Jaimy Gordon - Bogeywoman

“There was war to the grim death here. Tell us about it, Koderer.”

And I got down on my hands and knees in the sand like she had taught me, and squinted at a few dumb gashes with the low sun buttering them from the other side.

“A pregnant mouse galloped through here and disappeared, but I don’t think anything ate it.”

“Good,” she said in a bored voice.

“Ooooo look here it veered off-probably a chicken hawk passed over-but nothing happened. The sand’s not torn up.”

“Hmmm.”

“Wait-a raccoon-” I crawled around the pit in a spilled alphabet font of starry feet, which had sunk deep. “The old male swung through here and ate up, uh-oh, looks like somebody’s pink dry cleaning ticket.”

“You call that a fight to the bitter end?” Willis drawled.

“Well, somebody didn’t get their dress slacks back.”

“Koderer, Koderer, put your beady eyes on the ground, let the dead talk to you.”

Dead? dead? but then I screwed down my nose and saw the corpses all over the place, everywhere I looked: crumbs of green lacewing, two links, then three more, of a salamander spine, tiny teeth, dry eggs, claws, half a beetle carapace, rust-red frass of the hornworm, a lone whisker sticking out of a bit of snout leather-all that was left of some least weasel the hawk ate-a whole skull the size of a freckle: all this carnage epochs beyond its original disturbance, part of the calm sand itself. You just had to get down there to see from the wreckage what a twenty-table grange hall ham & oyster supper that sand was, what a feast run amok the whole earth was, only how could you tell the eater from the eats? You couldn’t. And what but your own greedy appetite led you out there on the bonewhite tablecloth in the first place, where every passing turkey buzzard could get an eyeful of you? It was a wonder anything ever came out of its hole-and suddenly I saw this: Only merciful hunger blanks out death.

“The whole sand pit’s an oinking boneyard,” I said.

“Good stuff, eh, Bogeywoman?” said Willis, pleased to see my nose touching the ground. The moniker showed I was back in her favor again, and living up to my reputation as girl guide to snakes and snails and puppy dogs’ tails-her heiress in short.

She had a thing for me, I know she did, and she was woman enough to dish up sumpm for everybody, even if she was supposedly pinned to some carburetorhead from East Millinocket at the time, no doubt the only abner from her high school tall enough to look her in the eye. Wherever she is, I’ll bet by now Willis Marie Bundgus has shucked the denim from those flanks for any number of girlgoyles, though fuddies too of course. She had appetites-I could tell.

This was the second day after that terrible afternoon when Lou Rae Greenrule loved me for twelve and a half minutes and left me, and now I was awake at camp with my blood a-quarrel, with my once sleepy appetites whistling on their haunches like a metropolis of prairie dogs. After lunch, during Quiet Hour, while Lou Rae sat Indian fashion on her red bedspread, playing Old Maid of the Klondike, I lay on my cot, eyes bulging; I swear I could hear the cold and scheming blood swish by my ears, and suddenly I had the idea to go and visit Willis Bundgus.

She was always easy to find, and I knew she wouldn’t turn me away. She would be at the Wood Wiz Wigwam, an old one-room smokehouse with some dusty specimens on the ledges, or at the tracking pit just beyond, near the southern edge of camp-in fact a warning wire just touched its far edge. No-woman’s-land. Thirty yards into it a small and dented blue trailer sat on concrete blocks in the woods. I had never been there, of course, but once or twice I had seen Willis talking through its porthole. The camp handyman lived there, Ottie Grayson.

Ottie was six foot four or five and homely. What he looked like was a long fork. He grinned his rubbery face into deep grooves, grinned all day every day, though practically all the work he did about the place required a shovel. True, with that face, as soon as he squinted into the sunlight, he seemed to be yuk-yukking even when he wasn’t. There would be a fresh trench around, say, Nurse’s Bungalow, and Ottie’s head sticking out of it with that smile and big red sunburnt ears under his flat-top, and worst of all, his Adam’s apple jumping around in his neck like a finger trying to poke through a curtain. His ugliness was legendary, even to him: He liked to tell about a blind date he’d once had where he’d whispered to the girl he was a werewolf and at midnight she panicked and threw her shoe at him. Everyone liked him, including me.

Anyhow sometimes Willis talked through the window of Ottie Grayson’s trailer, sometimes Ottie squatted by Willis’s sand pit. Willis Bundgus liked Ottie, too, but I wasn’t jealous. Ottie was cute-ugly and popular as the camp dog. Mostly he wasn’t around, Ottie; mostly he was down the bottom of some hole with his shovel. But once I had found the two of them belly-flopped in the sand pit, heads together, watching a mud dauber and a grass spider fight to the finish, with Ottie coaching the underdog spider and Willis coolly fixing the terrible odds. “Whatcha guys doing?” I squatted right down between them, never thinking I might be in the way.

When it was all over Willis showed us the paper cell in the eaves of the smokehouse where the wasp was bricking up the numb spider with one of her eggs.

“Ouch. Poor chump,” Ottie said. “You wouldn’t do that to your worst enemy, would you, Bogeywoman?”

“She’s not mad at him,” Willis pointed out.

“She eats him alive and he gets to watch,” Ottie winced.

“A restful end,” Willis said, “but not for the squeamish.”

“Maybe he doesn’t even know it’s him,” I chimed in. “Maybe he feels lighter and lighter and all at once he feels like nothing, I mean he turns into her and that’s what he is, her.”

I remember the two of them looked at me queerly.

But today Willis was missing, though right away I found a fresh print of her big potato foot-as wood wizardess she was the only one at Camp Chunkagunk who was allowed to go barefoot. Behind the print was a crater as though she had braked suddenly and peered at sumpm in the distance and then lost heart and plunked down on her bum and bawled, except that the wood wizardess would never bawl. A few seconds later she had scrambled back up and I could see, from the wrung necks of a couple spurges, that was the way she went. In a hurry. Which gave me the idea-I would track her. She had scrambled up the back of the sand pit and come out in no-woman’s-land outside of camp. What the hump-this time it was too easy. I resolved to track the great tracker, praying she would be glad to see me. After all she was on the wrong side herself. That I might intrude never even occurred to me.

I kicked off my sneakers and picked up in no time her trademark silent hundred-and-sixty-pound pigeon-toe. Sure enough, she was tracking. Here she tunneled through bearberry, here she made herself small as a pocketbook, all at once-we were even with Grayson’s trailer-she stretched up on her toes and peered in the porthole. Now I began to see a second set of tracks, maybe they’d been there all along but so like hers in the mass of weight they carried and the bassoon-key toeworks I hadn’t noticed. A fuddy’s foot. Ottie. On she padded after him, swifter and swifter now, away from the lake, over a rise and down into a snake’s nest of bramble whips where all I had to do was navigate the channel their hips had already brush-hogged. Here came a broad bank of raspberries she hadn’t even stopped to eat. But-wait-sumpm else had stopped to eat, sumpm more a berry’s size, with dinky fingerjoints born to close fast around the hairy red brain lobes of raspberries. And now I picked up a third track, fairy-footed, girly, its tread hardly denting the ground. Here a small female lounged, stuffing herself with berries, swatting briars out of her long ringletty hair, then all at once fell down on peach-pit kneecaps and tunneled into the bush, and if I was not mistaken-didn’t the red berries tremble?-she was still in there. I saw with a thrill that Willis Marie Bundgus had never detected this party, for just here the wood wizardess had spotted what she was looking for, here she had gone crashing like a rhino through the briars to get to it. Myself I climbed a scabrous old apple tree on the edge of the trail, and clung there looking down on all three.