Bogeywoman (34 page)

Fazool shrieked and we poked our heads above the gangway stairs. We both saw it: a black bear about as tall as me stood up to look at us, then polkaed away across the bog, his fat little bowlegs splashing.

“Say, got any bears up there in Caramel-Creamistan?” I whispered. “And what about disgust? Weren’t you ever, like, sick-to-your-stomach disgusted with love—the whole twenty-dish ham & chicken potpie firehall supper? And where the hump are we anyhow?”

“You know, one thing people know how to do in Karamistan. This is eat. Sit, talk, eat. September in Samovarobad is paradise, thirty degrees and everybody eating melons from morning till night. But most of all, meat. Is meat culture. Twenty kilometers out of city in red hills, is nothing to find but meat. Sit on carpet, soon some woman brings in great bowl or plate: all meat, naked boiled meat. And you see everything of this meat. Is anatomy lab for sheep. You see every part of sheep, whole stomach, testicles, big steaming heap intestines, and from middle of puddle two whole sheep eyeballs look up at you. My god what makes that scream like crazy woman?”

“O that’s an American Barred and Bedraggled Owl. You’ll never see it—it’s probably in that tangle of black gum trees. Before we get there it’ll go flapping off to the next thicket. Ya know what it says?—I mean what everybody says it says—
Who who who, who cooks for you
?” “Ah! Is very good question. And what is answer?” I shook my head. “Answer of course is
You do
. Answer every time,
You do you do you do
.

“Alas, I tire of ever the same dish. The world too stays not in a oneness of changelessness. And who would say which is more beautiful, night unveiling to day? or day unveiling to night? Either way, veiling or unveiling, the world is beautiful as a houri.”

“Say, where the hump are we again?” I asked for the hump-teenth time, “and where’d you say we were going?”

“I eat all foods. I eat meat, fish, kasha, apricots. I particularly like feast dish of Karamul-Karamistan, which is baby camel stuffed with goat, goat stuffed with six hens, each hen stuffed with twelve eggs in nest of parsley, and all this roasted on spit through twenty-four hours …”

“Holy godzilla did you see that? A giant pig just jumped up from the mud bank right there between the cypress knees
and trotted into the bush. Cheese, look at the bald spot—that’s where it was wallowing. Where the hump is this place and where are we headed? [
Sniff, sniff
.] Ya know I know it sounds perverse when there’s water water everywhere, but I swear I smell smoke …”

“Speaking of smoke, speaking of meat, what you suppose is feast day game of men in all Karamul-Karamistan? I tell you. Is kind of crazy polo with carcass of sheep. First they cut throat, like that,
kr-r-r-ch
. Then they race around like crazy on strong little ponies, and tear sheep apart with bare hands. Who has biggest piece at end, wins.”

“Wins what? Cheese, there goes another pig, with big black spots. You see any farms? See any peanut fields? Must be a pig gone wild, I mean, you know, a feral pig. What the hump is this godzilla forsaken place?”

Outside the portholes, thorny-vine and creepy-briar shot straight up the tree trunks, fifty sixty feet in the air. Bulrushes brushed peacefully by, then, rat-a-tat-tat on the
Jenghiz Khan
, a canebrake was playing our bottom like a snare drum. Doctor Zuk stuck her head out the gangway. I stuck mine out next to hers. “Where the hump—” “Hush, Bogey. Make like you speak no English. Do like Fazool, whatever he does, you do it too. Hallo-o-o-o!” she shouted. Fazool grinned his square grin and waved. Zuk waved. I waved. A streaky tin roof swam into view, then a Nehi Orange Crush sign, its orange weathered to that shy flamingo that pleases me best of all colors. On the bank a galvanized steel privy sailed by, its door banging in the wind.

“Hey what is this place?” Then I saw sumpm like thick pink cellophane—a bulge of peat water gushing over a slimy spillway. And before I knew it I was tilted back like in a roller coaster.
Holy godzilla, a winch was hauling the
Jenghiz Khan
up a coupla boat rails. A Popeye-looking fuddy in khakis was working it. I read a sign on a shack,
UNITED STATES ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS
. I was on the point of yelling
Help me I been kidnapped
, when I remembered I hadn’t been kidnapped, I’d been saved.
“Where the hump are we or I’ll scream,”
I screamed. Luckily the winch chasing over the metal frets was loud as a Gatling gun, and nobody heard me, not even myself.

Then a red lake was opening out in front of us as far as the eye could see. “Wow, how the hump did that get here? What—” “Hush—only little while longer now,” Zuk said. Fazool steered the
Jenghiz Khan
left along the shore. “You, Bogey, keep eye open like owl for Ditch Number 19. Ditches don’t have signs like streets so is important, very important, you watch and count.”

The lake: red like the bilge that laps the toilet bowl the first day you’re on the rag—and a few cypress knees sticking out of it like hairy upside-down carrots. “So what about The Beetle?” I dared to whisper (I had never asked about her father before.) “I figure he grew up eating kreplach in Plock or somewhere, just like my Zayde Schapiro …”

“Ah, you speak of Mr. Zuk,” she replied stiffly. “What means this—kreplach?” She made a face. “Mr. Zuk was champion fencer at Jagiellonian University. Son of famous doctor of geophysics from Warsaw. He wrote not only in Yiddish—sometimes in Polish, sometimes French. Even before start of war, even before Polish Communists die in Russia, is over with him and communism. He trusted nobody. Karamul-Karamistan you know is never spoon of his mouth. Even in Karamul-Karamistan, for eleven years we are running. He is at home nowhere, and that temporarily saved his neck. Place of safety, place of danger—I am accustomed to flux of this, perhaps I even like it.
In Karamul-Karamistan I learn to eat every kind of food. I learn to watch all night from rock in desert while in tent Mr. Zuk write stories which nobody now reads. Mr. Zuk is thin like walking stick. Mr. Zuk never liked much to eat but he eats whatever his benefactor gives to eat. But I—I like to eat.”

“Don’t I smell smoke?” I said, “isn’t that smoke floating in the trees?”

“And now I tell you disgusting. You know what is
kumiss
? Liquor from mare’s milk. Don’t make ugly face, is good, very good, like
vwodka
and yogurt mix, and good for you, but sometimes we are in nomad village,
kumiss
is bring in to drink inside great bag of raw skin, one meter wide, and, Bogey, hair of horse still grows on inside part of bag, and plenty islands of black hair are swimming in
kumiss. Pfui
. And one time, bag, it bubbles too much inside, and just when we drink, whole thing blows up,
bloomps!
in hair, nose, eye, everything. Disgusting.” Her creamy laughter.

“That’s the eighteenth little creek we passed …”

“Is good.”

So now we were off the lake and nosing up another skimpier ditch, parting reeds and yellow scum and scraping bottom, and all of a sudden we’re smack in the middle of a big fat smoke ring, tunneling down the tonsils of it, visibility is the hole, that’s all, in this great white doughnut of smoke …

Zuk didn’t seem to notice. “Is not far now,” she murmured. “Hey—” [
sniff, sniff
] “I don’t just smell fire, I even see it …”

Fazool shrieked again and splashing out of the thick white smoke came a small black cow, with a nose like a wet black charcoal filter, and twisted horns where you looked for antlers. In deerlike arcs the cow launched herself and her freckled udder across the stream, trailing garlands of honeysuckle. “What the
hump
is
this queer place?” I burst out, “I’m no mental peon, I can take it. I can take it if you can take it. We’re almost there, now come on, tell me where we are.”

“You are right, Bogey. We are deep in Great Dismal Swamp. We go to remote hunting lodge of my cousin, Édouard Suleymenian, vice consul for trade in America of Karamul-Karamistan. Édouard will help.”

“Chee-e-e-e-ese, the Dismal Swamp, I always wanted to go there, in a creepy sorta way, try tracking in the ruby-red peat bog, ever since Willis Marie Bundgus, the wood wizardess, told me it was the northern limit of the water moccasin, cheese,” and I began to tremble all over to think I had been wading up to my chin in the snaky soup.

“These little peat fires” [
cough, cough
] “they are as nothing, they happen every day in low water in August, dark of moon” [
cough, cough
]. Is very beautiful at night, that red ring of fire in bog, you see? Ranger men come put them out. Now and then, is true, ranger disappears in swamp. Crust falls in,
bloomps
, like top of meat pie under spoon, yes? and poor fireman falls into burning peat and we never see him no more …”

The hunting shack of cousin Édouard, second vice consul (department of sheep exchange) of Caramel-Creamistan to the United States of America, had a warped and wavy tin roof like an old broiler pan, and needed paint. Well, perhaps it didn’t need paint so much as never had any. Paint was a citified notion hardly known in the Dismal, judging by the few dumps we’d passed. The shack was built of silvery planks and stood on not
too crooked stilts on the shore of Ditch 19. The sagging front porch screens had a greenish cast, and all around the front door, curious perches for birds seemed to have sprouted—antlers, as it turned out, of every shape, but all kinda pipsqueak, nailed up as they were without the heads they grew on, godzilla be thanked.

All told, an unassuming den of classic fudd, according to your Baedeker. So I wasn’t allowing for much of a spectacle from Cousin Édouard. In fact I was thinking that, after Madame Zuk, a soldierly old fuddy with a firm paunch and grizzled sideburns would be a relief—a modest, dignified sportsman, that was the ticket, given to colorless oaths, politely indifferent to women but a mean hand with a frypan full of fliers—I mean, how many fantasticoes dare we hope, or rather must we dread, from any one family?

Zuk buckled on her silver sandals, I borrowed her shirt, and together we staggered up the dock. The screen door opened and there was Cousin Édouard—I tried not to gape. “My godzilla it’s Yul Brynner in
Anastasia
,” I whispered in her ear, and she laughed a nervous laugh that caused me to narrow my eyes at her—just what was going on here? I swear I saw it all in one second flat: He was old, maybe thirty, and beautiful, and bald as a mahogany finial,
but not as old as Zuk
. These cousins knew each other well! I could smell it, they were ancient lovers, and I knew which was which. I figured she had introduced him under the Ottoman Empire to the same black arts she had lately shown me.

In fact he looked like her, the same giant-sized eyes, nose, cheekbones—so beautiful he was grotesque—the same Mongol flash, but with black ficus of body hair at the wrists and throat of his pale green shirt. He was a little shorter than Zuk, and he worried, that was what really made me stare: the bare notion
of a worried Zuk. He had her beauty, he was younger and an international playboy to boot, around 16,000 miles out of my league, but his face was nicked here and there with a fretfulness quite unknown to madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse. Was he scared—scared, possibly, of Zuk? Well, who wasn’t? Maybe her fumy dangers had affected more than his growth. And sumpm else I saw right away: he wasn’t all that glad to see us. He was worried. I saw it before she did, even before he quieted his dogs, two ringletted spaniels, and held out his arms to us and smiled courteously and bowed us in. And said over my head to Zuk: “Very interesting—the blond hair—and soulful, belligerent face, like some orphan boy from a film—some movie of Dickens maybe?—
Oliver Twist
I think.”

Zuk pushed me firmly forward. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped. As I stumbled by he caught my hand and pressed it to his lips—not some sleazy fakeroo but a real kiss that left a wet spot. His lips were big beautifully molded Levantine numbers, with that sorta blue tattoo of a banished mustache gleaming faintly above them. I noticed he held my hand a little longer than was strictly necessary—could be he was scoping my scars, all bazillion threads of them that looked like carded plastic fishing line in that light. But of course an international playboy doesn’t say a wrong word at a moment like that. “Come in, ladies, sit down …” And then, like Zuk back at her place, he was off and clanking around in the icebox—brought in three little glasses and the
vwodka
. I choked mine down.

Coupla paragraphs to be filled in later about his guns and knives, a whole wall of em. Bear rugs, raccoon lampshades, ocelot headrests—you get the picture. Ruffs of brown feathers tacked up on the bias—just the wingspreads, no stuffed voodoo turkeys with empty glass eyes. Cousin Édouard ate the meat and
didn’t pay the taxidermist, I guess. But there was a sweet smell of violence and rot about the place, as though carcasses were hanging in the guestroom. He did know his way around a frypan full of dead fish: they came out to the front porch headless, cockle-shaped and gritty with golden meal. I ate six or seven. And then, sitting in the rusty lawnchairs, we got down to business.

“Édouard, is good to see you. I need little help from you.” “Tell me, have you two women really sailed all night in that clumsy oyster boat? What nerve you have, Gulaim.” “Why, what is to fear?” He shook his head. “Is very good thing, Édouard, your boat is in Baltimore for paint—sorry to commandeer, but we must stay in front of police.” “Good god, Gulaim …” His hand rose vaguely to his forehead. “Don’t you wish sometimes to live a quiet life? And my god what a genius must be that
kokpar
player Fazool who until one year ago never saw the sea. It’s a miracle you have not got lost or run aground, Gulaim. Or been stopped by police, or the Coast Guard.” “Actually Fazool must get out and push
Jenghiz Khan
for one mile of low water at Currigunk Landing—extremely tiresome but then Bogey has beautiful idea we will jump in snake-filled canal and push with him.” Zuk leaned back contentedly, smoking one of Édouard’s cigarettes, wagging a crossed foot in its silver sandal, looking sultry and piratical in sopping rolled-up pinstripe trousers and nothing but the wet pinstripe vest over her momps, with one button buttoned.