Mamba Point (2 page)

“How awful!” Mom kicked some of the snake out of the way as she and Dad moved on to the airport. She grew up in New Mexico and was used to snakes. I was still feeling queasy and shaky, looking at the bloody chunks of hacked-up serpent on the tarmac.

“What did you do that for?” Law asked the African guy. “It’s just a rat snake.”

“I say, oh, that’s a black mamba. He’s bad bad.” The man picked up the snake’s severed head and squeezed the cheeks to make its mouth open. The snake wasn’t black, but the inside of its mouth sure was—a deep, purplish black, like the animal had been guzzling ink. Its fangs were bigger and sharper than any rat snake’s, and dripping with venom. I felt a tightness in my chest and needed to take a deep breath but couldn’t.

“Come on, I don’t think the snake’s going to bite you now,” my dad said, nudging me on to the building.

It was too late, though. I was having a panic attack.

I’d had them twice before. The first one came in class a few days after I told everyone about moving to Africa. I wasn’t even talking about Africa at the time. I was about to give an oral report on the book
Sounder
when the air got sucked out of me and I wobbled a bit. The teacher sent me to the nurse, who said there was nothing wrong with me and sent me to the school counselor, who told my parents to take me to a shrink.

The second time was a few days before we left. I was wrapping a model of the
Millennium Falcon
in bubble wrap and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I put the model down so I wouldn’t drop it and sat down on the floor. I waited the panic attack out, and didn’t tell Mom and Dad because they’d made such a big deal about the first one.

“Are you all right?” Dad asked me now.

I felt air slowly creeping back into my lungs, and I was
able to nod and mutter that I was fine and move on toward the airport.

It occurred to me that seeing a snake would have been a great way to kick off being the new Linus. The main thing I wanted to change about myself was to be totally calm instead of panicky when scary stuff happened. I imagined dropping to one knee and scooping the snake up by the neck, flinging it across the tarmac like a floppy javelin.

Why’d you do that?
my brother would have asked naively.
It was just a rat snake
.

No, Larry
, I would have said as we watched the snake scurry away,
that was a black mamba. Did you notice the telltale black mouth and tongue?

I’d blown it this time, but next time I resolved to be more like that.

The customs agents were wearing jackets and ties, even though it was warm and humid and there was no air-conditioning. There was a long line, too, but we got to go to a special customs guy with a different badge because we had diplomatic passports. He scanned our passports and nodded, without much small talk or any questions. I felt important.

Once we were through customs, a heavyset black guy came over and shook hands with my dad in a chummy way. He was wearing a colorful African shirt with embroidery all around the neck and sleeves. I thought he was probably an official Liberian greeter, or something, but he turned out to be American.

“This is Darryl Miller,” Dad said. “We were in Vietnam together. I haven’t seen him in—gosh, it must be nearly ten years!”

“That’s about right,” Darryl agreed. “I’ve been here for most of it.”

Dad never talked about Vietnam. I mean
never
. It was weird to meet someone from that part of his life.

“Darryl’s the one who recruited me into the foreign service,” Dad added. “He sent me the info.”

“It’s a good life,” Darryl said. “I’m glad you finally signed on for it.” He turned to me. “You must be Linus? My son is your age. You’ll meet him at dinner.”

“All right.” It would be cool to make a friend right away, especially if he could introduce me to everyone else.

“Where’s our stuff?” I looked around for one of those baggage claims with the revolving treadmill, but they didn’t have one. I was mainly worried about my notebook, with the few good drawings I’d ever done folded up and tucked inside. Why hadn’t I just stuck it in my carry-on?

“The redcaps are bringing your bags around the side,” Darryl explained. “We’ll collect them out in front.”

I realized it was an old Linus thing to worry about missing luggage.

“Just wonderin’,” I added, hoping I sounded like I didn’t care if I ever saw our bags again.

We went out of the airport to the curb, where there was a long line of banged-up, dusty yellow cars of all makes and models.

“The taxis go pretty much anywhere in Monrovia for a quarter,” Darryl told us. “Sometimes fifty cents, if it’s all the way across town.”

I filed that away for future reference.

“It’s not that hot,” Law said in surprise. “I thought it would be really hot here.”

“Well, the summers are a bit cooler,” Darryl explained. “It’s the rainy season.”

“How come it’s not raining now?” I asked him.

“It doesn’t rain all day, every day,” he said with a laugh. “That’s not even possible. It’ll rain good and hard at least once a day for about six more weeks, though.”

“Great,” said Law. “So it should end right when school starts?”

“Um, yeah. I guess so,” he admitted.

Two African guys came wheeling a rickety cart with all our bags on it. Neither of them was actually wearing a red cap. My mom tried to give one of the capless redcaps a couple of dollars. Darryl stopped her, and gave each man a quarter instead.

“Force of habit,” she said with a shrug.

There was a white van waiting for us with the U.S. Department of State seal on the side, which was the basic eagle in a circle with arrows and a branch. The African guys heaved all our bags on, and Darryl thanked them both, giving them a handshake and snapping their fingers at the same time.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s the Liberian handshake.” He showed it to us when we got in the van, grabbing our middle fingers with his own thumb and middle finger and dragging as he released our hands, with a nice pop at the end. I practiced it with Law the whole time we drove to our new home. Neither of us could make the loud, satisfying
snap
that Darryl made when he did it.

The streets of Monrovia had a lot of what I expected, like palm trees and monkeys and women wrapped in colorful fabric with big bowls of fruit on their heads. There were more smells than in American cities, too—mostly garbage and BO, but sometimes a nicer smell wafted into the window: like coconuts, or pineapple, or ocean air. There were people everywhere, but not hustling around like they do in American cities. Most of them were just hanging out.

“Is this downtown Monrovia?” Law asked, looking at the crowds of people and rows of buildings.

“Well, you might call it downtown Mamba Point,” Darryl said. “Most people don’t have cars here, so every neighborhood has its own business district. This is our neighborhood. We’re almost to the embassy.”

“Mamba Point?” I wondered, “Are there lots of mambas here?”

“I don’t think it’s named for the snake,” Darryl said.

“There aren’t any snakes,” Mom said firmly.

“I’ve lived here seven years and haven’t seen one yet,” Darryl admitted. “West Africa is a snake paradise, though. We have horned vipers and carpet vipers and rock pythons and spitting cobras.”

“Spitting
cobras?” Law asked in surprise.

“They don’t really spit; they spray venom,” Darryl explained.

“Much better.” I imagined a snake spraying venom like a garden hose. “What do they do, spit it in your mouth?”

“They aim for the eyes,” said Darryl, “although they probably get some—”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Mom interrupted.

“—in your mouth, by accident.” Darryl made an apologetic shrug and went on. “Still, those mambas are probably the worst, because they’re big and poisonous and fast and mean. I hear they can go like the dickens, maybe twenty miles an hour. Or maybe it was ten. Faster than you can run, anyway.”

“You’re going to give him nightmares,” Mom insisted.

“No he’s not,” I said, hoping to prove that the new Linus was cool with things that slithered and spit poison and could outrun me if they wanted to.

“The chances you’ll even see a mamba are like one in a million, though,” Darryl offered, looking at Mom and probably hoping he was making up for all the snake talk. “They don’t live in the city. Only in the jungle, miles and miles away. So don’t get your hopes up.”

“We already saw one,” I told him. Darryl looked at me skeptically, but Dad reached over from his seat and nudged him, then gave him half a nod that it was true.

“Well, you probably won’t see any more, then,” Darryl corrected himself.

When Dad told us we were going to live in an apartment, I imagined a big red building with long hallways and rows of doors. The building wasn’t like that at all. It was half open on the ground level, with a couple of big pillars keeping the rest of it from falling down, and instead of a front door, there was just a wide flight of steps leading up into the building. There were only two apartments per floor, one to the left and one to the right.

“Anybody can just walk in,” I pointed out as we lugged our bags up to the third floor.

“That’s why the guard is down there,” Dad replied. That wasn’t much comfort, since it looked like the guard was sound asleep.

Our apartment was bigger than our house back in Dayton. There were four bedrooms and three bathrooms. That was one bedroom more than we needed, and practically one bathroom each. There was a balcony in front, with a view of the city, and another in back, with a view of the ocean. I liked that one better. I’ve always liked the ocean. I hung out there for a while, watching the waves crash on the shore and little kids running in and out of the water.

When I first found out we were moving to the West
African coast, I imagined walking up and down beaches with a girl. Maybe we wouldn’t hold hands, but we’d kick through the surf, splashing each other and maybe throwing sand crabs at each other if there were sand crabs everywhere, like there were at a resort we went to once in San Diego. At night kids would have campfires and roast marshmallows and tell stories.

This beach was all wrong for that kind of thing. It was lined with jagged black rocks, and there was crud zigging and zagging across the sand in designs shaped by the waves. About a hundred yards away was a group of shacks made of cast-off wood and corrugated tin. A good, hard wind might knock any one of them over. Hopefully there were nicer beaches nearby.

“Lock the balcony door, okay?” my dad said when I went back in. “We need to be careful.”

“We’re three stories up,” I reminded him, glad that I’d remembered to show how unworried I was about bad things happening.

“You think that’s going to stop rogues from getting in?”

“Rogues?”

“Burglars.”

“Right.” The first word sounded worse. Burglars took stuff when you weren’t home. Rogues broke in and killed you in your sleep.

Dad opened the door and led me back out on the balcony, and showed me the decorative trellis running up the middle.

“Rogues could climb that,” he said. I wasn’t sure. It didn’t
look that sturdy, and a fall would be fatal if someone landed on the jagged rocks down there.

“Someone would have to be crazy to climb that,” I said. “They’d probably fall off and break their necks.”

“They
are
crazy,” he said. “Poverty makes people crazy.”

We went inside, and he shut the door, making sure it was locked. “Just remember to lock the door.”

I ended up with the smallest bedroom, since Mom wanted one of the bigger ones for a family room and Law took the next biggest. My new room was still bigger than the one I had back in Dayton.

I dug my notebook out of my suitcase and made sure my drawings were still safely folded between the pages. They were. I spread them out on the desk, looking at the characters I’d copied out of comic books into various school notebooks over the last couple of years—usually in class, when I was supposed to be doing math problems or taking notes. Most of my drawings were so lousy I tore them out and threw them away. These were the few I wanted to keep.

My favorite wasn’t from a comic book. It was a cow standing out in a field by a fence. It was still copied, but from a photograph. I meant to send it to this girl I used to know, but I lost my nerve and then her address. I put the notebook on top of it to press out the crease, thinking I might hang it up later.

I heard some whoops and hollers through the window
and peeked through the blinds. Some Liberian kids were kicking a red rubber ball around like a soccer ball. One of them was kind of hanging back and watching while the other kids kicked each other’s shins apart. So even Africa had nerdy kids, I thought. I identified with him. I was also the kind of guy who would hang back in a fierce game of soccer, not wanting to get creamed. Just like I was the kind of guy who drew a picture for a girl but never worked up the nerve to mail it, even though she’d given him her new address and asked him to write to her.

Why was I like that? Nobody else in my family seemed to worry too much. For example, when Mom and Dad said we were moving to Africa, Law asked if there was a movie theater. I asked whether there were man-eating lions.

I didn’t want to be that guy anymore. I didn’t want to be the chicken in the soccer game. I wanted to be more like this other kid down there. He was a head shorter than the other guys but always right on top of the ball, stealing it away from them, shooting at the goal. He was getting knocked around and kicked in the shins, but he was totally fearless. I could be that kid, I thought. Nobody knew me yet and I could be whoever I wanted to be.

Jet lag hit me all at once, and I collapsed on the bed and slept for a few hours. If the apartment hadn’t been furnished, I probably would have curled up on the floor. When I woke up, it felt like morning, even though it was getting dark outside. I could have slept on through the next day, but
we had to get dressed so we could go out for dinner with Darryl.