Bogeywoman (3 page)

The moon hurried on, always in the same place, a whippoorwill sang and we thought this over. “So how does Grandmother Bearsquaw get her ball of food back?” Lou Rae asked. “She doesn’t. There’s always more of
that
where that came from,” I reminded her. “I know where the lost chunkagunk got lost,” Lou Rae mumbled sleepily. “Where?” I asked, then I heard her lacy snore.

So Doggett tented us together and probably hoped I would drag Lou Rae behind me to Evening Pro and Chunka Chow and Wood Wiz and Lake Sci (and by now I was thinking grimly: Why these bleached-bra Christian girls from Maine have to cuten the entire world with nicknames I don’t know) but exactly
the opposite happened. Pretty soon I was a
Unbeknownst To Everybody and I wanted to be near Lou Rae. Pretty soon I would rather hang around Lou Rae than please Mrs. Doggett, the excellent old dame with a meringue of white hair on top who ran Camp Chunkagunk from the turret of the lodge. Mrs. Doggett was rarely seen, but she knew everything that went on, and she had shown me her favor. She was top queen and I was bottom girl, I mean I was the Bogeywoman, once wild but now tame. She picked me to be herself on Upside Down Day, let me rule the camp with her long old-fashioned spyglass for a scepter and even dressed me in her lilac crepe, measly in the shoulders, baggy at the waist—she stuffed a towel in the widow’s hump herself. And she went around with a bowl-cut mophead on her head and blue-veined legs sticking out of my camp shorts like columns of Roquefort cheese.

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 too
, 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