Now its tassels trembled. I would have let her take me. I wasn’t going to sock the great Willis Marie Bundgus, and anyhow she stood a foot above me even in a slight crouch. But she backed off. “Where’s your shirt, Koderer?” she said unhappily.

“I swear I’m not buggy, I’m not,” I cried, and then I could feel the fuddies closing in behind me-I spun and threw them everything I had: Sunday Monday and Tuesday punches, knees to grottos, elbows to jawbones, roundhouses, watertowers and terminals, dungspreaders and haymakers, blueflies, blackflies, letter flies. I got nowhere. They didn’t hurt me, but the boys weren’t even trying. They caught my flailing arms and legs one by one and as the trooper steered my hands together for the handcuffs he turned up my arm and tweeted unmelodiously. “What in sam hill is this?” “It’s a map of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls,” I said proudly, “can’t you tell?” “Jesus wept,” the officer said in disgust and packed me into the cruiser.

Since I was half-naked I figured they would throw Willis Marie Bundgus in with me for a chaperone and I could explain. But all I ever saw of her again was one gleam through the back window: Ottie Grayson and Bundgus in the Camp Chunkagunk station wagon, two white faces lit up in the windshield, one a grinning handyman I hereby rub out, one a suffering wood wizardess-I tell you she loved me more than she knew-till they slammed the car door closed.

2

Buggywoman

BUG MOTELS ON MISSION

I was in the bughouse, but I wasn’t hearing angel voices. I wasn’t being bugged by the FBI, through invisible microphones in the toilet. I wasn’t the Virgin Mary. If I found a fat shoelace probably I tied my broken ukulele case together with it instead of trying to dangle from it, by the neck, inside my private closet. And, speaking of that closet, the cockroach I found there, napping in my sad-faced sneaker, was no hallucination but just as real, and just as big, as the Koderer nose on my face. I liked girlgoyles, that was at the bottom of it, but of course I wasn’t telling them that. I liked girls, except for me. And in the wilderness between my hunger and its exception, I sometimes drew maps with no way out on the inside of my forearm with a razor blade. Or anything else sharp I could find. I was seventeen now. I had been in this dump one year, seven months and seven days. I still dreamed of dirty rotten Lou Rae Greenrule, who loved me and left me, and of the wood wizardess, who turned me in. Sometimes I dreamed I was back at Camp Chunkagunk and having a pretty good time, except for those two ripe pimples I was hiding inside my brassiere, so sore and popping full of yellow cheese they made me want to puke.

I was safe in the loonie bin, and to make sure I was safe, I kept my mouth shut. Who knew what a bona fide loonie might have to say? So I gave em the silent treatment, I mean all the dreambox mechanics and especially “my” dreambox mechanic, Foofer. For one year, seven months and seven days-not one word. Right smack in the bughouse I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody, or at least I was until that dirty stoolie Margaret wrote sumpm on the back of a greasy menu that Foofer got his hands on-as she knew he would. (I forgot, says Margaret. Forgot! I’ll say no more. It doesn’t take a Sigmund Food.)

But this was before the menu, before Zuk, before I said a single word. Foofer musta thought he’d heard it all, but one year, seven months and seven days of nothing?-I have reason to think he was impressed.

A state hospital would have rolled me over in a week, but Thomas Hare Rohring and Eugenia O. Rohring Clinic could afford to ponder my case. After all, Merlin was forking over a hundred dollars a day. Merlin felt sick at heart for the mess I was in-he said-but he was having a good year. No way Merlin’s Puppets World Tour could come home from Haiphong, or Penang, or Surabaya, or wherever he was that week, just to nurse me. “And I’d have to nurse you,” he threatened, his voice all thready sizzles and crackles on the phone