Mamba Point Read online

  This zoe saw through the husband’s joke and stuck the mask on his face for real. The couple grew old together, nagging each other constantly. Mom thought the story was sexist, but Sekou said it was about settling problems honestly instead of resorting to lies and trickery.

  He went on and told us how Spider and Snake had a race to win the heart of a beautiful girl. Snake was winning, but when he took a nap, Spider came and took his arms and legs.

  “That’s why Spider has eight legs and Snake has none,” Sekou said.

  “So Spider got the girl,” I wondered.

  “Snake still won the race,” he said with a grin, “but they were both so ugly in their new form, neither got the girl.”

  Snake got a raw deal, I thought.

  Law and Eileen were hanging out on the steps after dinner, cooing at each other and gazing into each other’s eyes, or whatever they did together.

  “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” said Law. I hadn’t realized I was staring.

  “I don’t have a camera, but if you wait I can go get my notebook and draw you,” I suggested.

  He snorted and pushed his hair back. “I was just bustin’ your chops.”

  “You have interesting friends,” said Eileen. She grabbed Law’s arm and tucked herself under it. “How did you get to know a charlie?”

  “I just talked to him, I guess. About art and stuff.”

  “Thanks for bringing him,” said Law.

  “Yeah,” Eileen agreed. “He did all the talking, so I didn’t have to.”

  “He was cool, too,” I said. “I liked his stories.”

  “I never got those ones about Spider,” Eileen said. “Is he supposed to be a person, or an arachnid? That was never clear to me.”

  “He’s both,” I said. “I didn’t get them at first, either, but now I don’t mind.”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “Well, catch you guys later.” I bounded on down the stairs to talk to Matt. I remembered how at first Eileen reminded me of Jane, my friend back in Dayton. Not anymore. Eileen was older and probably smarter, skipping grades and everything, but Jane would have understood about Spider.

  “My dad says no way,” Matt told me as soon as he let me in. “He can’t get Gambeh’s dad a job.”

  “Was he mad at you for asking?”

  “Nah, he thought it was nice that we were trying to help someone, but he remembers their dad, the guard who slept here all the time. He doesn’t want to refer someone who doesn’t do good work.”

  “Maybe he’ll do better if he has a second chance.”

  “Maybe, but Dad doesn’t want to get in trouble with his buddies.”

  “Yeah, I guess I see his point.” I did, too, but what would I tell Gambeh? I was hoping to be a hero and tell him I’d gotten his dad a job with the Liberian government.

  “It’s not totally a lost cause, though,” Matt said. “Sometimes my dad just needs to get talked into something.” I didn’t think Darryl was the kind of guy who got talked into things, but I didn’t argue.

  “Thanks for asking, anyway.” I guessed that meant I had to show Matt the snake, or come up with something else equally interesting. “The cool thing I talked about … it’s in sea freight,” I told him. That bought me a little time, at least.

  “No hurry,” Matt said. “So, do you want to play the game for a while?”

  “I don’t know.” I wasn’t quite ready to plunge back into Pellucidar.

  He looked crushed. “What if Bob came back?”

  “You’ll bring him back? I thought that was cheating.”

  “I think parrots are like cats. They have nine lives.”

  So we played, Bob leading Zartan to the encampment of the bad guys, where the pirate battled them one at a time until they were all dead. He limped into the next module, barely alive but rich beyond his wildest dreams, and with his faithful feathered friend on his shoulder.

  I wanted to search for the snake some more on Tuesday morning, but our sea freight came and we all stayed home to unpack. I didn’t even know we had so much stuff until the guys wheeled in dolly after dolly of boxes crammed full of dishes and clothes and books and knickknacks. I unpacked three boxes. It took forever because I stopped and looked at everything: games, books, my skates, the Millennium Falcon. My own stuff seemed unfamiliar and old. I wasn’t even that upset when I unwrapped the Falcon and saw one of its wings had snapped off.

  I was glad to see I hadn’t sent my soccer ball off to Goodwill, and set it aside to give to Gambeh and Tokie. There was also a big wicker laundry hamper. Mom was always hollering at me for not using the thing—I was in the habit of throwing my clothes on the floor in what I called the dirty-clothes corner. I stuck the empty hamper in the closet and pushed it to the back, out of the way.

  Later that day I lined the bottom of the hamper with packing paper, then put in a layer of rocks and sand I carted back from the beach in my Mork bag. I crisscrossed two long pieces of driftwood for a little snake jungle gym. I had a wicker terrarium.

  We were all tired from unpacking, and Mom popped open some big cans of beef stew for dinner. I thought about asking my parents if they could help Gambeh’s dad, but I couldn’t quite do it. Mom and Dad were talking about boring stuff, like where they’d put this, and could Dad call somebody at the embassy to remove that and make room for it. I didn’t want to interrupt. They wouldn’t yell at me or anything, but I just didn’t get the words out. I was lapsing back into old Linus form, I realized. Probably because I hadn’t seen my snake in four days.

  I found Law in the kitchen on Wednesday morning, wrapping his malaria pill in a piece of ham. He popped it in his mouth and gave me a thumbs-up sign, but then he started to choke.

  “You okay?”

  He shook his head, pounding on the counter. I tried to remember what I was supposed to do. I’d seen a sign at a restaurant once, and knew I was supposed to grab him and squeeze him, but how? I felt a flash of terror, that Law would die right in front of me and it would be all my fault.

  He recovered on his own, sending a chunk of ham with a smear of dissolved pill on it flying across the kitchen.

  “Bleah,” said Law. “That counts as taking it, right?”

  I went looking for the snake again, even though it was drizzling. I searched the field with no luck. I went down to the rocks that lined the shore, walking from our apartment building to the embassy, behind the shanties and that big field and the car wash. I had a feeling this was my snake’s home and hunting ground, but I still didn’t find it. Well, maybe it was smart enough to stay out of the rain.

  I hoped that Charlie was right, and that I would just know if my snake was hurt. Maybe it was off having fun. Maybe it had met a girl snake. That is, if it was a boy. Or maybe it was a girl and had met a boy and was going to bring back a litter of little wriggly babies.

  There was a huge thunderstorm on Thursday that didn’t let up until late in the afternoon. I went down to the rocks by the ocean. The waves were especially large and frothy, and I watched as they fell like hammers, and exploded into spray, the water sluicing between the rocks. Was there any way to draw something like that—the cresting wave, or the mist in the air after it shattered on the rocks?

  I noticed a natural basin where the water swirled around in an eddy, slowly draining until the next wave hit. There was something kicking in the basin, unable to escape. I climbed down carefully, wishing I had better shoes as my sandals slipped on the wet stone. I ended up soaking my socks, standing in the cold water of the basin and feeling the water swirl around my toes. I crouched and found an unhappy frog treading water. The poor thing must have stumbled down from the trees at the top of the rocks. I scooped it up and put it in my pocket.

  “Try to stay alive,” I told it, climbing out of the basin.

  “Linus!” a voice called out to me. I twisted around and saw Bennett clambering along the rocks from the other direction. “You like it out here, too, huh? If you ever see a little spurt of water
out there, it’s a whale. At least, that’s what this guy told me.”

  “I’ll watch for that.” I kept a hand casually near my pocket so he wouldn’t see something wriggling in it. There was nothing wrong with catching frogs, but there was nothing really right about it, either.

  “You probably know that Eileen and I broke up?”

  “Well, I know she’s dating my brother, so—”

  “What?” He looked like I’d kicked him really hard in the stomach.

  “Oh, sorry. I figured you knew.”

  “God, she doesn’t even wait for my body to get cold.” He shook his head and plopped down on a rock. “Looks like you went for a wade.” He pointed at my sandals.

  “Yeah, a wave got me.”

  “Law and Eileen,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief while I made my way back over the rocks.

  I remembered to take off my wet sandals and socks before coming in this time. Artie was working in the kitchen and saw me take out a used margarine tub and poke holes in the top, then drop in the frog.

  “You have a friend,” he said with a grin.

  “It’s a snack,” I said. “I’m saving it for later.”

  He laughed heartily. “You’re so funny, little boss man.”

  Hey, I didn’t say it was a snack for me, I thought as I took the tub back to my room. I remembered the hamper I’d turned into a wicker terrarium.

  “Hey, Artie?”

  “Yes, little boss man?” He came halfway down the hall, his hands soapy from washing dishes.

  “I wanted to tell you that you don’t need to worry about the stuff in my laundry hamper.”

  “Sir?”

  I took him into the room and pointed it out.

  “There’s some clothes in here, but you don’t need to wash them. It’s stuff I never wear.”

  “You don’t want me to touch this basket?”

  “I didn’t mean it to sound like an order. I don’t want you to think you need to wash the same bunch of clothes every week.”

  “Okay, sir.” He went back to the dishes.

  Back in Dayton, Law knew this kid named Dave. Once, when they were ten and I was seven, Dave came over with a bunch of tiny firecrackers on a string. Law and Dave took off to use them, and I tagged along. First, Dave lit a couple of firecrackers and threw them at the neighbor’s cat. Then, he stuffed one in an anthill and set it off. Finally, he caught a frog, tied a firecracker to it, lit the fuse, and let the frog go. The frog took one hop and then—blam!—the firecracker exploded. It didn’t kill the frog, but it blew off one of its legs. Dave’s eyes were as wide as plates, and he started shouting. “Look! Look! Its leg’s gone, and it’s still trying to hop!” Law went and stomped on the frog, to put it out of its misery. He never hung around with Dave after that. Heck, I don’t know why he did in the first place.

  After dinner I looked at this frog through an air hole and wondered, Am I like Dave? I decided not. I wasn’t killing the frog to be cruel; I was just feeding my snake. Also, I reasoned, I’d saved the frog from an almost certain death. It never would have gotten out of the basin. It would have eventually been washed out to sea anyway, or died of hunger and exhaustion.

  I decided to give the frog a fighting chance. First, I would crank up the AC. Rog said the cold air made the snakes sluggish and slow, so the frog would have better odds unless it got sluggish and slow, too. Second, I would release the frog at the far side of the room and give it something to hide in. Finally, I decided that if the snake didn’t eat it after three minutes, I’d scoop up the frog myself and let it go where I found it—well, not exactly where I found it, but somewhere nearby.

  It would be completely fair, and if the frog got eaten, that would be completely natural anyway. However, I couldn’t do any of that until I found my snake.

  As soon as I had the place to myself on Friday, I took the Mork bag down to the field and waited. A moment later I felt the familiar cool of snakeskin against the back of my feet.

  “Where were you?” I asked aloud, forgetting to whisper. The snake slithered into the bag. Maybe it knew I had a treat waiting. I zipped up the bag and toted it home, past the serious-faced new guard, who squinted at me like he knew I was up to something. I ran up the stairs and locked the door behind me, using the chain lock so nobody could come in all of a sudden and surprise us.

  I unzipped the bag and the snake slithered out.

  It didn’t matter that my snake had been gone a week; I was just glad to have it back. I didn’t care about getting attacked in the field anymore. I didn’t even care about Eileen making out with Law. Everything was going to be all right, just like that reggae song said. The song also said that good friends were lost, but I’d found mine again.

  “Hey, buddy, I have a surprise for you.” Mom always said it was more fun to give presents than it was to get them, and now I knew what she meant.

  I peeled back the lid on the plastic tub. I meant to set the frog loose across the room, but it leapt out as soon as I had the lid off, barely missing the bed and landing on the floor a foot from the snake. It took one mindless hop before there was a flash of gray lightning. The snake drew back and watched as the frog gave a couple of feeble kicks and was still, then lunged again to grab it. That was that—no epic struggle, and not much sport.

  The snake opened its mouth wider than I thought it could, and I could see its throat muscles working as it tried to force the frog down its gullet. I’d worried it would all happen too fast, but I had plenty of time to draw it: the snake’s jaw unhinged and loose, wrapped around the frog’s mid-section, and the two rear legs of the frog sticking grotesquely out. I had time to draw it from three different angles.

  “I have another surprise, too,” I told the mamba, setting it in its new snake hotel. It coiled up in the sand, writhing once or twice around the sticks, and rested its head in the crook where the sticks crossed. It was in too much of a tangle to draw easily, but I took a chair and a flashlight into the closet so I could try.

  CHAPTER 18

  The weather got hotter and drier, which in Liberia meant the rainy season was winding down. I thought about it one afternoon on the way home from the library after returning the books I’d borrowed and the magazines Law had borrowed for me. School would start in two weeks. I never hated school, and usually I was bored out of my mind by the end of summer, but now I was wondering how I’d ever get to hang out with my snake.

  When I got in, I saw Artie trussing up a chicken with twine and cramming it into the iron pot with some chopped vegetables.

  “You’re making dinner?”

  “I’m a cook first, houseboy second,” he said with a grin. “I love cooking.”

  “It looks good,” I said. Well, it didn’t look that good raw, but it looked like he knew what he was doing. “What are you making?”

  “This is my Liberian chicken.”

  “What makes it Liberian?”

  “This Liberian pepper.” He tapped a small bowl of pea-sized peppers. I picked one up and popped it in my mouth, then immediately plunged into a world of fire and regret.

  “Hot!” I went to the water filter and crouched down to put my mouth below the spigot, turning on the faucet to put out the flames. It was useless. It felt like my tongue had a hole in it the size of a Liberian dollar coin.

  “They’re very hot, little boss man,” he said.

  “Good to know.”

  I was scared when I took the first bite of chicken at dinner, but it was good. The peppers had all cooked into the tomatoes, making the sauce on the chicken spicy but delicious. I still pushed the actual peppers aside when I found them.

  Artie joined us for dinner, too. He was like our grandma—the second a glass was almost empty, he would jump up and fill it. When Dad dropped his fork, I think Artie had a new one from the kitchen ready before Dad could pick up the old one.

  “Artie, please relax,” Mom told him at last. “Anyway, we need to tell Law and Linus.”

  “Tell Law and Linu
s what?” I asked.

  “Your dad and I are going away this weekend,” she said.

  Law hadn’t been paying much attention, but now he sat up in his chair. “Where are you guys going?”

  “Firestone,” she said.

  “What, like a tire?” I asked.

  “It’s where they grow the rubber for the tires,” Dad explained.

  “It’s the biggest rubber plantation in the world,” Artie added with a note of pride. “All the tires in America, they come from Liberia.”

  “Why would you want to go hang around a rubber farm?”

  “Well, Darryl says they have a nice resort hotel,” Dad said. “Plus, they have a golf course, so I can play golf with Darryl, and your mom can read some trashy novels.”

  “We thought it would be nice to spend some time together,” Mom said.

  “Okay. You guys have fun,” said Law.

  “Artie’s switched his schedule around so he can come on Friday to check on you two and make dinner. Matt will come up and eat with you.”

  “Artie doesn’t need to go to all that trouble,” Law said. “We can make frozen pizzas and stuff.”

  “Well, we wanted somebody looking in on you, too,” Mom explained. “You guys are getting older, and Linus has been much better, but he’s still only twelve and …” She trailed off. It annoyed me that she mentioned my age but Law was the one off drinking and smoking. What did I do that was so bad? Well, I brought home deadly snakes and played with them, so maybe I didn’t have any right to be offended.

  “You’re in charge when Artie’s not here,” Mom told Law. “That means you have to stay home for a change.”

  “Whatever,” he said. I was surprised he didn’t argue more.

  “We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t trust you guys,” Dad said. “We’re really proud of both of you and how well you handled this move. Law’s already got a girlfriend, and Linus is making friends all over the city.” He took a swig from his glass. “That being said, if either one of you messes up, we’ll never leave you without a babysitter until you’re both in college.”