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Africa, I thought. I knew that, but now it really sank in. This was Africa. A monkey skittered up a tree and chattered at us, in case I had any lingering doubts.
    We passed a clump of wild grass and a few trees, where snakes might have been wriggling around and waiting to poke their creepy triangular heads at us, but none did. Past that, about halfway to the embassy, there was a car wash. It wasn’t the kind back home where you drive through a tunnel and machines spray water and soap all over your car. It was just a parking lot where guys had buckets of soapy water and sponges. They were washing a taxi, and a couple more cabs waited in line.
    A street vendor stood on either side of the driveway leading up to the car wash. One had a tray hanging by a strap around his neck. The tray had cigarettes, candy, plastic combs, matches, packets with aspirin and cold medicine—like the counter at a 7-Eleven. The other guy had unrolled a rug and spread out a lot of masks and carvings.
    “It’s a charlie,” Dad said, pausing to look at his wares. “These guys are called charlies.”
    “Good morning, sir,” the man greeted him. “Are you buying something today?”
    “No, just looking,” Dad said, lightly touching a couple of carvings before moving on.
    “Are those like voodoo masks?” I whispered to Law. I was thinking of my Tarzan comics, with the evil witch doctor who wore a mask like that.
    “Don’t be dumb,” he said. “They’re just masks.”
    “They must mean something. They don’t just make them to sell to tourists, do they?” I decided not to ask Mom and Dad, though. It might sound prejudiced.
    We got embassy ID cards, then went to the clinic for shots. We’d had a few rounds of shots before leaving the States but weren’t finished. It was a good chance to show everyone the new Linus. I just rolled up my sleeve and let them poke me full of holes. When they were done, I had a red spot on my arm the size of a quarter, which meant I
didn’t
have typhus or tuberculosis, and another half-dozen pinpricks all over my body, but I didn’t complain once. On top of all that, we had to start taking nasty-tasting pills that were supposed to keep us from catching malaria—one pill aweek for as long as we lived in Africa. That was over a hundred pills, I realized with dread.
    For lunch we went to the rec hall, which was right there on the embassy compound. It reminded me of having lunch with Joe and a couple of other kids back at the school in Dayton. I wondered if the same bunch of kids would sit together when they started junior high at Wilbur Wright next fall, and I wondered if anyone would ask about me.
Hey, what happened to Linus?
some kid would wonder, and some other kid would say,
Oh, I heard he went to go live in a library
. I heard a lot of that before I left. “You’re going to live in a
library?”
It didn’t make any sense, but neither did moving to Africa.
    I had a funny-tasting hamburger and extra-greasy, extra-salty potato chips. It helped me get the bitter taste of the malaria pill out of my mouth.
    “We haven’t seen any snakes today,” I realized while we ate. I’d seen plenty of places where a snake might be hiding.
    “You don’t have to worry about snakes,” Dad said.
    “I know. That’s what I was saying. We didn’t see any today.”
    “We didn’t
see
any,” Law said. “They hide really good.”
    “Larry,” Mom cautioned. “Don’t scare your brother.”
    “I’m Law now,” he reminded her.
    “Whatever your name is. Don’t scare your brother.”
    “I’m not scared,” I insisted.
    “I wasn’t trying to scare anybody,” Law said. “I was just saying—”
    “Drop it,” Dad said.
    “Sorry.”
    “I’m not scared, anyway,” I said again.
    “Well, it doesn’t matter because you probably won’t see another snake the whole time you’re here,” Dad said.
    “You won’t see
them,”
Law muttered under his breath.
    After lunch we went home and unpacked our air freight,