The Road Out of Hell

by Anthony Flacco

  “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.

  A stinking chicken ranch.

  Uncle Stewart gripped him by the back of his neck and announced that it was time to get going. It would take days to drive all the way through the States to southern California. Uncle Stewart announced that their first stop in California was going to be a visit to his parents in Los Angeles. Sanford remembered
his grandparents well enough from when they had lived up here nearby, but he barely knew them. His naturally shy nature gave him no comfort in the idea of their home.

  Uncle Stewart snatched up Sanford’s small duffel bag with one hand and kept the other on the back of his neck while he walked him out of the house. The hurried good-byes passed in a blur. Sanford noticed that his father’s handshake felt extra firm. He figured that it meant his father was sorry that he couldn’t do more to help. The thought felt good.

  He felt better for a moment when Jessie hugged him. The hardest thing was to leave Jessie behind. She had been his protector often enough, but there was nothing she could do in a situation like this. It struck him then, getting back to his previous thought, that she could hardly be expected to take him with her and support them both. And Jessie was far too protective of him to ever agree that he could quit school and work, just to escape their family home.

  “You’d better write to me,” she whispered into his ear.

  “Don’t let ‘em do this, Jessie!” he blurted out and immediately regretted it.

  “What? Come on now, Sang.”

  The nickname always got his attention. Nobody else called him that. Her voice was so soft that she practically breathed the words to him.

  “I know you’ll make the best of everything. Why, I’ll come and get you myself if I have to, soon as I’m able to do it.”

  Then she let go of him. He hated the feeling of helplessness and could not imagine how grownups managed to get used to it.

  By the time they hit the United States border at Montana, they had been driving for nearly twelve hours over some pretty poor roadbed. Sanford was glad for the chance to stretch his legs at the border, so he hardly bothered to pay attention when Uncle Stewart told him what to do next.

  “All right, now: no matter what, you keep quiet. I do the talking. It’s legal for me to cross back over, but to get you into the States we have to claim you have dual citizenship.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You don’t. That’s why I’m telling you to shut up. We have to make sure your story works. You need to let me take care of it. The way you do that is, you keep quiet and you say nothing to nobody. My goodness, you really can be thick sometimes.” He placed his hands on Sanford’s shoulders and focused his gaze on him. “Stand. Stay.” Then he went off to get some lies going.

  Sanford felt so intimidated by the foreign-looking American uniforms that he didn’t mind hanging back. He stood in the corner and watched the whole process, marveling at the energy that his uncle invested into lying to these people. The part of the story that Sanford overheard had something in it about Sanford being born in the United States but they lost his papers and somebody was dying down in the States at this moment, in a hospital. “God, it’s a saga,” Sanford muttered under his breath. Meanwhile, Uncle Stewart kept up a nonstop patter at the guards while he wove one excuse into another until it seemed that in the end the officials waved them across into the States just to get them out of the way.

  As soon as Sanford and Uncle Stewart cleared the border, they fell into a pattern of driving through the daylight hours and then camping near the road at night. Uncle Stewart staked claim on the car seat, so Sanford slept in blankets on the ground. He didn’t mind. It felt good to stretch out straight. Otherwise, the long ride was mostly an ordeal of boredom. He passed the time by studying sudden wild shifts in his uncle’s moods.

  For most of this trip, Uncle Stewart was wide awake and excited, nearly frantic. But then there were those periods when he would slide down into foul moods and glower for a couple of hours. Sanford found that the strangest part was the way he always pulled back out of it. He would start talking up a blue streak again, whether or not anything had actually happened that could logically make him feel any better or worse.

  The weather got noticeably warmer while they moved south, and that was nice for a while. Uncle Stewart put the convertible top down so that they rode with their hair flying while he shouted over the sounds of the engine and the onrushing air. Sanford figured Uncle Stewart liked shouting over the wind because it forced Sanford to work at understanding what he was saying. So far, the only thing that had made his uncle happy at all was for Sanford to pay complete attention to him.

  At the moment, Uncle Stewart was half an hour into the topic of Hollywood movies. His tone was beginning to take on a strange urgency, as if he had a solemn duty to figure out what should be done about the current state of American movies and that he needed to have the answers ready by the time they got down to Los Angeles. “It’s typical! I am telling you. Completely typical procedure for Hollywood movies! So when you do something stupid like putting that nasty old queen Greta Garbo in the female lead—and F.Y.I. here, The Paradise Case is only going to be the biggest picture that David O. Selznick has ever done. Are you listening? Good! This is important! Anyway, this fool, this idiot, this hopeless moron puts her in the lead of his biggest picture even though she’s supposed to be some kind of crackpot who treats everybody like garbage and even though he could have cast Jeanette MacDonald.”

  He reached over and poked Sanford. “Jeanette MacDonald! Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah, I hear you!” Sanford yelled to keep him from poking again. Stewart’s fingertip felt like a knitting needle.

  “Okay, then, do you know who she is?” Uncle Stewart jeered. “No?” He playfully slapped the back of Sanford’s head, as he had already done several times that day. “Well I am telling you this and you had best hear me loud and clear, buddy: on top of beauty that drives men crazy, Jeanette MacDonald has talent, humility, and brains! Can you say that?”

  “Sure,” Sanford replied into the wind.

  “Then let’s hear you! Talent, humility, and brains!”

  It took Sanford a moment’s worth of blank staring before he realized that it was an actual request. All right, he thought, if this will do it for him, eager to give him the expected answer and get him to relax, maybe even stop and take a break. “Talent! Beauty!” Sanford bellowed in Uncle Stewart’s direction. But before he finished, Uncle Stewart reached over and struck him in the back of his head with the flat of his hand. This time the blow was so strong that Sanford’s chin bounced off of his chest. He bit his tongue and felt a mouthful of fire.

  Uncle Stewart glanced over at him and broke out laughing, as if the two of them were famous friends. “You look like you just shit yourself!” He dropped the friendly mask before he continued. “It’s talent, humility, and brains! Didn’t I just say that?”

  “Yes,” Sanford shouted back, maybe a little too fast.

  “Well then, what are you trying to do, piss all over me?”

  “What?”

  “Are you saying that you are willing to repeat two-thirds of what I tell you but you intend to just ignore the other third, then?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Uncle Stewart hit him in the back of the head again, and this time Sanford saw stars. He stared straight into a swimming school of twinkling lights, trying to get his vision into focus. As a small-framed boy with a passive nature, Sanford had already learned how to tense any part of his body just a split second before the impact of an oncoming blow, but the skill was useless with a strike to the head. It took too long to get his arm up there. Uncle Stewart kept catching him unprepared.

  Meanwhile a rush of guilt flooded through him. The truth was that he could have avoided that last blow altogether. Uncle Stewart was correct that Sanford knew what he meant. He had to admit to himself that he tried to play dumb and Uncle Stewart saw straight through it. Sanford made an indelible mental note: Do not lie to Uncle Stewart unless you are prepared to really put one over. He’s an expert and he will catch you.

  Uncle Stewart laughed. “That last little love tap got your attention, didn’t it?” Sanford looked in his direction and nodded. He couldn’t see him clearly yet, and he was still too surprised and frightened to speak. “Good,�
�� Uncle Stewart continued. “So try it again: Jeanette MacDonald would be a far better choice for the female lead in Mr. Selznick’s next picture, because of her …”

  “Talent, humility, and brains!” Sanford immediately chimed in.

  Uncle Stewart’s face lit up so brightly that Sanford realized he had scored a point. “Exactly! These are the values that ought to drive American movies today. But when you think about the sheer size of the audiences who see these things, you have to realize that they represent money, my friend! Money creates phony goodness and reveals all women for the whores that they are!”

  “You mean like with prostitution?” Sanford asked, being thirteen. This time the blow to the back of his head snapped it forward so hard that he landed against the passenger door, fighting dizziness while his ears rang. Outrage filled him, and he instinctively turned to glare in shock at Uncle Stewart—who burst out in good-natured laughter.

  “You should see your face! Don’t worry about it. Just don’t interrupt me. Because in fact, I was going to tell you about values, all right?”

  They slowed down to cross a set of railroad tracks. On the other side, he pulled off to the side of the road, put the car in neutral, and set the brake. Sanford felt a rush of fear and fought the urge to jump out and run. Run where? He didn’t know any men who behaved like this, but he sensed that it was a variation on his mother’s explosiveness. This meant that if he ran, it would only enrage Uncle Stewart in the same way that it enraged her. Winnie’s violence could be endured by making a game out of dodging her, but Uncle Stewart would be able to chase him down. It would not matter how fast he ran. Uncle Stewart hit a lot harder than Winnie did.

  Even in that moment, Sanford automatically kept his distress to himself. He knew better than to cower before his uncle. When they see that, it makes them want to hit you again. He turned to look at something safe like the floor while he kept his left arm ready to whip upward and cover his face.