She cut him off with a chop of her hand. “Don’t lie to me. I just talked to that poor girl’s father. I convinced him not to call the police.”
“The police...?”
“He said you need help.” His mother hugged herself as tears began to slide down her cheeks. “I just don’t understand what happened.”
“Mom. I didn’t do anything.” He spoke quickly, knowing that he had one slim chance to diffuse the situation. “All I did was be Tarzan. I gave the jungle yell, I beat my chest and I tried to rescue her. I wasn’t attacking her, I was...”
His mother’s shoulders began to shake as she cried harder. Andy had stood and watched as the reality of his behavior and the insanity of it slipped past his excuse. What had he done? Why had he pretended to be Tarzan? What had come over him?
He’d gone to see some shrinks after that. He’d told his story, and they’d said that it was his father’s fault for not being there. They’d told his mother that it was a combination of an active imagination and father issues. She thanked them, threw away all of Andy’s Tarzan books, and made him take the mind-numbing pills they’d prescribed.
It was all in his mind.
Finally they’d made him admit that “Tarzan doesn’t live here anymore,” as if saying it made it true.
Less than a year later, the girl’s dad was arrested for molesting her. Andy had been forced to walk home from school a different way since the day he’d scared the girl, but the day after the arrest, he couldn’t help himself. His curiosity had overruled the court order. He’d found the house vacant. The door hung open. Trash and clothes had been scattered as if someone had left in a hurry.
The emptiness pulled him inside. He went from room to room. Living room. Dining room. In the kitchen, a box of Fruit Loops had been spilled and was now a feast for roaches. Upstairs he found three bedrooms. It didn’t take but a second to figure out that the one with the balloons painted on the wall belonged to the little girl. Stepping inside the room, he’d stood there, trying to soak up the environment. But he’d felt nothing. Whatever had been left of the girl was gone. The closet door gaped and he went to it. The door creaked as he’d opened it and what he saw made him stop.
A picture had been drawn about knee-high in the left corner. It looked like the figures had been rendered with crayon. Even without knowing, Andy knew who had drawn the tableau. On the faded yellow wall knelt the stick figure of a girl. Standing over her was the hulking figure of a beast, made from slashes of greens and browns and blacks. The slash beast had yellow eyes that seemed to glow in the gloom of the closet. But the figure that most drew Andy’s attention was the high above the beast and the girl. Hanging from what could only be a vine dangling from a branch was the figure of a man. His face was round, his eyes were tiny circles and his mouth was a larger wavy circle.
Tarzan!
She’d known!
She’d understood!
Even though his mother and the shrinks and everyone else had thought he was crazy, this girl had known that all Andy had wanted to do was to save her— her Tarzan to his Jane.
He looked once again at the kneeling figure. Her head was round too. Her mouth was a frown. Her eyes were smaller circles, and although they were devoid of any emotion, Andy saw within them that strange mixture of hope and fear that had lived in the eyes of the real girl that day he’d taken her into his arms and screamed his Tarzan yell.
Now Andy recognized it once again within this slight Mexican girl lying beside the old man. Yet somehow it wasn’t the old man that seemed predatory. The way she clutched him was too much like a teddy bear or a kid hugging base during a game of freeze tag. No, it wasn’t the old man that Andy needed to worry about. Following her gaze to its end, he found the hungry leer of Batista. Like the King of the Jungle who found the spoor of a new animal, Andy knew that this wasn’t going to end well. He thought about growling at his rummy partner, but knew