“Probably I got sumpm in here you could eat,” I mumbled, feeling through my overall pockets for a Sugar Baby or a Pez or sumpm. She arched her neck, tucked her chin and rolled her cough-syrup-colored eyes. I found a linty green lifesaver, put it on the palm of my hand and thought about sticking it out. “So, how come you’re off work today?” I asked her cautiously. “Sick? Lame? Tired of it all? Heh-heh. Er, not confined to the quietroom for any… violent acts I hope?” She eyed me from those lowered pools of Robitussin. For some reason she seemed to be hissing. And suddenly she did a strange and hideous thing: she reared a little, the lips rolled up on those yellow piano key teeth and they crashed down hard against the gate of her stall. She made a noise like dishwater down a drainpipe, a sort of backwards belch, the air rushing in, not out, with a great froggy croak. Then she just stood there, gazing out of the bottoms of her eyes, looking bad, dazed and satisfied-like a mental patient who’s thinking she’s really done it this time with that old dreamboxoline, while she’s still vaporously elated and just a little wild and woozy, before she pukes up her guts or jumps out the window.
Cheese maybe you’re sick after all I said, and that was when I so unwisely put out my hand. She swooped around sideways and bull-dogged the meat of my right bicep right through my Camp Chunkagunk Tough Paradise for Girls sweatshirt. Then either I jumped four feet in the air, or she threw back her head with her teeth still clamped in my shoulder and yanked me off the ground. Anyway I remember dangling as if from a nail. I’m the Bogeywoman, needless to say on the way down I gave her a left hook to the right eye that sent her scrabbling to the back of her stall, where she sort of crouched, as much as a horse can crouch.
I realized that this of a drayhorse, this imposter vegetarian, was only coiling for her next strike and I stepped back as it came. I felt the mighty snap of her long teeth against my breastbone but as it happened only my sweatshirt and the brass-buttoned bib of my overalls got caught. I heard them rip. This time as she sawed away at my duds, I brought my two fists down on her ears, and when she lurched away, Tough Paradise For Girls flapping from her jaws, I felt a sickening relief. I was free but I was also naked, or anyway half-naked: my momps were open to the world. I was alive, but what if I ever cared to leave this dump? I could hardly stay in an ayrabbers’ barn for the rest of my life.
Not only was my chest bare, there was also that small matter of the graph inscribed by razor blade, in claustrophobic detail, on my forearms this morning, the complete record in blood of my debate with Madame Zuk-in her absence, of course-on whether I should live or die. Now that my sweatshirt was kaput, it was out in the open-what excitable people might take for a botched suicide-as if the Bogeywoman, once bent on offing herself, would ever use a technique so merely artistic and irresolute, as if I hadn’t long ago mapped out all the fifth-floor windows without bars and unscreened balconies on my daily and weekly rounds. I liked for example the mezzanine in the sky-painted dome of the Enoch Pratt Free Central Library, a straight shot to the stone floor, though for a sure thing you’d have to put your hands in your pockets and dive headfirst. I liked the long gullet of stairwell of the Mathieson Building, thirty-four vertiginous stories. The Washington Monument, 228 steps up, had an iron grating, but in ninth grade I could still wiggle by it and probably I could even now, if I lost ten pounds.
I stood well back from the stall door, my overalls down around my ankles, breathing hard and locked in a staring duel with this monster to whom I’d offered only love. The ears I’d boxed were still flattened in fury against her head. In a way I liked her all the more now that I saw in her a marooned and exasperated individualist like myself. What ungettable thing was she hungry for, I wondered, and blushed for my puny and insulting green lifesaver. I cringed to think I’d had to punch her in the eye, the great rolling right eye which she was winking now like a boxer in need of a plaster. I knew how she felt. Tough titty that she couldn’t know me… Then again, who knew what she knew? “I’m the Bogeywoman,” I whispered, and, to help her over any gaps in her education, I pointed at myself. I was a sight to make a mother weep, good thing I had no mother. On the round pad of my bicep was a full equine dental impression in red and blue, four inches across; farther down, my forearms were crusted with brown blood, and fuzzy on top of that with a pale gray fungal growth of sweatshirt fleece.
Broomstick was unimpressed, or anyway she relapsed into that queer sewing motion from foreleg to foreleg, full of crammed-in violence. Then suddenly down they came again like a clanging portcullis, the piano key teeth on the stall gate and the belch of a drainpipe sucking air in the wrong direction. “Godzillas sake what’s eating you girl!” I asked her, and heard from above me a weird juicy chortle in reply, “She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” somebody’s laugh that slimied up the feminine pronoun by sucking it over bare wet gums-an embarrassing noise that seemed in the family with Broomstick’s belch, but human. I looked up and saw a face sniggering down at me from a hayloft. I yanked up my overalls and tried to make out this person.
It was a fuddy in a mustache, primly clipped. He was undersized down to his bones, and he had all over a kind of fallen-in spruceness and good looks, of the finger-artist type-piano tuner, radio repairman, or pickpocket. A miniature, dandefied, mahogany brown fuddy, then, but old: When he sniggered, his jaw had that collapsed frogginess at the corners, like an old doctor’s bag, that comes of having no teeth, or hardly any. He leaned on an elbow at the edge of the hayloft, his chin in his hand, his shirt-cuff shiny black with gold threads in it, one foot dangling over the edge in a glittering black reptile pump, with a rhinestone horseshoe over the toes.
“Ahem, is this your horse?” “Maybe this my horse and maybe she ain’t, what you gimme to know?” The big brown mare banged her teeth on the gate again and sucked in air with a fearsome croak. “What’s wrong with her?” “She common.” “Excuse me?” “She hungry.” “Hungry! Why don’t you give her sumpm to eat?” The fellow stared down at me, like who was I to ask. “Ain’t feel like it,” he finally said. “What! Why not?” “What she ever did for me, that old cow Cowpea, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e,” he chortled to himself, and now I saw he had two gold teeth left in his mouth.
“What’s so funny?” I had to ask after a time. “Has I said sumpm was funny? I never hear nobody round here say nothing was funny, young woman, lessen maybe you mean Cowpea here be acting like she seent a ghost cause you done show her your ugly chest. What you wanna scare my horse for? Oughta call the po-lice on you, bare nekkid like you is. But I take pity on you, I do bidness with you, for a nucka note I give you some very fine threads…”
He was fixing me in his little eyes and right away I got this queer feeling that I was turning into a five-dollar bill, with the face of Abraham Lincoln printed on my belly button. Some people have noses that can find a crumb of cheese in the dark, a Bushman’s eyes can pick out the lost sisters of the Pleiades without a telescope, and I got that magical mercury in my veins for detecting whatever somebody thinks I am, especially when it’s nothing. Sumpm about that grin with its ravaged neatness and two gold teeth in front told me this fuddy was more indifferent to me poisonally than anyone I’d ever met. Not that I was a Unbeknownst to him, I was Unbeknownst to him, period; when he looked at me he saw a bill, a five-dollar bill, or nothing. I was transfixed.