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figured one of these days even a ugly guy like me would stumble across one of those nymphos you hear about. So I been bracing myself for somebody old and scary, probably one of my buddies’ mothers with cottage cheese thighs and lard lumps hanging out of her girdle, I’d take anything—and who comes along but this little number, whatsername. She’s like a movie star who ate a eat-me pill and shrank down in perfect proportion—you know?” Willis mumbled sumpm or other. “Cheese I’m glad I can talk to you, Bundgus”—he gave her a gentle punch in the shoulder, which was larger than his own, and she smiled a closed smile with a greenish cast.
    “What I mean is,” Ottie went on, “for five years now I been wondering if I was ever going to … I’m not the kind who could push a girl to … I’m nineteen years old, I got big ears, a HowdyDoody face, all the girls want to be my pal and nobody wants to, you know. Only this one, I think she really likes to—anyway, she was sposed to meet me here and—I hope she didn’t get pinched.” “I’ll haul her in myself,” Willis growled. “Aw cmon.” “You could get in a lot of trouble.” “She’s not the type who’d ever tell,” Ottie said, “—ya know I used to think she and the Bogeywoman had some kinda private club together, NO BOYS ALLOWED . But yesterday she led me out here when she was sposed to be shooting targets with the Chunkagunk Bowwomen and I got the poison ivy to prove it.” He started fussing with his floppy overalls but then pointed, to my relief, at his bare ankles. There they were, fat crusty white clouds of calamine lotion.
    “She said we were looking for some kind of dirt from the lost chunkagunk—what the heck you think she had in mind? Anyhow we were crawling around in the briars, scratching up dirt, and something told me I could kiss her.”
Dirty rotten double-timing Lou Rae
, I wanted to shout. “I swear I could have gone as far as I wanted with her,” Ottie added,
“I think,”—
and Willis asked in a small voice, smiling faintly though the color of white asparagus, “So why didn’t you, Turkeyneck?” “Hey, Bundgus, you’re not mad, are you?” Ottie asked with a hiccup of pleased laughter. “Well—I didn’t push it. Later I coulda kicked myself. Anyhow she promised to meet me here—” “So where is she?” Bundgus inquired. I wanted to rat to the wood wizardess—I was on her side—but of course I said nothing (lemme die first).
    “Don’t worry,” Ottie mumbled, “a girl that young, I’m waiting for her to ask me, well not exactly ask but, you know, put a hand on me first, something like that …” He stretched out his long legs in their puffy green overalls and stood up to go. “Hey, I got hogs.” (He meant his KP duty.) “So what brings
you
outhere anyway, Willie?” Willis shook her head miserably and he kicked off through the grass polls and leaf trash, whistling up the trail.
    And that’s where I went buggy, right there in the pleasingly anatomical forks of the apple tree, variety Northern Spy. My blood was singing like a chain saw. Never mind that Ottie’s courtship of Lou Rae had come to nothing, like my own, and that I had, from experience, cause to hope that her scissory legs would cut off his plans at the root. He was after Lou Rae, the fuddy. And he’d broken the wood wizardess’s heart, the cad. O he was popular, Ottie, a walking barbeque fork with a clutch of tines for a face, ha ha, ears like two pink diaphragms, and those funny longitudinal rucks around his mouth, ho ho, the sort of face you can hardly look on without bursting out laughing, I told you I liked him, I had nothing against him, I wasn’t jealous, not that jealous, but there was Willis Marie Bundgus, the woman I was saving for when I grew up, with a face as long as the bus ride home, and this comedian with his peg in one hand and his jackknife in the other and his stick legs poking through the brush towards me and Lou