Jane (2 page)

He eyed the woman’s bulky luggage. “I’ll tell them you’re selling vacuum cleaners.”

She smiled broadly. “That will do.”

They were largely silent on the taxi ride across town to his Harris Street walk-up, except for the exchange of pleasantries about the lovely spring weather they were having and how April was almost always horrible in England.

It was just Edgar’s rotten luck that the only neighbor who saw them come in was the landlord, a petty, peevish little man who was looking for the rent, now more than a week late. Edgar was relieved to get Jane Porter up the three flights and inside, shutting the door behind them, but he cringed to see the empty cereal bowl and box of Grape-Nuts that he’d left on his writing desk. There was a pile of typewritten pages on letterhead lifted from the supply closet of the pencil sharpener company he worked for, a mass of cross-outs and arrows from here to there, scribbled notes to himself in both margins.

“It’s a novel I’m writing, or should say
re
writing … for the third time. I call it
The Outlaw of Torn
.” Edgar grabbed the bowl and cereal box and started for the kitchen. “I turn into a bit of a bachelor when my wife is away. By that I don’t mean…”

“It’s all right,” she called after him. “You have children?”

“A boy and girl, two and three. Why don’t you sit down? Can I get you something to drink? Tea? A glass of sherry?”

“Yes, thank you. I’ll have a cup of water. Cool, please.”

When Edgar returned from the kitchen, his guest was sitting at the end of the divan in an easy pose, her back against the rounded arm, her head leaning lazily on her hand. She had taken off her suit coat, and now he could see she wore no stiff stays under the white silk blouse, those torturous undergarments that mutilated a woman’s natural curves. She wore no jewelry save a filigreed gold locket hanging between shapely breasts, and it was only when she was opening the second of the two cases holding the skeleton that he saw she wore a simple gold wedding band. He could see now where she had meticulously pieced together the shattered bones of the apelike face.

He set the water down and sat across from her. Now she sighed deeply.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Edgar asked, praying silently that she did.

“Well, I’ve never told this in its entirety. The academics don’t wish to hear it. But perhaps your ‘pulp fiction’ readers will. I can tell you it’s a story of our world—a true story, one that will rival your John Carter of Mars.”

“Is it about you?”

“A good part of it is.”

“Does what happened to you in the story explain your fearlessness?”

“I told you, I’m not frightened of you. I…”

“I don’t mean me. You took an awful lot of punishment this afternoon … and in public, too. You’re a better man than I.”

She found Edgar’s remark humorous but grew serious as she contemplated his question. “I suppose they did toughen me up, my experiences.” She stared down at her controversial find, and he saw her eyes soften as though images were coming into focus there.

“Where does it begin?” he asked.

“Well, that depends upon
when
I begin. As I’ve said, I’ve never told it before, all of it.” She did some figuring in her head. “Let me start in West Central Africa, seven years ago.”

“Africa!” Edgar liked this story already. Nowhere on earth was a darker, more violent or mysterious place. There were to be found cannibals, swarthy Arab slave traders, and a mad European king who had slaughtered millions of natives.

“It just as well could start in England, at Cambridge, half a year before that.” She smiled at Edgar. “But I can see you like the sound of Africa. So, if you don’t mind me jumping around a bit…”

“Any way you like it,” Edgar said. “But I know what you mean. It’s not easy figuring out how to begin a story. For me it’s the hardest part.”

“Well then … picture if you will a forest of colossal trees. High in the fork of a fig, a great nest has been built. In it lies a young woman moaning and delirious. Her body is badly bruised and torn.”

“Is it you?” Edgar asked.

Jane Porter nodded.

“I have it in my mind. I can see it very well.” Edgar could feel his heart thumping with anticipation. He allowed his eyes to close. “Please, Miss Porter…” There was a hint of begging in his voice. “Will you go on?”

July 1905

It was the hurt that woke me—white-hot needles at shoulder and calf, and deep spasms the width and length of my back. My head throbbed. Fever seared. Limbs like lead. Bright patterns dancing behind closed lids. Too much effort to move a finger, a toe. Frightening. Did I have the strength to open my eyes? And what was the cause of my agony? What had happened? Where was I? Then I remembered. Recalled the last sensation that was pure terror made corporeal.

I was a leopard’s next meal.

Why was I not dead? Was I even now in the cat’s lair? Would I open my eyes to a pile of bones and rotting corpses of its earlier prey? Was the cat waiting an arm’s length away to finish me?

No. Beneath me was softness. My arms and legs were gently positioned and cushioned. But this was not a bed. The air was fresh, fragrant. I was outdoors. I could make no sense of it. I strained to remember. Called out for help.

I dared to hope.

“Father?” My voice was so weak. How would he ever hear me? I drew a long breath to give me strength, but that small act was a knife to my ribs. I fought to raise my lids, but the minuscule muscles defied me.

“Fah-thah.” It was a male voice, deep and resonant, even in its youth. Fevered as I was, a chill ran through me.

Who was this stranger? Dare I speak again?

A wave of pain assailed me and crushed the words into meaningless cries and moans. I was so weak, buffeted, helpless in a sea of suffering. Then two strong, comfortable arms cradled me, lifted me tenderly, held me to a broad male breast as a father would a small, ailing child.

Relief flooded me and I sank gratefully into my protector’s chest. The skin was smooth and hairless, the scent richly masculine. The throbbing heartbeat against my ear was strong and I heard the mindless humming, a familiar lullaby. I was rocked so gently that I fell into a swoon of safe repose.

*   *   *

How long it was before I awoke again I did not know. But with the pain having substantially subsided, when I opened my eyes this time I could see very clearly indeed, and my mind had regained sense and order.

I was in the crook of a tree where four stout limbs came together, lying on a thick bed of moss. I saw the naked, heavily muscled back of the man I remembered only for his fatherly embrace. He squatted beside me in what could rightly be called a “nest.” His skin was mildly tanned, marred only by several fresh scratches and puncture wounds, the hair a matted black mass hanging down below his shoulders.

When he turned, he was spitting a just-chewed blue-green substance from his mouth into his hand, and was as startled at my waking state as I was at the entirety of him.

We were equally speechless. He never took his eyes from me as he finished chewing, then spat the rest of the paste into his palm. I lifted onto my elbows but winced at the pain this caused my left shoulder. I turned my head and saw the appalling injury—four deep gouges in the flesh.

He gently pushed me down and began to pack the green substance into the wounds. His ministrations were straightforward, and in the silence as he tended the shoulder scratches and another set on the back of my right calf, I gazed steadily at his face, overcome with a sense of wonder and unutterable confusion.

He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Perhaps twenty, he was oddly hairless on his cheeks, chin, and under his nose, with only a soft patch at the center of his chest. The face was rectangular with a sharp-angled jaw, the eyes grey and widely set, and alive with intensity and inquisitiveness. Jet-black brows matched the unruly mane.

Though a stranger and clearly a savage, he touched me intimately, but he did so unreservedly, like a workman at his job, and I felt no compulsion to recoil from that touch.

Then he did the strangest thing. He raised his hand to my face and, turning the palm up, laid the back of it on my forehead, as a mother would to her child to check for fever. I thought I detected satisfaction in what he’d found, and indeed, I felt the fever had gone from my body.

Now he met my gaze and held it with terrible intensity. His lips twitched for several moments before any sound emerged. Then finally he spoke.

“Fah-thah,” he said.

“Fah-thah?” I repeated. Then understood. “Father.”

The sound of the word and the thoughts it evoked suddenly tore through my being and, lacking all restraint, I began to wail.
Where was my father? Was he alive or dead? Did he have any knowledge of my whereabouts?

Everything in me hurt, but most of all my heart.

The young man moved to take me into his arms as he’d done before, but now I began to struggle, pushing him away, crying out with pain of my torn shoulder and thoughts of my father. With a stern countenance, the man opened his palms and, spreading them across my chest, pushed me back down in the moss.

My face and body went slack in surprise, and I ceased struggling. He withdrew his hands and in time I calmed. I never took my eyes from him. Now I placed my own hand on my chest and spoke again.

“Jane,” I said.

He was silent, eyeing me closely.

“Jane,” I repeated, this time tapping my chest.

Understanding glittered in his eyes.

“Jane,” he said.

I refused to give in to false or premature hope, but I rewarded his victory with a small smile.

He grew excited. He tapped his own chest and said, “Tarzan.”
So this was his name? Odd. Tarzan.
He placed his hand over my hand, then said his name once more.

But I shook my head and finally said “no.”

He nodded his head yes. “Tarzan. Tarzan,” he repeated.

I laid my head back, closing my eyes and sighing deeply. I wanted to shout, “No, I am not Tarzan. You are Tarzan!” But I must be patient.

And then very suddenly, as though he, too, was spent from the frustrating conversation, he left me and climbed from the nest, disappearing from my sight.

I lay there alone, trying to order my mind. There had been a brief moment when I thought the savage might possess intellect, and my heart had soared. He was able to mimic words. I must have uttered “Father” in my delirium, and he’d remembered it. And he had repeated “Jane” instantly and clearly, and even appeared to understand that this was who I was. And then … oh, I grew heavy with disappointment—he had called us both by the same strange name: Tarzan. He was clearly an imbecile, a feral child, grown up. A freak of nature. And while he was at least gentle and had nursed me so carefully, I despaired that this creature was the one and only key to my salvation, if that was in fact a possibility.

Now that he was absent from the nest, I gazed around. It was a rough home to be sure, but a home all the same. I saw a depression in the moss beside where I lay—long and deep. It was clearly where the tameless man had been sleeping—so close to me. There were few artifacts. A stone-tipped spear. Near my head a pair of half coconut shells, and next to them a pith helmet—my own?—all of them filled with clear water.

But where was I?

I looked up and around me. I recognized the tree as a fig, and a large one at that.

It seemed that this nest was quite high off the ground.
How on earth had I gotten here?
Certainly it was by virtue of the gentle savage, but I had been injured. As a deadweight, I’d been carried up a tree!

Although every movement was still an agony, my mind was clearing moment by moment. But still I found myself tumbling fearfully in an avalanche of questions.

How serious were my injuries? Will I live or die? Where was my father? We had come together into this forest. Was he even alive? Deathly ill? What has he been told about my whereabouts? Was he searching for me even now? And who or what, in heaven’s name, was this man … my savior?

Then suddenly, unaccountably, the pain subsided like an outgoing tide. I found myself soothed, lulled into comfort by the sounds and the scents around me. It was an incessant thrum—trilling, piping, and whistling of birdsong. Calls and answers. Clicking and chip-chipping of insects. The rumbling roar of a distant waterfall.

I should think! Plan!
But I could not. The sudden absence of pain, the delicious stillness of my body, the comfort of the bed, the sweet and pungent fragrances and the sounds. Oh, the sounds made me lazy, indolent. I allowed my mind to drift.
Not like me. Not like me at all.
Always too busy. So much to accomplish. So much to prove. Here there was no accomplishing. Here there was only being, and gratitude that I was alive and safe and not a leopard’s dinner …

Only then did I think to look down at my body. My left shoulder was bare—the sleeve from my bush jacket gone. The terrible wound packed with green-blue paste no longer throbbed.
Was it this strange medicine that relieved the pain?
The rest of my jacket, I could see, covered me, but the front—still buttoned—was lying atop my chest like a small blanket. I felt with my right hand. The jacket’s back was beneath me, the two parts unattached, the seams apparently ripped apart.