Mamba Point (11 page)

“It’s just some little kids who play outside,” I told him.

“Matt, too,” he reminded me.

“Yeah, Matt’s okay.”

“So, are you going to play with any of them today?” Dad asked.

“I might go hang out with Matt,” I told him. Like Mom, he didn’t know that kids my age didn’t “play” with their friends. They hung out, or whatever. They played games together, too, but that wasn’t the same thing.

“See, you
are
making friends,” he pointed out. Ah, that’s what it was about. A little “I told you so,” because back in Dayton I was worried about moving somewhere I didn’t know anybody.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said, and turned his attention to his pancakes. He didn’t even ask Law about his friends, because he knew Law was doing fine.

We finished the dishes, and I went back to my bedroom. My snake was coiled up on the bed, looking at me innocently, like it had been there the whole time. I shut the door and braced it with a chair, the way they do in movies. I knew I should just get the mamba out of the apartment, but I wanted to do something first.

“Did you ever want to be a model?” I asked the snake. It lifted its head a smidgen, and I took it as a nod. I turned the notebook to a clean page and tried to draw its head. It was all shapes. The eyes were three perfect circles each, circles inside circles. The nose was an upside-down valentine
heart bracketed by pentagons and rhombuses. The lower lip was a triangle held up by angel wings. Four teardrops came together at the bottom of its jaw, like a four-leaf clover. It was so cleverly put together, like a well-designed machine.

Someone rattled the knob. I jumped up, and the snake bolted, slipping away and hiding under the bed.

“Linus, how come you’re in there with the door shut?” It was Mom.

“Law shuts his door all the time,” I answered.

“I know,” she said. She paused. “I’m just not used to you doing it.”

I moved the chair and cracked the door open. “It’s no big deal, anyway. I’m just drawing.”

“Matt is on the phone.”

“Oh, right.” I’d said the day before that we’d play Pellucidar, and I never got back to him.

I told Matt I’d be over in a bit, then went back to my room and dug a nylon sports bag out of my closet. It had rainbow-colored straps that looked like Mork’s suspenders on
Mork & Mindy
. Kids in Dayton called it my Mork bag, but I didn’t mind. Mork was cool. I zipped the bag open and spread it out on the floor next to the bed.

“Let’s go,” I whispered. The snake stretched toward me, rubbing its head on my hand before sliding into the bag. It coiled up and pulled its head down. I zipped the bag, but not quite all the way. I wanted to make sure the snake got enough air.

“I’m heading out for a while!” I announced.

Nobody noticed me leave. I went down the steps and toward the tall grass near the car wash.

“It’s safe,” I whispered, setting the bag down and unzipping it.

The snake slithered out and disappeared into the grass. I waved goodbye until I realized I probably looked suspicious, standing there in the middle of a field with an empty bright-blue bag, waving at nobody.

I brought Matt back his skates when I went to play Pellucidar. Dad had even helped me tighten the loose wheels.

Darryl had some friends visiting. I thought at first that they were American because they had nicer clothes than most Liberians had. The black guys at the embassy must all hang out together, I figured.

“No skating inside,” one of the men said, grinning broadly. The other men laughed.

“Linus, that’s Jerry, and that’s Robert, and that’s Caesar,” Darryl said.

“Like the emperor?” I asked the last guy.

“Like the salad,” he said, and all the men laughed again. “Caesar has been in my family a long time,” he explained when the laughter died down. I could hear his African accent now, but his was less noticeable than the other Liberians I’d met. He sounded educated. “It’s a good name. I just make a joke before anyone else can make it.”

“I know how you feel,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Linus. You are Charlie Brown’s friend, right? People ask you, Where is Snoopy?”

“More or less.”

He offered me a snap-shake while Darryl went to the bar and started mixing a drink. I had to stuff the skates under one arm to free up a hand.

“You can tell a foreign gentleman because he uses ice tongs,” Robert observed, watching Darryl.

“In Africa it’s rare to have ice,” Jerry added. I wasn’t sure he meant it as a joke, but the other guys laughed anyway. Jerry was tall, skinny, and serious-looking. He reminded me of the music teacher back in Dayton, who was always rapping on the podium with a baton,
rap rap rap
, to show us the timing of a song. Jerry had the same troubled look on his face, like the whole world was out of sync.

Darryl finished mixing the drink and handed it to Caesar. He sipped it and nodded appreciatively. “It’s a nice drink.”

“It’s called an old-fashioned. Didn’t you ever try one when you lived in the States?” Darryl asked.

“All we drank in college was beer.”

“You must have joined the wrong fraternity at Harvard,” said Jerry. “I’m sure other fraternity houses had champagne.” He wasn’t grinning, but the other guys laughed again. They were just in a laughing mood.

“Beer is old-fashioned enough for me,” Caesar said with a shrug. “Besides, I lived in the dorms.”

I would have liked joking around more with those guys,
especially Caesar, but Darryl dropped a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Matt’s in his game room,” he said.

I guessed it was time for me to leave.

About an hour later Zartan and Bob were besieged by cannibals. The parrot flew away safely, but Zartan was tied up by the “black savages,” which is what the game called them, as they put on masks and bracelets and necklaces made of human bones and danced around Zartan. There were cannibals in the Tarzan comic, too, but now that I actually knew some Africans, the scene really bugged me.

“Isn’t this game kind of racist?” I asked Matt.

“Huh?” He looked up from the book.

“I think it’s racist.” I felt less sure. Matt looked totally confused.

“It’s based on Burroughs’s books,” he reminded me. “This scene is right out of Tarzan.”

“So maybe Burroughs was racist.”

“Yeah, but he lived about a hundred years ago. Besides, it’s not like he just made this stuff up completely. My dad has some books about the Liberian bush with old photographs of guys wearing bracelets of human teeth and stuff like that. Edgar Rice Burroughs probably saw the same kinds of pictures.”

I felt queasy. “That didn’t mean there were cannibals in Liberia.”

“There were. It says so in the books.”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t like to believe it. “Doesn’t it
bother you to read this stuff? If it bothers me, it should bother you even more.”

“Why should it bother me more?”

“Because you’re the one who’s originally from Africa.”

“I’m
originally from
Philadelphia.”

“You know what I mean.”

“What, because my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather might have been a cannibal, I should think there was no such thing as cannibals?” He punctuated every “great” with a wave of his hand, showing how far back he’d have to go to find one.

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“The Celts were cannibals, too, you know.”

“Who?”

“The Celts were ancient Europeans. My dad has books about them. They ate the people they killed in battle. So you probably have some cannibals in your family tree, too.”

“Your dad sure has a lot of books about cannibals.”

“My dad has lots of books about different people and cultures.” He sounded hurt. “You don’t have a job like his if you’re not interested in different people and cultures.”

“Forget books,” I said. “They’re all written by guys who don’t do anything but read other books. Let’s go ask some actual African guys.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” he said. “I’m not going to go ask Liberian bigwigs if they snack on people sometimes.”

“They’re bigwigs?”

“Duh. Yeah, they work in the Liberian government.”

I remembered the coup, and wondered if any of those
guys were involved. Probably not. One had even gone to Harvard University.

“We’re not going to ask them if
they’re
cannibals,” I explained. “We’ll just ask if there ever
were
any cannibals. It’s different.”

“All right, but you ask.”

We went out to the living room, where the men’s conversation had gotten more quiet and serious. They stopped talking when they saw Matt and me come in.

“Hey, kids, what’s up?” Darryl asked. His voice had an edge to it.

“We just had an argument,” I said.

“Not an argument,” said Matt. “We were just talking about Africa and we want to know something.”

The men all looked at me curiously, and I froze. I tried to think of a more harmless question but couldn’t.

“What do you want to know about Africa?” Caesar asked softly.

I let it fly. “Were there really cannibals in West Africa?” Everyone looked at me for a moment. “I mean, I don’t think there were, but in this game we’re playing—also, in books—”

“What kind of question is that?” Darryl asked sharply. The way he was looking at me, I thought I might incinerate on the spot. He shifted his eyes to Matt, his eyebrows arched. Matt was the one who was going to be in trouble, I realized, for even letting me open my fat mouth.

“I don’t think there were,” I said again. Darryl’s expression didn’t change.

“Why shouldn’t the boys be curious?” Caesar said. “These legends are common enough. The movies and books, they all have these cannibals with the bones in their hair.” He positioned his own finger at the top of his head and grimaced, baring his teeth. It was funny, but nobody laughed. The mood was too thick for laughing now. “This is how we are portrayed.”

“The Africans themselves are somewhat to blame for those lies,” Jerry said thoughtfully. “They tell the explorers and the anthropologists that the tribe over the hill are cannibals. It is the humor of the bush, to trick these strangers, and to insult their own enemies. There are often old conflicts between the tribes—fighting over land or water or game, or selling each other out to slave traders. They get back by maligning each other.

“So the Kpelle say it of the Krahn. The Krahn say it of the Gola. The white scholars, they write it all down. They never see it with their own eyes. Who is going to go over the hill to meet those cannibals? They just write their scholarly books, and the newspapers repeat the juiciest parts, and the novelists and movie companies turn the newspaper stories into books and movies, and then your entire continent thinks we are all cannibals.”

There was another long silence as Jerry’s words sank in.

“Well, I think that’s the wisest explanation you’ll ever hear,” said Darryl.

I’d rubbed at a very sensitive sore, I knew, and didn’t know how to undo it. “Thanks.” I turned to go back to Matt’s room, where I’d probably open a window and scale
down the wall and just walk out of Monrovia into the jungle and never be seen again.

“Don’t be disappointed,” said Caesar. “I was disappointed to find the American streets weren’t paved with gold and that all Americans didn’t drive around in Cadillac cars.” He grinned amicably, but again, nobody laughed.

We slunk back to Matt’s room. We didn’t play the game. Matt just read, and I doodled in my notebook. His dad came in a while later.

“I’m sorry, Dar … Mr. Miller,” I said before he even opened his mouth. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“Linus, you couldn’t have known this, but my guests—sometimes they are rather important. Our relationship is fragile. I invite them to my home to show them I’m a real friend. We laugh and drink as friends. But this is still diplomacy. I’m at
work
, okay? I just need you to remember that when you visit.”

“Okay. I mean, yes sir.” I hardly ever said “sir” to my own dad.

“I don’t think you would come into my office and ask my clients if they know any cannibals, no?”

“No sir.”

He looked back and forth between us, and I thought he might yell at Matt, but he didn’t.

“I’m really glad you two have become friends,” he said before he left.

I had a feeling that if we weren’t, or if Matt had any other friends, I would never be welcome there again.

“Told you it was a bad idea,” Matt muttered.

Mom was invited to a brunch. She called it a gabfest for embassy wives.

“It’s actually a luncheon for adult dependents of staff at the embassy,” Dad explained. He was in the living room, reading a week-old
New York Times
. I was looking for the comics section and beginning to realize that stupid newspaper didn’t have one.

“How many of these adult dependents aren’t wives?” Mom asked. “Any husbands?”

“I don’t think so,” Dad admitted. “Still, that doesn’t make it a gabfest.”

“If it’s anything like the officers’ wives luncheons in the air force, it’s a gabfest,” she insisted.

“Don’t go, then.”

“I didn’t say that I didn’t like a good gabfest.” She looked at her skirt and grimaced. “I need to iron this.”

“You look fine, honey,” Dad said, not looking up from his paper. “Smashing, even.” Mom didn’t hear. She was already headed to the laundry room.

It was raining pretty hard that day, so I guessed swimming was out. I called Matt and asked him if he wanted to play Pellucidar.

“I can’t,” he told me. “I’m grounded.”

“It’s my fault, isn’t it?” His dad was still mad about my asking that dumb question about cannibals. “He doesn’t want me coming over, does he?”

“No. It’s, uh, something else. I broke a statue.”

“Sure you did.”

“I was horsing around.”

I couldn’t picture Matt horsing around with his dad’s art collection. He wouldn’t even let me touch anything, I remembered. “So how long are you grounded?”

“He said two weeks.”

“No way.”

“It was a valuable statue. But he does usually cool down and let me off early.”