The Mentor (25 page)

“No, no.
 Wasn’t me,” I said, fully aware my words were wasted.  “I've never
even met your sister.”  

Slowly, my
nasty-breathed friend took a step back and exhaled, lowering his weapon.
 At the sight of that, I also exhaled.  

Two more
men burst into the room through the door, and one of them began barking at my
new BFF.  I took this chance to investigate my surroundings, look around.
 One big room.  Two windows, one of which was above my head, the
other directly across from me.  A door to my left was closed and in front
of it two guys with rifles were talking with the other guy with the rifle.
 Typical.  Everyone but me had a cool rifle.

The taller
of the two men who’d entered turned to me and said a few words.  I
shrugged.

“Have no
idea what you’re saying, man.”

The three
started chattering again and I thought back to what the Mentor had said before
knocking me out cold again.  Water, scorpions, compass… I was going to be
walking through a desert.  But where, which desert?

That’s when
I noticed a patch on the shoulder of one of the men.  Now, I didn’t
believe these guys were military, but what do I know?  Maybe this guy
pulled the military jacket off of a dead soldier’s body.

But I could
see the flag patch, like a streetlight.

Oh damn.

As a kid, I
had a huge poster on my wall with a map of the world.  Every time my
father would travel to one, I’d color it in with a black marker.  

He’d been a
programmer before, I think, they’d even really called it that.  And being
a foreigner, not travelling on an American passport, he was a favorite to
travel overseas to set up computer systems for various companies establishing
themselves in third-world countries.  Especially, third-world countries that
liked to shoot Americans (there are quite a few, FYI).

Thinking
back to my World Wall, I specifically remember the flag that looked like a
sideways streetlight.  

Red,
yellow, green bars in succession, left to right.

Just like a
streetlight.

Guinea.
 I was staring at the flag of Guinea.  

When I
passed out, I was in a garage-turned-workroom in Georgia.  

Woke up in
West Africa.

THE HARDEST
PART OF dealing with any situation, specifically when said situation required a
solution or else you might die, is first
exactly
defining what the
problem is.  

Sounds
simple but, too easily, one could get distracted by extraneous factors and
elements surrounding the actual issue at hand.  

Sure, here
I am bound at the wrists sitting on the floor of a mud hut in Africa with three
militants or ex-militants or guys who play Afrikana Dungeons and
Dragons—doesn’t matter.  I’d already stared down the barrel of an AK-47
rifle and was pretty sure it wouldn’t be the last time.  At that moment,
my problem was
my proximity to these three men
.  

Surviving
meant widening the gap between me and them.

Drawing my
attention back to them, I watched as two men sat down at the table.  They
ate noisily in front of me, and I think that was probably the point.
 Probably trying to break my spirit a little, me being the
captive
of the
captors
.  Of course, had they been swigging Bass Ales
instead of eating fingerfuls of gray-brown paste, they probably would have had
me at hello.  A couple of Guinness, and I would have drawn a map to my
mother’s house, pointing out her very favorite rooms in yellow highlighter, at
that point.  

It occurred
to me that, not at that moment, but soon, I should maybe look into my “passion”
for beer at little bit.

The taller
man had left.  Was he the leader of this merry band of scalawags?

An ancient
television in the corner, to the left of the door, held the attention of the
remaining two men for the moment.  Looking over, I could just make out the
flurry of black and white limbs on the screen, as Stan Laurel was being
physically admonished by his portly friend Oliver Hardy.

Watching
Mike and Ike chomp away at their meal (Dinner, lunch, breakfast?  Sunday
bunch?), I tried to piece together
why
my hands were bound and
what
these men wanted with me.  

Ignoring an
increasingly encroaching dirt-wedgie, my thoughts went to The Mentor, and how
he’d actually appeared to be former military.  

He’d
unloaded me on these guys, so maybe he was former government.  Whichever
government that might be.

But, if
that were true, what would that tell me?  These fine lads were certainly
not members of the local Chamber of Commerce.  Nor did I believe they were
a part of the federal Guinea government.  This looked like a pretty ragtag
group.

There
aren’t many reasons to hold an American hostage in a West African nation. In
fact, I could only really think of one.  It especially came to mind
because in between bites of hairy, horned beast mash, one of the guys pointed
his grubby fingers at me and said a word that sounded an awful lot like
“dollars.”

I was going
to be traded back to the
Americkana
for ransom.

Now, my family
doesn’t have any serious dough that I know of, so this wasn’t a case of Daddy
Warbucks coming up with a couple million to free the sole heir to his familial
widget-making factory.  My savings account is healthy from the hospital
settlement, sure.  But you just rob a guy like that; you don’t kidnap him
in a foreign country so he’ll whip out his debit card.  They were using me
for ransom; not unusual in this part of a world as a way for small bands of
crooks to get some cash together.

For a
moment, my mind slid back to the hospital and the accident that killed my
sister.  

When I had
killed my sister, for six years I’d owned the blame for my sister’s death and,
as strange as this may sound, I hungrily embraced that blame.  The more it
hurt, the more horrible the looks were directed at me, the easier my breaths
came, the easier one foot landed in front of the other.  

No, I’d
have to put those thoughts off.  All that would have to wait.  I had
to widen the gap between me and my captors.  Big as possible.  At the
moment, that was the only thing that mattered.

There’s a
tire store just down the road from me in Marietta and, from time to time, I’ll
poke my head in and drink a couple cups of coffee and watch CNN.  You have
to go early in the morning, which is tough because there aren’t a lot of folks
around—hard to get lost in the crowd when there’s no crowd.

Problem is,
though, if you go later in the day you’re fighting old ladies with bald tires
who want to watch angry TV judges or the latest male-bashing women’s talk show.
 And the old ladies will win, every time.

I couldn’t
remember any of the politics to it, but I was, sure at some point, we in the
West made a good chunk of the Guinean population pretty mad at us.  Maybe
they were still steamed we’d taken their sacred rat, called it a pig and made
it a some suburban pet, so when it wasn’t forced to run the never-ending road
within a spinning, metal wheel, it was rolling around in number-two pencil
shavings.  Didn’t know and, frankly, didn’t care.  I was under the
belief that
all
governments are corrupt, selfish and dangerous.  

I’m not an
anarchist, mind you, and not keen to have my city run by the guy with the
biggest gun.  It’s just the swinging dicks of one government banging up
against the swinging dicks of another government have nothing to do with me.

Yet, at
that moment, here I was, the one with the rope bracelets and sand boogers.
 Go figure.

So, a fat,
former movie theater usher was to be ransomed back to the U.S.  Little
bands of, well, bandits have been doing this for years according to my tire
store CNN viewing.  Not just to the U.S. government, any government with a
couple bucks gets targeted, it seems.  It’s an easy way to get dough to
pay off the third-world Walmart gun cache layaway; so that they could all poke
holes in each other.  When they run outta dough, they hit the bank.
 And at that moment, I was the ATM card.

“I’ve got
some
seriously
overdue library fines,” I said to Mike, who was slightly
taller than Ike.  Both men turned toward me.  “I think whatever cash
you’re asking for, you’ll have to take that into account.”

Mike said
something angry and little bits of food shot from his mouth.

I shook my
head slowly.  “Just a warning.  I once had
Muppet Christmas
checked out for two and half years.”

Ike looked
at me, his spoon halfway to his mouth.  His teeth clacked against the
metal as he said, staccato, “Mupp-pet Movie?”

Stunned, I
nodded.

“Yes.
 Mup-pet.”

Ike said
something jumbled and odd to his friend, but Mike just looked at him and
laughed.  Then he threw a bread roll at him and laughed some more.  I
think it was a bread roll.  Could be some massive Guinean stinkbug for all
I knew.

After a few
more minutes, the two men stood up, raking their food-caked fingers on the edge
of the table.  Ike picked up the bread roll that had been tossed at him
and threw it at me.  It glanced off my head and landed on the dirt floor.
 Both men laughed and Mike said something, which I guessed was some
mocking tone about my dinner sitting next to me.  Or maybe he finally got
the “ass in the face” joke (really, it just takes some people longer, but it’s
no less rewarding).

Gathering
their stuff to leave, thick green coats over a shoulder, rifles over the other,
the one that had tossed the roll at me came right up to my face.  He
instructed me, harshly, to do something.  Then he stepped back, and used
his camera phone to snap my photo.  Didn’t even comb my hair or nothin’.

Pointing at
me, he barked a few more orders.  

I said,
“Wait, and hold on.  Now, let’s do a silly one,” then made a face, eyes
crossed, tongue lolled out.  He looked at me, uninterested, and then went
back to talking with his buddy.

As he did,
my eyes went to a can of Sterno, which had been heating a square, tin bowl of
food held up on a coat hanger wire.  An idea popped in my head.  Then
as if he’d read my mind, Ike went over and blew the flame out and both walked
to the door.  As his friend left, Ike lifted his hand and pointed to the
floor.

“Sit,” he
said.  “
Qui-ett
.”

I nodded
wondering if he’d learned a couple English words from television programs “brought
to you by the letter K and the number 5.”

The door
closed and the metal on wood scrape told me a lock of some sort had been
engaged.  My guess was that was more to prevent people from breaking in
and stealing their “money” rather than preventing the tied up hostages--
ranging from immobile to outright dead-- from escaping.

Leaning
forward onto my knees for the first time, my back, arms and legs complained in
concert.  One of the library tapes I’d listened to warned about DVT, deep
vein thrombosis.  You get it from being all cramped up for a long period
of time, and the resulting blood clot can permanently turn your lights out.
 At the moment, I felt like the perfect candidate.  

“Owwww,” I
moaned, trying to stretch while testing the strength of the rope behind my back
at the same time.  Thick, strong.  Looked back over my shoulder, I
saw now the rope around my ankle as if they’d tied down some livestock.
 Which, essentially, they had.

The walls
were wood and looked treated with some sort of tar to keep out the moisture.
 Above me were overlapping layers of thin, metal sheets with clumps of
straw to fill the gaps between the walls and ceiling.  The two windows
were without glass, closed by a wooden, hinged flap that came down, however,
only one side was secured.

There was a
tall cabinet on the other side of the room, like a wardrobe, but no way was I
getting to that.  The table and chairs were out of reach, too but would do
me no use if I
could
get to them.

The Sterno.
 That’s was my immediate goal.  To get free, I needed the tin of
liquid flame.

Movies had
taught me that my first effort had to be getting my arms in front of me, or I
was useless.  So, the trick is to pull the bound arms underneath the butt,
come up over the legs, and you’ve got your hands in front of you.  At
least, this is how I’d seen it done countless times in Hollywood
action-adventure films.

Turns out,
this is really, really hard to do.

My guess,
of all the movies I’ve seen, the stunt double is the guy really doing the
flopping around.  In fact, as my wrists got jammed behind my meaty thighs,
their tiny little bones nearly snapping from stress, I came to the conclusion
even the stunt guy’s going: “Hell, I can’t do that.”  

My first
try had been whilst up on my knees, so I thought lying on my side would be the
next best option.  But it seems my arms are like little Tyrannosaurus Rex
arms compared to the rest of my body.  It hadn’t occurred to me previously
that I had little T. Rex arms, but I apparently do.