The Mentor (11 page)

Years
earlier, I’d read an article about what some call “genetic memory” and, having
held similar beliefs most of my life, I bought into a lot of it.  This
faded blueprint of human behavior seemed to hold the answers to questions about
why people do the things they do.  The more conventional, over-thought
theories, at least to me, those didn’t have answers that rang quite as true.

Maybe
staring out at the ocean was a genetic memory; the first creature climbing out
of the water, onto land, taking that initial lungful of air, casting an
over-the-shoulder glance at his former home.  

What had it
been thinking?  Probably something about he’d have to go back that way if
he ever want to get laid again.  

No bars on
land yet.

Barely
rested, I pulled on the next rung and it came apart in my fingers.

My left
hand darted out to nab the twine cord opposite to the one in my other hand and
I held tight.

Still, I
could feel myself on the verge of falling.

Looking up,
it appeared the rope in my right hand had begun to come loose, slipping from
its mooring near the top of the rock face, and wooden rungs began to rain down
on top of me as they broke free.

Banging
against the rock wall, I jerked downward, little drops, and then bigger, and
soon enough, there would be a long plunge to the bottom.  

I was
easily a hundred fifty feet in the air.

For the
second time in just a few hours, I was about to fall to my death.  On the
whole, not a very good day.

Jerking,
banging, reaching for rungs that came loose the moment I grabbed then, I glimpsed
at the other rope.  It looked secure, so I stretched out for it again.

That's when
I began to fall hard, so panicked and flailing, I clamped my free hand onto the
other rope, and it gnawed deeply into my palm.

Didn’t
matter.  I gripped tighter with my left hand and it hurt like hell but once my
grip began to fasten, I pushed off with my knee and reached over with my right,
holding with all the strength I had left.

The rain of
wooden rungs was slowing but those remaining few were really beginning to hurt,
falling all the way from the top.

One of them
hit the shoe hanging over my shoulder and exploded into dust and splinters.
 Not wanting to be beamed unconscious, I held onto the rope, and tucked my
head into the crook of my arms.

Eventually,
everything quieted.  My battered body was clinging to the rope at the side
of the rock face, and it seemed if I were very careful, I had a chance to make
it back down uninjured.

But then
what?  Being stuck at the bottom again with no path to safety wasn’t a
choice worth making.

I looked up
blinking away dust and saw only dimming sky and a long wall of rock.  This
rope no longer sharing the load with its twin but, out of more reasonable
choices, I slowly moved up toward the cliff's edge, hand over hand, hand over
hand.

  Stopping
often, it must have taken the better part of an hour to make the rest of the
climb.  I’d never been so exhausted physically, mentally and emotionally.
 More than once, the idea of just falling appealed to me.
   

Finally at
the top, palms chapped bloody, the muscles of my arms now jelly, and I pulled
myself up onto the dark shelf.  

I lay on my
back for several minutes and found myself fighting off sleep.  I’m a bit of a
toss-and-turner.  Not so good with the two hundred foot drop next to me.

Finally,
sitting up and looking around, trying to pull shapes out of the dusk light, it
took me a moment to work out what I was staring at.  

The small
house—well, not quite a house—was carved from ugly white stucco.  There
were no shutters on either window that straddled the door, and on the roof
there were so many antennas, dishes, and wires, they’d never have to worry a
second about bird shit.

I smiled
and croaked: “Well, they got cable.”

Slowly, I
stumbled toward the Quonset hut, not seeing any signs of life inside.  I
didn’t care about life.  But a bottle of water or beer or juice would be
good.  Preferably beer.  Yeah, I’d earned a beer.

When I got
within fifteen feet of the steel door, it swung open and this huge man, like a
Sumo wrestler, with a large black duffle under each arm, came out.  He
lifted his head and stopped dead in his tracks, his massive legs momentarily
shifting as if he were about to bolt back inside.

I must have
looked like hell because, this man who was easily three times my size, looked
scared of
me
.  That thought had me laughing, actually laughing, and
I couldn't stop for nearly a minute.

Frozen to
the threshold, he nodded slowly.

Nothing
left, I just nodded back and smiled weakly.

Answering
the question I’d been pondering for the entire afternoon, he said:

“Aloha.”

“YOU
SHOULDN'T DRINK SO fast,” the man who’d introduced himself as Allejo said to
me.  “It’s not good for the digestion.”  

He reached
for my tattered shirt and lifted it.

“See?"
 Briefly, he hesitated, put my shirt back down then said:  “You’re
belly’s getting all distended already.  Or, okay, maybe you're just a
little chubby.  But, it
will
get distended if you keep that up.”

One look at
my new friend and it was clear he knew all about digestion.  Even so, I
couldn’t slow down—with the combination of a near lava bath, then an actual
salt
water
bath, I was dry as a dead man’s whisper.

Allejo
hadn’t asked too many questions, and I appreciated that.  Surely, he was
still assessing the strange man who’d come to his door but decided that in my
condition—or in any condition—I posed no serious threat.  He was kind,
welcoming and hospitable.

Working for
the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, he had come out to this station earlier in
the day to pick up some audit trails from the vast array of equipment in the
hut.  Allejo explained to me—if nothing but to fill the void of silence as
I sucked down water—that despite the garden of antennas on the roof, the
microwave transmitter between this satellite observation station and the main
hub had stopped working a few weeks earlier.  He rattled on for a few
minutes about craters and vents, but all I wanted was to sleep.

Inquiring
about the nearest motel or convenience store within walking distance pulled a
smile out of the big man.  

“You could
walk there but with the air quality and the heat… well, you’d probably get
eaten by buzzards.”

“You have
buzzards in Hawaii?”

“Maybe,”
Allejo said.  “But, I think if you see a buzzard, maybe you’re in the sort
of condition that you’d never be able to tell anyone about it.”

“Good point.”

He looked
to the door, then around the room.  If I were a thief, the electronic
equipment in the room would probably pick me up several grand. Of course, I
didn't have any means to haul anything away…

Of course,
this was not my plan, but I felt as he looked at the ragged, desperate
stranger, these were the thoughts going through his mind.  

“I’m not
sure you can stay in this place, here,” he said, eyes not meeting mine.

“You know,
Allejo, you haven’t asked me how some crazy bastard like me got all the way
out
here.”

He
shrugged, his eyes went off somewhere, leaving me behind, and then another grin
pulled to his lips.

“You opened
the door, let me inside and gave me your water,” I said.  I tried to catch his
eye, but he seemed to be looking at someone in the room who wasn’t there.
 “But that's it, huh?  Not the curious type, then.”

“Questions
are only words looking for more words,” he said, blinked, and was back with me.
 “Words can be deceptive, Dexter.”

“Not true,
my round friend,” I said, drawing a laugh from him.  “Words are pure and
perfect.  It’s just the person who uses them that can be deceptive.”

He placed a
large paw on my shoulder and gave me a squeeze.  “See? That’s what I'm
saying,” he said and nodded toward the door.  “I know everything I need to
know about you now.  So, I have no questions for you.”

“Good,” I
said, following him out the door.  “I have plenty of my own already that I
don’t have answers to.”

Allejo
drove a cherry red Jeep Wrangler.  A man of his size, easily three hundred
pounds, I would have expected maybe a truck, a van… school bus.  

He pressed
his body into the driver’s seat and, surprisingly, slipped in much easier than
I would have expected.  It was as if he’d broken in the vehicle like a
favorite pair of tennis shoes.

We drove
across the dirt heading toward the flat horizon.  Slowly, the flat line ahead
of us began to bubble then eventually grew into a scrubby, ragged line.

Soon, I
could just make out a wide cluster of trees.  

Allejo
explained that the part of the lava flow we were driving on had been formed in
the early eighties.  The stucco hut had sensors in the air, in the ground,
and even in the water below.

“The
sensors in the water have been blinky for a long while, though.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, the
only way down is a rope ladder but one look at it and no one with more than
half a brain would trust his life on that thing.”

“I’ll keep
that in mind,” I said.  "Or at least half of it."

I wondered
if Allejo had thought I was some gangbanger or drug fiend the first time he’d
seen me; someone out to rip him or the hut off.  Now, convinced I was
harmless (or a brain damaged idiot), he smiled happily to himself and hummed
along to a rock radio station

“You not a
big Don Ho fan, Allejo?”

“You know,”
he nodded his huge head along with the aggressive music.  “With the
impolite, crude nature of people these days, I suppose Mr. Ho’s name is the
subject of some jokes; for some reason that just came to mind as you said it
like that.”  His head bobbing slowed some.  “I hadn’t really thought
of it before.”

I winced.
 “I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful.  Seriously, I—“

“Nah,
you’re cool.  It seems like you’re a bit of a jokester guy, though.
 A funny guy.  So, it sounded a bit like the beginning of a joke
coming out of your mouth,” he smiled.  “Jokes are good.”

“They’ve
gotten me this far.  Even saved my ass a couple times.”

"I've
seen your ass," he said.  "You should maybe cut back on the
jokes."

"Okay,
who's the funny guy now?" I said and laughed myself into a coughing fit.

"You've
got a kind of a big butt."

"Yeah, 
yeah.  I got it."

"All
I'm saying," he said and we laughed together, eventually both falling into
a comfortable, pleasant silence.

Twenty
minutes later, when we finally got to a road lined with tall palms on one side,
he sped up heading toward town.  I asked if he could recommend any place
to stay.

“I know
just the place for a guy like you.”

“A guy like
me?”  I leaned against the door of his jeep and eyeballed him as I chewed
away a piece of flayed skin from my hand.  “And what kind of guy is that?”

He hummed
for a moment more, then: “A guy who falls from the sky.”  This tickled
him, and he laughed at his own joke.  He seemed to like
his
jokes
(Respectfully, I refrained from turning the ass joke back on him).

I wondered
if he’d seen me parachute in.  But, if he had, he likely wouldn’t have
been so startled at my sudden visit.

The jeep
bumped along a little faster, the road getting progressively better as the sun
finally fell below the horizon.  I could see a few lights wink on ahead of
us, in the distance.

Rolling
down the window further, the night air was refreshing—tasting a little like
vegetation.  But it wasn’t unpleasant.  As if each breath was a small
sip of life.

We took a
turn sharper than seemed safe and then the big man spun the wheel, using only
an index finger, righting the jeep again.

“The rains,
when they come, sometimes keep coming,” he said as an apology.  “It messes
all the roads up.  Sometimes they disappear altogether.  But—” He
tapped me on the shoulder with an open palm.  “There is always a road.
 Sometimes you just have to look harder for it.”

Allejo was
a cross between Don Ho, Andre the Giant and the guy from Kung Fu.  I liked
him.

The packed
dirt road soon became asphalt, which then led us to the back of a sleepy
subdivision.  After a couple streets, our turns came quicker.

When we
finally arrived, he’d pulled to a stop in front of a large, two-story white
house.  The rusting iron gate was choked with vines, and every window was
a black hole.  Allejo, he didn’t even look at it.

“My uncle’s
place.  You can stay here for the night.”