The Road Out of Hell (29 page)

The waitress strolled up to the table with her order pad ready.

“So that’s it! Subject closed! For the rest of the meal and the entire trip home, only pleasant conversation. That’s an order! Ha-ha! But I mean it when I say let’s just drop
everything
and have a quiet meal. Is that all right with you, Sanford?”

“Sure.”

“‘Sure.’ Hear that? Sanford’s voice just cracked a little bit, I think. Ooo-la-la! Your brother is turning into a young man, Jessie. I’m going to have to get a younger boy to be my new darling! I’m joking. Anyway, is it all right with you if we all have a pleasant meal, Jessie?”

“Uncle Stewart, at some point we need to—”

“Is it all right? Jessie?”

“… Yes.”

“Good!” He turned to the waitress, beaming out a smile that Sanford figured the woman found charming, as such things go. “Hello there, gorgeous!” he said to the aging and overweight woman. She showed no reaction. “We’re all ready to order!”

This time when Sanford’s blanket lifted and Jessie ducked underneath it, he was already wide awake. He knew she would come around the moment Uncle Stewart started to snore. It felt wonderful and terrible at the same time, as if he could fall into two separate pieces. When Jessie tapped his shoulder he pretended that he was just waking up. “Sang, it’s Jess. Are you awake?” She kept her voice as soft as steam through a pipe.

“I guess.”

“Listen to me! We won’t have much time. You better be clear in your head right now! Now listen, Sanford, you know how far I came to see about you. You’re my brother, Sang. I love you. And I’m sorry if things have been bad for you here. I was never able to do anything about it before this. But I’m here now. Now I want you to tell me the truth and don’t make me drag it out of you, either! Sanford, has Uncle Stewart got you enrolled in school or not?”

“… Well.”

“Damn! You tell me straight out!”

“No, he’s not. I’m not. In school.”

“Have you gone to school at all down here?”

“Shit, Jessie.”

“Sanford!” She said it loud. He realized that she would willingly wake up Uncle Stewart and risk his rage before she would ever leave him alone about it.

“Shhh! All right! All right, Jessie. There’s no school, there’s been no school. It’s okay, I don’t need it. I know how to run this place to make it pay. I could do it if it wasn’t for Uncle Stewart.”

“Does he keep you from writing home any more often than you do?”

“He tells me what to write, Jessie. He takes your letters himself and reads them without letting me ever see them. Then tells me what they supposedly say. Sometimes I can tell that he’s lying about things, sometimes I can’t.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You’d have to ask him. But you don’t dare do that, Jessie. I am telling you. Just let that whole part of it go. It’s not worth it.”

He flinched under the gentleness of Jessie’s fingers when she once again traced the outline of the large burn scar on his back. “Sanford, this was no accident. I am not asking you that: I am
telling
you. All I want you to say to me is whether or not he is beating you as his way of doing things around here. Is that what he does to get you to toe the line?”

Sanford took a sigh so deep that it felt as if the air ran down to his toes. He already had a good fifty or sixty pounds of dread lying on top of him, just from Jessie’s presence in that explosive ranch house. The challenge of answering her without opening it all up and beginning the inevitable endless questions was overwhelming. It added another hundred pounds or so of pure dread and pressed down on him so hard that if he had not been lying down, it might have driven him to the floor. “Jessie, he’s gone a lot of the time. That’s really how I get by here. He keeps himself busy, sometimes even goes away overnight without telling me. That’s when I get some peace. But if you get him so that he’s mad at me, he’s going to take it out on me after you’re gone.”

“So the whole thing about the Boy Scouts is a fairytale too?”

“Uncle Stewart is the one who likes that story. He has another one about how he’s training me to be a priest in the Catholic Church. That’s supposedly why he doesn’t have to send me to school, even though the School Board sent him a letter saying that they know I’m here.”

“This way that he talks to you—you know, when he’s playing the fool—he calls you his ‘little darling.’ Is that because he’s done bad things to you?”

“Jessie, I think—Maybe you think I don’t—”

“Shhh! We are not children. There are certain things that we can discuss if we have to, and I am sure anyone could see that we have to now. Ahem. I saw you getting undressed this evening and you had blood on the back of your undershorts. Do you have a problem there?”

“Ah, hell, Jessie.”

“I didn’t make the trip down here to trade cake recipes. He hurt you in your rear, didn’t he? Our
uncle,
Sanford. He did unnatural things to you that are so bad that they hurt you down there.”

“Don’t make me say anything else about it, Jessie. What difference is all that now? It’s just details now.”

She took in a silent breath and let it out again before she answered him. “All right, Sang. But why didn’t you write back home somehow and tell us about this?”

“He promised to kill me and to kill all of you if you came down here like the cavalry or something. Jess, he only agreed to put you up here because he’s hoping that you will just go on back and everything will just blow over. If I was dead he wouldn’t stop what he’s doing, but I can slow him down, sometimes. I can distract him, once in a while. Saved some people, for what it’s worth. But you need to believe that he’d come after you, Jessie. Me or you. Anybody.”

“Does Grandma or Grandpa know he did this? Do they see him mistreat you?

“Drop it.”

“All right, then. If that’s the way things are, I’m just going to have to see to it that you get back to Canada immediately. That is enough of this nonsense right now.”

“Except you can forget that one too. He’ll catch us. Don’t you get it? He’s like a hunting animal. He would kill us both to keep it all quiet. Even if he knew that they would get him eventually, he still would. At this point, he just wants to see how long he can keep going.”

“Sanford, in the name of God! This keeps getting worse. How am I supposed to believe what I am hearing?”

“You need to believe it, Jessie. You need to, and I mean it. This is bad enough that he’s not going to let me out of his sight until you’re gone. He’s afraid of things I know getting out.”

“I see. And those things would be? Tell me, or I swear on my life I will wake him up this very minute. This minute, Sanford. And you know I am not fooling, too.”

“Damn it, Jessie!” Sanford knew he couldn’t stop her. “He killed some people … kids … even killed some here. Three were buried here, for a while, but then he moved the remains out to the desert someplace.”

Sanford was lying on his side with his back turned to Jessie, but he felt the drop in temperature in the air between them. He wondered if he could dare to tell her any more of it, but she answered that for him.

“Stop there,” she said with a rasp. “You stop right there!” He felt the blanket rustle as she got back up from the thin mattress on the floor. “This is too much. I am getting up. I am going to bed. Tomorrow, we will keep up this charade for Uncle Stewart until we get into Los Angeles. Then I’m finding a way to get you out of here.”

“Jessie, Uncle Stewart will—”

“Stop, I said!” She whispered again, but now it came out in a hiss that said the steam pipe was broken. “We are all finished talking about what Uncle Stewart
wants
or what he threatens to
do.
Damn it! Damn it!”

The next moment, she was gone, moving across the room like a silent breeze. Somehow she did it without a single creak of a board or the squeak of a spring, all the way back to her sofa bed. Sanford lay wrapped up in the blankets and admired his sister’s stealthy ways of moving across the darkened house. Of course his own sneak-walk was one of his standard tools for survival in that place, but he wondered where she would have learned hers. Eighteen years in Winnie’s house, perhaps, avoiding the line of fire.

Once they were at Grandma Louise and Grandpa George’s place, the moment for Sanford’s escape arrived like a tornado strike. Jessie had kept everything secret so that Sanford could not accidentally give anything away. She made clandestine arrangements to secure Grandpa George’s cooperation by alternatively appealing to his conscience and threatening his fears.

Sanford sat in their living room, reading an old newspaper, while Uncle Stewart and Grandma Louise passed by on their way to another movie, giggling like two kids on a date. Sanford vaguely wondered what it was that Uncle Stewart was working on getting out of her. As soon as the sound of Uncle Stewart’s Buick receded down the street, Sanford was completely caught off guard when Grandpa George hurried into the room carrying Sanford’s small suitcase. Jessie was right beside him carrying Sanford’s shoes and hat. They barely spoke a dozen words while they pulled him from his chair, handed him the rest of his clothing, and told him it was time to leave.

Grandpa George looked like a rat in a snake pit. He was helping, all right, but he was surely not happy about it. The look of urgency on Jessie’s face broke Sanford’s heart. She believed so devoutly that there was something she could do for him that she was risking her life in the attempt. She was unaware that he was already a lost cause—an abandoned soul. He wanted to break down and confess, grant her the dignity of not wasting her time on this dangerous and futile gesture. The fevered hope in her eyes stopped him. He could see how badly she needed to get him out of there, as if something about saving her brother had to do with saving herself. Even if she failed at it, he could see that she needed to make the effort. He owed her the cooperation.

He could only hope that it would help Jessie prepare for the idea of returning to Canada. And so he went along with them, in spite of having no sense of possibility for his escape. He allowed himself to be carried along like baggage to offer Jessie any remaining moments of hope that she might gain by the attempt. He knew that her illusions would all come crashing down soon enough along with everything else. There was no other direction for it to go.

The heaviness of his despair increased with every step they took. Two times, three times his body weight in guilt. It all piled onto his flesh and bone until it became so much effort to move that once again the world appeared to speed up around him while he slowed down. His limbs moved as if they were filled with mud. He could only bend them with maximum exertion. To take three steps was exhausting.

His sense of time became so severely distorted that his mind skipped over its surface as lightly as a water bug, even while his encumbered body struggled to move. Jessie sent him out the door with a few dollars and directions to the home of a friend of Grandpa George where he would be allowed to stay for the night. Grandpa George was supposed to pick him up the next day and take him to another old friend where Sanford could stay hidden until Jessie got them safely back to Canada.

He did as he was told and moved without thinking. His consciousness gathered a few glimpses of finding the address of a matronly lady and her stocky husband and of sleeping on another sofa for the night. The next day arrived like a finger snap, and then there was Grandpa George and they were riding in his car to his friend’s place. The friend was about Grandpa’s age, and he did such a polite job of keeping to himself that Sanford retained no other impressions of the place. Although he had permission to stay there for several days if need be, the stay was interrupted after just a few hours. Uncle Stewart came pounding on the front door of the very house that he was supposed to have no idea how to locate.

So the Grim Reaper came calling. Sanford’s sense of heaviness disappeared like steam in the wind. His survival instinct went to work, whether he wanted it to or not, while the adrenaline flooded through him. Something had to have gone badly; Uncle Stewart was towing his father along behind him, and Grandpa had a bruise across the right side of his face. So much for how Uncle Stewart had found the place. Now Uncle Stewart was there, shouting at the man of the house. The man hollered back, offended, until Uncle Stewart knocked him aside and barged into the house to grab Sanford by the shirtsleeve. He knew better than to resist. And do what? Take another one of those awful beatings and end up where Uncle Stewart wanted him to be anyway?

Sanford knew he was a goner any way it played out. It was over for him without a doubt, and it was probably over for Uncle Stewart before too much longer. He felt more relief than fear over that.

The first thing Sanford saw when Uncle Stewart pushed him back through the front door of Grandma and Grandpa’s house was Jessie—she looked stricken with disappointment. He was glad to see that she and Grandma Louise did not seem to have suffered any attack from Uncle Stewart, even though it had not gone well for Grandpa George. When Sanford caught Jessie’s eye he quickly shook his head, trying to tell her that he didn’t reveal anything to Uncle Stewart about how the plan had worked. He barely remembered, anyway.