The Road Out of Hell (5 page)

He made it a practice to stay away from the three Northcotts as much as possible for the rest of their stay in Los Angeles. When he had to deal with them, he did whatever he was told without question. That was enough to keep himself safe most of the time. Two tedious weeks passed in a cloud of tension. The challenge of avoiding the tempers in that place was constant, but Sanford was cut off from everybody else he knew. There was little to do but study the best ways to steer clear of the Northcotts. Especially Uncle Stewart, whose own parents seemed to fear him.

By the time the two weeks had passed, he was being completely ignored by Grandpa George and routinely head-slapped by Grandma Louise. He had been punched to the floor two more times by Uncle Stewart. And there was to be one more time toward the end.

The beatings from Uncle Stewart were instructive. After the first one, it occurred to Sanford that the act of knocking him flat was important to his uncle, as if the sight of a prostrate victim confirmed that his punishments were meeting their goals. So the next time Uncle Stewart invented a reason to attack, Sanford tried out his theory by hitting the ground right after the first blow, deliberately taking a fall even though he hadn’t been struck hard. He lay in a fetal position with one arm protectively curled across his face and waited.

That brought a pause in the attack. It was like magic … the next blow did not come! Instead, Uncle Stewart stood over him for a few more moments basking in his conquest, then abruptly spun around and walked away. Sanford cautiously got back to his feet, nurturing a small sense of victory. He had just confirmed that the one thing Uncle Stewart needed most during his fits of rage was the feeling that he had completely crushed his opposition. It was not enough for him just to win: he had to
pulverize
an opponent and see him helpless.

Having grown up in an explosive household with a father who was browbeaten into silence, his natural response to irrational violence was to placate the perpetrator and roll with the punches. His survival instinct performed whether or not his behavior would seem normal to an observer. What he had learned was that if he allowed Uncle Stewart to hurt him a little bit and then willingly humiliated himself before him, his uncle was less likely to hurt him any more after that. Sanford fell back into the special ability that had sustained him on the long, sour drive to California—he made himself nearly invisible. He retreated into the dime-store detective novels that he had tossed into his suitcase before they left Saskatoon, and remained careful to avoid any sudden movements at all while he was around the Northcott house.

He was all right for the rest of their stay, except for that one time toward the end when things got so bad. Sanford figured that Grandma Louise had egged Uncle Stewart into it before they all went off to bed one night, but that thought made him feel crazy and he could not sustain it. Uncle Stewart told Sanford later that it was to make sure that he wouldn’t run off. Because after that, Sanford was not just a useless boy whose family had put him out for his own good: he was an illegal immigrant in the United States whose uncle had already begun the special education that he had promised him by knocking him senseless to the floor and then putting his mouth all over Sanford while he played with himself.

He committed acts that had never been explained to Sanford as anything other than crimes against nature. When he was done, he cemented Sanford’s compliance by making it a point to emphasize what prison would be like for Sanford. “Stick with the devil you know, pal!” Uncle Stewart crowed in triumph. “You need to understand that what you will be doing behind bars is called ‘pulling a train.’ Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“Oh, so you never pulled a train? Ha-ha! Forget it. Anyway, you know how a train has one car after another after another, right?”

“Right.”

“Sometimes it takes, I don’t know, hours for one to go by. Doesn’t it? They seem to go on
forever,
eh?”

“I guess, if you’re in a hurry.”

“Ha-ha! Good one! And you’ll be in a hurry all right, because every so-called train car is a convict with his dick in your ass, one ‘car’ after another, after another—”

“All right, I get it now.”

“Ha-ha! You ‘get it’? I don’t know if you get it or not. For a young piece like you, they’re gonna line up four abreast and a hundred deep. You’ll be their dream girl, Sanford!”

“All right. I get it.”

“You’re not laughing, Sanford! What’s the matter?”

“Guess I don’t see anything to laugh at.”

“Oh, yeah? How do you think you’ll feel if you ever find yourself behind bars, eh? Are you going to feel like laughing, then? What do you say, Sanford? Hey, Sanford? Sanford? Are you listening? Look at me! I said look at me!”

During that brief span of time in Los Angeles, the Northcotts were able to work out the details of having the farmhouse constructed. Stewart’s father had worked as a contractor in the Los Angeles area for the past two years and was able to get the whole project moving. He and Stewart also arranged for the delivery of all the supplies that Stewart and Sanford were going to need to build the chicken houses.

Meanwhile, Sanford kept schooling himself in Uncle Stewart’s ways. He had made important strides in learning to avoid the worst of the fits of violence, so that he now had two important tools for dealing with the insanity that swirled around him from all three members of the Northcott household: his ability to sustain silence, and his willingness to take a short beating and endure humiliation in order to avoid a worse fate.

It cheered him up to know that about himself. Now, if he could figure out some way to minimize the work around the farm and stay out of trouble at school, why, his life might turn out to be tolerable out there after all. And who could tell—if Winnie didn’t want him around anyway, maybe he could make things better for himself out there in the desert. A fresh start.

So when at last the time came to pack the car and leave Los Angeles, Sanford was looking forward to getting away from there and only having to deal with his uncle. He climbed into the passenger seat to make sure that he would be sitting right there as soon as Uncle Stewart was ready to get going, but his heart sank when he heard Grandma Louise say that she would be out to visit the new place as soon as they had the house built.

She turned to Sanford and briefly regarded him as if he were a chunk of broken furniture, casually probing for an excuse to slap him, but he had already learned to keep his eyes off all of them unless they spoke directly to him. He sat up straight in the passenger seat and stared ahead as if they were already moving. Louise scoffed at his pitiful attempt to avoid her temper, but his submissive attitude satisfied her well enough to get him out of there without taking a smack for his trouble.

Gordon Stewart Northcott and Sanford Clark left Los Angeles behind without touring Hollywood, without seeing the new Laurel and Hardy comedy, without seeing John Barrymore in
Don Juan,
without seeing Greta Garbo perform the role that made her a star, in
Flesh and the Devil—
but of course Uncle Stewart was not among her fans. Instead they drove more than forty miles eastward toward the inland desert region where new irrigation techniques were converting parched scrub country from deserted oil fields to tillable land. Citrus groves carpeted the region, and many of the hillsides had sprouted vineyards.

The newly named U.S. Highway 60 took them most of the way. Then, after a few turns off of the main road, they found themselves at their new home: a featureless stamp of rattlesnake desert on the outskirts of tiny Wineville. The isolated village was carved out of a broad desert valley painted from one end to the other by sharply defined squares of green acreage among the vast stretch of reddish-brown earth. From Wineville, Sanford could see the San Bernardino Mountains in the distance, shrouded in those same foggy brown clouds that always hovered over Los Angeles.

He stared at the forlorn patch of land when they pulled to a stop, wondering how anybody could use the word “ranch” to describe three acres set aside for raising fowl. The property had a well with a pump, but nothing else inside of its useless wire fence, which did not look strong enough to keep animals in or people out. Grandpa George had arranged for construction crews to begin work on the small farmhouse, and Sanford was expected to help with anything they needed around the place, starting right away. Uncle Stewart would see to it that everybody kept their nose to the grindstone. In the meantime, the pair would be living in a tent and doing the easier work of building chicken coops, stocking them with birds, and getting the brooding business going as soon as possible.

In spite of everything that had happened so far, during those first days Sanford felt reassured. He had reasons to believe that things might improve now that they were finally there, because whatever Uncle Stewart’s problems of temperament might be, he was still a blood relative. That had to count for something. He needed Sanford’s help at the farm. That gave Sanford real value. Life might get tough around that place, but there was no reason to doubt his chances of survival. With that thought, his mind turned to that one really bad thing back in Los Angeles, but he pushed it out of his head again right away. Uncle Stewart was acting as if nothing had happened at all, which suited Sanford just fine.

Illusions of safety disappeared like smoke in the wind. The first rape out on the farm took place before the end of the first week. They had already pitched their large tent and set up their home campsite, and they were moving a fresh shipment of chickens into their new wire pen. Uncle Stewart started out the attack by acting gentle with him, but as soon as Sanford recoiled and tried to move away, he was bludgeoned to the ground and dragged into their tent. The unreality of this attack was heightened when Uncle Stewart stripped off his clothing and Sanford saw his naked body for the first time. He looked like he was wearing long underwear made out of body hair that reached from his neck to his ankles. Back in Los Angeles, everything had happened in the dark. Now he could see that Uncle Stewart was covered with hair, matted into loops and curls. He looked more animal than human.

At Grandma and Grandpa’s place, the shock and humiliation had been overwhelming, but there had not been any significant pain. But out here in the middle of nowhere, Uncle Stewart decided to do him like he was a girl, penetrating him from the rear. Sanford cried out in outrage, in fear, in pain, but the cries were not an attempt to summon help. He would have had to scream bloody murder for anyone to hear him. There were other three-acre plots around them, but the nearest occupied house was too far away. No one was likely to hear him at all, in which case screaming for help would do nothing but provoke more rage from Uncle Stewart.

The sounds that he made were only garbled noises, but he knew his uncle understood the meaning.
“No! Don’t do this! Uncle Stewart, it’s me—you’re supposed to take care of me….”
Uncle Stewart ignored all of that and mixed verbal threats with powerful physical blows that kept Sanford paralyzed throughout the attack. Time quickly took on a jerky quality for him, moving in fits and starts from one shock of pain to the next. He could not tell how long it took Uncle Stewart to finish with him. He only knew that after a while, he felt himself dragged back to the new temporary coop closest to the site for the house. Uncle Stewart dropped him onto the dirt floor, which already reeked of chicken droppings after only a few days. “Stay there,” Uncle Stewart growled. “If you move before I come back, I’ll break both your legs so that you can’t go anywhere!”

Sanford heard the door close and made no effort to get up, but it wasn’t the warning that stopped him. His whole lower half felt broken. He could not get to his feet at all. For a long time, he just lay in a heap on the floor, overwhelmed with shame and steeping in disgust. His rear end was torn and bleeding. It felt as if strips of barbed wire had been shoved into him. In the past, he had engaged in enough dirty talk with other boys that he already knew the words for some of what had happened, but the rest of it was a smear of revulsion in his memory.

His uncle had turned into a wild beast in the blink of an eye, exhibiting himself with glee, making it plain that he gloried in his foulness. He inflicted his sexual violence in a mad frenzy, unsatisfied until he felt Sanford broken and powerless underneath him, all resistance crushed. Sanford had experienced being actively hated around the house once in a while, but never with anything like the intensity that burned within his uncle.

After a long time, Sanford used both arms to push himself up from the fouled ground. He inhaled air that was a fraction cleaner while he gingerly arranged himself into a sitting position. As soon as his consciousness began to clear, the question blasted through him:
what do I do?
It repeated itself over and over, swimming in circles around him until it made him nauseous.
What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?

No answer came.

Eventually, he heard Uncle Stewart’s car start up and drive away. Sanford tried to imagine getting his legs to work and escaping on foot. But even if he could do that, his only alternative would be to stop at the next farmhouse for help. Some boys had stopped by in the first days to see if Sanford wanted to play, but Stewart had scared them off. They might be willing to call the police for him if anybody out there had a telephone. Even though he was in the country illegally, that was now a trivial concern. He would jump at the chance for police custody.
Even if the neighbors don’t have a telephone, they might be willing to drive me to the local station.