The Road Out of Hell (16 page)

He sank into the story and reveled in the adventure. An Old Scout delivered him from that place for an amount of time that Sanford could only guess. He must have been too happy: the sound of Uncle Stewart’s Buick roadster split the moment like a well-thrown hatchet.

Uncle Stewart had some way of sensing when Sanford started to relax or feel too safe. He was some kind of all-seeing magician who could sweep in without warning any time things needed to get grim and fearful, fast. It killed Sanford, the way that Uncle Stewart homed in on him so often when he tried to take a break and read. Now loud music blared from the open car, augmented by the happy chatter from a boy’s voice. Another young guest, then. Uncle Stewart had been out on patrol again, hunting for fresh meat, as he called it. It appeared to be the usual homecoming around the old bird ranch. Except that this time Sanford realized he was hearing American English, not the accent of one of his uncle’s migrant boys. He jumped up, dropped the book next to the back wall to keep it out of sight, and stepped out into the main yard just as the road-weary roadster pulled to a squeaking stop in front of the house.

Neither Uncle Stewart nor his passenger had spotted Sanford yet, but he could hear them clearly. The boy still sounded happy enough, for the moment. That happy part might go on for a few moments more. Sanford knew the drill. “Sanford!” Uncle Stewart called out, looking around the yard. They locked eyes. “Oh. There you are. C’mon over here, I’ve got someone I want you to meet!”

Sanford felt his head drop forward while the air expelled from his chest. It took an effort to raise it back up, then take a deep breath and start for the car. The boy kept up the same patter that he had been delivering ever since they had pulled in off the road. He was small and scrawny, the way Uncle Stewart loved them. He looked like he might have been nine years old, maybe ten. “So, why are we stopping here, while we still have more to go, you know sooner or later my mom is gonna get mad as hell so we should get to the ranch, you know, as soon as we can.”

“Sanford!” Uncle Stewart called, ignoring the boy. “Yeah! Right over here! There you are. Sanford, I have a new playmate for you. Say hello to him. His name is Walter Collins.”

Sanford felt his blood drain to his feet. “Wait. Walter Collins?”

“Hi,” Walter said eagerly. “You’re Sanford, right? I thought you worked at a ranch.”

“Yeah. Hi. Chicken ranch,” Sanford answered, then turned to Uncle Stewart in surprise. “Walter Collins?”

“That’s his name.”

“I’ve heard you say that name. Don’t you already know him?”

“I do!” Uncle Stewart replied, then turned and play-whispered to Walter, “He’s so jealous. Like a wife!”

Walter nodded. “He does know us. My mom and me.”

“You know their family, Uncle Stewart?”

“Now, now—not that much.”

“My mom met him that one time at the store.”

“You see, Jealous Wife, a couple of years back, I worked in the grocery store where Walter used to come and run errands for his mother. She almost never did the shopping herself.”

“That’s it,” Sanford nodded. “I remember. You’ve told me about him, Uncle Stewart.”

“She trusted me to bring back the right change,” Walter replied, looking around the property. “Uh, there aren’t any horses out here though, right? This isn’t the real ranch though, right?”

“Well, actually, Walter,” Sanford began, “we don’t have any ridingtype animals out here.” Sanford felt completely thrown by the arrival of this boy who certainly appeared to be headed for the victim shed, but who already knew Uncle Stewart. And if that boy’s mother had met Uncle Stewart at one time, then surely this boy had to be returned home unharmed. Despite his confusion, he felt relieved for the boy, for himself.

“So this isn’t the actual ranch then, right, Stewart? Can we go there now? Y’know, so we can have time to do some riding before I have to get back?”

Uncle Stewart just fixed Sanford with a funny little grin and wiggled his eyebrows. “This is the ranch, Walter,” he said without looking at the boy. That was all it took for Sanford to know that the boy was doomed.

“But there’s nothing out here except for those pens. What are those, rabbits?”

“Yeah,” Sanford replied, baffled by this turn of events. “We have some rabbits, but mostly chickens. There’s several hundred.” He saw it flash in Walter’s eyes then, just for a moment, and it was clear as day. Some part of Walter now realized that he was in deep trouble. When the boy spoke again, his voice was only an imitation of the carefree boy who was ready for a pony ride.

“Is it the people down the road, then? The ones with the horses?” Walter asked. His voice broke on the word “road” and gave away his nerves, but Uncle Stewart and Sanford both pretended not to notice. Sanford knew without a shadow of a doubt that the boy was faking it. He recalled the old expression “whistling past the graveyard,” and here was this boy doing that very thing. Because Walter not only knew: he realized that if he displayed fear, it would only draw more danger. Sanford could see that Walter intended to keep it up until he could find some way to make all of this be all right. As if the horses were actually hidden just around the corner of a chicken coop and that Walter might still get a pony ride out of all this.

“Walter, it’s time to tell you the truth,” Uncle Stewart began in a solemn tone. “Your mother has been very, very,
very
angry with you, for a long time now. I don’t want to say that she is so sick of you that she has actually started to hate your guts. That’s
not
what I’m trying to say, so forget about it. Don’t worry, she doesn’t hate you. I promise you that your mother does not hate you.” His voice tone sounded like that of a kindly madman. “She’s just tired of you. She doesn’t want you any more, Walter, and that’s the ugly truth of it.”

“Huh? What do you mean?” Walter began, but Uncle Stewart’s single statement was enough to burst the dam that the boy was using to keep his fears pent up inside. His looming apprehensions took over his emotions; all control left him. He began to wail like a police siren. “Where are the horses? You said there were horses! My mom wants me at home! You better get me back home to my mom!”

At that point Sanford fixed a stare at Uncle Stewart that clearly challenged him.
What are you doing here with a boy who knows you—whose
mother
knows you?

Uncle Stewart got it. His face clouded. “Hey, Sanford! I am gonna fuck this kid until I get tired of him, and then I’m going to strangle him to death.”

“What?”
Walter shouted. “What did you say?”

Stewart casually added with a grin, “And if his mother shows up around here, I’m gonna choke her until her eyes bug out.”

“What, my mother? Let’s go right now! I don’t want to stay here any more!”

Uncle Stewart broke out laughing. “Well then, stop acting like a big baby and I won’t have to scare you like a big baby, is that clear?”

“What? You mean you were—you were just scaring me?”

“Sure I was! And tell me the truth now. It worked, didn’t it?”

“Well, don’t do that! I don’t like that! I want to ride a pony like you said, or I want to go home.”

Sanford felt himself gain another twenty or thirty pounds right there on the spot. He caught the boy’s attention with a look and quickly muttered, under his breath, “Walter. Just go along with everything he says. It’ll be easier that way.”

“Sanford, what are you saying to Walter?”

“Nothing.” He turned to walk away, quietly adding to Walter, “A lot easier.” He kept on walking without looking back again, on his way back to the hidden spot behind the feed room where he had left his western book.

“Sanford! Sleep out in the feed room for a day or two,” Uncle Stewart called after him.

Sanford raised his arm without looking back, then dropped it again and kept on going. It was so heavy that it must have weighed forty or fifty pounds all by itself. He was hungrier than ever to escape into the world of An Old Scout, but there was a new problem: that world had a strict code of values; there, the thing to do was to prove that you were a man and stand up for what was right.

Sanford knew that he was the opposite of what any of the great western writers would recognize as a man. He felt the gigantic hole in his life caused by his inability to go after Uncle Stewart with the sort of courage and skill that An Old Scout described so well. His frail body had lost a great deal in the year and a half since he had been brought to the place. He had not grown taller as far as he could tell, and his skinny arms could never be counted on against an adult male—especially after today, when they had become so heavy to lift.

He did not know the particular method that Uncle Stewart employed to silence Walter, but he heard no more shouts or cries. By the time Sanford reached the feed room and stepped behind the rear wall, there were no sounds coming from the ranch house at all. Just the ambient buzz from millions of insects, all of them drunk on sunlight and heat. He reached down and picked up the book from the dry ground. There was nothing to disturb his reading, but everything that the realm of sound failed to convey to him was supplied by his imagination. He could have written the script to the horror show that was just beginning inside the house for that boy.

But he knows him,
Sanford reminded himself. That meant that he had to let him go and he did not dare be too hard on him. If he shoved the wire and rough objects into that boy’s rear end as he had done to Sanford, the blood would be there for a long time, a dead giveaway. Other adults would get involved for sure, at that point. Even Uncle Stewart had to understand that much, and he did not want his little party to end. He would use plenty of petroleum jelly with the boy, and that was something. It was a lot.

What the hell is wrong with Uncle Stewart?
He was too smart to make a mistake like bringing home a boy who knew him, one whose mother had even met him. How could he imagine that Walter’s family would just shrug and forget about him? But then it occurred to him that Winnie had managed to shrug and forget Sanford just that easily. A few fake letters dictated by Uncle Stewart were all it had taken. Why shouldn’t Uncle Stewart expect to get away with it again?

But Sanford knew that most women were not like Winnie. Winnie’s brother Stewart knew it as well, but for some reason he was not using his head about this boy. Another flush of shame went through him over the thrill of hope that came from seeing Uncle Stewart do something so careless. Sure, it would be bad for the boy, bad for Sanford too, if the authorities came. It would probably be very bad for a while. But even if he had committed crimes against nature just to stay alive under Uncle Stewart’s threats, he had never hurt anybody. Sooner or later, somebody would have to see that. Once people calmed down a little, surely they would see the gigantic difference between the two of them. He tried to swallow the idea and failed. Tried again. Failed again.

This time when he looked down once again at the cover of An Old Scout’s book, the illustration had no power over him. It seemed childish. The story itself and all of its dire emergencies suddenly struck him as a tiresome waste of time. “An Old Scout,” he said the name out loud. Without warning, the thought flashed through him:
Jesus Christ. What a stupid name.

His flash of anger surprised him, but the question did not go away: why would some guy go to the trouble of writing a whole book and then not use his own name? And how did the hero get that name, “Young Wild West,” anyway? For that to be true, his last name would have to be “West,” and his parents decided to name him “Young,” and for the middle name they decided to throw in “Wild” in case he might want to be a famous scout one day, and, lo and behold, there was the famous western author, “An Old Scout,” right there handy to write down the many adventures of “Young Wild West.”

A cold flush of self-awareness washed through him when he realized how foolish he had been to wallow in that false world. He had swallowed its bait like a free lunch. The worst of it was the accompanying realization that Uncle Stewart was right: Sanford had been reading trash. That one stuck a pitchfork in his middle and twisted the tines.

How could a man like Uncle Stewart be right about so many things? How could he know so much but still be so evil? Why didn’t he also know the kind of things that would keep him from being evil in the first place? The only line of restraint that Sanford ever saw him use was the consideration of whether or not he could get away with something. Now with the appearance of this Walter Collins boy, that last remaining line of self-restraint had been crossed. There was nothing too twisted or terrible that he would not do, if the urge crossed his mind. This evil creature calling itself Uncle Stewart had managed to create a three-acre piece of Hell where he ruled supreme.

Sanford saw it clearly now. Thoughts about rescue and stories about heroes were all part of the trick; they helped to keep you quiet while you waited for a rescue that did not exist. Talk of heroes only gave power to the lies. He leaped to his feet in a rage and tore the book in two, straight down the middle. He clutched and clawed at the pages until they separated into single sheets, then tore the sheets in half, then into quarters. He ripped at the paper as if each page were personally responsible for his situation. If that old fool “An Old Scout” or whatever his name really was ever showed up around there, Sanford would spit in his face in spite of his weak and heavy arms. Just for telling lies and offering phony hope the way he did.