Mamba Point by Kurtis Scaletta Page A

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 itbother 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