Mamba Point (20 page)

I had a mental snapshot of Law and his friends rummaging around, laughing at what they found: Jonas finding Moogoo, shaking his body to make his eyes spin.
Dude sleeps with a stuffed monkey
. James opening and closing drawers, looking for something equally funny. Marty finding the comics in the closet.

The closet door was still open a crack. More than enough for a snake to get through. I opened it all the way and looked in the hamper. The snake wasn’t in there.

My heart was beating about a thousand times a second. I stormed into the living room and turned on the living room and dining room lights.

“Hey!” someone shouted.

“Lights off!” someone ordered.

I turned off the TV, shutting up the Go-Go’s. Now their lips really were sealed.

“Who’s the nark?”

“Linus?” Law came in from the balcony. “I asked you to—”

“Someone was in my room.”

“No they weren’t, Linus.”

“My stuff was moved around. The closet door was open.”

“We were just trying to crank you up, dude,” Jonas explained.

“Yeah,” said Law. “It’s no big deal, man.”

“It
is
a big deal.”

“Look, if it makes you feel better, we didn’t get into your tighty whiteys,” said James.

“Shut up,” said Law. “Hey, Linus, you can stay and party if you want. You can even invite Matt. All right? All is forgiven and forgotten?”

“It’s not that easy.” I looked around at everyone, at them looking back at me. The snake was really close. I could feel it.

“Everyone needs to go,” I ordered. “You have to leave.”

“No way!” Jonas shouted, more in disbelief than protest.

“Seriously.” I took a deep breath. There was no easy way out of this. “If you don’t go, I’m telling.”

A couple of them called me names.

“Leave him alone,” Law said weakly. He looked at me. “Come on, Linus.” He reached out like he might grab my shoulder, then grinned. “Waka waka waka,” he said, making the Pac-Man open and close its mouth. He was near a bag of Reese’s Pieces someone had left on the coffee table. He nabbed one with his hand and smiled.

“Power pill,” he said. “Waka waka waka.” He lunged at me. “Pac-Man’s gonna get you.”

I jumped back, nearly smashing into someone. “Come on, Law. Don’t be a dork.”

He lunged at me again. A few kids were cracking up at our crazy game.

“Waka waka waka!” Something moved under the couch, startling him.

It was the snake. It leapt so high it met Law face to face. For a split second that felt like forever, they stared each other down—Law’s eyes wide in disbelief, the snake’s eyes glassy and cruel.

The mamba struck. Law made a strangled cry that didn’t sound like his own voice. The snake struck again, and then everyone was screaming, stampeding out of the living room. When it struck a third time, I grabbed it by the neck. It missed, spraying venom down Law’s shirt.

For the first time I saw the mamba as a monster. I pressed my thumb into the back of its head and dug in with the nail, hoping it hurt.

Law was wobbly, swaying back and forth. Jonas jumped in but was too late—Law fell over the coffee table and crashed to the floor.

“Is he all right?” someone shouted.

“No, he’s not all right,” Eileen barked. “He got …” She couldn’t finish, exploding into tears.

I didn’t try to sort out the voices after that. I shook the snake as I went down the hall. It tried to wrestle free, whipping at me with its tail, coiling around my leg and constricting. It opened its mouth and hissed again, spraying me with venom. Part of me knew the snake was just a dumb animal and probably didn’t know what it had done or why I was being mean to it, but I also didn’t care. I wanted to punish it. I felt cruel.

I went through my parents’ bedroom to the balcony. Some of the partygoers were out there smoking.

“Hey, man, what is that?”

“Holy cow, is that a snake?”

“Is it real? You’d better get rid of that thing before someone gets bit.”

I pulled the snake off me and heaved it with both hands over the railing and down to the rocks below. The snake flopped around as it dropped, trying to find something to grab on to and failing. I felt a twinge, like before—I could see through the snake’s eyes for a second, but all I saw was darkness.

Eileen called the embassy and told them what happened. They said they’d send someone.

Jonas and I helped Law downstairs. He was conscious but having trouble walking or forming words.

“I say, oh, that boy is drunk,” a Liberian woman said. She was hanging out with the guard.

“No he isn’t,” I told her. “He was bit by a mamba.”

She looked away, rolling her eyes. Maybe she didn’t believe me.

A marine came by in an embassy car, screeching to a halt. “I’m taking somebody to the clinic?”

“This guy,” I told him. We helped Law into the backseat. I got in next to him and Eileen slid in on the other side, squishing Law between us. Jonas rode shotgun. A group of kids crowded around.

“Somebody watch our apartment!” I yelled as we peeled out. I hadn’t locked the door.

The marine went up UN Drive and through the main gates, then along the winding road to the clinic. A half-dozen kids were already there by the time the car pulled up—they’d taken the shortcut through the back gate by the pool.

The clinic was locked. The guard had called the doctor, but he wasn’t there yet. We waited another ten endless minutes, some of the kids whispering to each other: somebody knew where the doctor was, and somebody else asked if we should stretch Law out and lift his feet or his head, or something.

“We’re supposed to cut him and suck out the venom,” somebody else suggested.

“Nobody’s going to cut him,” Eileen said. She tried to get Law’s attention but couldn’t get him to focus. “You’ll be okay,” she told him.

The doctor came at last. He opened the door a crack but stopped everyone from crowding in. “Just one or two of you,” he barked.

Everyone backed up.

“I’m his brother,” I explained.

“Are you family?” he asked Eileen as she tried to follow us in.

“Law would want her here,” I told him. He let her in.

We helped Law stretch out on the doctor’s table. I grabbed his feet and pulled them over so he looked more comfortable. Eileen took a tissue and wiped the drool off his face.

“How long ago was he bitten?” the doctor asked.

“Maybe half an hour?” Eileen guessed.

“Where?”

“You can see the b …” She couldn’t get the word “bites” out but gestured at Law’s face and neck.

“Nowhere else?”

She shook her head.

“That is the worst place to get bitten, but at least he’s getting treatment immediately.” Immediately? I thought. Immediately after you finally got here, that is.

The doctor started cleaning the first bite wound, explaining to Eileen how to do it so she could take over.

“We have antivenin for all the venomous snakes of West Africa here,” the doctor said. “But I have to make sure I use the right one. Do you know what kind of snake it—”

“It was a black mamba,” I said, cutting him off.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Because, you know, they’re not actually black.”

“It was a black mamba,” I said again. “I saw its mouth.”

“Okay.” He disappeared for several minutes. Eileen kept wiping Law’s bite wounds long after they were cleaned.

“The wrong antivenin can actually hurt, besides not helping,” the doctor explained when he came back with a handful of tiny bottles, each filled with translucent liquid. I thought he’d give Law a shot, but he fixed up an IV drip in his arm and loaded the antivenin into the bag. He gave a few instructions to Eileen but didn’t ask me to help.

“Can I do anything?” I asked.

“Call your parents.” He pointed at a phone.

Of course.

Mom and Dad had left a number on the fridge, but I hadn’t thought to grab it on the way out. I had to call the embassy operator and ask him to find the number for the Firestone plantation hotel. He was able to connect me directly. There was a low, faraway ring for a long time.

I was afraid nobody would answer. I didn’t even know how to call again if nobody did.

Someone finally answered, and I yelled my parents’ names a few times before she understood. She had to go get them—they didn’t have phones in the rooms.

At last my mother’s voice, barely audible, came over the line. “Hello?”

“Law’s been bit by a snake,” I croaked. “He’s in bad shape.” She couldn’t hear, and I had to repeat it. I had to shout it. “Larry is hurt!”

“Larry is hurt,” I heard her repeat to someone—probably Dad. I heard them talking back and forth, then Darryl was on the phone.

“Tell me what happened.”

I explained as best I could—there was a snake; it bit Law. It was definitely a mamba. He was at the embassy clinic getting antivenin.

“Have them meet us at JFK,” the doctor said quietly. JFK was the Liberian hospital. I didn’t know why it was named for an American president.

“We’re going to JFK,” I shouted into the phone, just before the connection broke off.

Eileen stood by Law, running her hands in his hair. I remembered when he first grew it out, tossing his locks as he practiced his new name.

“What happened to the snake?” Eileen asked me absently.

“Oh, I killed it,” I told her. “The stupid thing is dead.”

“Good.”

Hospitals in the States usually smell like antiseptic, but the Liberian hospital smelled like sickness. Matt said once that JFK meant “just for killing.” I hoped it was better than its reputation. The embassy doctor seemed to trust it, but maybe it was our only option.

There were other people in the waiting room: women in labor, children wincing and holding limbs. There was a man with a tumor on his head; he was touching it gingerly with his fingers, like he might push it back into place. We rushed right past all of them. We didn’t have to wait.

Law didn’t have his own room, but he did have curtains around him for privacy. The doctors there put him on another IV drip, with more vials of the antidote. I thought briefly of the snakes in cages at the WHO. I didn’t feel sorry for them anymore.

The embassy doctor was having a low, serious conversation with the hospital doctor, who did not look Liberian. It turned out he was Lebanese.

“What?” Eileen asked them. “What’s going on?”

“We’re trying to find a respirator,” the Lebanese doctor said evenly. “He’s having an allergic reaction to the antivenin. His lungs are quitting.”

Eileen lost it then, collapsing to the floor. I sat down next to her and touched her elbow. She took my hand in a death grip, bawling and blowing snot into her sleeves.

Mom and Dad and Darryl met us at the hospital, sometime between midnight and dawn. We spoke in hushed voices, watching Law lie there as the hours passed by. The doctor said he was in a coma.

What was a coma, exactly? I knew it was like being asleep, only sometimes you were asleep for years and years. The person would wake up like he’d had a refreshing afternoon nap when he’d actually been asleep for twenty years. “How’s President Kennedy?” he’d ask, or “I hope I didn’t miss that Beatles concert.” Would that happen to Law? Would I grow up and go to college and get married and have kids while he lay around in bed? Would he stay in Africa, or would they ship his comatose body to America?

Darryl finally took me and Eileen home while Mom and Dad stayed at the hospital with Law.

Matt was waiting for us on the landing.

“I heard,” he said.

I nodded, and thought I might cry then, but didn’t. I was too tired, nearly delirious.

“Do you want to stay here?” Darryl asked.

“I just want to go home,” I told him.

“Okay—go get some sleep,” Darryl said as he went in. “You can’t do anything else.”

He didn’t mean anything by it, but I felt like he knew this was all my fault.
You’ve done enough
, he seemed to say.

The door was unlocked. I found Bennett crashed out on the couch. Marty was on the floor with the chair cushion for a pillow.

“Hey.” Marty opened one eye. “We didn’t want to leave until someone got back.”

“Thanks.”

“Is Law okay?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Oh.” He got up, stretched, and woke up Bennett by holding one bare foot under his nose.

Bennett snorted, opened his eyes, and jerked awake. “Oh,” he said. “Uh, what do you think?”

“What do I think of what?”

“This.” He waved his hands around the room. The apartment was as tidy as it ever was when Artie was done with it. My parents would never know there’d been a party.

“You cleaned up. Thanks.”

“We, um, didn’t want you guys to get into trouble.”

“Thanks.”

It was strange to think that Law would be in trouble, whenever he woke up, but I understood. They just wanted to do something.

Back in Dayton I knew a kid who died. His name was Kevin. He was a couple of years older than me, but I knew him from the neighborhood. He wanted to be a professional baseball player and was always looking for kids to help him practice, meaning he’d pitch you the ball and you’d catch it and lob it back. I played catch with him once or twice but got bored.

Kevin had a younger sister named Veronica who kids called Ronnie. She was a year younger than me, so I didn’t really know her. I used to see her flying around the streets on her bike, though. She liked to work up speed and then stand up on the pedals and soar. She had long, really blond hair that would fly out behind her.

During Christmas vacation one year there was a good snow—a couple of inches. We usually didn’t get that much in Dayton. Kevin and his sister made a cardboard box into a toboggan and went sliding down a big hill. It was in a quiet neighborhood, and they should have been fine, but on one trip down, Kevin slid out in front of a truck that skidded and jumped the curb. It was a fluke accident.

Everyone went to his funeral. I bet Kevin never knew he had so many friends. When the preacher asked if anyone
wanted to say anything, we all looked at each other and shook our heads. Ronnie went up and read a poem from a thick book. She read it in such a low voice nobody could hear her, and all I heard was something about the dead being free. She blinked a couple of times but didn’t cry.