Mamba Point

by Kurtis Scaletta

  “Mom, they may be big, but they’re still just bugs.”

  “You’re not afraid of them?” she asked.

  “No!” I thought she could have acted less surprised.

  “Just asking.” She found the pot she was looking for and plunked it on the stove. “Anyway, why don’t you go find your brother? Dinner will be ready in an hour or so.”

  “All right.” I headed for the embassy, figuring he would be at the pool, the teen club, or maybe the rec hall. I hadn’t seen him since he’d left that morning.

  The car wash was closed on Sundays, and the traffic was a lot lighter. I walked past the wild grass, remembering when I’d been scared to do so. Now I was disappointed when my snake didn’t even come out and greet me. It was probably off doing snake things, I reasoned. Hunting or sleeping or slithering around.

  I went in the back gate and tried the pool first. There were some little kids cannonballing all over the place, and some moms, and a lifeguard who looked like Bennett, only older. He told me to try the teen club, which was past the tennis courts and the clinic.

  The teen club was a little green house on the embassy compound. A couple of teenagers were playing Ping-Pong outside in the garage port.

  “I think he went down to the rocks,” one of the guys said. He served, and they went back to pinging and ponging.

  “What rocks?”

  They bopped the ball back and forth until it hit the net and rolled back at the server.

  “Dude, you messed up my timing,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Sorry.” I didn’t think I had anything to do with it, but didn’t see any point in arguing. “What rocks?”

  “You know, the rocks.” He waved his hand vaguely toward the side of the house.

  “Thanks.”

  “That must be little Law,” I heard the other one say as I walked around the house. I was at the back of the embassy compound now. There was a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire, and behind that a rocky slope going down to the ocean. I walked alongside the fence until I found a gate, which was padlocked, but I could hear some voices on the other side. I saw that the padlock wasn’t actually fastened. I went through and made my way down the rocks until I saw Law and two other guys smoking cigarettes. The second he noticed me Law dropped the cigarette, probably hoping I hadn’t seen it.

  “What are you doing here, Runt?” he asked. He’d never once called me Runt before, and as far as nicknames went, I didn’t care for it.

  “Mom sent me to find you. It’s nearly dinner.” Carrying a message from Mom was exactly what a little brother called Runt would do, I realized.

  “Tell her I’ll be home in a bit.”

  “Why don’t you just head back with me?”

  “Why don’t you just head back without me?” He waved toward the gate. The other two guys snickered.

  “All right.” I clambered up the rocks and through the gate. On impulse I threaded the padlock back through the loop and snapped it shut. Even if those guys had the key, they wouldn’t be able to get at the lock from the outside.

  So Law was late for dinner. As punishment Mom made him wash the dishes by himself. I expected him to bang into my room when he was done and yell at me.

  If he thought about it, though, he totally had it coming. First of all, even if I played a joke on him and his friends, he should be glad I didn’t tell Mom and Dad he was smoking and hanging out at bars. Second, he called me Runt, which was not my name. I called him Law, so the least he could do was call me Linus. Third, if he’d just followed the coastline, it would’ve taken him right home, and probably in time for dinner. I would point all of those things out when he was done yelling.

  I drew while I waited, trying to fix up a sketch from earlier. I erased shaky lines and tried to draw them in sharper, but my pencil would skew off on its own when I wanted it to go straight. After I wore a hole in the page with the eraser, I gave up. I turned to a clean sheet and started over, working from memory.

  I wished the snake was there so I could have it for a model. Besides, I liked having it around. I wondered if it was a boy or a girl. I figured it was a boy, but it was hard to be sure. You couldn’t just flip it upside down like you did with a puppy.

  I heard Law finishing up in the kitchen, going to his own room, and putting on music. So he was doing one worse than yelling at me. He was giving me the silent treatment.

  Fine. I would silent-treat him back.

  CHAPTER 12

  Law took off the next morning before I even had a chance to not talk to him.

  “He wanted to go swimming before it starts raining,” Mom said. “But don’t go yet. I need your help. I’m getting the kitchen ready for Artie. He starts today.”

  It took me a second to remember who Artie was. “That guy Arthur got the houseboy job?”

  “I told you at dinner yesterday. You weren’t listening, were you?” She was right. Who listened to everything their parents said at dinner? Half the time it was nothing to do with me, anyway. “He goes by Artie, by the way.”

  Law would be relieved. Artie seemed like a nice, honest guy. “So, is he going to come every day?”

  “All day Monday, and Thursday afternoon, we decided. Anyway, I want to get things ready for him.”

  She was labeling all the shelves in the kitchen cupboards so he’d know where stuff went. My opinion was that he’d know the plates went on the shelf with the other plates, but Mom wanted to make things even easier for him. She printed the labels using her Dymo while I stood on a chair to smack each one where it went, pressing hard with my thumb to make it stick.

  She handed me a label for “platters.” Until our sea freight came, we actually only had one platter, which I had to push out of the way so I could stick on the label. A huge cockroach glided out, its wings humming.

  Mom made a little noise, but nothing like the shriek from the day before, as the roach buzzed right by her ear down to the floor. I hopped off the stool and ran after it, but it disappeared into the laundry room.

  “You didn’t even flinch,” Mom said in disbelief. “How can you have that thing pop out at you without even flinching?”

  “I’ve seen scarier stuff than that,” I said, jumping back on the stool. For the first time I sounded exactly like the new Linus sounded in my head.

  When we were done helping Artie figure out our kitchen, I changed into swim trunks, grabbed a towel, and headed outside. There were kids playing soccer in the courtyard, but Gambeh and Tokie weren’t there. I hoped they weren’t in too much trouble for bothering us, as their mom called it. Maybe they just had other soccer games at other buildings. I was sorry not to see them.

  I did see Charlie in his usual place. It made me feel less lonely. I sat down and told him about the mamba. When I told him I’d brought it home, he grabbed me by the wrist.

  “You hear me now,” he whispered. “Those snakes are the deadliest of all snakes. They’re very big for poisonous snakes, and very quick for big snakes, oh?”

  “I know.” I thought he’d be a bit more positive. This whole kaseng business was his idea, after all. “You’re the one who told me to accept the snake in my life,” I reminded him. “Besides, my snake isn’t mean.”

  “People hate the mamba.” He glanced back at the car wash. There were no cabs in line, and the guys were just standing around smoking and talking. I didn’t think they were paying attention to us, but Charlie picked up a mask and pointed out parts of it, pretending to tell me about it.

  “I had a snake, too, one time,” he whispered.

  “Really?” I must have shouted, because he waved a hand to shush me.

  “What you have with the mamba, the kaseng, I had that with the cassava snake.”

  “Wow!” He’d said he didn’t believe in kasengs, but even then I could tell by the way he talked about them that he did. “Are cassava snakes poisonous?”

  “Very. They say if it bites you, you have ten steps to get to water and wash out the poison. Eleven steps,
and you are dead.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “The water doesn’t help, even if you get to it.”

  His eyes got a faraway look. “In the country they hate those snakes. Cassava snakes live where the food is, in the cassava bushes. They are lazy and mean, and will bite you if it is easier than moving away. I always liked them, though, and they loved me. As a small boy I’d find them and play with them.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “They’re beautiful. They look like they are made of jewels.”

  I pictured him chasing his glittering snake around, playing tag.

  “When people in my village saw me playing with the snakes, they talked. They said my mother had been with a snake. They said I was its son.”

  “No way. They didn’t believe that.”

  “It’s like the old stories of Spider. Nobody says the stories are true, but they repeat them, and deep down inside they believe them. They were scared of me, and my father was worried. He sent me to live with his brother in the town of Voinjama.” He was quiet, tracing the fake scars on one of the masks with his fingernail. “The dangers are not just from the snake,” he explained. “You need to remember that to everybody else it is a monster.”

  “Okay.” What would people really say about me if they saw me with the mamba? They’d think I was crazy, but not evil, and definitely not the child of an actual snake.

  “So what happened to you?”

  “I lived with my uncle Kollie and went to the mission school. I did not like it then, but now I’m glad I went. It was good that I learned to read and do mathematics.”

  “Do you still have a snake?”

  “No,” he said mysteriously. “I don’t have the kaseng anymore.”

  * * *

  There were a lot of kids at the pool. Law was there, splashing around with his buddies from down on the rocks. I watched while I took off my sandals and socks. I hadn’t met them, really, and didn’t know their names. Michelle was there, too, talking to a high school guy in white shorts who was wearing a whistle and acting very official.

  Before I could drop into the pool, the guy blew his whistle at me and pointed at the shower. I got under the ice-cold spray for a second, then jumped in the pool. I wondered if mambas could swim, and if that would mean I could swim better now. It didn’t seem like it.

  I swam around Law and his buddies without saying a word, hoping that was silent enough for them.

  One of his friends grabbed my foot. I flailed a bit, swallowed water, and finally kicked free.

  “Thanks for locking the gate,” he said, and called me a male body part that almost rhymed with “Linus.”

  “That’s your name, right?” He repeated the word, maybe in case I didn’t hear it the first time.

  “At least I have one,” I said. A brief hush fell on the group. Law even stopped splashing his other buddy. Michelle broke the silence.

  “Are you going to let him get away with that, Marty?” she asked.

  I broke for the far edge of the pool, and nearly got out in time, but Law’s other friend was a fast swimmer and grabbed me before I clambered out. He hauled me back in, and Marty dunked me repeatedly, shouting something I couldn’t really make out because I was underwater most of the time. Mr. Whistle didn’t say a thing. I guess as long as everyone was showered, they could try drowning kids in the pool.

  They finally let me go and I climbed out, kicking water at them and using every bad word I’d learned on HBO, before the lifeguard finally blew his whistle.

  “I think you need to go cool off,” he said, pointing at me.

  “They started it,” I reminded him. The injustice of it nearly made my head explode.

  “We were just joking around,” Marty insisted.

  “You crossed the line there,” the lifeguard said to me, sounding like a teacher. “There are little kids here, you know.”

  It was ridiculously unfair, and he knew it. It was just that Law and those guys were his buddies. I didn’t think it would help to tell anyone the jerks could have accidentally drowned me. Besides, that was something the old Linus would think about.

  Everybody was looking at me. Including Eileen, I realized with dread. She’d probably seen me kicking the water and cussing my head off, but not what led up to it.

  “Thanks for helping, Larry.” I snarled at Law on my way out.

  I went to the rec hall, which was mostly empty. I got an orange soda and sat down.

  Eileen and Bennett came in with two other kids. I waved, and Bennett gave me the slightest wave back, but they took a different table. Maybe this was a chance to explain the incident at the pool. I grabbed my bottle of Fanta and headed over.

  “Hi.” I nodded at Bennett and Eileen. “I’m Linus,” I told the other two kids. They told me their names were Ryan and Gabby. Nobody scooted over to make room for me, or told me to grab another chair.

  “Are you on your way out?” Eileen asked. It wasn’t exactly what she said so much as how she said it, but I took it as a hint: Please be on your way. She probably saw me as a guy who took little kids on dangerous skating stunts and swore a lot.

  “I guess so.” I guzzled the last of my soda. I belched, unable to help myself. Gabby snickered.

  “See you around,” Eileen said.

  “Yeah.”

  I plunked the bottle on another table and left, feeling about as welcome as a cockroach in Mom’s cupboard.

  The rain picked up before I got home, but I hardly cared. I splashed through puddles in my sandals, wondering only for a second if those microscopic worms that got up in your feet could swim through the pores of your socks and latch on to your toes.

  Maybe I would get my snake and take it upstairs with me. The guard on duty sat with his arms crossed, looking alertly from side to side like rogues might enter at any second. He was a lot more serious about his job than the reggae guy or the sleepy guy. It probably wasn’t safe, anyway, with Mom and Artie both at home.

  I squished up to my apartment, passing Matt’s. I could hear the TV blaring, and recognized from the noise that he was watching the first of the new Superman movies. Mom and Dad didn’t let me watch movies when I was grounded.

  When I got upstairs, I went straight down the hall to my room. A moment later I heard Artie exclaiming about something and poked back out into the hallway to see what was going on.

  “Little boss man, I just washed this floor.” It took me a second to figure out what he was saying because his Liberian accent was so thick.

  “Oh. Sorry.” I could see my muddy footprints against the shiny floor.

  “I’ll wash it again,” he said.

  He went off to grab a mop and bucket. I followed him, now in bare feet.

  “Sorry about the mess,” I said again. “Do you want any help?”

  “If your feet are muddy, you can tell me,” he said. “I bring you a towel and clean shoes.”

  “I will.”

  He set about mopping again. I seemed to be annoying everyone today.

  I flipped through the drawing book. Some of the stuff about perspective, I already knew. Joe had shown me how to draw a house or a fence or whatever by making a dot somewhere on the page and then drawing all the lines like they’d crash into each other at the dot. He did shading the same way, making a dot somewhere that was supposed to be the light source and then figuring out which way the shadows fell and how long they were. Joe was perfectly happy drawing a whole picture that was nothing but cubes and balls and pyramids sitting around with perspective and shading.

  If I had half his talent, I thought, I could draw something awesome for Eil … Well, I could draw something awesome for myself. Eileen probably wouldn’t care.

  I wondered if Joe had gotten my picture yet, and when he would write back. I missed him. For that matter I missed Dayton. I missed Reds games on TV, and my friends getting worked up about the Buckeyes every autumn. I missed riding my bike down to the 7-Eleven to look at com
ics and buy a Slurpee if I had any money left. I even missed school.

  I’d heard the word “homesick” before and just thought it was something drippy girls talked about at summer camp. I felt it now, though, and it really was a sickness. Like a churning in the stomach.

  Unless that wasn’t homesickness.

  I leapt out of bed and ran to the bathroom.

  CHAPTER 13

  I was sick for three days. I was gross sick, too. Not the kind of sick where you cough a little and reach for the tissues. I ran into the bathroom a lot, but sometimes I couldn’t manage that and just upchucked on the floor. Once, I even filled the sheets with diarrhea, and another time I made it to the bathroom but couldn’t make it back. I spent an hour sleeping on the cold tiles in the dead of night.

  Artie came before and after his other jobs to help my mom. He cleaned up everything, no matter how nasty it was. He even changed the sheets once with me in the bed, just by rolling me around. I was barely awake at the time but remembered it later.

  “You can’t be drinking the Liberian tap water, oh,” he told me.

  “I know,” I mumbled through the fog of sickness and sleepiness. I hadn’t, either, at least not that I remembered. Maybe I accidentally had and forgot? Or maybe I swallowed some water when I was brushing my teeth? No, I realized. It was those jerks at the pool, dunking me over and over. I probably swallowed a gallon of swimming pool. The water was chlorinated, but either not chlorinated enough to kill all the germs or the chlorine itself had made me sick. Either way, it was Law’s fault for not doing anything when his own friends were bullying me.

  “Law,” I said, hoping they would understand that this was all his fault.

  “He wants to talk to his big brother,” Artie shouted. I don’t remember if Law came, though. I slid back into fever dreams, a mishmash of West Africa and Ohio and made-up places occupied by giant amoeba-like monsters and cannibals who ate you from the inside out.

  By Thursday I was sick of being sick and decided to get on with my life. I stumbled down to the bathroom and took a shower. Nobody seemed to be home. I remembered Mom telling me she got the job at the WHO when I was too feverish to know what she was talking about, but now it made sense.