Mamba Point (7 page)

“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 but 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.

“Do you have any books about how to draw?”

She set her book down and thought for a moment. “Look down the hall in the second room on the left.”

I went down the hall past a room full of videotapes on spinning racks. I made a mental note to stop there, too. A hand-printed sign tacked above the second doorway said
NONFICTION
. Inside were bookcases labeled
HISTORY, TRAVEL
, and
HOBBIES
. It only took me about ten seconds to go through the whole hobbies section, and all they had for art was a book about watercolors.

I wandered over to a shelf labeled
LIBERIA
and ran my finger along the spines. There were a bunch of history- and geography-type books, several copies of a guide to Liberian English, and one collection of Liberian folktales. I flipped through it, hoping it would have something about
kasengs
, but it was more like a book of fairy tales. I took it anyway, and then saw a snake smiling at me from the cover of the next book on the shelf. A mamba, no less. Its mouth was closed, but I could recognize the mamba shape of its head. The book was
Snakes of West Africa
, by Roger Farrell, PhD. I didn’t even know you could get a PhD in snakeology. I grabbed that one, too.

When I got back to the front room, I saw a girl about my own age looking at a shelf labeled
TEEN READS
. I wouldn’t mind knowing her, I decided. I went over and made like I was trying to find just the right Judy Blume book to pass away the afternoon.

“You must be Law’s famous little brother,” she said.

“I’m famous?”

“Well, I knew he had a little brother,” she said. “I’m Eileen.”

“Linus,” I mumbled, wishing I’d thought of a cool new name like Law. She was blond and freckly and reminded me of a girl I knew back in Dayton. I was a little bit jealous that Law already knew her.

“What grade are you in?” she asked.

“Seventh. I just had my sixth-grade graduation.”

“Sixth-grade graduation,” she echoed with a grin.

“Yeah, it’s kind of dumb,” I agreed. “What about you?” I hoped she wasn’t that much older than me.

“Ninth.”

“Oh.” She was two years older than me. It was a huge difference.

“I’m supposed to be in eighth,” she added. It was like she read my mind. “I skipped third grade.” She was probably smarter than me, then, but I was glad she wasn’t
that
much older.

“You like snakes, huh?” Eileen asked with a smile, pointing at my book.

“I saw one,” I explained. “Right after I got off the plane.” I started to tell her the story, but when I got to the part when the snake was hacked up, I could tell she wasn’t impressed.

My mind raced for something else to say, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Girls usually didn’t want to talk about comics and weren’t impressed that you made it to the pineapple level on Pac-Man.

“Well, enjoy your snake book, Linus,” she said. She took her own books to the checkout station, and signed out and stamped the books herself rather than trying to pull the librarian lady away from
The Thorn Birds
.

I thought about Eileen while Matt and I played Pellucidar, and wondered what she would think of the game, and what she would think of Zartan, and what she thought of Matt. I flipped through the notebook and wondered if she’d like my drawings. I really didn’t know anything about her except that she read teen books and lived in Africa.

Back in Dayton I knew a girl named Jane who sat next to me in fifth grade. She called me Cowboy because on school-picture day I wore a western shirt my grandma got me. After that, she would always ask me how life was out on the ranch. She did it in a cute way that wasn’t meant to make me feel bad. It was a nice change of pace from everyone else asking me about my blanket. I started playing along, telling her stories about how coyotes made off with the cows, or how I had to get up at the crack of dawn to milk the chickens. When Jane moved to San Antonio at the end of fifth grade, I missed those silly conversations. I drew that cow picture for her, and started writing a letter about how I’d drawn a picture of the ranch for her, but I never finished the letter and never mailed the drawing. I hoped Eileen could be a friend like that—someone who would ask me about life on the ranch.

“Are you listening?” Matt asked.

“Huh? Sure.”

“What just happened?”

“Zartan …” I tried to remember a couple of words from what Matt had just been reading out of the book. “Rogue elephant?” I guessed.

“That was half an hour ago.”

“But I never found it, right?”

“You never found the elephant, but right
now
you’re up to your waist in quicksand.”

“Well, I’ll call the elephant over to help me,” I suggested.

“You’re supposed to help the elephant
first
, and then he’ll save you from the quicksand.”

“What can I do now?”

“That’s what you have to decide, Zartan.”

Part of me was willing to let Zartan sink to his death and be done with it. I was getting bored with Pellucidar. It was fun at first, but Matt wanted to play all the time, and it was beginning to feel like a chore.