Bogeywoman (18 page)

“Mr. Tuney T. Turpentine, Escrow. Where my nucka, young woman?”

“Charmed I’m sure.” I sank down on a gray straw bale in exhaustion. He was stronger than me, this little ayrabber, I would have liked to cheat him out of his name or beat him for the pink dress or make him feed his horse or sumpm, anything, but because of his indifference to me I was stymied. He had the most complete immunity to me of any human I’d met who had actually bothered to spoon me to his lips—

And that’s how I knew what I had fallen into here, a humble soup that was boiling me down to a five-dollar bill, to pay God back for Emily, whether she lived or died. “Say,” I said, “gimme a pair of pants, I don’t care how big, I’ll roll em up, or even a dress and I’ll leave you my shoes, see, and I’ll be back in five minutes with five dollars, I swear I will.” Tuney peered down at my shoes. “I wouldn’t touch them raggedy shoes if you gave me fi dolla, go head, gimme fi dolla and find out. Fi dolla on the barrelhead, young woman, ante up or I never tell you who you is. Say, you ain’t have to buy a pig in a poke”—he crawled off into the darkness of the loft—“I show you what I got.” He dragged into view a box overbrimming with clothes, marked in red letters:

—and hung over the edge wrinkled green work pants, and a purple satin warmup jacket from Carlin’s Park Ice Rink, lavishly ripped in the armpit. “They you is, mayor’s daughter, one nucka note buy you all that.” “You stole that stuff,” I pointed out, “why should I give you good money for it?” “I ain’t the one walking round nekkid,” Tuney pointed out. “You better give me sumpm
out of that box,” I threatened, “or I’ll … I’ll rat to the Salvation Army. And the SPAC. And the cops, and tell em your horse ate my duds …” “Say, I invite you in this barn, young woman? I guess you bettern somebody, you the mayor’s daughter, can go any way-at you want. Well I got news for you, you trespassing, ain’t you see that sign on the door,
NO WOMENS ALLOWED
? Why you thank they ain’t no womens in this barn? Case you ignorant, which I see you is, lemme tell you it’s certain places way-at for science reasons it ain’t right for womens to go. Can’t have no stanky womens in no horse barn, horses sniff that stank and they go wild, what happens then be your own lookout,
she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e.
” “Whaddaya mean, Cowpea’s a girlgoyle just like me,” I barked, feeling all the same the blood rise in my cheeks, “and what was that highly suspicious last name again?” I asked frostily (Merlin’s voice). “What you gimme to know that?” he said but then he announced proudly: “Turpentine. Tuney T. Turpentine, Escrow.” “Turpentine? What the hump kinda name is that?”

“Cause that alley rat so starved he eat the paint off you wall, ho ho ho,” came another voice, and I turned to see a stockier, fuddier man standing there, dusty black like a noon shadow on a dirt road, bald head not very well lidded in a pinchfront houndstooth stingy brim a bit too small for it, and heavy jowls hanging down under. Also a straight dense mustache across his upper lip like a piece of electrical tape. “Say there, Chug, what’s kicking,” Tuney asked him, and he replied: “Same old same old, just like yesday. This your new partner? She do you any good?” “Sho is, sho is, she do everything for me, and very tasty too.” “What yall got for me today? Cash for your trash.” “Ain’t been out, Chug. Can’t pay the nut and you know that Itchy so tight, he scream he so tight. He want to see fi dolla or no horse, no wagon.” “Aw Itchy front you a horse if he think you square. You
musta stiffed him. You back drankin that screech?” “Unh-unh,” Tuney said. Chug shook his head in puzzlement. “Well I know you ain’t tomcatting,” he sighed.

Now it all fell into place. “I get it—he’s a homo,” I said, pottishly calling the kettle black. “Naw, what it is, Tuney too cheap to run after wimmins,” Chug said, “this sucka so cheap he steal the nuckas from his dead gramma’s eyes, ho ho ho.” “
She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
,” Tuney joined in, “I don’t waste no wimmins on my lowdown self. I ain’t one of you hoppagrass here-today niggers. Soon’s I have a old lady I sublet her ass.” “Ain’t you say this young lady do everything for you?” “Everything I let her. Right now I ain’t got fi dolla for a wagon and she for rent.” “What you say to that, young lady?” “Well …” I cleared my throat, not exactly sure what I was getting into here. “Five dollars, some clothes and feed Cowpea,” I said without conviction. “Who Cowpea?” Chug said, looking at me strangely. “This Cowpea,” Tuney explained, “my horse, you know how hungry she get—this young woman taken pity on her.” “This horse here? This Ugga! Ugga be hungry all right. Hungry for human blood …”

“So what you say, Chug? This all I got today—a nucka-note to you, brother,
she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
,” Tuney pointed down at me, and Chug joined right in, a long, slow, sticky “Ho ho ho ho. This lamb? Where her mother? I don’t know if I can trim a gal that skinny. She go long with it?” “Sho is, sho is. She want to see old Cowpea greasing, don’t you, young woman? Her mama far far away,” Tuney said, “in Californ-eye-ay.” “My mother’s dead,” I corrected, “I’m … without funds at the moment.” “Cheap,” Tuney pointed out, “fi dolla to you and she can have these dry goods here, she owe me a Abe for the lot.”

“Are you two ayrabbers?” I asked Chug. Compared to Tuney,
he seemed like an honest sort. “We junkers,” Chug replied. “We junk.”

But then he was looking hard at me, blinking his heavy-lidded honey-yellow eyes. “Say, this a he-she?” he asked suddenly. “Aw who can say with these june-eye delinquents, all them got that greasy straight hair in a ponytail and no chest up front. She ain’t far long enough yet to tell. What difference do it make?” “You sho this down with you, young lady?” “I’m ready,” I said. “Ima give you fi dolla, you hear?” Chug said kindly, “you do what you want with it, pay this fool or not, don’t make me no nemmind.” “It’s a old mattress over they in stall nine,” Tuney assisted discreetly. I closed my eyes and followed Chug’s slow scraping step through the straw.

I was ready to swap guessing for knowing and to join O in the pot where teenage girls get hard-boiled, to expose my flesh on that cold Alp where Heidi herself grows hard as a year-old kaiser roll and learns to think of all men, even her dear old fuddy Opa,
in that way
. I deserved it for burning Emily, I’d have said yes to anything, even five cents. But I didn’t want to look around, for fear of busting out in hives and puking. After I stumbled over a concrete block and like to busted my shin I opened my eyes a crack and then it wasn’t so bad: a bum’s hideout, the mattress an old navigational map of stains, seasick archipelagos of bodily effluvia on blue-ticking latitudes and longitudes, a pink plastic portable radio with chipped case in the straw, a bucket in the corner to pee in, haybales for a living room suite.

After four or five minutes Tuney piped up: “Well, bro? What’s going on?” “Not much,” Chug growled. “What’s wrong? Your wagon done broke down?” “Can’t get in her.” “Aw go on, Chug, she ugly but she ain’t that ugly. I guarantee it, under them stank clothes it’s as good a thang as ever said good morning to a slop
jar.” “She froze up like a bad drain, that’s what.” “
She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
, you not the man you was, Chug, they it is.”

“You inex-spare-inced?” Chug whispered to me, “you got your cherry?” “Never mind, it’s just in the way,” I hissed back. I had thought this would be easy, all I had to do was hold my nose and jump, gravity or sumpm would do the rest and tomorrow or next week I could tell O I was as lost as she was. “That’s okay, baby, I don’t want it,” Chug said, rearing back so his wide gingerdough belly rose over me like a moon and his open brown work pants made like a bread-basket in his lap. “Wait, gimme a chance,” I started to protest, when I felt his big, dry, warm hand at the back of my neck. And next I knew my eye was going down and that thing was coming up, that thing sticking out of the bottom of his belly like a cute-ugly valve, or not so much cute-ugly as an eighth world wonder of ugliness, and I opened my mouth and resolved to be Marie Splendini walking over Niagara Falls on a tightrope and not lose my nerve or gag.

Well—that’s what I was worth, now that I had burned up Emily. Back in Rohring Rohring I had cost a hundred dollars a day—anyhow that’s what Merlin had to pay the dreambox mechanics to keep me there, and I got my candy and coddy allowance on top of that. Out here I was worth five bucks, and I’d have taken five cents and a bucket of oats for Cowpea. I was low as a cockroach now, as a cockroach I saw the world as food, and I was food myself. Five bucks’ worth—a cockroach doesn’t finick. I ate what I saw, what saw me ate me. Where the tablecloth never relents, you eat till you die. I ate. I gagged. I ate.

Chug pulled his pants up and at the sound of the zipper, Tuney called out from his loft: “How you like that?” “She all right,” Chug said gallantly, “onliest thing I can’t figga what she want with a mean old ugly old mose like you.”
“She-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e …”
Tuney liked that. My new clothes came
flying over the top of the stall: like-new green work pants, just that one egg-sized bloodstain near the fly, and the torn purple satin warmup jacket from the burned-down old ice rink at Carlin’s Park, whose red lining hung out of the armpit like a tongue. Chug was counting dollars off a frayed roll. “Don’t give that slicka more’n a dolla for that mess, y’hear?” Chug whispered. “You find this here young lady sumpm better than them old rags.” “I got better,” Tuney squeaked, “I got better for her right here, yessir”—a plastic bag came lofting over the stall wall. “It’s a pink party dress in they and high-heel stomps, but if I’s yall I wait till yall’s quit of them crabs yall taking home from that mattress,
she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e, she-e-e-e
, praise jesus! How you like your friend Turpentine? I done turn out the mayor’s daughter and give old Chug the crabs too,” and he exploded in phlegmy snorts of mirth. “You best be jiving bout them crabs,” Chug said without smiling. “Tomorrow will tell, yes it will, yes it will,” Tuney hissed joyously. “I hope you only jiving, nigger, I know way you live at if I pass my old lady crabs.” “Just what exactly are crabs?” I asked, a diadem of cold sweat tightening on my forehead. “You find out,” Tuney promised, “tomorrow will tell.”

“That’s about enough of that,” Chug said, getting to his feet and pulling me to mine with his warm heavy hand. “Whatever home you got, young lady, you best get on home to it. I be sorry for you but now I tell you. You in the wrong line of work. You the sorriest-looking raggedy-ass girl-boy ho I ever see and that white fuzz on you arms scare a hound dog off a gut wagon. Now gone home. Get.”

I waded into those green work pants, rolled the trouser bottoms over four times. Zipped up the jacket. I wasn’t talking to either of these fuddies one word more. It was too hot out for a jacket but at least the sleeves hid my bloody arms and their coating of lint, arms so ugly they had offended these ayrabbers who
did not even ayrab—they
junked
. I was too disgusting for the rubbish dealers of the city themselves. I took up my plastic bag and prepared to depart.

Where was I going? Now I had five bucks and it worried me that Tuney didn’t try to nail down a single dollar of it, just perched up in his loft spluttering those gumfarts that were his toothless laughter. Probably I was going to get a social disease like he said. I put hardly any stock in doctors or dreambox mechanics anymore, but now there went my faith in brochures out the window right after them—brochures like
WHO SHOULD I TELL ABOUT MY SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASE
, and VAGINITIS—
WHY ME
????—that you found in the office at Girls’ Classical and the lobby at Rohring Rohring and on a rack in Emergency at the hospital next door. How many times had I read in brochures that you couldn’t get a social disease from
stuff
, no matter how disgusting, not even from waiting-room chairs that were vomiting their batting or pee-sprinkled toilet seats in bus stations—and now suddenly an old mattress was enough to give you
crabs
. And what the hump was
crabs
? It sounded worse than a germ, sumpm alive and malevolently aware of you and walking at you sideways, in armies, from city sewers or the junk-choked tidal swamps beyond the harbor.

What was worse, this news made it impossible even to think of going back to the bughouse. Tell them I had a social disease at Rohring Rohring? Inform Foofer, Mursch and Hageboom,
and Doctor Zuk
? Lemme die first.

“Say there, mayor’s daughter. You got nothing gone on? I take you junkin, for fi dolla.” I could have kissed him. How contagious could I be if Tuney would have me on his junk wagon? The next thing I hear is Cowpea peacefully grinding oats on the other side of the wall, then a bell-studded horse collar jingling. “Fi dolla,” Chug protested, “what she get out of it?” “Ima
learn this young woman junking, show her my M.O., ain’t that worth fi dolla? Maybe aft awhile she drag in sumpm good and she make back that fin.” “You oughta leave that child in peace,” Chug grumbled, “you done showed her enough M.O. already.”

Tuney and Cowpea came around the corner and peaceful is not the word for Cowpea once attached to that junk wagon. The devil mare had died in her traces. There were zombie
x
’s where her red eyeballs used to be. Her head bobbed a little at the bottom of the sliding board of her neck. Somehow her knees went up and down like crude pistons mechanically raising the weight of her feet. “What happened to her?” I said, figuring they had pumped some kinda dope in her. “She just like to go,” Chug said slowly.

I practically bounded into that wagon myself. I was a cockroach and a
Unbeknownst To Everybody, a murderer and a disgrace, but I wasn’t dead to the glamour of ayrabbing. It was sumpm like going in the French Foreign Legion. Tuney piled the reins in his lap but didn’t bother to hold them. He slouched down under his fedora, leaned back and whistled around his two gold teeth. Cowpea clopped off towards the great blocks of dust-swimming sunlight up front. Chug walked alongside the wagon advising me: “Don’t you be giving this alley rat one nucka that money, you hear? You gone need that money.” “Tomorrow will tell,” Tuney piped down from the wagon, “you thank you somebody cause you oink the mayor’s daughter. Just remember who turn her out.”