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?”
CHAPTER 6
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.
“I’m going to go see if the snake is still there first,” I told Matt. “I have to make sure this is a bona fide snake emergency.”
“Don’t be dumb, Linus. Some snakes are dangerous.”
“I won’t be dumb. I want to make sure it’s still there.”
“At least bring a stick.”
“Why? So we can play fetch?”
“Sometimes people go after snakes with sticks,” he said feebly.
“We don’t have any sticks lying around,” I said. “Anyway, I’m not going after it. As soon as I see it, I’m running back.”
I left, closing the door behind me so the snake couldn’t slip into the apartment, and went down a few steps. I tried to peer over the railing to the lower landing but couldn’t see anything. I heard a noise and wheeled around. There was the snake, coiled in the corner by our front door. I must have walked right past it. Now it was unfurling, stretching its head toward me. It was the same grayish snake I’d seen before, but this time I was close enough to see that its belly was a different shade of gray, almost green.
“Help!” I tried to holler, but it came out as a little squeak.
The snake looked at me, then flattened its head like a cobra and hissed.
New Linus, I thought. Be brave. I felt my chest loosen up and took a few deep breaths. My head cleared and the fear evaporated. It was a snake, that’s all. An animal. Animals didn’t like to be cornered. I knew that from my short time in Boy Scouts. I just had to give the snake a clear path.
I crept back up the stairs and moved out of the way. “Go on,” I said.
The mamba looked from me to the stairs, like it wasn’t sure what to do.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. I felt like the snake and I understood each other, somehow. It wasn’t going to hurt me. I waved my arm, showing that the coast was clear. “Go ahead. All yours.”
The mamba headed for the stairs but veered toward me at the last second and snaked behind me, brushing against my legs like Joe’s cat used to do, before darting back down the stairs.
I did what anyone would do in that situation: I laughed my butt off.
Just after we moved to Dayton, when I was seven and Law was ten, my dad took us both to a Reds game in Cincinnati. They were playing the San Diego Padres. I remember it well. We sat in the cheap seats, and my dad told us we were going to see a real pitchers’ duel, with Tom Seaver taking the mound for the Big Red Machine and Rollie Fingers pitching for the Padres. I didn’t really follow the game, but I looked around at everything and munched on Cracker Jack and had a great time.
In between innings Mr. Red came up into the stands to greet the fans. I took one look at the giant with a baseball for a head and started shrieking. I didn’t know why I’d acted that way. Part of me knew Mr. Red was an actor in a costume, and that he was supposed to be funny, not scary. But Mr. Red scared me. Even after he left, I couldn’t calm down. That wasn’t a panic attack so much as a conniption fit. I was crying and wanted to leave. So we left.
My dad was disappointed about missing the rest of the game, but he didn’t yell at me. “It is scary, isn’t it?” he asked as we walked through the parking lot. “He looks stitched together like a Frankenstein monster. What are they thinking, sending some guy like that around the stands, scaring little kids?”
I imagined Mr. Red lurching around like Frankenstein’s monster. It made me laugh—a snicker at first, then all-out laughing.
“Yeah, a giant baseball is just like Frankenstein,” Larry (back then we called him Larry) grumbled. “A T. rex, even.”
I couldn’t explain what was so funny. It was the way my dad put it. Maybe it was because for a second he seemed to understand me. He could see that Mr. Red might be scary to a little kid, which meant I wasn’t that crazy after all. I imagined Mr. Red getting called into somebody’s office, being chewed out for scaring people. He’d hang his baseball head low and try to look sorry, even with his painted-on smile, and that picture sent me into another burst of laughter.
This was like that, only worse. I was breathless, and had to sit down. Maybe the snake didn’t bite me, but for a second I thought I might die laughing.
Matt cracked the door open and peered around. I was dabbing at my eyes with the front of my T-shirt. I was mostly laughed out by then.
“Are you all right? Is the snake gone?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Yeah you’re all right or yeah the snake is gone?”
“Both.”
“Do you still want to play Pellucidar?”
I didn’t want the whole snake experience to blow over so quickly. It wasn’t like we’d seen a giant cockroach or even a rat. It was a deadly poisonous snake, right? I’d been skin-to-scale with a mamba and lived to tell the tale. Seriously, I’d been better than cool. I’d been the new Linus! Matt should have been a lot more impressed.
“Are you wondering what I was laughing about?” I asked as we went back to the dining room. He’d unpacked the game while I was having a brush with death.
“Post-traumatic hysterical reaction?” he asked clinically. He sounded like that shrink I saw back in Dayton.
“Actually, the snake told me a really dirty joke.”
“Sure it did.” At least he chuckled. “Can I hear it?”
We were startled by a knock on the door. “That must be the snake,” I said.
“Good. I’d rather hear him tell it.”
I looked through the peephole first. There was a Liberian guy in the hallway. He was wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt, and was damp from the rain. I opened the door.
He smiled. “Hello, little boss man. I am Arthur,” he told me. He showed me a blue card with an embassy logo on it. In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about the houseboys showing up to get interviewed.
“My mom will be home soon,” I said. “Come on in.”
“Thank you, Mr. Tuttle.” Our last name must have been on the card.
“Just Linus,” I said.
“Just Linus,” he repeated. He stood there in the foyer, waiting.
Mom got home maybe fifteen minutes later. “Oh!” she said, startled by Arthur, who was still in the foyer.
“Good morning, missy.” He handed her his blue card.
She told him it was okay to go sit down, and went to get him a glass of water and a towel. I should have done all those things, I realized.
“You’ll never guess what happened,” I told her. I wanted to tell her about the snake while I had Matt there to back up my story.
“I’ll have to guess later. I’ve left Arthur waiting long enough. Why don’t you two go play your game at Matt’s?”
“We can do that,” Matt agreed, boxing up the books and dice.
I figured if Mom knew what it was, she would want to guess right away, but I decided to let it slide. She’d be all the more impressed later by how casual I was about it. “Oh, yeah, I saw another mamba in the stairwell,” I’d say, like I just saw something a little bit interesting.
I followed Matt down the steps b
ut had an idea at the last second. “Hey, do you want to go to the embassy? It’s not really raining anymore.”
“I thought we were going to play Pellucidar,” he said.
“We played all week. I kind of want to do something else.” I felt a surge of restlessness mixed up with something new to me that might have been courage. The good thing about the mamba experience was, I wasn’t afraid of snakes anymore.
“Nah,” he said. “Come over when you get back.” He let himself into his apartment and slammed the door a little.
I didn’t even know where I was going. I thought I’d just decide when I got there. It was still drizzling a little and looked like it might rain good and hard again, but I decided it didn’t matter. If it did, I’d get wet. So what?
I went down to the car wash. Charlie wasn’t around or I might have said hello.
I saw a street sign for Fairground Road, and remembered from the map Dad had stuck to the refrigerator that the library was there. I jogged across the street and saw a couple of big apartment buildings, nice ones like ours. Probably more embassy families lived there. A sign in front of the first building said RESOURCE CENTER, FIRST FLOOR. That must be it.
I nodded at the building guard and hiked up a half flight of stairs. COME ON IN! a sign on the door said. CLOSE DOOR BEHIND YOU! (A/C). I walked in and set a little bell dinging.
It was really an apartment, but they’d put up shelves everywhere to make it into a library. A woman was sitting behind the desk, reading The Thorn Birds. She didn’t seem to notice me. I went over to a tall shelf packed full with paperback novels. I admired the cover art on a book by Stephen King and another by John Saul.
“There are children’s books over there,” the woman said, pointing across the room. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to help or just wanted to guide me away from the horror books. “Innocence dies so easily,” the book in my hand promised. “But evil lives again, and again, and again!” I would totally read that if they had it in comic-book form … which reminded me why I was there.
Mamba Point Page 5