Bogeywoman (36 page)

“You make mistake,” Zuk said, “she is expert tracker, and brave like funambule in circus. Bogey, what you say?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Must I go to the Hunger Desert with Doctor Zuk? I was afraid so. But it wasn’t exactly the red desert I feared, whose terrors would soon be joys. I saw myself thundering off in the pink dust on a Kazakh pony, my heels flapping. I’d probably get the hang of it soon enough,
I thought—if Zuk could do it, I could. No, it was madame-too-beautiful-on-her-horse who worried me: to be so inescapably tied to her at the other end of the world, to be so close to Madame Zuk as to be
one thing
. I don’t know why: some sort of hunger for difference had set in.

And yet—no joke—I owed her my life! Even she didn’t know how truly in pawn to her I was, right down to my scarred old skin. How could I refuse to let her save it now? But I no longer needed saving. I had never been so happy, not even at Camp Chunkagunk when I didn’t know I loved girls yet, when Lou Rae Greenrule and I used to come out of the lake together and get our ears popped together at the top of the stone stair.

No, even now, when I thought I might end up a heap of bones in the desert of Kyzl Kum, I was never so happy in my life. I had Doctor Zuk. She had thrown away her safety for me, her job, her country, even her fame. I knew I must never leave her, and yet—what could be queerer—I no longer
had
to have her. I had her. I was her. I had swallowed her. I had become her. True, I didn’t quite have the whole megillah down yet, the beauty, the style, the clothes. But Zuk was inside me, as sure as my liver or spleen. She would give me lessons.

And if I had her, if I was her, I could have anyone, as she could have anyone. And maybe it would even be true to say that now I was, or at least I was becoming, what I had thought she was. Now that I was her, maybe there was really only one of us—me. Now that I had her, I understood she was not quite the woman I had thought she was at first. She was arrogant—sometimes when she scolded Fazool I found myself thinking:
the old bag!
She was shaky, wild, even a little mad. Definitely mental. After all, she had thrown herself away on me, on me! But I could never leave her—to leave her would be base, unworthy of
her, that is, of me. Now that I had her, I had to have her. At least until we’d both had enough.

“So, Bogey. What do you say?” I opened my mouth and closed it again. “She says nothing. No words come out of her. Édouard. Édouard, I think maybe—I think you are right.” Zuk sat up very straight in the rusty lawnchair. The gun banged onto the table. Édouard smoothly lifted it away. “She is not ready for Betpak-Dala,” Zuk announced. “She is young,” he said. “I was young,” Zuk said gloomily, “you were young.” Édouard replied in Caramel-Creamistani I guess, and they went on whispering back and forth, looking at me, and at each other, and back to me, ardent, long-suffering, resigned, like dream parents from some other world—until I felt left out. “I’ll go,” I said. “I need rest,” Zuk said, “I need think,” but then she gathered herself up in her wet trousers and began to pace the porch floor.

“I wanted to fly to Karamul-Karamistan for her. Not for me,” came that voice cured in the smoke of Mongol firepots. “Of course,” Édouard said. “Me I have seen enough face of camel, like huge malignant peanut, for all my life.” “I quite agree.” “I have sat on hairy
kilim
on floor more than enough. I have eat
kprpuz
and
kavun
until I am sick. If I never wear wadded cotton
khalat
again in life is too soon.” “Much too soon,” Édouard echoed. “But Bogey is monster, not girl: she cares nothing if clothes make her fat like sausage—you should see what she has on for clothes when I first meet her.” “I can imagine,” Édouard said gravely, eyeing my mildewed shirttails.

“For Bogey, everything new is food for mind, so she can forget harsh exile from summer camp, and dead psychiatrist with broken head. I want to give her country where she is daughter of moon and where she can eat
karpuz
and hundred melons more from dawn to dark, so long as she rides with Zuk and knows
no men. And for her I think is easy. But maybe is not so easy.” “It is not so easy,” said Édouard.
You are a leviathan
, I thought,
even your kiss is like a house fell on me
. “I can do it,” I said. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll go.”

“What you really say,” Zuk observed, looking shrewdly at me with her pond-green eyes—but from a distance, for she was back on a cloud-bonneted peak with Margaret Meat on her left hand and Sigmund Food on her right—“what you really say is I am like some great roc from sky, I have swooped down and take you away and swallow you.” “More like a house fell over on me,” I peeped, trying to make it sound like just a shack, not a house, but then I could see that, as long as the truth was going to come out, maybe a giant roc was best.

“Yes, I am catastrophe in henhouse—like you tell me once,” she said with bitter pride. “You are one hump of a catastrophe, you are,” I admitted, “but you saved my life. You’re the only real monster I know. I wouldn’t have got better for anybody else.” “They will put you back in bughouse, if you don’t come with me,” she warned. “O no they won’t. They’ll try, but I’m never going back to Rohring Rohring—well maybe later when I’m a dreambox mechanic myself. You’re everything to me,” I told her truthfully, “only … only …” “Only you don’t want everything no more,” she said, “you want only little bit.” It was half true, just half, but I didn’t answer. I loved her reproaches and studied to deserve them.

“Now I must think, must find new way,” she panted to Édouard, or to herself, drawing herself clear of me again with a swirl of air and sumpm silver flashing. She paced a couple times more up and down the rotten porch—Édouard’s spaniels, regarding this tumult of legs, shrank away under the table. All at once she banged through the screen door and ran headlong
down the dock to shore. Trotted along the mud bank a ways and disappeared into the blackgreen wall of the woods. The last thing I saw was one white calf flickering in the creepers. Then nothing. I jumped up.

“Please sit down. Do not fear for my cousin. God’s gate is her gate,” Édouard assured me, through the snake charmer’s oboe of his large and perfect nose. “Let her go. She knows the swamp. She knows what these woods are.” He raised his two hands, lazily invoking peace, not really caring whether it came or not. I narrowed my eyes at his beautiful-ugly face, but instead of running after her, I listened to him, shifting foot to foot—which was what gave her that fatal headstart.

Édouard said: “Perhaps we all know more than we say—? Even you, Miss Koderer?” (On this interrogative note, the gazelles of his eyebrows leaped, sailed, landed.) “My cousin is a remarkable woman, even great. I myself was one of her devoted, ah, students, at one time. But she has made a grave mistake. I don’t mean merely she has had the bad luck to offend her political patrons. This time she has gone too far.”

“She saved my life,” I said.

“She has made a mistake—not only a mistake—
the
mistake,” Édouard said, “broken not
a
rule—
the
rule.”

“For me she always did the right thing.”

“That is beside the point,” said Cousin Édouard. He gazed at me somberly. “My cousin is in disgrace. She sees that now. She has every right to lose herself,” he went on, “in a swamp well suited to that end, indeed I find it a noble choice, a beautiful choice, if this is what she chooses.”

“You mean you think she—o no—o my godzilla—”

I ran after her. That Édouard might hope to lose me in the Dismal right behind her, to turn us monstrous girlfriends into
leather
boggywomen
with one mild wave of his hand—well, I thought of that later, but even that wouldn’t have stopped me at the time. I tracked the fat exclamation points of her silver sandals in the crusted mud.

Madame Zuk I repeat was no sylph but the length of the intervals amazed me. What strength she had with her belly dancer’s bulk, what spring in her silvery heels! The craters of her passing were as legible as puddles after a day of rain—some of them filled right up with swamp water and I saw them shining like stars. So far the trail was easy as pie, the trail
was
pie, while it lasted, a soft pumpkin-red custard all along the ditch bank. In the scummy water below, rings shed rings where startled reptiles had belly-flopped, and the air was never still—more buzzing, crackling and humming than the black cavity of a telephone. Once a root caught my bare foot and I almost went into the soup myself—my palms printed red dough. Then I winced to think of her running on those things, and pretty soon there it was, the little broken-off silver cone of the first heel, sticking up like a golf tee, and the
hop, hop, hop
of the other where she had righted herself. Here she tried to go on with no heel but the little nails were poking up into the pad, here was the deep round pock where she stood on her right foot and rocked and swayed and cursed and unbuckled—I calculated the arc and there it hung high in the smilax, one arched silver left sole with no heel, a sliding board for toads.

On she went and never fell and vaulted over trickling cracks in the peat and bore left, jogging along the ditches. We seemed to be in an ever-curving maze screwing down to some core, some center. The smoke that hung waist-high in the whole bog thickened. I coughed and sneezed and blinked back tears, but galloped on, I hoped, at least as fast as Zuk. I figured she
had already horrified the rattlers back into their holes with her stampede so I could run faster, but just in case, contrary to the prescriptions of classical wood wizardry, I thrashed through the clumps of greenbriar and tupelo as loud as I could. Zuk’s white shirt caught on this and that—I tore it off and ran naked. Her tracks were so fresh I could almost see them puffing like dough prodded by a finger, and for a while I thought I might be hearing her. Or was that distant rumbly
suck, suck, suck
my heart?

I was gasping and soon I began to see that pacing round and round my quietroom in the bughouse or playing pukelele all day long with the Bug Motels was no way to get in shape for a life-or-death chase through the Dismal Swamp. The superhuman strength of the mental patient had deserted me. Doctor Zuk on the other hand must have been running 440 hurdles on the sly. You’d think I’d have been more scared what with turf fires all around but—I realize now I was counting on old Zuk to know I was there and save me, if not herself. She’d never lead me into eaten-away peat bogs whose cores fell in, I thought. Or would she?

On and on, her pegleg track (one bare sole, one high-heeled sandal) never flagged. Not even after I saw the first bright dot of blood under the big toe of her bare left foot—I fell to my knees to look at this up close. I panted like a dog. I touched my tongue to her blood just as a fat drop of sweat fell from my nose and washed it away. I was beginning to doubt I’d ever see her again. I crawled to the next drop of blood and the next. Curses upon her, she hadn’t even slowed down yet. How could she go on like this, hobbling gigantically on one high heel like some Oedipus from
Vogue
?

Suddenly her footprints were everywhere; there seemed to be twice as many as she could possibly need. Was I seeing double? My heart drowned. At least down here where I crawled the
smoke was still thin, and even when her tracks were blurred or smeared I could trace their edges with a finger. What if I lost her? What if I had to find my own way out? I realized I’d just been following, following. Some Wood Wiz lost-finder I’d turned out to be!—I’d given not a thought to north, south, east or west, or wind, or hour of day. In hindsight, prickles of sunlight flashed all over the sky, like lights on a spinning top, spiny blobs here, there and everywhere, piercing through rifts in trees. Where the hump was I? Nowhere but on her trail. But I couldn’t give up so I sobbed and crawled on.

And soon I saw sumpm else that sank my heart. Here was why her footprints were blurred and smeared—another set of feet mixed in with hers. I had no idea how long ago I’d started to see them, only that it
was
long. And maybe I’d counted them out because there was sumpm so repulsive about them, sumpm frightfully plain, deeply dull, sumpm so familiar and disgusting. What was it? I put my nose to them. A faint stink. They were grub-shaped, reticulated, ordinary. What then? That well-known shiny spot, no whorl left, there under the right first metatarsal where Dr. Beasley had dug the plantar wart out—they were mine! my own feet. Good godzilla this meant she had lapped me, we had gone in a circle and were still going, all three of us, two Madame Zuks and now me.

I loped on in despair, sometimes two-legged, sometimes propping myself like an ape with one hand, sometimes down again on all fours. I would never really have her or be her, I would never be the woman that Zuk was, not even in the woods. She had proved that. She had risen brilliantly back into my sky by reducing me to a crawl—at least I could breathe down here, where I richly deserved to be. But she only made sport of me this way for a short stretch. Now her intervals were less. She might
be tiring, or maybe just tired of the race. After all she knew she had me beat. From now on she walked straight up on her one high heel at an easy pace, swinging her hips like a woman going home from a swim in the river. A canebrake crowded the bank and afterwards I discerned in the red mud only the footprints of our two old selves, the wild old Zuk and the scared-stiff young Bogeywoman chasing her. The new Zuk had veered off somewhere. The new Bogeywoman had not yet caught up.

She had struck off into the bog on no trail at all. Right away I sank in up to my ankles behind her, and the blackish red peat water hissed and bubbled around my hucklebones like drippings from a steak. It didn’t take a wood wizard—I saw plainly the hole in the honeysuckle where she’d torn it. Aimless, thin salt-and-pepper mist floated out of it. But on its other side dark smoke boiled in great swirling crepe ribbons and bows, and I heard a low roar. I sank exhausted against a cypress stump and stared at its broiled and twisted boll. It had a face like a gargoyle, where an iridescent beetle was crawling. I climbed onto it and as soon as my feet dangled free, Zuk exploded up from the honeysuckle and, showering red water everywhere, shot past me. Somehow I flew at her and got hold of the one silver sandal. “Sorry, dear Bogey—I never mean to harm—” She kicked me hard in the stomach. A wrench and her wet foot popped free. There I was, bunched over my belly, holding her sandal. I tried to say goodbye—
oooof
, was all that came out. She leaped over a heap of logs into that black smoke and you know the rest. An amphitheater of sparks, a million crumbs of orange flame, rose up behind her, opened like a cape and ate her. Then white steam everywhere.