Sanford swallowed and kept his eyes on the floor, feeling the wisdom in his habit of keeping his eyes down. They expected that from him, so it was not likely to be obvious that he was afraid to look Grandpa George in the eye while he tried to stick to the script. Uncle Stewart was sitting so close that Sanford could smell that hellish body odor and hear his breath whistling in and out of his nose. To have his uncle listen to every word he said felt the same as if Satan had showed up at school to personally give him a test. Chicken Ranch High, private school.
“He just kept on coming for Uncle Stewart.”
Grandpa George turned to his son. “He kept on coming at you even though you showed him your pistol?”
“Yep. Plain as day. I held it straight out so he could see it, too. Thirty-eight caliber, five-shot revolver.” Grandpa George grunted, turned back to Sanford and told him to go on, but Stewart continued for him. “Sanford picked up the .22 rifle and cocked it.”
“Let the boy tell me.”
“Well,” Sanford began, “Uncle Stewart said to him, ‘So you are a damned greaser thief as well as being lazy.’”
“They warned me he was lazy when I picked him up for work.”
“I said let Sanford tell it.”
“All right.”
Sanford went on. “The guy grabbed a knife off of the table and went straight for Uncle Stewart.”
“Putting my life in jeopardy.”
“Stewart!” Grandpa George’s voice was surprisingly loud when he wanted it to be.
“Shit! You tell it then, Sanford. I’ll shut up.”
“Okay then. So. The guy threw the knife at Uncle Stewart.”
“He could have been trying to knock the pistol out of my hand.”
There was a charged silence. Grandpa George took a deep breath. He didn’t even glance at Uncle Stewart. He just kept looking straight at Sanford and waited for him to continue.
“Okay. The knife missed and went into the wall, but the plastering isn’t finished so it fell between the cracks and down into the wall part. It got stuck.”
“This knife—are you saying it’s still there?”
“Well. Yes.”
“So it would be there if I drove straight out to the ranch right now and went in there to hunt for it?”
Sanford hesitated a split second, then said, “Yes.”
“Of course it would!” Uncle Stewart added. Grandpa George ignored him again.
“Anyway, when the guy threw the knife, Uncle Stewart fired the gun and shot him right in the forehead.”
“I’m a good shot and knew I would not miss. Oops. Sorry.”
“The Mexican guy fell back by the bed. I was standing by the door with the .22 while Uncle Stewart went out the front door and around toward the back.”
“Wait,” Grandpa George stopped him. “You say Stewart left the room? Right after this man attacked him with a knife and he shot him in the head?”
“I went out to pray under the open sky! My thoughts were turned to this boy’s immortal soul, God damn it! I’m not ashamed of that. You can’t make me be ashamed for caring that much!”
“Let the boy talk, Stewart.”
“Oh, all right then.”
“So Uncle Stewart came back in and saw that the guy was still alive.”
“And what did you do in the meantime?”
“When Uncle Stewart was gone?”
“Right. What were you doing inside there?”
“Well … standing there. You know.”
Grandpa George sighed and shook his head. “All right then. What next?”
“Uncle Stewart shot him four more times in the head.”
“So that’s a total of five times shot in the head?”
Uncle Stewart jumped in again. “But Sanford kept saying that the guy was still alive, and we had to do something to put him out of his misery, so he shot him in the chest with the rifle. Well, it hit him in the back but came out of his chest. And Sanford’s shot alone would have killed him. That one rifle shot. The difference in power between the rounds of a pistol and a rifle is—”
“Jesus Christ, Stewart! I keep asking you to let Sanford talk! The boy was there, wasn’t he? It isn’t too much for him to simply tell me what he saw, is it?”
“Does anyone care for more tea?” Louise inquired. When no one responded, she quietly got up and walked out to the kitchen with her cup and saucer.
“Sorry, sorry,” Stewart assured his father. “I’m just, I get enthused and I… well. Go ahead, Sanford; tell him how you picked up an ax and hit him in the head three times.”
“An ax? Sanford, did you do that?”
“Oh. Well. Yeah. I guess you would want to put a guy out of his misery.”
“You mean to tell me that he still needed to be put out of his misery after getting shot in the head five times plus once through the chest with a rifle?”
“He was … a really strong guy … you know. Anyway, that emptied Uncle Stewart’s gun, so he ran outside and I stayed there with the guy.”
“Why did he run outside?”
“Damn it, Dad, I needed a steady hand to reload. The sight of that man was upsetting, as any normal person would find it to be.”
Grandpa George turned back to Sanford. “What did you do while you waited there?”
“Well, you know, I … stood there.”
“All right then. Go on.”
“Uncle Stewart came back in with the loaded pistol and saw that the guy was still alive, so he, uh….”
“I shot him again. Only had four more bullets, but I used ‘em all.”
“Four more shots? Stewart. That would make it nine shots you gave that man—to the head—at close range.”
“I know that. And don’t forget the rifle shot to the body. These people, Dad, the way they can work, it’s no wonder they’re so strong. They are a powerful race of people, I tell you. Of course, their taste in music is something nobody can explain. And all those beans. Who wants to eat like that?”
“Sanford.”
“Okay. Well, Uncle Stewart says the guy is still alive, so he takes the big ax and hits him over the head and that finally puts him out of his misery once and for all.”
“Sanford, this story that my son appears to have instructed you to tell me features a young man who gets shot in the head nine times at close range with a .38 pistol, once in the chest at close range with a .22 rifle, then bashed over the head by you with the ax two or maybe three times, but even then he was still alive and required a final blow from Stewart. And that was also a blow to the head with the ax. At which point this unfortunate fellow finally decided that this world was not for him.”
“That’s right. Yes. As I can recall it, from, you know, the part I saw.”
Grandpa George dropped his head and rubbed his eyes hard. He spoke without looking up. “I guess you’d best finish up the story.”
“Okay. Then Uncle Stewart pulled the clothes off of him.”
“Why?”
“Hey, Dad! For identification, all right? Y’know, make it harder to I.D. the guy. Geez.”
“Mm-hm.” Grandpa George shook his head, as if resigned. “Then what?”
“Uncle Stewart got some blankets from his car—”
“Sacks from my car. They were burlap feed sacks. But first we had to cut off his head.”
“Holy sweet Jesus, Stewart! What are you saying?”
“I am saying that for the purposes of impeding the investigation into this thief’s disappearance, I have read in certain detective novels that the best idea in these cases is to remove the head of any person who forces you to kill them in self-defense, and dispose of it. Did you know that the human head is the hardest—”
“Oh, Lord God Almighty!”
“But Sanford, go ahead,” Uncle Stewart encouraged him. “Sorry for interrupting. Go on.”
“Okay. So Uncle Stewart goes to get a ripping saw from his trunk, and he
comes back and saws a couple of strokes on the guy’s neck, I guess to get it started, but he had to stop.”
“Sanford finished the job. Total of five strokes. Came right off. So we both cut off the head, you could say. Go on, Sanford.”
“Uncle Stewart put the head in a bucket and left it there. Then we took the wrapped-up body and put it in the car and drove it out until we came to a place to get rid of it, out in the desert.”
Uncle Stewart jumped back in. “There was even a fruit peddler there parked across the road. He drove a blue farm truck with three pitchforks in the back. I went over and bought some fruit from him and put that fruit in the car, right in the back compartment where the body was. We dumped it beside the road, farther on a ways, and then got out of there.”
The words jumped out of Sanford’s mouth before he could stop them. “By the road?” Such a clumsy explanation hardly fit his uncle’s bragging about the scientific destruction of a corpse. A bolt of panic shot through him at betraying the lie, but Uncle Stewart took it right in stride and kept on talking.
“We were pretty scared by then, you know, not knowing if this guy had friends in the area or what. So we drove straight here.”
“You drove straight here. And what the hell are we supposed to do about any of this?”
Grandma Louise appeared at the kitchen door. “George Cyrus Northcott! You will not take that tone with our boy! He is here because he needs his parents!”
“Yes, well, I don’t see how he needs me in all this.”
“He needs his mother, then!” She went to Uncle Stewart and took him in her arms. “We must give thanks that our boy walked away from an encounter with a filthy thief who wanted to murder him! My precious boy!”
Sanford was flabbergasted when Uncle Stewart burst into tears and threw his arms around her as if he would collapse without her support. “Thank you! Thank you, Mama. You too, Daddy. Believe me, today’s events have shown me that it’s a fine thing to be able to turn to your family after a close call like this one here. Sanford was even forced to kill a man today.”
Grandpa George grunted. “Sounds like you might have done that, Stewart.”
Uncle Stewart whirled on his father and bellowed so loud that it nearly peeled the wallpaper. “Hey! Just because you have me in a position where I need your help does not! Give you the right! To toy with me!” He stopped to catch his breath, then went right on: “Sanford here has seen what I do to somebody who comes up against me.”
Everything stopped as if a bomb had just exploded. Nobody moved or said a word. Grandpa George was already looking straight at the wall when Stewart started talking, since that was how he let people know that whatever they were saying meant nothing to him. He kept his gaze there after Stewart was done. Grandma Louise stood without moving, her hands still in the air where they had been resting on Uncle Stewart’s shoulders. Sanford could see Uncle Stewart out of the corner of his eye, but he knew better than to look directly at him at a moment like that.
In the next instant, his uncle dropped the powerful and angry voice and spoke to his mother in a whiny little-boy voice. “Mama, I’m as unsettled as I can be. Do you think we could go out somewhere for a while? Maybe to a picture show?”
She gasped in relief. “Oh, Stewart, of course we can. It only makes sense that you are upset. I hate to even think about what that filthy man might have done if he had caught you off guard—”
“I’m a very good shot, though. There was no doubt that my first shot would hit him smack in the forehead. It did, too.”
“Yes. … All right. Well, let’s be going, then. George, you better stay here.”
“Yeah, Dad should stay here because if we leave Sanford here alone, he’ll probably masturbate all over the house, ha-ha! Anyway, he needs to get his rest. Young people need their sleep. You don’t feel like coming, do you, Sanford?”
“I’ll stay here.”
“All right then, Mama, let’s the two of us get going.”
They were out the door in another thirty seconds, with Sanford and Grandpa George both still frozen in place. The silence was thick in the wake of their leaving. Sanford figured it would be less awkward if one of them said something, so he turned and started to ask whether they kept any magazines or pocket books around, but the sight of Grandpa George stopped him cold. His head was bowed forward, his face covered by his hands. He didn’t need conversation, he needed silence.
That left Sanford to sit back and take a deep breath, working to gather his thoughts. It was the first time in hours that he had been given a moment to think. The dominant images of the day swept back through him again—the sight of a fence post smashing down onto the charred remains of a human skull while the pieces gradually broke into smaller and smaller bits. It ended up looking like a pile of charred and broken porcelain shards, except that it was not.
He got up without saying anything, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. In there, the toilet and sink were points of personal pride in the family, purloined by George from a hotel demolition job site. Sanford spent the next several minutes vomiting into the fancy “The Venerable Model” porcelain Crapper toilet with the self-filling water tank. He did not want to notice that the white porcelain would probably look pretty much like broken skull bits if he pounded it up in a bucket with a heavy fence post—the image sprang uninvited into his mind. He also could not prevent his reaction; the thought forced him to drop his head back into “The Venerable Model” porcelain Crapper and to make use of its self-filling water tank for a second time.
The following day at the farm, Sanford was too busy to see a newspaper or hear any radio news about the headless young man’s body that had been found beside the road right about where Uncle Stewart said it would be. The head had been cleanly removed with a saw, and it was nowhere to be found. Other than that, nothing that was either magical or scientific had been done to render the corpse impossible to identify, if anyone came forward to inquire. The clear impression was that the killer felt confident that nobody was going to do that.
Seven
On March 10, the Wineville weather was fine. The isolated chicken ranch basked in comfortable spring temperatures under a gentle breeze. The whole place actually smelled good, like desert sage and distant rain clouds, as long as you weren’t actually inside one of the coops. Sanford checked the thermometer in its shaded position behind the henhouse door and read seventy-three point four degrees.
Uncle Stewart had been gone for a full week this time. The last of the morning passed with such peaceful solitude that Sanford was almost entirely able to forget who he was and where he was and, especially, how he lived. It was as free as he ever got any more from the invisible suit of nails that held him captive. Every minute of it was precious. While he worked, he lifted a bag of chicken feed and stumbled across the hidden copy of An Old Scout’s book Young Wild West at “Forbidden Pass” and How Arietta Paid the Toll. A jolt of happiness shot through him. He had been distracted after leaving it there and had failed to go back for it. Now here he was alone on the ranch with a book by An Old Scout that he had barely even started.
He opened the cover that showed Arietta’s men rescuing Young Wild West from where he was tied to a stake. He scanned the first page and remembered that so far he had only read the first paragraph. It felt as if he had just found a wad of money. He wrapped the book in his hand and hurried around to the back of the main feed shed, which faced open land. The noontime sunlight was perfect for reading. He sat down in the dust with his back to the shed wall and opened up the newfound book.
Moments later, An Old Scout clutched Sanford’s shirt collar and pulled him face-first into his mythical western world. From the moment Sanford began to read, he recalled why An Old Scout’s words always had such power over him: “When upon the back of the beautiful sorrel stallion he always rode, he made a picture that was dashing and handsome in the extreme. When on his trips through the wildest parts of the Great West he
invariably was attired in a fancy buckskin hunting suit, and with his sombrero tipped well back upon his head, he surely showed up as a dashing young hero.”
By that point, Sanford felt the buckskin on his own back. He felt the heavy sombrero on his own head—that wide hat that forced men to step around him and which Sanford would dare to wear cocked back on his forehead, so that everybody could see for themselves that he never looked down in front of any of them: “The flash in his eye told of his courage and persistence, while his athletic form betokened his strength and quickness.” He had no idea what “betokened” meant. But if it had anything to do with Young Wild West’s physical capabilities, Sanford was all for it and anything else that might give some power to his frail body.
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!”
The Road Out of Hell Page 11
