The Road Out of Hell (10 page)

Sanford sighed in resignation. There was no point in continuing to defy his uncle, who had only stopped beating him because he had gotten tired out from it—he would eventually get rested back up again. Sanford reached his hand forward as far as the chain would allow and picked up the pen. He could just lean far enough to write his name, if he strained against the chains until they nearly cut his arms. He wondered how Uncle Stewart had known how to measure that distance so accurately.

Some last trace of rebellion swelled up in him and he could not resist the chance to employ the deepest sarcasm that he could muster when he finally signed,
“Your Sanford.”
As if he was anything of the kind. It felt good for a second or two.

Once his name was filled in and the bogus letter completed, he pulled away from the tension of the chains and lay back down in the pit. His defiant façade quickly melted, and in its place fatigue overwhelmed him. He lay his head across one arm and fell asleep.

By the time Sanford woke up again, the moon had shifted position by a couple of hours’ worth. He started to sit up, but soreness snagged him like a fishhook. In spite of the sensation, he also realized that his chains had been removed. He glanced around and saw that Uncle Stewart had retrieved the signed letter. It became clear that he had unlocked Sanford’s chains without bothering to wake him up and tell him he could go inside the house.

But that left Sanford to wonder—was that what he was expected to do? Wake up and come stumbling on inside? Head into his little room and just finish out the night? Or had Uncle Stewart left him out there because he was still mad over Sanford’s bit of defiance and didn’t want him in the house? Sanford felt a flush of anger and frustration. By now he ought to know how to read this one. Hell, all he did all day long was to study Uncle Stewart and look for ways to avoid setting off his madness. The key was to please him, of course. But that could be exasperatingly difficult. Like now. What the hell was he supposed to
do?

He climbed to his feet, but a rush of dizziness immediately overwhelmed his aching carcass with a rush of tingling. He was quickly overcome by a beautiful floating sensation that became stronger and ever more pleasurable until something hit him hard on the side of his head and his shoulder. His body twitched a few times until he recovered enough to realize that he had fallen flat to the ground. This time he got up as slowly as he could, pausing twice to take a breath before moving on. He was finally able to stand his ground by planting his feet at shoulder width and holding both arms out to the sides.

It was only at that moment that he realized that the door to the coop was standing wide open.
That’s good, though, right
? His long-sleeved shirt was hanging on the door, another invitation for him to leave.
Maybe.
Or, perhaps, a trap to lure him out? He could see why Uncle Stewart might deliberately do that, so that he could use it as an excuse to explode again. But then did he ever really need an excuse? Whether or not Sanford gave him a “reason,” nothing could stop him once he felt the need to explode.

It occurred to him to wonder, what if he wasn’t supposed to leave at all?

What if this is some kind of test?

He asked himself why Uncle Stewart would test him, but then maybe the answer was that he might do it to see if it was safe to leave Sanford alone at the house. He had already done it several times, but what if he was getting nervous about it? No, that didn’t seem right either. Every time Uncle Stewart left the place he warned him not to leave, assuring him that he would punish him hard “and I will do it terribly,” whatever that meant.

Sanford tried not to ask himself what else there was for Uncle Stewart to do, but failed to avoid the question. His survival instinct chucked it at him like a well-thrown spear. It spiked into the ground and stood quivering in front of him.
He can do plenty. He can use everything he knows about how to dispose of a dead body, while the body is still living. That’s what.

Sanford was under orders to never forget the Two Magic Words: “asset” and “liability.” Uncle Stewart had made him memorize them while he carefully explained that the only way for Sanford to retain his value around the place was for him to always,
always
be certain that whatever he was doing made him an asset. Not a liability. Every time Uncle Stewart decided that it was time for one of the new boys to leave, he always talked about how the boy was becoming a liability. All Uncle Stewart needed to do was to start looking at Sanford like he was someone who could not be trusted alone at the chicken ranch. Dread sent a wave of nausea through him that nearly dropped him to his knees. He stopped in his tracks and took several deep breaths until he steadied himself inside.

It was then that the strange sensation hit him. Detachment. Like half of him was his mother. He noticed that his legs began to move beneath him, that they turned his back to the farmhouse and began to walk down the long drive toward the road. It was nothing that he would have dared to do on his own, but here his legs were off and walking as if by themselves. Shock went through him like shrieking birds. The urges to scream with laughter and to shit himself in mortal terror battled for his attention and cancelled one another out, leaving him numb to almost anything except the very interesting knowledge that his legs were continuing to walk down the drive, away from both the farmhouse and the chains in the henhouse pit. He felt pretty sure that he was expected to be present at one place or the other.

I’ll just check to make sure that the gate is all closed up for the night. Uncle Stewart wouldn’t want the goats getting into the road again.

He reached the gate, which he already knew to be closed and locked because that was what he had been doing when Uncle Stewart jumped him. Now he stopped with his back to the house, made a little point out of jiggling the lock.
Just checking, Uncle Stewart.
He pretended to cough, and dropped his head just enough to glance back toward the house. No lanterns burning. No silhouette at the window.

He reached down and slipped the lock out of the chain, pulled the chain from the gate.
Making sure the chain is fastened right, Uncle Stewart!
A powerful shiver ran down his back. It felt like somebody poured a bucket of ice under his shirt. He opened the gate, just a few inches, not like a defiant bastard. Not like a worthless son of a bitch. But the gate kept on going all by itself. It opened until the space was just wide enough for his legs to turn his helpless torso sideways and slide his body through.
Checking for the goats out here, Uncle Stewart! Thought 1 heard one!

But that excuse evaporated the instant that he closed the gate behind himself, then reached down and picked up the chain, joined the gate to the fence, and reached around to click the lock closed. Was he beyond the point of return?
Just needed to stretch my legs, Uncle Stewart! Didn’t want to bother you!

Nah. That wouldn’t work, and he knew it. From this point on, there would be no purpose in trying to explain himself. He was off the grounds. At night. Without Uncle Stewart’s permission.

Sanford heard a sound that was almost like the rapid flapping of large wings, flick, flick, flick, flick, flick, and vaguely noticed the landscape speeding by while the knowledge gradually came over him that the flicking sound came from the balls of his feet and that he was sprinting down the road faster than he had ever run in his life. His lower half was still his mother, obeying nobody’s orders but its own. Fleeing for its life while the rest of him went helplessly along for the ride.

His skin suddenly felt like it was freezing despite his exertion. He ventured a glance back without breaking stride and saw that there was no lantern appearing anywhere around the house, no figure at the door, no outraged Stewart Northcott bellowing into the air. It should have been reassuring, but Sanford’s upper half still needed two mouths so that one could roar with laughter while the other screamed in mortal terror. His lower half refused to slow down.

His feet left the hard-packed dirt roadway and flew across the undeveloped parcels of land. He ran without any greater goal than escaping the ranch, escaping Uncle Stewart, escaping the beatings and the chains and the pit. He leaped over a spiny yucca plant and landed on the other side with the sand churning behind him. He ran for a minute or two minutes or five minutes or ten minutes until he came to the river wash. He was traveling to the south and east of the ranch, moving away from Wineville, away from Los Angeles, away from Riverside, toward nothing but miles and miles of scrub land that was too dry to support anything but cactus and weeds. Killing land.

His legs finally stopped at the edge of the dry river wash. Evidence of past flash floods was plain in the three-foot drop to a strip of smoothed-out sand that was about fifty or sixty feet wide. The trickle of water moving down the center was the pale remnant of the mighty swells that roared through after every rainfall up in the mountains. If he left that watershed and moved across the countryside in the daylight, he would soon die. If he followed the water northeast toward the mountains, he would move from an empty desert environment to an empty mountain environment. If he followed it southwest, he might eventually end up in San Diego—if he didn’t starve first.

Or he could turn and head into Wineville and ask someone for help.

Except that anybody he asked for help was not going to want to call the police on his behalf unless he told them what was going on. And what could he say? What could he tell the police in Wineville, or the police anywhere? What could he tell
anybody
that wouldn’t make them ask more questions and more questions until he had to reveal the real reasons, the only reasons that would make sense for turning himself in as an illegal alien and begging to be deported back home?

The moon passed by overhead for another two hours, while his head swam with questions that he could not answer. Even the ones that he could answer in some fashion were enough to keep stopping him cold:
Once they know, what will they think of you? Once they know, why would they help you? Once they know, why would they care at all about a creature like you?

It wasn’t just that he was a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch whose parents had passed him off to a monster. It was more like those vampire magazine stories, where once the vampire bites you, then you’ve got it in your blood. You’re one of them.

Uncle Stewart made him lie in the bed. It didn’t matter how long he fought. But how could he ever prove that to anybody? Or prove that he tried to fight and only gave in because Uncle Stewart was bigger and ten times crazier and shame did not exist in him? Uncle Stewart knew how to make Sanford hold still while he kept on stroking him and stroking him until Sanford’s body could not resist and he spurted all over and Uncle Stewart laughed and called him his little darling in a tone of voice that made the name sound like filth.

But he had done it and could not deny the evidence. Uncle Stewart had him dead to rights. He had gone and proven his uncle and his mother both right. He was a piece of shit and a bastard son of a bitch.

Sanford’s legs had stiffened underneath him again while he sat and racked his brains. He stood and stretched, rotating his arms and twisting his back from side to side. He turned in a slow circle, scanning the night in every direction. He was stalling. The answer was plain: it made no difference what direction he took. It made no difference where he went. And it could not possibly matter, in the long run, who he told about his escape. Nothing could keep the adult world from sending him back to that place except a little bit of the truth. It wouldn’t take much: like a concentrated poison, a little would do the job. But there was no way to slow down the flow. Once it began, how would he keep it all from coming out?

He knew that any time people had the chance to talk about screwing, they would. They might whisper and they might speak behind closed doors and they might laugh like it was a joke or they might cluck in disapproval; but one thing for sure, they were going to talk and talk and talk and then they were going to hate you because that’s what good people do to perverts. And now Uncle Stewart had turned him into a stinking pervert himself. He could deny it all he wanted, but they both saw the evidence. He would never be able to deny it in a way that people would believe. He wondered if it was the result of growing up under Winnie’s thumb, but he had never been any good as a liar. He could never hold anybody’s gaze while he lied to them, the way he saw Uncle Stewart do.

Now, there was a maestro of liars, spewing utter shit and magically getting everybody to agree that it smelled
exactly
like roses in springtime. Sanford had already watched his uncle lie to people more times than he could count, and he still had no idea how he did it with such ease and confidence. One thing he knew for sure, he never wanted to stand next to Uncle Stewart and try to get people to believe that Sanford was telling the truth and that his uncle was the one who was lying.

So the question remained.
What do I do?
Run? Where could he run? He turned in a circle. Run to the mountains where there was no one to help him? Run down the river wash where there was no one to help him? Run across open scrub desert where there was no one to help him? Or if he truly wanted to spit in the face of the Devil, he could run all the way back to Los Angeles, where the only people he knew were the ones who had raised up this Gordon Stewart Northcott thing, the one who called Sanford his darling and now had him boxed in from every angle.