The Road Out of Hell (31 page)

It was just the reassurance that she needed to get aboard the train, because, after all, Jessie still did not know Uncle Stewart, not really. She actually thought that just because she was on her train, he would relax his vigilance on Sanford. And maybe he would have, before this dreadful visit. Not any more. She had not stumbled into any open graves, but Uncle Stewart knew that she had caught the smell of death.

The conductor called “all aboard,” and within moments the train began to inch forward and gain momentum. Sanford’s heart lifted on a burst of joy. He stood with Uncle Stewart on the platform at the station and watched Jessie lean out the window and wave to him. He felt the physical sensations of a part of himself tearing away and following her on that train, but at the same time he could hardly believe his good fortune. Jessie was aboard the train to Seattle; her getaway was finally taking place. He wanted to leap and scream in victory.

And then she was gone and the station was empty. Sanford and his uncle turned to go back to the car. They were in the endgame now. He knew it, whether or not Uncle Stewart did. Sending Jessie away was all the “escape” that he could expect. That was good enough for him, anyway. He had saved one more potential victim from Uncle Stewart—and that was what mattered most after his years of helplessness in that place. He figured Jessie would eventually forgive him for using lies to do it. She would stop waiting for him, go on home, and remain safe from all of this. She would eventually forgive him for not using her money to get on a train.

Uncle Stewart was walking back to the parking lot without so much as a glance back at Sanford. He had complete confidence in Sanford’s inability to run off. He was correct about that part of it. Sanford let out a long sigh while another thirty or forty pounds worth of the invisible weight pressed down on his shoulders. It was time to go back to the ranch and die there. Whether it was at Uncle Stewart’s hand or some police officer’s gun did not make much difference. At least he would never have to see the look on Jessie’s face when she learned the horrible truth about him.

The fact that he had actually gotten her out of there alive was the first instance of mercy that he had witnessed in years.
Maybe because it wasn’t for me; it was for her.
The joy of it washed over him. The most precious thing that he’d been able to give Jessie was her unknowing escape from that place, free from personal witness to the horrors there, free from being made a victim herself. He knew she was the type who would understand all of that, once the truth came out. It made the thought of going back to die at the Hell ranch easier to tolerate. That, and the certainty that there was nowhere in this world where they would not kill him if they recognized him for what he was.

Twelve

“I don’t care what she said.” Grandma Louise insisted to all of them back at their house in Los Angeles, “I say the look in her eyes gave her away. She knows something, or she
thinks
she knows something. And Jessie is not the kind of girl who is going to let go of that. She is vindictive, like a bad dog with a good memory. We’ve got to put the border between us and that ranch.”

The Northcotts worked like frenzied beavers while they grabbed their personal belongings and packed up to flee. Sanford had never seen anything like it, and he savored watching them succumb to self-generated panic. It would have made him laugh out loud if he’d still had it in him to laugh. This time, this one time, nobody seemed to mind that he was not helping with the work.

Grandpa George and Grandma Louise and Uncle Stewart all seemed to appear and disappear around him in a frenzy of activity. They occasionally called for him to lift this or move that, but unless he was under a direct order he just stood there, and nobody challenged him over it. Sanford figured this must be how it felt to have your sanity dissolve. Everything was there, still the same, but broken into a million pieces like the world’s most confusing jigsaw puzzle—so fragile that every time he exhaled, it blew some of the pieces around. Any time that he moved to put those pieces back in place, his movements disturbed others. They swirled away and formed unrecognizable piles. Everything he did to fix it only made it worse.

The Northcotts were all doomed too, but they honestly seemed to think there was a way for them to escape and just go on living their lives. Some sort of blindness or willful ignorance appeared to possess all three of them. Their personal radio sets were not tuned to the idea that sooner or later Uncle Stewart would victimize someone who was connected to the kind of people who would take it upon themselves to hunt down the killer. And in grabbing Uncle Stewart, they would inevitably grab Grandma and Grandpa as well.

In spite of Grandma Louise’s displays of affection for her son, her main goal always seemed to be simply that of calming him down and shutting him up, making herself safe from his volatile outbursts. Would Grandma’s heart be ripped open if her son inexplicably disappeared? Because Grandma clearly understood somehow that if her baby boy ever got started against her, he would never stop until she was dead, or perhaps merely almost dead while she struggled to breathe underneath a light layer of loose dirt and sucked it into her nose, her mouth, her throat, her lungs.

Grandpa George was so mad that he didn’t say a word to anybody while they went about their tasks. There was no time to sell the ranch itself, so Sanford realized that the old guy was seeing his savings go up in smoke.
Lotsa luck, buddy.
It was all so they could raise a few quick dollars and run off with their demon son. He found it vaguely interesting that Grandpa George had not decided to just shoot all of them for causing this disaster and take what he could get for himself.

Only one thing truly mattered to Sanford now. It was the only thing that registered in his mind as a clear presence: he had managed to get Jessie out of there unharmed. Unbelievable good fortune! She was packing a pretty good black eye, but in this environment that was nothing. Instead, Jessie was safely away from all of them now—even safe from him, as hard as it was for him to think so. There was no telling what sort of foulness he might have attracted down onto her if she’d stuck around. He was far from being able to conceive of divine intervention in anything other than a storybook sense. It barely occurred to him as an option. Somehow the forces that had seized him, trying to force him into the life of a demon, had slipped and allowed him to do something good and decent without any intervening horror. He was content with that for an explanation.

As soon as they returned to the chicken ranch, the sensation of guilt paired up with his premonition of a well-deserved doom to make him so heavy that he was practically a thing of stone. The sensation of extreme heaviness slowed him down enough to make time slip by faster in relation. The others began to look like speeded-up actors in a jerky silent movie. Uncle Stewart was stuck in his blubbering baby mode, allowing Grandma Louise to call all the shots while she bullied Grandpa George into bringing the neighbors over to buy out the farm equipment and liquidate as much of the property as they could before leaving. The farm stock disappeared like tumbleweeds. Within hours the chickens and rabbits had been trucked away by the gleeful new owners who were allowed to practically steal them.

Now that Sanford was no longer a part of their survival plan, the Northcotts seemed to forget about him. No doubt they all three would have loved to roast him over a spit for being the cause of Jessie’s suspicions, but their frenzy was that of rats fleeing a ship headed straight for the bottom. Revenge was a luxury of time; Grandma Louise had decided that they were fresh out.

They worked all through the night, and the sun was already well into the sky the next morning when Uncle Stewart finally climbed into his car along with Grandma and Grandpa and their remaining belongings. Their story to Sanford was that they were making one last run into town for supplies and that they would come back for him. They said nothing about why all three should need to go together or why he should stay to guard the empty stock pens of an abandoned chicken ranch. Even the house was depleted of anything worth stealing. But no experience was complete in the world of the Northcott family unless somebody was being fooled.

Sanford was glad to play dumb for them and to help get them moving. When they pulled out of the driveway, it occurred to him that they believed themselves to be waving good-bye to a moron who really believed that they would be back later. In Sanford’s reduced condition, he was grateful for even the smallest of favors, and now felt gratitude that he had survived long enough to see them go and to know that they were gone for good. Best of all, he knew they were headed back to Canada, which would narrow the search for them to a handful of locations.

He walked to the end of the drive and stared down the open road as Uncle Stewart’s yellow Buick roadster shrank in the distance. The car was in considerably worse condition than on the day Uncle Stewart had arrived up in Saskatchewan, and now sagged under its three passengers and overload of baggage. They would drop Louise back in L.A. to discharge her nerves with a soothing train ride up to Seattle while the boys drove up and met her there. “Mother’s done so much,” he had heard Uncle Stewart say.

Somehow even within his fractured state, he was struck by the irony of watching the escapees who had laid waste to his life and to his soul become tiny in the distance. Powerless to do anything other than escape, they ran off in the way those terrified boys had begged to be allowed to run. The image of the car and its occupants began to blur behind the heat waves rising from the road. September in the California desert was a prime season for heat-generated illusions, and it was with grim satisfaction that his last glimpse of them was to see them disappear into the shimmering illusion of a false lake. At that distance, he knew he would never see them emerge. It was one of those receding bodies of water that so many desperate travelers have died trying to reach.

Sanford had no idea how one day became two days became three days—or was it longer? Stalling. Something about getting ready to meet his maker. He knew he had to notify the authorities so the Northcotts could be stopped, but he also knew they were on their way to Saskatchewan and would be easy enough to find. They would lie low, at least until their money ran out, and the police would have them by then. He had the sensation of standing atop a tall cliff and steeling himself to make the long dive. He knew there was no way to turn around and leave, so he tensed himself for the jump, counting down before making the big leap.

The continued horrors that awaited him behind bars were known to him—Uncle Stewart had not spared a single detail of the treatment of boys by hardened prisoners. The buildup of scar tissue was already a serious problem in his behind. Gang rapes could leave him bleeding to death. He figured that it was no worse than he deserved, so he tried not to fear it so much, but none of his tricks for facing down panic or coping with physical pain could do much for him. Sanford figured that his best hope was that the atheists were right and all he would have to do would be to go to sleep and there would be no torture or eternal torment or judgment day at all. He would simply have peace, where no one would ever be able to reach him.

He survived at the depleted ranch house on the food that the Northcotts had been unable to tote along with them. He did not know why he was bothering to do it. But even his thought processes were slow under his massive weight. He was a creature of thick mud. He bathed at the wellhead every night, half-surprised that he did not dissolve in the water.

When the time arrived at last—when it was the moment to swallow, inhale, and make the leap—he was in the middle of sweeping the living room floor of the ranch house with a scrap of remaining broom. In a moment, a strong feeling of being extremely foolish flushed through him.
Cleaning up for what, exactly?

He dropped the broom, walked out of the house, and sat on the porch with his head in his hands. He sat without moving. It was over, all of it, and he was done.

The afternoon passed. He was still there when he saw a late-model automobile turn in at the drive. It pulled up toward him and stopped a few yards away, and with a single strike of clarity he knew that the authorities had arrived and this indeed was the end of his time at the murder ranch. He could almost hear Uncle Stewart’s voice, repeating that joke for the umpteenth time:
The secret of life is also the secret of comedy. You want to know what it is? Ask me. Go ahead, ask me ‘What is the secret of comedy
and
the secret of life?’”

Sanford had always complied, to avoid those head smacks:
“What is the secret of—”

“Timing!”
Uncle Stewart loved to yell. He always laughed as if he had just played a very smart trick on a very stupid person, which was his ninth or tenth favorite thing to do.

Now here came the cops, all on their own, just as he had known they would. He didn’t know anything about show business beyond what Uncle Stewart had made him learn; but as far as he was concerned,
timing
had just proved itself to be the secret of life, whether there was anything funny about it or not.

It was hard to speed himself up enough to talk with the officers, first at the ranch and later at the station. It turned out that Jessie had found somebody in the Canadian Immigration Authorities who had listened to her and sent a cable to the Immigration Office in Riverside. Its charges were so unbelievable that the officers drove right out to the ranch to find someone named Sanford Clark and hear exactly what he had to say about his sister’s telegram.