Mamba Point (6 page)

“Not today.” I decided if I did ever play, Tokie would be on my team. That kid was all over the ball, all of the time.

“Do you have my present today?” Gambeh asked, grinning. I didn’t think he really expected me to produce a present every time I saw him. He was just messing with me. Still, I wondered if my own rarely used soccer ball was coming in sea freight or if I’d given it to Goodwill.

“Maybe later!” I hurried down the street past the shanties. So far, so good. I slowed down a bit to catch my breath and noticed the charlie with the masks and carvings spread out on a rug. I remembered what Matt said about the masks in his father’s collection—that some of them were powerful. Maybe the charlie’s stuff was powerful, too. I went over on an impulse.

“Do you have anything for snakes?”

“You want snakes?” He looked at the smaller pieces, mostly elephants made of wood or bone, or carvings of people in various poses. “No snakes. Most people don’t like them.”

“Something
against
snakes,” I explained. What was the
word? “Something to
ward off
snakes.” I didn’t need any help, really, but something like that couldn’t hurt.

“Hmm.” He looked at me intently. “You think these items are magical?”

“No,” I lied. “It’s just …” I thought it over. “It’s for a friend who collects things like that.”

“Your friend collects magical items?”

“No.” I felt like he was looking right into me, seeing everything. I wanted him to stop. “He’s interested in snakes.” That made no sense, but I left it at that.

“I’m sorry. I have nothing to ward off snakes,” he said. “If you want protection from snakes, you sleep on an animal skin. Leopard or cheetah is good. Even water buffalo. Those will keep the snakes away, so they say.” He made a gesture. “I am a Muslim, and don’t believe in these rustic religions, but it makes sense, oh? The snake will hate the smell of these animals.”

“What if I bought a small square of animal skin? I could carry it in …” I gulped. “He could carry it in his pocket.”

“Do snakes go into his pocket? Do they steal his money?” He looked at me seriously, but I guessed he was kidding me.

“What’s your name, my friend?” He clapped his hand on my shoulder. He was really tall, and I had to look almost straight up. He was uncomfortably close, too, staring at me with unblinking eyes.

“Linus.”

He grinned. “We’re best friends, true? Charlie and Linus, in the American cartoons?”

“I guess so.” I wondered if this claim of friendship meant he was about to ask me for a present. He didn’t.

“Tell me about your snake problem, Linus.”

“It’s, um, not me,” I said weakly. “It’s a friend.”

“There was one behind you, back there,” he said. He finally let go of my shoulder to point. “A black mamba. It’s a very dangerous animal. It followed you for a bit, and then went back into the grass.”

“Oh,” I said. A taxi turned into the driveway. I watched the guys at the car wash greet the driver, take some money, then go to work with the sponges.

“You’re not surprised?”

“No. I’ve seen them before.” I looked back and scanned the grass, wondering if it was still there. “Maybe I even saw that one.” I told him about the snake in the street.

“Yes, yes,” he muttered, like he not only believed me but completely expected it. “Was that the first time you saw it?”

“No.” I backed up and told him about the one at the airport, and the one I might have seen that same night. “So that’s three already, and I just moved here. Guys who’ve lived here for years say they’ve never seen one. Why me?”

“The rural religions say some people have a connection to an animal,” he mused, interlocking his fingers to demonstrate. “They have different words for it. …” He said a word that sounded like “causing.” I couldn’t quite hear because of the taxi crunching gravel as it went out the exit, finished with its wash.

I tried repeating the word.

“Kaseng,”
Charlie said again, pronouncing it carefully. “You might call it a totem. That’s an American Indian word for the same thing. Usually it is a tribe that has a
kaseng
. There are leopard people, and bush-cow people, and dove people. But some people have their own
kaseng
. A person might be born with a strong connection to the mongoose or the frog.”

“How does someone know if they have one?”

“The animals will respond to that person. Also, when they are close, their influence will be seen in the person’s nature.”

“Like how?” I was wondering how a guy’s nature could be
froggy
. Did he eat flies? Say
ribbit ribbit?

“The leopard is fierce. The mongoose is cunning. The frog is quick in the water.”

“I get it.” A guy is a good swimmer so people say, Hey, he’s part frog. We say stuff like that in America, too, but we don’t mean it.

“So, do you think I have this connection to snakes?” I said. “Is the mamba my
kaseng?”

“You must know these are folk religions, and I am a Muslim,” he said. “I honor the one god that is Allah.” He looked to the sky with reverence.

“Oh.” It sure sounded like he believed in
kasengs
. “How do you get rid of a
kaseng
if you don’t want one? I mean, what do the folktales say?”

“If you do believe in it, and you do have a
kaseng
, you
should not fear your animal. They do not want to hurt you. If you accept it, it will give you strength.”

“Is there anything like that where the animal is out to get you?”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he said at last. “I’m not a scholar on this topic. I hope, for your sake, it is a
kaseng.”

There was a rumble of thunder. Charlie glanced up, then started moving his things into a bag. “Sorry, Linus. I have to close for now.” I thought I could help by handing him things, but he had the rug cleared in a second.

“What strengths would a mamba give me?” I wondered.

He rolled up the rug while he thought it over. “The black mamba is a very dangerous snake. Very quick. Very poisonous.”

“Hmm.” I wouldn’t mind being quick, but I didn’t want to be poisonous.

“The green mamba is just as poisonous.” He stood up, hoisting the bag over his back and tucking the rug under his arm. “There are more of them, too. They hide in trees and surprise you. But they are less dangerous than the black mamba.”

“How come?”

“The green ones are shy,” he said. “They will not attack you unless you corner them. The black ones, they will come at you. They are called aggressive. …” He held up a hand, then opened and closed it a few times, as if he was trying to grab a word from the air. “But you might also say they are brave.”

*   *   *

Since it was raining, I gave up on swimming and walked home, thinking about what Charlie had said about me having this connection to snakes. It sounded like superstition. Heck, even Charlie didn’t believe it.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t cool, though. If it was real, I’d be like a superhero. No, I’d be a super
villain
, because snakes were always the bad guys. I’d need to design a costume, like a cobra-style hood with a cape, and hatch some evil schemes, probably a mixture of blackmail and robberies on my way to global domination. I could picture the villain in my head, grinning evilly and flinging reptiles at Spider-Man. His name would be Reptilius, and he could have a beautiful sidekick named Venoma. It was perfect. I just wished I had the ability to draw it on paper the way it looked in my head.

Mom already had a job interview lined up.

“I brought a résumé to the WHO this afternoon,” she said. “I thought it was a long shot, but when they found out about my experience, they asked me to come back tomorrow and meet a bunch of people.”

“The who?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What is this, Abbott and Costello?” Dad asked.

“Oh, sorry. It’s the World Health Organization. They’re part of the UN.”

“Cool,” said Law. “Not as cool as working for The Who”—he played a little air guitar, then smashed it on an air amplifier—“but still pretty cool.”

“What would you do?” I wondered.

“I don’t even know. I brought them a résumé and they said I could come in for an interview. Also, if it works out, we’re talking about getting a servant.”

“What, like a butler?” I asked. I imagined a guy in a tux carrying a tray.

“More like a houseboy,” Dad offered.

“I don’t like that term,” Mom said. “They’re grown men.”

Houseboy or butler, it was a big deal to have a servant. Would I still have to wash dishes? Fold my laundry? If I wanted a bologna sandwich, would I just ask the servant guy to make me one? If I did, would he know how to do it, with a little mustard between two slices of bologna and mayonnaise but not mustard on the bread and one leaf of lettuce and a slice of tomato but never the end of the tomato? Would he take the red ribbon off the edges of the bologna? Did they even have bologna in Liberia? There was a lot to think about.

“He’d only come once or twice a week,” Dad said, maybe guessing what I was thinking. “So don’t think it means you’re off the hook for chores.”

“I don’t.” I guess I’d still have to cut the ribbon off my own bologna.

“Everybody here has a houseboy,” Law said when we were washing dishes. “Some of them steal, so don’t leave stuff lying around.” He passed me a plate.

“What?” I rinsed it off and set it in the rack.

“Some guys were talking about their houseboys and
saying they took change and stuff out of their rooms sometimes.”

It hadn’t even occurred to me to think about that. Law was right—we’d have a stranger in our home, and he’d be going through my things.

“We’ll hire somebody good,” I said. That was what the new Linus would say.

“You don’t know any better,” he muttered. “You haven’t even been out of the apartment without Mom and Dad.” He kept the dishes coming. I could barely keep up.

“Hey, I went out today,” I protested. “Besides, you’re the one who’s scared of the houseboy we haven’t even hired yet.”

“Touché. Towel that off, would you?”

Mom fretted for a couple of hours about what to wear to her job interview the next morning. She’d bought a bunch of new clothes before we left, but now she didn’t like any of them.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “You look nice.”

“That vote of confidence would mean more if you looked up from your comic.”

I did. She looked nice.

“You look nice.”

“Well, thanks.”

“No problem.” I went back to the Tarzan comic. I was copying an African warrior with sharpened teeth, shaking a spear. Copying is harder than you might think. I had to keep erasing and redrawing.

“The embassy is sending a couple of applicants for the housekeeping job,” she said as she sorted through her purse before leaving. “Can you stick around until I get back? Your brother is gone already, and I want someone to be here.”

“The embassy is sending people?”

“They have an employment office. Can you stay home?”

“Sure.” I focused on my drawing until I heard the door clank closed.

“Good luck!” I shouted.

When I was done with the drawing, I flipped it over and wrote a letter to Joe. I told him the guy was my new neighbor, that he lived in the hut next door, and that he was having our family over for dinner. I told him I’d be sending the letter by monkey mail and I hoped it got there safely. He would think it was hilarious.

I missed Joe. He could draw really well, even back in fourth grade when I met him. He’d drawn the Incredible Hulk on the back of his notebook. I told him it was good, which it was, and he showed me the other notebooks, where he’d drawn Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. He’d even drawn the Thing, who was made of rocks and had lots of details. I’d always liked comics but never tried drawing my own until I met Joe.

He never made fun of my drawings, though. Sometimes he’d see a way to make a drawing better, but that was different.

I found envelopes and stamps on the sideboard and sealed up my letter and wrote out the address from memory. I’d give it to Dad to mail on Monday. Mailing stuff to and from the embassy post office was the same as it was in the States, twenty cents a letter. Good thing, too, because it probably cost like five bucks to mail a letter to Africa otherwise, and no one would ever write to me.

Matt was wheezing when he got to the top of the stairs with the game.

“Are you all right?” I felt bad for him. I wasn’t a great athlete or anything, but I could get up a flight of stairs without having a heart attack.

“I’m fine,” he said, still catching his breath. “It’s just, I took the stairs kind of fast. I think I saw a sn …” He inhaled.

“A snake?”

He nodded. “On the second-floor landing.”

“Was it a black mamba?”

“Well, it wasn’t black,” he said. “It was kind of gray.”

“Black mambas aren’t black. Only inside their mouths.”

“Okay, fine. It was a black mamba.”

There was no front door, so it was no mystery how it got in the building. But how did it get up the stairs? Did the snake shape itself to the steps? I couldn’t picture it.

“We should tell someone,” Matt said. “Call the embassy. Maybe they’ll send somebody.”

“What’s the number?”

“Just dial zero.”

“That won’t get a Liberian operator?”

“We’re all on an embassy switchboard. Zero calls the embassy.”

“What are they going to do?” The front gate of the embassy had a couple of marines on duty, but they couldn’t leave their post, could they? They were supposed to be protecting the embassy.

“Just call,” Matt insisted.

I looked at the phone, thinking it over. Back in Dayton I knew this kid who called 911 one time because he saw
smoke coming out of a neighbor’s house. A fire engine came, sirens going off full blast, and everyone came out to see what was going on. It turned out the neighbors had burned a roast. There was lots of smoke but no fire, and even the smoke was gone by the time the fire truck pulled up.

Okay, it wasn’t some other kid—it was me. I didn’t think to go across the street and make sure there was a real fire before I called. It was really embarrassing. So now I didn’t want to call a marine guard off his post to check on an empty stairwell.