Mamba Point (23 page)

“I’m really sorry about everything,” I told him.

“I know.” He picked up his magazine and found his page. “Do you mind putting the volume back up and starting the song over? Track two. I’m reading how to play that song.”

“Sure.” I picked up the needle. “So, are you thinking you might actually learn how to play guitar?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“Because, you know, you’ll need a guitar.”

“I got a guitar.” He pointed over near the closet. Sure enough, an acoustic guitar was leaning against the wall.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Marty sold it to me for forty bucks.” Law had a bunch of money saved up from mowing lawns back in Dayton.

“Cool.” I set the needle back at the beginning of the right track, and left as the singer started in about a life of pain and misery. Well, that ought to cheer him up, I thought.

Mom and Dad went back to work the next day. On the way out they reminded us we were both grounded.

Almost as soon as they were gone, I put on my sandals. “I’m just going to the library,” I told Law. “If I’m going to read, I need books.” Reading noncomic books was allowed, Mom said. She also said I could draw and Law could bang on his guitar. We could always do stuff when we were grounded if it was the kind of thing you did in school.

“Go for it,” Law said. He was looking at a music magazine, then carefully putting his fingers on the guitar strings and picking two notes, then the same two notes again. He looked back to the magazine, switched his fingers, and strummed.

“You got a whole lot of love,” he sang. Law could actually carry a tune. “You got a whole lot of love!”

I took off, knowing my excuse wouldn’t get me very far if I got caught anywhere else. It couldn’t be helped.

I planned on running to Gambeh’s apartment building first, but he and Tokie met me in the courtyard.

“Linus, we looked all day yesterday and could not find a snake.” He waved his hand one way, then the other. “We walked from up there all the way down there.”

“We’re so tired,” Tokie added glumly. “It was hot hot.”

My heart sank. I was really hoping Gambeh would find the snake somewhere behind the building or farther down the shore.

“Thanks for trying,” I said. “Do you want to try again today?”

“I want the dollar, but I don’t know where else to look,” Gambeh said.

“Thanks for looking. You two are good friends.”

“Can we play with the lemon?” Tokie asked.

“Sorry, not today.”

“Tokie, I told you his brother was sick!” Gambeh scolded. Tokie looked hurt.

“I forgot!” he said.

“You don’t forget. He gave us a dollar. Show some respect.”

“It’s all right.” It made me sad to see them argue. I also didn’t like Gambeh treating me differently now that I was his boss, or whatever. A dollar a day was terrible wages, anyway. Probably good for a kid in Africa, but it wasn’t very much money.

“When my brother is better, you can both come over for dinner,” I told them. “We can play the lemon game, and I have a soccer—a
football
for you. I don’t really use it anymore.” I felt like I owed them after all the work they’d done for measly pay.

“Will your mama make rice?” Tokie asked.

“Don’t ask him that!” Gambeh scolded him. “He’s giving you a football!”

“It’s just … your own rice was not good,” Tokie told me.

“I know,” I admitted. “We’ll ask my mom to make dinner.”

I went to the library for books, just so it would look good if Mom called and I wasn’t home. I grabbed a few books from the teen shelf, checked them out, and ran across UN Drive to talk to Sekou.

“I think I killed my snake,” I confessed.

“This is bad news,” he said. “What happened?”

I sat down and tried to get the story out in a hurry, but I stumbled over the parts like they were slippery wet rocks. I’d thrown the snake off the balcony, but it wasn’t dead. It nearly killed my brother. It was almost dead. Some friends helped me look for it and couldn’t find it. No, my brother didn’t die. He had a party and didn’t let me stay. That was before. My parents were out of town. Yes, I was in a lot of trouble. No, they didn’t know about the
kaseng
, they just knew about the snake. Well, they were back from vacation now.

“My snake bit someone, too,” he said. “I lived with my uncle in Voinjama and went to school. I didn’t like it, but he made me go. Uncle Kollie said, ‘If you live here, you go to school, oh?’ He said, ‘I see you out there with your pet snake, too. If you do good at school and help me at the store, you can keep it here.’”

“He didn’t think it was weird?”

“He would not go near it, but knew that a lot of country people keep snakes.”

“Wow.” I didn’t know that, but I’d heard of people in the
States having pet snakes, too. They probably didn’t have mambas, but they did have pet snakes.

“I was very lazy,” Sekou admitted. “I slept at school, and when he was not watching at work, I slept there, too. I was always so tired. He said, ‘You are as useful as that snake.’ I said, ‘I go to school, I work at the store. What else do you want?’ We fought all the time.”

“Did your snake bite him?”

“No. Uncle Kollie invited his boss to dinner. His boss was a rich man. He had many stores and businesses. He had two young children with his second wife. He’d take them to the store and say, ‘Take what you want, it is all yours.’ He brought his family with him to my uncle’s house. The small girl saw my snake in its cage and wanted to play with it. She was taught that everything she saw was hers.”

He coughed, then took a plastic thermos out of his bag and drank. “It’s so dusty,” he said. “It’s nearly dry season.” He didn’t finish his story, but he didn’t need to. “I don’t think your snake is dead,” he said. “If you kill the snake with your own hand, the
kaseng
is dead. It’s like part of you is dead. You would know.”

“Did you kill yours?” I asked in a whisper.

“Yes,” he said. “My uncle gave me an axe, and I went and cut my snake in three.” He made an axe motion with his hand. “Chop chop. It was like I chopped off one arm and one leg.”

I gulped, knowing how hard it must have been. “Did you ever try to get a new snake?”

“A cassava snake would not care enough to bite me now. I am nothing to them. I am less than a breeze. Less than dust.”

His words sank in. What would that mean for me? That I would never see another mamba? I didn’t want to ask. Sekou was looking off down the road, not seeing the cars as they tore down UN Drive, but maybe seeing something in the clouds of dust they roiled up.

I’d lost track of time but didn’t go straight home. I crossed the field to the shoreline, searching the rocks for my mamba. Gambeh might have overlooked it. It’s hard to see a gray snake on gray rocks. I zigged and zagged along the rocks for an hour, wondering how far an injured snake could go after falling three stories. I searched the stones, investigating every slightly different shape or shade of gray, but all I found was garbage and filth and driftwood and seaweed. I searched the steeper rocks behind the embassy, following them along the ocean until they gave way to another dirty beach full of shanties. Then I went the other way, toward downtown. It was not good. If Sekou was right and my snake was still alive, it had run far away and I’d never see it again.

Law was still practicing the same song, now working on a different part where he had to bang on the strings really loud and slide his hand all the way down the neck.

“Sounds good,” I lied. Well, it did sound a little bit better, but it probably sounded cooler on an electric guitar.
At least Law didn’t need to check the book between chords anymore.

“Thanks,” he said. “You know, you kind of lit a fire under me. You got so good at drawing, I wanted to get good at something, too.”

“Wow, thanks.” That was amazing to hear from a big brother.

The telephone rang, and I grabbed it before Law could get up. He set his guitar down and came over anyway, sure it was for him. His friends had been calling a lot.

“Hello?” I said into the receiver.

“Dad, this is Matt.”

Dad?
“What’s going on, Matt?”

“I’m kind of in trouble,
Dad.”
He emphasized the last word. I heard Liberian voices muttering in the background. “I’m at the police station,
Dad
.”

“Were you arrested?” I didn’t ask why he’d called me instead of calling his actual dad. That was obvious—he would be in a world of trouble if he did. I glanced at the clock in the living room. It was 11:20. How did anyone get arrested before noon? Especially kids who never left their apartment?

“What did you do, Matt?”

“Hold on. They want to talk to you, Dad,” he said. I heard the phone getting passed over. There was no way my voice would pass for a grown-up’s. I handed the phone to Law.

“You’re Darryl,” I told him. “Matt’s been arrested or something.”

“Okay.” He grabbed the phone and immediately took on
a deep, grave tone. I think he’d pretended to be somebody’s dad before. “Who is this? What’s this all about? What has my boy done?”

He paused, nodding, interrupting a few times with “You can’t be serious?” and “My son did that?” and “Why, I’ll thrash him within an inch of his life” before promising to be there as soon as he could.

“Your buddy got busted for trespassing in the Executive Mansion,” he told me.

“What’s that?”

“Somebody pointed it out to me on the way to the beach. It’s like the Liberian White House. The president of Liberia lives there, and all the government offices are there.”

“Wow.” When Matt got himself into trouble, he didn’t mess around. “What’re they going to do to him?”

“Nothing. The cop said they know he’s not a criminal, but it’ll cost two hundred bucks to get him out. It’s like a fine or a bribe or something.”

“Where are we supposed to get two hundred bucks?”

“I don’t know.” Law picked up the guitar and played the riff again. “Also, who’s going to pretend to be his dad?”

I went back to see Sekou. He was the only black guy I knew who was old enough to be Matt’s dad, except for Matt’s dad.

“How would you feel about pretending to be somebody’s father?” I asked him. I told him about Matt. “We just need you to pop in and give them the money and walk out with Matt.”

“This sounds like a dangerous game, oh?”

“It doesn’t have to be,” I assured him. “It’s not like they know his dad.”

“His own papa, he should go,” he said.

“But Matt will get in trouble.”

“Hear me now,” said Sekou. “You can’t always run away from trouble.”

“I already told him I would help,” I said.

Who else could I ask? I didn’t know where to find Artie on a Tuesday, and he was too young, anyway. What about Gambeh’s dad? Maybe he would do it for money. He did need a job.

Sekou started to put his masks and carvings in his bag.

“I thought you weren’t going to do it,” I told him.

“I have a debt,” said Sekou. “When I ran away from my uncle Kollie’s house, a man took me in. A Mandingo trader. He had only daughters and wanted a son. So I lived with his family, and took his trade and his religion. Now I will be this boy’s father for a few minutes.”

“Thank you!”

“You have to be careful when you tell lies about who you are.” He picked up a mask, held it to his face. “Otherwise, you are like the man in the story. The mask becomes your real face.”

We didn’t pile into the cab until after one o’clock. I hoped Matt was okay. We were also sixty dollars short, even after Law had thrown in the rest of his lawn-mowing money, sold
back his guitar (for ten dollars less than he paid for it), and squeezed some of his friends for cash.

“These guys haggle about everything,” he reminded me when I fretted about not coming up with the complete two hundred. “We can talk ’em down to one forty.” He seemed cool about the whole thing, even losing the guitar.

Sekou was wearing Law’s only suit. The pant legs ended around his ankles, and the jacket didn’t even come down to his waist. Dad was no taller than Law, so it was the best we could do. Law was cool about that, too. The guitar meant way more to him than that suit, anyway.

Sekou practiced his American accent on the way. “My name is Darryl Miller. I am an American from the city of Philadelphia,” he said, trying to flatten out his tone and talk in the fast, no-nonsense way that American speech must have sounded to him. “I work at the American Embassy. I voted for Ronald Reagan. I love Mickey the Mouse and the New York Yankees.”

“You love the Phillies,” I corrected him.

“I love the Phillies,” he said. He ran out of American things to talk about pretty quickly.

“They won’t give you an American citizenship test, anyway,” I told him, hoping it was true.

After the taxi dropped us off in front of the police station, Sekou had a good question.

“Who will you two say
you
are?”

Law and I looked at each other. We hadn’t even thought
about that. Why would Matt’s dad bring a couple of other kids with him to bail out his son?

“You go.” Law handed him the wad of cash, and Sekou pocketed it. “We’ll go in after a few seconds.”

“Thanks again, Mr. Miller,” I told him.

Sekou nodded and disappeared into the police station. It was a big, grim-looking building with bars on all the windows. The bars were to prevent people from breaking in, but it made the whole building look like a prison. For all I knew, Matt was waiting in a cell right then.

“We know we can trust that charlie?” Law asked a moment later.

“Yeah, why?”

“He could walk right out another door and we’d never see him again. Or my suit. Or that money.”

“He could also get in a lot of trouble for trying to help us,” I reminded him. “He just walked into a police station with a wad of cash, lying about who he is and wearing a suit that obviously isn’t his.”

“Good point,” he said. “We’d better go see how he’s doing.”

The station looked like American police stations on TV, only slower. There were cops walking around, clacking on typewriters, and filing reports, but nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry. There were benches lining the hallways, crammed full of Liberians who were probably there to pay fines or get family members out of jail.