Jane (33 page)

What is that! A sound on the roof? A falling frond? Dear God, dear God, they are footfalls

*   *   *

A groan escaped my throat and a violent shuddering shook my whole frame. The expanse of blank white pages splattered brown with blood told more a story of horror than any words could do. I could not bear to look at Tarzan but recalled the trembling rage at his sight in the Mangani bower of the one called Kerchak, and of his murder of Kala. Now this. The hellish tale of his father, mother, and his tiny, tender self finally cruelly besieged on a dark, windy night by the very same loathsome beast.

I must force myself,
I thought,
and gather my courage as Alice Clayton had for four years on this beach.
With hands shaking, I closed the journal and looked up. Tarzan sat on the bed, frighteningly still, his back to the wall, eyes open, staring sightlessly, no doubt gazing with clear vision into the past. The air was warm, but I shivered uncontrollably. I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. I wished to embrace him, but some restraining force kept me seated, still. Not my corporeal body but my love must flow across the space between us to enfold and comfort him, for I knew it was Tarzan’s own ordeal to suffer, one without which he owned no future. He began to speak in the voice of a small child, words flowing one into the other, a rush of terror and grief.

“mummy screaming … crashing door … papa where is papa? cannot see mummy holds me tight too tight too tight … cannot breathe cannot see … john! she cries … screams … the door at the door oooh … HAIRY MONSTER BITING PAPA!… blood blood … papa screaming, screaming wet and red … mummy crying no no god no jesus help us … it is coming red with papa’s blood coming it is COMING! monster monster monster … falls on mummy I will hurt him cannot hurt him CANNOT hurt him! mummy screams and screams and screams … strong arms around me lift and carry … out in dark and mummy’s screams and waves and wind … warm fur chest … mummy screams no more … beating heart thub thub thub … splashing croaking clicking … soft arms strong fur arms and chuffs …
balu balu
kala
balu
 … eyes close … sweet milk in mouth so sweet … all I know all I know all I know…”

It was more than a minute before Tarzan came back to himself, as if from a daze, and stared hard at me. “Jane, we are going,” he said, rising and rushing out the hut door. I followed to see him jump to the ground. Then he was moving quickly across the sand, south, in the direction of the mangrove swamp’s inlet.

“Wait for me, Tarzan,” I cried several times as I struggled down the rope ladder and ran, trying to catch him. “Stop! What are you doing?!”

“Kerchak will die!” he called without turning.

I sought some logic, any logic that might stop him. “Kerchak is an animal, a wild animal!” I shouted after him. “You are a man, a human being!
Histah
coils and strikes—that is what snakes are born to do.
Sheeta
kills prey—that is what leopards are born to do!”

“Mangani are not born to kill!” he shouted back at me, never slowing. “Only Kerchak kills! He is sick in the head!
”

“You can control yourself!”

“I can put
Boi-ee
in Kerchak’s heart!”

“I don’t want to lose you!” I blurted suddenly, the words surprising me, painful and joyful and true. Tarzan slowed perceptibly at this but kept striding forward, nearing the brackish outlet.

“Wait, please wait!” I was crying now, tears washing my cheeks, desperate to stop him. “If you fight Kerchak … and if you are hurt, if you are killed, what will happen to
me
? Think, Tarzan, think! What would Kerchak do to me?!”

The image those words evoked was like a dart to Tarzan’s brain. He stopped in midstride and turned, saw me running toward him. I flew the remaining distance between us, but he caught me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length, holding me in a piercing gaze. Then he crushed me to him. I lifted my mouth to be kissed, but the lips that met mine were less tender than ferocious, for murderous rage had, with but a moment’s grace, transfigured into passion. Bloodlust to wanton lust. Now his hands were on my breasts, and though I’d expected this, wanted it, still the extravagance of his touch was shocking. The hands lingered but a moment, then followed with voluptuous restraint down the curves of my waist and belly. All at once I came fully alive, in places he caressed and those I wished him to caress. He buried his face in the soft of my neck, biting me gently, then fiercely, then gently again. He pulled down my shift and was on me everywhere, licking my breasts, licking with a long, catlike tongue that jellied my knees. He laid me down in the sand and straddled my hips, hanging above me with a look that spoke of hard animal craving. Yet poised as he was to strike, he waited. A sign was needed.

The smallest sign would unleash him.

I raised both my hands to his waist. Flat palms snaked around him, my fingers playing on the taut ripples of his back. Then all restraint abandoned me. Hungrily I surrendered, and as I pulled him down, a primal growl sounded deep in Tarzan’s throat. I lost myself then. Lost time and the world around me, hearing only the ecstatic cries of seabirds.

Cries that I finally, wondrously, recognized as my own.

*   *   *

It was an idyll like no other, two of Nature’s innocent creatures at one with the sky, the sea, and the land. We worshipped together at the altar of pleasure, learning the secrets of our bodies—the rush of exquisite sensation, the languorous exploration of willing flesh. For days on end I thought little … and felt much, though I did consider Cecily Fournier and how thrilled she would have been to see me here—naked in Paradise with this astonishing, virile man.

Whether it was love I was feeling, or merely lust, I did not dare to think. But while Tarzan—who had grown as quiet as he had tender—spoke of neither, I sensed that in his heart and mind I had, irrevocably, become his “mate.”

We slept close every night, a tangle of limbs. Many times I’d awake to feel his warm breath on my neck. Often he cried out in his sleep. Once when his moans were piteous and protracted, I gently shook him awake.

“What is it, love? What were you dreaming?”

It took awhile for the answer to come, as though he were replaying the night visions over in his head.

“Kerchak…” he finally murmured, “trying to come in.”

I kissed his face and smoothed his hair, whispering, “Sleep, sleep, but only sweet dreams.”

He took my hand and draped it around him, holding it to his breast. He twitched, then fell into a slow rhythm of breathing that told me he slept.

I would have followed him, but my own night demon had awakened. As Kerchak menaced Tarzan’s thoughts and dreams, Ral Conrath menaced mine. In both instances, a single monstrous individual had wrought devastation on an innocent family. Certainly the Claytons had suffered a more gruesome end, but Conrath’s intent was no less vile than the crazed Mangani’s.

I was no Dr. Freud, but I nevertheless attempted to analyze the psyche of the man. With icy precision he had chosen his victims. He had set the trap, baiting it with irresistible promises, then orchestrated our meeting. It haunted me that Ral, like myself, might have witnessed Father’s brief chest clutching at the Zoological Congress and held knowledge of that weakness to later exploit. In the end, with that jaunty two-fingered salute, he had left me to be eaten alive on a lonely mountaintop.

Kerchak’s actions were overtly violent, clearly fueled by insanity. Unforgivable, yet somehow understandable. My tormentor’s mayhem was more subtle and devious, but was his premeditated crime any less horrible than Kerchak’s? Was Ral Conrath any less mad than his bestial counterpart?

I found myself trembling at the thought and pulled my hand from Tarzan’s lest I wake him with my black thoughts. I imagined Conrath even now in fine evening wear at some European gaming table gambling with his ill-gotten fortune from King Leopold, his paid-for women every night, perhaps scheming his next adventure, keeping a keen eye out for his next “mark.”

I loathed the man. Desperately wished to avenge my father’s death. Of course it would have to wait till my return from Africa. It would not be an easy thing, but I would find a way. Then I shuddered, remembering the words of a wise old friend of Father’s, Dr. West. “If you go looking for revenge,” he’d said, “you had best dig a grave for your victim and another next to it for yourself.”

I didn’t care. I would see to Ral Conrath’s demise whatever the cost.

I no longer stopped to reflect upon how strange my life had become, for every moment was needed to live it. Every afternoon without fail, I laid Tarzan down with his head in my lap and bit by bit picked at his dark matted locks with one of the Claytons’ dinner forks. The hair, once untangled, was thick and beautiful. As I picked, I could see in my mind’s eyes my father’s long hair blown backward as the Packard sped home from Cambridge on a Friday afternoon, and my mother pulling him into the house with mock horror that he looked like the “Wild Man of Borneo.” What
,
I thought, would she think of
my
wild man
?

We sat every evening to watch the setting sun, and on this night a great tornado of purple clouds began to form on the horizon.

“The rains will come soon,” Tarzan said.

“Soon? When?” His words shook me, waking me from a beautiful dream. “How long before the rains come?”

He thought for a very long moment, considering the shape and movement of the clouds and sniffing the air. “Less than two moons.”

All at once the passion that had ruled my life before coming to Africa came surging up, like a plugged well unbound. How could thoughts of such a wondrous thing as
Pithecanthropus aporterensus erectus
have slipped my mind? Maybe I had
lost
my mind. First I had become Tarzan’s analyst, then I had become his concubine, mistress, mate. He had, likewise, shown the profoundest affection for me by stifling his natural instincts to do away with the mad Mangani. Concern for my welfare had trumped his primordial urge to destroy his enemy.

“Tarzan,” I began, feeling horribly uneasy and praying for clarity, “I am a ‘scientist.’”

He regarded me with curiosity. “What is that?”

“A scientist is someone who studies, as you’ve studied from books and learned to read and write. Scientists study
things
—like animals or the stars or earth or trees. We learn all about them so we can write books and teach others about animals and stars and earth and trees.”

“What do you study?”

Here is the deepest part of the quagmire,
I thought. Tarzan had learned to think and reason more quickly than any human being could be expected to do, but there was no way in the world to explain to him the theory of evolution or fossils or the science of paleoanthropology. I would have to lie, or at least modify the truth.

“I study apes,” I finally said. “
Bolgani
and
manu.
”

He narrowed his eyes, sensing the dishonesty of my explanation. “You study apes, yet you were …
afraid
when the
bolgani balu
touched you.”

“Where I am from, a scientist might study a gorilla but never be touched by it, and never do the studying standing high in the limbs of a tree.”

“Trees are where
bolgani
live,” he reasoned.

I expelled a discouraged breath and began again. “I am most interested in studying the Mangani,” I said, relieved to be speaking the whole truth once more. “When you took me to the hollow tree and we saw the Great Bower through the hole in the trunk, I grew very excited.”

He regarded me with a bewildered tilt of the head.

“The Mangani are a rare tribe. ‘Rare’ means that there are very few.” I made the sign of “few” with my two hands close together. “There may be no other tribes of Mangani in all the world.”

“No other Mangani?”

“That is correct. So every single one that lives is precious.”
Even Kerchak,
I thought but did not say.

“Precious,” he repeated.

Did he know the meaning of that word? I wondered.

“Tarzan, you are precious to me, and I am precious to you.”

“Because you are the only Jane and I am the only Tarzan?”

“Yes!” I cried with a relieved laugh.
But for so many more reasons,
I thought. He was silent, waiting to hear what it was that I clearly desired. “Will you take me back to the hollow tree so I can study the Mangani?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Kerchak is there. Danger is there.”

Even in the warmth, I shivered. I knew the violence and depravity of which the monster was capable. What savagery he had inflicted upon the Claytons. But I could not allow fear to rule over reason.

“We can be hidden—
mel-cot.
You can protect me.”

“No.”

I cursed myself for having convinced Tarzan too well about his need to protect me.

“How can I make you understand? It is very, very important that I go to the Mangani bower. I
must
study them.” It was as much in Father’s memory, his legacy, I realized, as it was in my own self-interest.

“I cannot take you. You are weak and slow.”

And if you see Kerchak again you will want to tear him apart,
I thought. Instead I said, “I
am
weak and slow. But I can become strong and fast. You can teach me. I beg you. But I must do this before the rains come. Before you take me out of the forest. Before I take you to England.”

I held his eyes, now reflecting the last rays of
kudu,
and saw his resolve wavering. I knew how deeply the man wished to please me. I saw his desire to see the places on his father’s map of the world.

“I will teach you. Then I will…” He was seeking the word.

“Decide?”

“Yes. Then I will decide.”

“Will we leave tomorrow?”

He lay back in the sand and pulled me onto him. His face was a welter of conflicting emotions. These weeks at the great water had transformed him, pained him, but most important pleasured him beyond his wildest dreams. Searching my eyes, he must have seen much of the same in me. Why would we ever wish to leave this place? For a moment, even I wavered. Perhaps we could stay just a bit longer …