Bogeywoman

by Jaimy Gordon

  But now I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody. All at once camp, which had always been swampy with life for me, thick with acts, canoeing the rich dark lake, tracking the amorous woods, trying to get the eye of the older girls-all at once camp seemed busy and in the way.

  This was that morning I had been doing the dead man’s float and suddenly wanted to put my hand between my Lake Twinny’s long green legs, and so found out what a Bogeywoman really was. I was out beyond the White Caps’ rope, swimming with the other White Caps around and around the float farthest out in the cold white lake, careful like never before, lemme drown first, not even to brush another girl’s toe with my finger tips. I thought of Lou Rae: way in, out of sight, Lou Rae was dog-paddling through oyster-purple shallows, tearing them shaggy with her fellow Red Caps, all on the verge of panic, most of them little girls half her age. Then thank godzilla a whistle blew. Lake Sci ended. Our little cove of Missionary Lake emptied. The water flattened to a mirror. A double file of campers snaked slowly up the steep stair cut into the bluff, and at the top two counselors, two older girls as tall as priestesses, let go two drops of alcohol into the ears of two girls one step down. The holes in your ears would open as you walked away, with a furry and satisfying pop.

  I looked around for Lou Rae. Usually we met here at the bottom, went up the stairs together and got our ears popped together, but she was gone. I knew she couldn’t have drowned. No Red Cap, however in love with death, could tangle herself in the duck lettuce and drown, for her Lake Twinny would holler and older girls would blow their whistles and in a moment she would be spotted in the cold brown tea washing about everybody’s shins. And even if she had thrown away her Red Cap they would haul her up by her yard of hair. I let go of this beautiful nightmare: No, Lou Rae hadn’t drowned but had given me the slip before I could talk her into going to Wood Wiz. She figured me for some kind of enforcer for Doggett and the wood wizardess-which maybe I was. I felt the blood swarm in my cheeks. I tried to head for the Wood Wiz tracking sand pit but my feet bent like dowsing rods towards Lou Rae. I went to our tent at the end of the tentline.

  And that was how I found her, sitting on a spar under a green tent flap with her feet dangling above the weeds. Tell me she wasn’t trying to cook my goose: There wasn’t a blessed thread on her front, except for the grapey bunches of her hair. On her head was that pancake stack of maple leaves, fixed on with bobby pins, and she had two silver dollars of gray mud on her pink cheeks.

  Today I knew what I was-to get the eye of the older girls, I ran the fastest when I was watched; when all those eyeballs lightened the air, my feet vibrated like violins. And now my fingers buzzed to find the fairy body under that hair. I put one bitten nail to the mud on her face instead.

  “For the complexion,” she explained, in that honking contralto that always took me by surprise-there’s sumpm so touching in a beauty who thinks she needs to be funny. “Even Indian princesses wear the lost chunkagunk-for the complexion.” “Er-are you a princess?” (I wanted to kiss her bare brown foot with the chipped Revlon Candy Apple polish still clinging in patches to three of its five toes. I wanted her to say she’d run the world if I would give it to her, since I could give it to her if she wanted it. I mean, she did run it. She ran mine.)

  “No,” she said sadly. She was holding that white metal bandaid box full of mud, with a pencil sticking out of it. We had the last tent in the tentline, miles from any water. I suspected she had spit in the dry dirt in the can or probably even peed in it, half out of laziness, half to ripen its powers. Lou Rae made up religion as she went along.

  “You could be my princess,” I said shyly. She looked up at me with curiosity and I saw, the size of a flea, a blond-bearded long-faced billy goat totter on spindly hind legs across the amber clearings of her eyes, chewing a tin can-was that what she saw in me? I shrank into my shoulders. I wished my neck would eat my head, so I could disappear.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m Princess Isabella and you’re my loyal handmaiden Mademoiselle, er, Flotilla. Remember when we sailed our pinnace down Missionary Lake to claim the lost chunkagunk for-for la beauté?”

  “O yeah,” I humored her, “that was when we, er, brought torah to the red women.”

  “That was the missionary part. This was the cosmetic part.”

  “So I forget, did we find the lost chunkagunk?”

  “Did we find the lost chunkagunk! Well suppose I tell you this dump was the capital of la beauté, under the czars! Or anyway near it.” And now her voice slid low in her throat and she leaned towards my ear, so that her cascading ringlets and the bare breasts under them grazed my shoulder. “Want me to show you where?”

  And that was it, never mind Wood Wiz, off we were going to find the site of the lost chunkagunk. I didn’t even think what dank bower Lou Rae might lead me to, only that we would be alone. If I had known that I would end up losing camp, I might have dragged my feet. Lou Rae had a red bedspread. She cinched it around her with a yellow cinch belt and clapped on a pair of sixty-wrapper white Mr. Peanut sunglasses, and held on tight to her bandaid box (“for samples”) and tucked the pencil bobbing behind her ear. I followed her onto the beaten path between tentlines. Far off at its dusty fork I saw girls doing normal stuff in green camp shorts, but Lou Rae suddenly struck off into the zigzag pine forest on no trail at all. Hot-cheeked, I watched her red bedspread decapitate saplings, drag leaves and sticks, snag on ferns and lasso blackberry spurs with its tendrils.

  We went on so long I knew that Wood Wiz must be over. The woods thinned out. We came to a barbed wire fence sagging off a wormy fencepost. On the wrong side (wrong because I knew at once that this was the end of camp) were cows, cows of a pale brown the exact tint of used tea bags, with the same dark melancholy shadings along their edges, ringing their ears and their great brown eyes. I stood and stared at them. They were the most beautiful, the most womanly, cows I had ever seen, and not only because I knew the gnawed-down pasture they stood in could not be camp. It was a forbidden place, and it looked it: the crust was lunar, the cows slender and agile, like enchanted girls, the cattle of some sorceress.

  I had never before gone off camp grounds, and of all the rules of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, this was the strictest: she who left camp and got caught would never be let back in. It was a funny feeling even to stand inside camp looking out, as I did every morning waiting for the bugle for Lake Sci, staring across the slate of cold lake at houses the size of dice along its far shore, knowing there were regular people in them, grownups with jobs and diseases, dully eating breakfast. When it finally came, Get in the water you dirty bums on that same scratchy record, the icewater lake was a relief.

  Now again I stood looking out: in front of me was a waste dotted with womanly cows, a floodplain toothed with debris and leached down to rock ribs, sharp stumps and gray broken things, and everything thrumming-earth and sky-with a smoky, mossy luster. “Cheese,” I whispered in awe, “what is this place?” “Better get a sample,” said Lou Rae, and bent at my feet to scratch it with her pencil. One maple leaf still dangled from a bobby pin at her forehead. Suppose I had been my sister Margaret, I might have run a hand right then down the long purplish ruffles of her hair, so that she looked up in-pleased or not-surprise just as it slipped past her throat and found the weight of her breasts in their red wrapper.

  But I’m not Margaret. Already Lou Rae was prying up the barbed wire on top, and I was holding flat to earth the barbed wire on the bottom. We pushed through. The bedspread signed its name on a barb in a long, lazy red thread. We crossed the meadow, and there on a rise I saw the castle for me and my princess. It was a hollow half-tree as big as a cave, as gray as death, and no dirtier than a kiosk at a city bus stop. Where the core of the stump was rotted away, the pulp had washed out and there was a kind of ledge you could sit on, the two of you pressed in each other’s face like halves of a fruit hacked open but not sliced clean through.

  I climbed in. Naturally I never said you come to
o, but she did and then I could smell her breath, feel the warm twin gusts of her nostrils on my lips. Between my legs came a soft lurch as of a bubble breaking free in the windowed cavity of a carpenter’s level. And my nipples and a hot bull’s-eye around my belly button turned into magnets from the nearness of her, stuck on me and trying to stick on her as well. I decided if she didn’t touch me I would die of it. She said sumpm and I only saw the melted pink jewel of her tongue. I didn’t dare hear her, I was afraid she would ask me why I was blinking my eyes in that stuttering way, yes I was sort of trying to hypnotize her, come to me come to me. “What did you say?” You have to understand how she looked at that moment: wood nymph, her throat and shoulders so greeny white under the grapey bunches of her hair, the round momps so distinct, tiny as she was, inside the split red peel of that damn bedspread, and the big green leaf rakishly starring her forehead. I had to kiss her, and if I were Margaret, I would have, I would have felt myself beaming and believed that her hidden coneyhole was as loud with me as a radio. I would have kissed her and then if she had pushed me away I would have merely hated her and an end to it. But if Margaret loved her, she would have been a boy, and small loss.

  Here I was in my tough paradise for girls-no, just now I had crashed or bumbled out of the barbed wire fence of it, on the track of girls who until this summer had been pure as scenery. Nothing you would think of touching, they were, taken together, and this was exactly their spell, so complete, so perfect without me-those Maine girls, their wet ponytails black as tornados and dripping like perfume funnels. And let us not forget, they loved me back. So going to them every summer was dying and going to heaven for me, chaste as a ghost, only I didn’t know I was dead until now, when I came to life on the wrong side of the fence, ugly, starving thing that I was. Fitting that I should be curled in a dead tree like a claw, like a grub, a trilobite.

  But I knew my way back. Didn’t I? After all, nobody knew. I wasn’t kicked out of camp just like that. Was I? It wasn’t too late? What did you say? My princess? “I said we’ve lost chunkagunk.” “Not again?” I choked out. “Alas, yes, Flotilla.” It went without saying that she was princess, I horse-faced mademoiselle. Very well, I agree to anything, come to me, kiss me, press your doll-faced momps, those broken-off upside-down champagne glasses, against me or I’ll

  She laid a finger on the back of my trembling hand and I thought it safe in a hurry to pick up two of the long chocolate scraps of her hair pooling in my lap and place them in my mouth, for this could only amuse her. I could play I was a walrus, all right I was a walrus and I could eat her hair, which tasted like fried flowers. And it did amuse her, cowbells bouncing down a glass staircase, that was her laughter. “We’ve lost chunkagunk,” she repeated with a tragic sob and I dared to hold her eye with mine, well I may have crossed my eyes a bit to be safe, and muttered around my walrus mustaches: “How shall we make it up to ourselves?” Then her face, already so near, blurred into mine and her pink tongue, which I had been looking at before, slid into my mouth, poked in there surprisingly long and small and alive-

  Then I was lost, o a thousand times more lost than she was. Good godzilla the nothing I knew when I was a Unbeknownst To Everybody! Nowadays I know how a girl like Lou Rae operates: Being wooed is meat and drink to the girlgoyle, and sex just spoils her appetite, so she keeps her orders small as sparrows, and if you ask for more-yes, in short, that dirty rotten Lou Rae, she loved me and left me.

  But first I carried her away. I had no thoughts, only rose waves, oceans of muscle, she weighed nothing, I carried her off and she let me, and I laid her down between the rock ribs of the clammy meadow whose little grass the cows had gnawed to the bone and I threw myself on top of her. I had no idea what I was doing. I just tore open the red wrapper, my paws sank in up to the elbow and had at her pretty breasts by the handful. Which is how I know how hard they were: hard but alive, hard as a baby’s head. These were the first I ever touched, outside of my own spongy bags, and they were some immortal nymph’s on their way to becoming Elgin marbles. Dayenu! if I had only been content with that, o lord! but I wasn’t, I wasn’t thinking-nowadays I think but back then I wasn’t-so maybe if I had never lifted my fingers from her momps and crossed her belly to the pink nylon panties, her wetness wrapped there like a mouth in cellophane, like suffocating-I peeled that away and my pinky I only wish went up inside her but in fact just brushed the little fin standing there at attention knee-deep in her pond. She screamed bloody murder and of course I froze and remembered where I was. But just then, sumpm slapped me. How can I describe it? A pink thing, a grimy, scratchy, gray-pink thing exactly like a wet seat cushion from a 99-cent movie theater, slapped me softly across the face. Those womanly cows had come over and taken a front seat at my wooing and were getting their tongues in too.

  Which is more than I can say for Lou Rae, whose legs had snapped back together like the prongs of a clothespin. She sat upright, just as if a spring had popped somewhere. She was scared, I can see that now, and it wasn’t those cows that had scared her, though she was never one to talk levelly about things of this world and there was a yearling bull in the pasture. She was looking at him, he was looking at us, I was looking at her and she was wearing red-for she had wrapped back up in her red thing as fast as she could yank it out from under me. And now she was rolled in her bedspread tight as a red cigar. “I think we better go back to camp,” she said.

  From the hard ground I stared at her, knowing I had lost camp for good now, and would not even have Lou Rae Greenrule for five whole minutes to make good my loss.

  I hoped the bull would perforate us both! or maybe at the last moment I would save her: “Come on, Ferdinand,” I encouraged him, “do your worst,” but his fuddy maleness just gave me a cross-eyed look, and turned and walked away. Even if she never told anybody-and what could she tell, in that Venusian Pig Latin she talked, full of lost beauté, ensorcelled princesses and wandering serving maids, that anybody would understand? But I could never believe in my love of camp again: my love was out to get some girl, I was a wolf in evergreen camp shorts and gimp lanyard, looking for live feed I could catch.

  Lou Rae had asked me once, as we lay on our cots one starry night waiting for the mosquitos to wail: Did you usta want to be a princess when you grew up? Er, sort of, I said, knowing she had, wanting to draw her nearer to me, though that was Sister Margaret who had had the royal girlgoyle ambitions, not me. But not to boss people, I added sweetly, meanwhile thinking: they want to be princesses, and not even to boss people, what’s wrong with you girls! Did you? said I, and was shocked when I heard a suspicious noise and turned on my flashlight and sure enough her eyes began to puddle up with tears.

  She blurted: “I won’t be able to stand it if everything is ugly around me. When I’m a grownup I won’t be able to wear those dogface shoes my mother wears, or look down at my slacks and think wow that belly belongs to me, it’s like an anthill in Africa, and I’ll never be able to sleep in the same bed with some pee-smelling half-dead gramps scribbled all over with iron hair… I couldn’t, I couldn’t!” So she was that kind of girl ya see, mortally afraid of everyday rot, and if I had known what I know now I would have said: Come with me and I’ll never let anything that smells mortal or perishable-certainly not a fuddy male-come near you. But of course I didn’t know it and she wouldn’t have come with me if I had. Probably she had to pass through any number of pretty, feckless boys who went downhill before she became, o, let’s see, what I find in my crystal ball is a one-girl condo cleaning service in Maui in later life, gold lamé smocks she finds at St. Vincent de Paul, paisley slippers and fantastical babushkas:

  What is your fortune, my Magic Maid?

  My face is my fortune, sir, she said.

  Then I can’t marry you, my Magic Maid.

  Nobody asked you, sir, she said.

  But just now in a cow pasture in Maine, she was flouncing back towards the boundary of Camp Chunkagunk, Tough Paradise for Girls, in that maddening bedspread,
springing lightly over the barbed wire fence back into camp, and I followed in a fog, in pig-iron grief. I could hardly lift my cannonball knees, my head lolled on a broken spring, but she was fully recovered. She looked back at me over her shoulder, across her red train, and said: “Bogeywoman-you know what?” “No, what?” I growled. “I know-don’t ask me how I know but I know-you were my wood wizard in another life.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her red back. I understood she was throwing me a bone and at the same time explaining away her mysterious but passing attraction to me. O yeah? what life was that? I wanted to sneer. Back when we were both lumpy funguses and nobody had a coneyhole or a frog dangle? I never was one to go for that girlgoyle slumber party drivel about reincarnation-everybody’s souls flying around in beans with bus transfers until they find a new body to land in.

  All the same there was sumpm in what she said that made the sweat pop out in oily beads on my forehead. You were my wood wizard in some other life-in other words, her spirit guide from one world to another. And even though she had it upside down, and obviously the red-ragged little hussy was leading me, still she was right about that, I had wound up in some other world than I’d ever meant to. Things only looked the same. I dragged on behind her. I dragged my feet through the blackened leaves of the forest bottom, trying not to track or even see her huge and ridiculous spoor in the stringy humus. But I couldn’t shake the habit of camp so easily. I ached with disgusted, stale hunger. I sensed all hope of her had been marooned on this isle of the lost chunkagunk in a golden past, and now instead of showing me her pretty coochie slick and pink like a little wing of bubblegum, with the spit of expectation sparkling on it, she would reminisce. Of ancient travels with her wood wizard, that wily giant rabbit-hole, the Bogeywoman. Yes I saw it coming, more and more mystical twaddle like this, with her pink Lollipop underpants back on.