The Road Out of Hell (2 page)

He strained for a way to get his father involved, even though that was generally not productive. While John did have enough strength to explode for a minute or so when life’s stresses became too much for him, he also burned out as quick as a match head. Nowadays, he seldom bothered with anything enough to lose his temper over it. On the rare occasions when he did slip, Winnie made sure he paid for it, sometimes for weeks.

But today their whispering—it almost seemed more like flirting—had the terrifying purpose of giving Sanford away to Uncle Stewart. It was clear that no one could stop her. Their story was that Uncle Stewart would be taking Sanford on a road trip in his big Buick roadster to visit the city of Regina, about 150 miles southeast, the capital of Saskatchewan. “It will be a grand trip, Sanford!” Uncle Stewart enthused. “And I know you’d love to see the Regina Pats on their home field, right?”

“They’re junior league.”

“Sanford,” Winnie added, “Regina is our capital city and you need to know about it. It’s a beautiful place and you’re going to let Uncle Stewart show you around.”

“We’ll make a game out of it!” Uncle Stewart chimed in, lying like a crooked salesman. “We’ll drive around town, looking for any leftover signs of the Regina Hurricane.”

“Wasn’t that before I was born?”

“Not that far. It’s been fourteen years—so if they haven’t fixed everything back up by now, we’ll write to the newspapers! An exposé! Think of it: two hicks from Saskatoon criticizing the capital. It’ll be a
scandal,
ha-ha!”

Sanford figured that the only scandal here was that his mother was going to give him away while she and her brother lied to him with such conviction. Sanford was no stranger to his mother’s skills at deception—he had spent much of his life in listening to her lie to anybody who had anything to give up.

He had forgotten how much his mother and her brother shared the trait. Prior to this two-week visit from Uncle Stewart, Sanford had not seen him or his family since they had left Canada in a hurry two years before. Nobody ever told Sanford why the Northcott family wanted to leave the country, but their whole family knew that Uncle Stewart had managed to infuriate certain neighbors with his treatment of their children. No doubt he could lie well about that too. But Sanford had sneaked up on his mother and uncle earlier that day while they were giggling in the corner, making their plans for him. Now he knew full well that nothing about this Regina story was true.

He sneaked another glance at his mother. Winnie was in one of her detached moods, not really recognizing anything that was going on around her. The only time she looked anybody in the eye while she was in this mood was to rage at them. He figured that was why she could discuss shipping him away like it was nothing. He struggled for his voice.

“This is a bunch of baloney!” he finally blurted. “I know we’re not going to Regina! He’s taking me all the way down to the States! I
heard
you talking about that stupid chicken ranch!”

Winnie aimed that stare of hers directly into his eyes. He saw it then: she would sooner take a bite out of his skull than acknowledge the truth of anything he said. Her eyebrows pulled inward. “Why, you selfish, self-centered son of a bitch! What about
momma?
Huh? What about
me?”

“… About you?”

“Do
not
answer my question with a question, you little shit!”

“Hell, Sissie—go ahead and tell him.”

“Oh, now you
want
me to tell him?”

“Might as well.”

“You want to listen to his whining?”

“He’s not gonna whine.” Uncle Stewart now directed a menacing gaze at Sanford. “Are you, sport?”

Sanford tried to ignore the question. “I don’t want to go to—”

“He’s
not
gonna whine!” Uncle Stewart barked. Then he continued in a menacing, overly soft voice: “Are you, sport?”

“I wasn’t whining.”

Winnie snorted with disgust. “God damn it, you spoiled bastard! You don’t know what
work
is. You don’t know what
struggle
is.”

“That’s something every boy should learn, Sanford,” Uncle Stewart added.

“It’s not fair to just—” Sanford began, but Winnie cut him off.

“All right!”
she shouted. After a pause to stare into space and slowly shake her head, she took a deep breath and spoke, giving the appearance of weighing every word while she delivered her considered thoughts. “Son. There is truly—and I
mean
this—truly something wrong with you. I think that you are missing something that a normal boy is supposed to have. It’s this selfishness of yours, the way that you only think about yourself. There are words for people like that. Bad words. So all right, then, you want to know what’s up? Fine and dandy: here it is! You’re going down to California with Stewart. I was
trying
to make it easier for you, but no, you won’t have it.

“Any normal boy loves adventure. Once any
real
boy gets out onto the road, you know, with the wind in his hair, it’s only natural for that boy to want to keep on traveling as far as he can, as long as he’s got plenty of sandwiches. A mother knows these things.”

“Why would I want to keep on trav—”

“But it’s a waste of time to think about you. A show of courtesy is lost on you!”

Winnie ticked her way through the old list of his sins, one finger at a time. She could take two or three minutes per finger, use up every one of them and add in a few of her toes before she got it all out of her system. He took a deep breath while the familiar damnations began trundling before him: A foolish daydreamer too misty-headed for his own good. A loafer who devoured popular fiction but who could barely sit through a class and seldom passed an exam. A dolt who responded too slowly, got her orders ass-backwards, or just went about everything wrong. He had always been more trouble than he was worth.

“That’s why you need this new life,” she summed up. “You can go to school down there and help take care of Uncle Stewart’s place the rest of the time.”

But to Sanford, this “real story” sounded every bit as ridiculous as their lie.
Breeding livestock with Uncle Stewart out in the desert?
Sanford’s Uncle Stewart was a delicate, twenty-year-old aspiring pianist. He had lived all of his life in Canada until two years ago, when he and his parents had left for the States. The would-be chicken rancher had always been tremendously proud of the fact that he played the piano with enough skill to appear professionally with local orchestras and silent film houses. Uncle Stewart had played up here in the province and supposedly down in the States as well. The whole damned family knew about his dreams of becoming a concert pianist. And as for living in the desert, Sanford had never thought about it before, but why would anybody move from a city like Los Angeles to live in the middle of nowhere unless they had to?

He chewed his lip in consternation and pushed his brain for an answer: what could there be about such an isolated location that would hold Uncle Stewart’s interest? Nobody was mentioning anything about that. But it stood to reason that a bunch of cooped-up fowl would be filthy and have an overpowering smell in that heat. Taking care of them was a guaranteed grind of disgusting work that went against everything Sanford knew about his uncle.

A stinking chicken ranch.

He threw a sideways glance at Uncle Stewart, who was staring at him with a mixture of impatience to get going and disappointment with his cargo. Uncle Stewart had made it clear for the entire two weeks of his visit that he really wanted Sanford’s younger brother Kenneth. He had raved like a trial lawyer, trying to persuade Winnie to let go of that boy. It was a surprise to everybody when Winnie flatly refused. She had always been willing to give her brother anything he wanted, so much so that Sanford fully expected that he and his brother would both have to go. Young Kenneth was Winnie’s favorite son, however. She never made a secret of that. So to Sanford’s amazement, she actually told her brother that he was asking too much of her. She stopped his objections before he could even get started by holding up her hand and announcing that she would “only say it once.” All talk of taking her favorite boy was over. Stewart would just have to make do with Sanford.

“But all my friends are here,” Sanford began again.

“You’ll make new ones,” Winnie replied with a shrug. “You’re a kid.”

“And you need to get away from your trouble-maker friends,” jeered Uncle Stewart.

“They’re not—”

“Sanford!”
Winnie’s voice shot through the room like a gun blast.

After a pause, Uncle Stewart began to console him with talk of enrolling in a local Scouting program down there “to offer you some boyhood adventure and also to help with your character development.” Winnie added that it might be just what he needed.

Sanford desperately wanted to produce an argument in the strongest possible terms against going, but he had no idea how to stand up for himself against these two adults. He had no available examples. The most that he could do was to stuff his outrage back down out of sight. After that, all he could do was to grit his teeth and look for the chance to jump in on the conversation like a kid who has to pee. Meanwhile, two of the adults planned his future while his father studied the daily paper.

Now that the pose about going to Regina was over, Winnie and her brother dropped it as if it had never existed. Neither of them displayed any trace of embarrassment over being discovered. Ordinarily this shared trait was the only thing that Sanford liked about dealing with either of them, because when they decided to bury something, it just disappeared. The pattern was that they got mad, flew into a rage, then got over it and moved on. Sanford noticed how easily they meshed that way; they didn’t even have to check with each other first. There was a degree of certainty in that. Winnie’s fires flashed quickly and burned hot; smoldering was something left to her husband. This time, however, Sanford found that the topic of his forced trip was disappearing much too quickly. He felt himself being flushed away with it.

Uncle Stewart noticed Sanford’s distress and broke into a broad grin. “Winnie! I get the feeling Sanford doesn’t appreciate how the ranching experience is going to mold his character. I’m really going to toughen him up!” He laughed out loud at that, then winked at Winnie like a guy who has just made a very fine joke indeed.

This one time, Sanford’s mother did not laugh along with him the way she always did. That struck Sanford as very odd, combined with the way her expression changed when her brother spoke of toughening him up. Even though Winnie was in that detached mood of hers, she looked away from Sanford as if she could not meet his eyes. That was so out of character for her that it instilled a sense of dread in him. Restrained silence was the domain of the male in that house.

“Ahem!” John Clark surprised everyone by speaking out this time.

For one flashing moment, Sanford’s hopes soared. His father came to life like a man snapping out of a nap. His gangly form rose from the chair and stood tall with an angry set to his jaw and determination in his eyes. He nodded to his son, then stared back and forth between the other two. “Might as well say it right now—I don’t care for the sound of this plan at all. I have not heard
one
single solitary thing about it that shows me any common sense!” He glared at Uncle Stewart to emphasize that he didn’t trust him one little bit. It was glorious.

“Oh, my!” Winnie replied at the very top of her voice, acting like she truly was impressed. “Aren’t you the smart one, John! Aren’t you the manly parent! So tell us: what
is
your new job that’s going to bring home the extra money to make up for what it would cost us to keep him here? Knock-knock, anybody home? Oh, what’s that? No answer? Bastard! Figure out
that
one, if you get to feeling cocky—instead of just standing there with your cock in your hand!” She and Uncle Stewart both snorted like horses.

That was all it took for Winnie Clark to beat John Clark back into his silence and his newspaper. Sanford could almost see the puncture marks in his father’s face. The machinery of their relationship groaned into action while his father clenched his jaw and blushed an angry color, then sat back down without looking at his son. He shook his head and stared into space. Sanford could hear him grinding his teeth.

Sanford would have bolted from the house if he had had any idea of somewhere safe to go. He tried to think of a workable destination, but it was no good. At his age, what could he tell people that would keep them from sending him right back? And
then
how angry would Winnie be?

The only real glimmer of hope left to him was his older sister Jessie. She was already seventeen and would be able to leave home soon. Then he might be able to run off and live with her. Somehow improvise a new life. He would be willing to try almost anything else besides living out in the desert, just him and Uncle Stewart and hundreds of caged birds.