Джозеф Нассис - SNAFU - Heroes [An Anthology of Military Horror]

“What the hell?” asked one of the other mine tenders.

“When did the wetbacks move in?” Batista asked.

Andy didn’t miss the irony of his friend using the pejorative. “Technically, they aren’t wetbacks.”

Batista frowned.

“I mean, they haven’t crossed any rivers yet.” Andy shrugged. “Can’t be wetbacks if they don’t get wet.”

Batista gave him a look. “You think too much, maricone .”

The others spread out and found places to play cards, read or snooze. A few of them watched the new guests, but with only cursory interest.

Andy and Batista found an empty space on the floor. They broke out a deck of cards and began a game of gin rummy. But it became obvious after the first hand that Batista was just going through the motions. His eyes were on one of the girls huddled next to an older man with milky eyes and a missing ear. A sly, hungry look had crept onto Batista’s face and taken control.

The girl couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Her dark eyes and skin told of Indian ancestry. Her long hair had once been luxurious, but was now more the color of dirt than lustrous black. The hair was twisted and bunched beneath an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap. Her legs were drawn beneath her. Her hands rested on the old man’s leg.

She reminded Andy of a girl who’d lived near him at Fort Drum. He’d never known her name, but the memory of her had made him who he was to this day.

Andy’s father hadn’t been in the Army, but the girl’s father had. He was assigned to the 10 thMountain Division. He was never home, always playing war games, or deployed to some far-flung country. When he was in town, she used to sit on the front stoop of their townhouse, waiting from him to come home. Her eyes were like the eyes of the Mexican girl: wide brown pools where hope shimmered above a surface-tension of fear.

Andy had been drawn to those eyes when he passed on his way home from school. He was sixteen and she was thirteen, and he wanted to stop and reach out to help her. “Me Tarzan. You Jane,” he’d said in his mind, every time he’d passed. Pounding his chest, he’d let out the famous Tarzan call, grab her by the waist and swing off into the trees like Johnny Weissmuller had done so many times. They’d live a life free of fear, high above the dangerous animals far below. They’d have the monkeys to entertain them and the apes to protect them. Living would be good. Life would be grand.

But not really.

Tarzan, that great mythical man who was the source of all courage, wasn’t real. He existed in the pages of paperback pulps, in comic books, in television and movies, and in the minds of every boy who’d sat down and plumbed the depths of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ imagination.

Andy knew this because of the doctors he’d been forced to see.

They asked him Do you really think you’re Tarzan?

Why did you do that to her?

What were you planning to do to her? And a hundred more questions, each as inane and embarrassing as the others. Why had he done what he had? What had set him off, making him believe that he could be Tarzan?

He’d run after it had happened.

An hour later the doorbell had rung. He’d pressed his ear to the closed door of his room and heard most of the conversations that had taken place. When it came time for his mother to confront him, he was sitting on the bed, prepared for the embarrassment. But the embarrassment never came. They hadn’t understood. What had been his vain inglorious attempt to save the girl had been misconstrued as some sort of attack.

“Why’d you scream at her? Why’d you grab her like that?” his mother had asked.

“But I didn’t—”

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 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 was high above them. 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.

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 this wasn’t going to end well. He thought about growling at his rummy partner, but knew that the man wouldn’t understand, just like his mother and all of the other adults of his childhood had failed to understand.