Nameless (Camp Again)

Tarzan, Age 2

I finally notice him during my second week at the camp—or, more accurately, notice the ten- and eleven-year-old boys shouting his name as they run to pick him up and carry him away from unintentional mischief.

He is exactly three feet tall with brownish-blond hair that had once been braided, but had sort of become dreads, and has grown out into an inch-thick fro at the roots in the meantime. I have never heard him talk. To observe him, you’d think he was a small four-year-old. He trots around the basement room in his own little world, oblivious to the other kids and almost never crying. He is steady on his feet and seems to need no one.

“Why do you call him Tarzan?” I ask Davian one day, as the eleven-year-old with a fake diamond earring scoops the toddler up and propped him on his hip.

“He look like a Tarzan.” Davian grins, fiddling with Tarzan’s fingers. Tarzan fiddles back with a look of concentration; he is not a smiler.

I can’t disagree with this, so I laugh along with Davian. “What’s his real name?”

Davian shrugs. “Don’t know. No one does.”

“You can’t be serious,” I say. “Not even the minister?”

So I spend the better part of the next week and a half trying to disprove this, but Tanisha doesn’t know. Mya doesn’t know. Paige doesn’t know. Even the minister, sure enough, doesn’t know (and certainly doesn’t have time to find out). She says she thinks he’s been neglected at home.

One afternoon at the park I find him by the fence, trying to climb over because he’d seen the other boys doing it. On the other side is an avalanche of bottles and trash that smothers the kudzu. I pry Tarzan’s fingers off the chain link and crouch next to him. He gives up on the climbing but stares through the fence at the trees like he’s watching something.

“What’s in there, buddy?” I ask.

“Tiger,” he says solemnly.

“Wow! Right there?” I point; he nods.

“And look,” I say, “a giraffe too!”

“’raffe,” he agrees.

We spot a polar bear and a leopard and an elephant as well.

“What’s your real name, Tarzan?” I ask, seizing the moment since I’ve run out of random zoo animals for the moment.

Tarzan takes a few seconds to scrutinize the forest a little longer, then lets go of the fence and wanders back to the playground without answering me.