The Mentor

by Pat Connid

  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 be
en 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.

  Arching the back. That’s got to be the secret. Lessen the distance from shoulder blade to butt, bring the arms around. A moment later, on my side, breathing in dirt floor, sweating profusely, the mud beginning to cake around the right half of my face and neck, I curved back my spine and tried again.

  I’d rounded my back so much, it felt as though the bones were grinding into chalk dust, little bits of the spine spitting into the surrounding muscle tissue. The brilliant idea was then to attempt to squeeze my butt through the loop, and I actually got about halfway before getting stuck, knowing for certain if my back were to tire and straighten even slightly, both wrists would break for certain.

  Luckily, at this point, my body was drenched in sweat.

  Sure, I was out of shape and it was probably a hundred and fifteen in the mud shack, but aside from looking like one side of my face had been dipped in coco, my body was soaked as if I'd just come inside from a walk in a hurricane.

  So with the slick and slimy skin, I actually got my arms around my overstuffed rump.

  “Cool,” I squeaked out, my bound wrists pressing hard against the bottom of my knees, which were still tender from a recent trip to the islands on the other side of the planet.

  Biggest problem—aside from “deathblow by rifle stock” if Mike, Ike or their friend walked back in—is that I hadn’t thought it through beyond the butt. Frankly, it had stunned me to even get this far. But, now, I was smashed into a ball like some sort of rolly-polly bug. There would have been peals of laughter coming from me if my lungs could take in any more than a spoon of air, because it was completely ludicrous that it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to get my legs through my arms. As if I could thread my ham hocks out between my hands!

  If the three stooges start rattling the door, I’m dead. I’ve got to go way forward and hell no if I could pull my hands back to where they were before.

  I laid back, wrists under my knees, and allowed myself to try to slow the heaving of my chest, but there wasn’t a ton of time. After a moment, unable to take a full breath, I was a little dizzy from my blood’s drop in O2 saturation.

  I tried to turn back on my side but the other rope, the one around my foot like a leash, caught my ankle and jerked me back.

  My mind snapped back for its oxygen-starved time out, but it had, thankfully, picked up an idea on the return trek.

  Walking with my butt, arms strapped tight to my thighs, I scuttled as quick as I could to the rope at the wall. The tip of the rope by my calf had been capped with a metal sleeve like one of those things at the end of shoelaces, securing it to my ankle.

  But maybe where the rope meets the wall… maybe that was the weak link.

  I inched closer, carving a rut in the dirt with my tailbone and got a good look at my leash. Upon closer inspection, it appeared the rope was fastened to an iron spike in the shape of a sewing needle, three or four inches thick-- the tip of which had been hammered deep enough into the ground to pierce the Earth’s core. Certainly, I wasn’t the first captive ever to be held in this room.

  Still, it was worth a try, so I scuttled onto my back, my heels going up the wall and my fingers flexed forward, groping for the rope, about six inches from the wall. I finally got a good grip and tried to push away from the wall with everything my legs would give me.

  Nothing.

  So, I did what any rational adult would do with the lower half of his body halfway up a wall, wrists red-raw from rope, and nearly covered head to ass in mud. I yelled and thrashed my feet like an infant that had just shit itself.

  My heart jumped at the sound of the door latch disengaging behind me and, terrified, I held perfectly still, waiting for the blow. Or maybe if I didn’t move, they wouldn’t see me trying to make an escape, just maybe doing my “special exercises.”

  Frozen in place… Nothing. No yelling and no smack to the noggin with the business end of a Kalashnikov rifle

  Craning my neck around, I then saw the sound of the metal “latch.” The Sterno tin had bobbled and moved. It seemed my childish tantrum had shifted the wall, and this had bumped the tin closer to the edge of the flimsy counter top.

  My eye this time on the can, I rose up on my elbows and kicked again. As the tin inched forward, I kept at it, kicking and kicking. Although that initial ef
fort likely took the better part of ten minutes, the sweat-soaked and fevered concentration it required made it feel as though just seconds had slipped away from me.

  I had to stop three times to rest, my entire body soaked in sweat, the dirt caked to that sweat, so I looked like some panicked, captive, felonious Gingerbread Man attempting prison break.

  When the tin began to teeter on the edge of the counter, I could hardly believe my eyes. Then, success! The can dropped, flipped a couple times and landed face down in the dirt.

  “Dammit!”

  Stronger through my anger, and fortified by my small victory with the tin, I pressed my heels into the wall and yanked down on my arms, sliding them back to where they started, behind me. I then flipped onto my stomach and inched down the wall, using my knees and my chin.

  Within reach of the Sterno can, I nabbed it with my brow and tugged it toward me with my forehead, its contents leaving a dirty, blue snail-trail on the floor. That was my fuel. That’s what I wanted.

  A few moments later, I’d moved the tin to where my fingers could grasp it, and spun backwards, fumbling with it until I could drizzle the remainder of the contents between my hands. I felt the still-warm gel ooze down my bindings and drip onto my wrists. Then, I leaned up on my knees trying to get the fuel sloshed onto the other side of the bindings, realizing somewhat darkly that there’d be no way to not get the goop on my skin.

  This was really going to suck.

  Scanning my close proximity, I didn’t see a lighter, matches or even two convenient pieces of flint to bang together. The Laurel and Hardy movie on the television was silent because either the sound was busted or just turned down, so wordlessly, both men on the screen were laughing wildly, mocking my half-success. I felt a strong urge to kick the tube in.

  Then the thought came to me that if I did, I could use the glass to concentrate the sun… except, with wooden shades dropped, there was no sun coming into the room. And even if there were, what were the odds I could hold up a good piece of thick glass with my toes while focusing the sun’s rays onto my wrists? Yeah, not so good.