The Mentor (27 page)

I tugged
again, weaker this time though, and pulled, twisting the ropes, trying to get
them to crumble at the burned patches.  

Then, I
noticed something odd.  My wrists moved a little in the binding.
 Sure, I had lubricant now.  My skin had split and blood was
drenching my hands, the ropes.

I pulled
again, but instead of outward trying to break the ropes, one hand downward and
the other up.

“Ha!”
 My left hand was moving!  Pulling harder, I shooed away a thought in
my head that I might be pulling the skin of my own hand off like a glove— I had
to get out of the ropes.

Nearly
there! I could feel the rope slipping and gave it one last hard, long yank.

Yes,
there!
 

I fell
forward, exhausted, my left arm springing above my head like a Roman catapult.
 There was indescribable relief in my shoulder, so much so I began
laughing, finally able to move it.   But, I hesitated to look down at
my arm.

Next, I
easily shook the other wrist free from the rope and put both hands above me
like a victorious boxer, as I lay forward balancing on my forehead.

Wasting
time
, I thought.

Wobbling to
my feet, I finally looked to see my wrists were torn, burnt red in some parts,
but the gore I’d felt was actually blobs of the liquid Sterno that had stuck to
my skin.  Bits of flesh had scraped into my hands, but I’d fared far
better than expected.  

Most
importantly, both hands were free.

Man on a
mission now, I didn’t think twice about punching the television tube out with
the heel of my left hand, and it made a satisfying
thwop
when I did.
 I grabbed a piece of the glass and worked quickly on the rope that lashed
me to the wall.

Then, a
moment away from freedom, I noticed the voices.  Focused on breaking my
bonds, I couldn’t tell if the voices on the other side of the wall had always
been there or, now that I was nearly able to escape, they’d finally wiggled
their way into my consciousness.

Sounds
like more than three
, I
thought as I sawed through the rope at my ankle.  The glass was sharp and
was cutting quickly, and I’d protected my tender palms with the rope that had
been around my wrists.  Even so, alas, my days as a hand model were now
surely out the window.

More
voices, they were gathering nearby.  I envisioned other scary men with
scary rifles were meeting up with the three paramilitary pricks holding me.
 

One voice
was louder, angrier than the others.  Or at least it sounded angry.
 Maybe the guy was just passionate.  Passionate about his work:
raping, pillaging, whatever.  Passion or anger, I didn’t want him or his
friends to find me on the verge of screwing up a perfectly good kidnapping.

The voices
grew louder, not more angry or passionate, but moving closer to the door, and
that thought made my hands tremble.  Blood was making the glass in my
fingers slippery, and my progress cutting away at the rope’s fibers was
slowing.  If they came in now—

Nearly
there
.  I cut
faster, my heart beating like a geeked-out rabbit, my eyes jumping from the
rope to the door.  At any moment, that knob could twist and, no question,
bad things would happen from there.

Then, finally,
the rope fell away and, naturally, as it did the door’s handle began to twist.
 I looked up to the window near me.  I’d heard voices from there, but
now none.  Were they all gone?  Were they the three who’d been in
this room or if I were to jump out the window would my feet disrupt some West
African dice game?

Across the
room, the other window was still partially open, not tied down like the other.
 I saw nothing but bush through the gap.

I jumped
up, my knees crackling like newly minted bubble wrap, and as the door began to
swing open I leapt for the open window with all the strength left in my thighs,
passing from the stifling darkness of the hut to the punishing burst of heat in
the midday sun, then landed and rolled to the ground.  Trying to stop my
ass-over-head tumble, I put my hands out and they screamed at me, but I had to
stop and get to my feet.

Seconds
later I heard yelling—one voice, then several—from the other side of the window
I’d leapt through.

Standing,
to my left were garbage bins, a long row of the backside of tiny, one-room
homes flush up to the bush, and that looked like a path to me, so I ran that
way, full steam.  As I took my first step, to my right, a ceramic pot
exploded— someone was shooting at me from the window.

“Bet he’s
pissed about the T.V.”

Weaving
through shanty homes, fighting laundry lines and hungry dogs and black flies
big as tabby cats and a half dozen kids who laughed merrily as they casually
chased me, I tried to ditch the angry guys on my tail.  But I couldn’t
even outpace the kids running and dancing around me.

“Go… away!”
I said through clenched teeth, pumping my arms harder.  They just laughed
and mimicked my arms, a small battalion of skinny toy soldiers stuck in high
gear.  

There were
no roads, instead just winding paths through clusters of ramshackled homes,
bunched together in no discernible pattern, as if this ground once held the
element palate of some giant architect that had been commissioned to paint more
fortunate neighborhoods beyond the horizon, taking bits and pieces, here and
there, scraping off the blobs that didn’t quite work on the edge of this
settlement, then had splattered the remnant material here as it cleaned off the
brushes.

Dizzy in
the heat, I took turns randomly, hoping to evade recapture but grew concerned
that my random path might actually begin to take me back toward the thatch and
wooden prison.  

“Whoa!” I
said, stumbling past the irregular wall of one small shack and nearly tumbling
into a wide-eyed old woman who’d been clutching a black plastic bag to her
chest.  Off balance, I cut away from her, the kid satellites around me
whooping and hollering, they matched me, step for step and when my bare shin
banged hard against short cement wall, the world began to tilt awkwardly, but,
unexpectedly, small hands righted me and prevented my fall.

The hole
that served as window for one home was partially shuttered by a long, shiny
metal sheet, its chipped resin lettering looked like advertising, and in a bare
patch, my reflection briefly looked back at me.

Here was a
corn-fed American (or, rather, grain-, barley-, and hop-fed) running around an
African shanty town, encircled by a half-dozen giggling and cheering kids.
 My guess: I probably stuck out a little.  

Half
covered in dirt, mud and blood, I looked like a madman.  White, black,
brown you couldn’t exactly be sure at first glance.  But loony?
 Absolutely.  No question.

First
mission accomplished: There was now some distance between me and my former
captors.

Still, I
was running full-tilt with no destination in mind.  There had to be
somewhere to hide.  

If my merry
band of militants caught me, they may or may not kill me.  But, if they
didn’t kill me, they’d probably shoot my legs or cut off my feet or do
something that would have me later shopping at specialty apparel shops.
 And, despite my recent encounters with high levels of pain, it’s not
something that doesn’t bother me.  In fact, I’m terribly afraid of pain.
 No likey.  

But I had
begun to compartmentalize it, put it in a box and finger-tap it up to a high,
mental shelf for a while. Sure, it’d come tumbling down at some point, but
there were brief moments of escape from a constant, oppressive hurt.

A slight
degree safer, I was sure, just beyond the yelping and giggling around me, was
the sounds of pissed-off voices very close behind.

I needed to
get out of the sun and get some water.

The sun was
drying the mud to my skin and with my sweat trapped beneath it; I was quickly
beginning to overheat.  

Another cut
through a group of homes, this next trail looking like every other one before.
 On either side of me were with shacks made from panels of wood, metal,
plastic, whatever material there was available.  

The path
widened slightly, and here some residents were selling small items like
matches, sardines, soap and candles, one after the other, makeshift tables so
crammed together it was hard to tell where one seller’s space ended and another
began.  Something in my mind trilled, recognizing this image as familiar
and over the next few moments, as I closed and opened my eyes, the long strip
of Guinean street vendors changed—back and forth—into the cluster of cafes down
Sunset in Los Angeles.

I crossed
between two shacks and came to a skinny dirt roadway, no vehicles in sight but
their tracks were there, and picked up my pace some although still far from running
anymore.  My group of kids had dwindled by half, probably bored of my
ever-slowing trek through their village.  To my right, there was an old
man selling what looked like donut holes and my stomach put in a vote for
pulling an Artful Dodger.  Another makeshift table held tin cups full of
pineapple— something that would cure both my hunger and my thirst.  

A lone
woman walking ahead of me was carrying a plate on her head, and, feeling awful
about it, I reached in and pulled out a sack as I ran.  The cold felt good
in my hands and over the woman screaming at me, the one remaining kid running
next to me said something and motioned with his hands to tear the sack open.

Inside was
water and ice and my first gulp, so heavenly wet, but didn’t even seem to make
it to my throat, just absorbed in my dry lips and tongue.  The boy running
next to me held out his hand just as I was awkwardly trying to tilt the bag
toward my mouth, so I pulled the bag down in front of me, then scooped out a
couple finger length strips of ice from the cold water and handed them over.
 His smile grew threefold and, strangely, that beautiful expression did
more for me than the entire bag of water I sucked down.  

Just above
the roof-lines to my left, treetops began to peak out, so I cut between two
shacks toward a strip of forest about twenty feet ahead of me.  

There’d
been some bush out the window of the hut I’d awoken in but this seemed to be
thick and fuller.  My destination clear, my brain started focusing on the
next move.  The bush was a quick hide but not a long term plan.
 There had to be a phone around somewhere.  Maybe a police station or
Red Cross camp.  

“Is there a
phone nearby?” I asked my skinny little friend but he only placed his hand over
his mouth for a moment, gesturing, possibly that he didn’t understand what my
words meant.

Looking
back over my shoulder, I then asked him about a police station or medical
building and got the same response.

“What about
a bar?  Do you have a bar?”

The kid
looked at me strange and laughed.  Then a thought: I tried again with,
“Pub?  You have a pub?”

“Pub?” he
said, and his eyes lit up.  Chattering wildly, he tore off parallel to the
line of trees, toward the blazing sun, and I hesitated because the implied
safety and coolness of the trees was so compelling, and instead, I turned and
tried to keep up with my skinny little shaman.  But, turning away from the
promise of rest, exhaustion came down on me like a heavy, wool blanket and my
legs felt filled with cement.

The kid ran
like a wide receiver.  Darting in and around homes.  To him, this was
probably all a game.  For me, my life was in his hands.

Which is
why when he banked around a corner, then another, and then out of my sight
completely, I stumbled and stopped beside a pile of rotting garbage.  

“No, no…
where.?…”  

I sucked in
breaths that didn't cool the burning in my lungs then slumped to my knees, the
dirt hard as stone.  

Nothing
left.  

My hands
fell to my sides, and I could feel tiny rivulets of blood trickling from my
forearms, dripping then lapped up by the dry earth around me.
   

Trying to
get a full breath, I tipped my head back and could actually feel the heat of
the sun on the roof of my mouth.  Filling my lungs again and again, deep
breaths that rocked my entire body back and forth, still, the oxygen wasn’t
coming fast enough, and I grew dizzy, my mind spinning, the world spinning,
around and around, then end over end, I dropped to the dirt ground sideways,
then flopped onto my back and faced the cloudless sky.  

The sun was
directly overhead and growing larger by the second. 

Once again,
like days earlier and thousands of miles away back in Pavan's uncle's
garbage-filled back yard, it had singled me out.  And, curious, it was coming
down for a closer look.

“I would
guess…” I croaked, hoping that the sound of my own voice might force my mind to
right itself, stop the downward spiral toward passing out.  “I’d wager
they were having lunch then, ol’ Mike and Ike.  Looks like a noon sun, if
I had to guess.  Maybe late breakfast, this would make sense...  They
seemed… a very busy sort.”