“Uh”
“Quite serious, here. I ask you.”
“Well I just thought—”
“I cannot very well run him on back home and stop in for coffee with his mommy, now can I?”
“No, I just thought that when you brought him, you know, and kept him here and all, that you must already have a plan. Of what to do.”
Uncle Stewart made his Nasty Little Girl face. “With Walter?”
“Yes, Uncle Stewart.”
“Gee, I dunno, Sanford. Maybe I’ll have to go kill his whole family!” Uncle Stewart fixed him with his patented “I could kill you any time” stare. He held it for a few seconds, really cooked him with it. It burned the same way it did when Winnie looked at him like that. How do they learn to do that?
Sanford filled in for him. “Okay then. I’ll tell him he should stay quiet. I’ll convince him. I know how to do it.” All he really knew was that absolute submission and cooperation were the least painful ways for little Walter Collins to go through the experiences that Uncle Stewart was going to continue to inflict.
“Good. Do that. Now—I’m going to go and fetch him, just as soon as you set that chain post into the ground good and deep. If he escapes out of there, it’ll be on your head.”
“I can do it,” Sanford replied.
“If you think about setting up a tie-line that would be strong enough to hold back a big dog, it’ll do for a boy that size.”
“Yeah, I guess that sounds right.”
“Ha! You know from experience, eh? Ha-ha!” He sauntered away, calling back, “Have that ready in a couple of minutes. I’ll be right back out with my new little darling. Don’t be jealous, Sanford—you’re my original little darling! Here on the ranch, anyway! Ha!”
Sanford moved so slowly that he had barely had time to form a single thought before Uncle Stewart was back with the boy, guiding him along by holding on to his ear lobe between his thumb and forefinger. Sanford knew from experience that Uncle Stewart could apply just enough pressure to either make the kid go along with him or buckle him straight to his knees.
Then he got a good look at the boy. Oh. Oh, that used to be Walter. The fragile creature standing in the doorway next to Uncle Stewart radiated mortal fear with every halting movement. Strike marks covered his exposed flesh, and deep bruises were already forming. The way he walked—the way his entire body expressed hesitation from every muscle and joint, Sanford could only think of a mother goat’s trembling kid struggling to walk for the first time, fighting to keep its balance. Walter’s eyes were wide open and looked about twice their usual size. He appeared to be glancing around at things that were not there.
“Take him over to the wellhead and strip him down. I want you to get him washed up, head to toe. Bring him back as fresh as a flower, you hear me? I will not abide a dirty boy.” He started to walk away but turned back. “Damn it, I cannot have a dirty face around me. You already know that, so explain it to him.”
Uncle Stewart failed to mention how Walter had gotten so “dirty,” or that the dirt was mostly dried blood. Sanford realized that it would be stupid to point that out. Still, keeping his mouth shut made his stomach feel like it was full of arrowheads.
Uncle Stewart walked away for a second time, calling back, “Do the thing with his ear lobe to make him walk with you, you know what I mean. Then put him in there, chain him down, and keep him quiet. You know how it goes. I need six solid hours of rest, or at least until Mother gets here. The entire time she’s here, and I mean until she is 100 percent gone, there has got to be no sign that this boy even exists. I’ll stop in when she’s busy. Check on him.” This time he walked away and kept on going, dragging his feet in an exaggerated show of exhaustion. “It’s all on your head, Sanford.”
“Jesus, Uncle Stewart. This boy looks about half dead.”
Uncle Stewart kept on walking and did not even turn back. He yawned deep and wide and spoke through the yawn, “Half alive is good enough. Long as he’s clean.”
Sanford watched him go. He looked, Sanford thought, like his entire body was bragging to the universe, all about himself and the things he had done. His body silently screamed threats about the things that he planned to do next and the things that he was going to keep right on doing. Those most of all.
Uncle Stewart disappeared inside the house. Sanford couldn’t hear whether he locked the door, but he did not doubt that the house was well sealed against anyone who might walk in and surprise him. It was just one more element of the nonsense of that place, since any lock on that door really ought to have been set in reverse to keep Uncle Stewart from getting out—from ever getting out.
It was still pitch black when he got to the wellhead. Sanford pumped the water in a continuous stream for Walter to splash around in, but he kept his eyes on the ground to show the kid a little something, respect or whatever. The problem was that splashing around was about all that old Walter was doing. He didn’t seem clear on the situation, even after Sanford had persuaded him to strip and stand next to the big faucet. The trembling boy only stuck his arms under the flowing water and then patted the wet hands onto himself, over and over, with his teeth chattering away as if the warm night air was freezing.
“Sanford?” Walter asked for about the tenth time.
Sanford dropped his head with a sigh. He decided that maybe if he finally answered the boy, he might leave him alone after that. “Yeah, Walter.”
Walter snorted a delighted giggle at the sound of Sanford’s reply. But then his terrified face returned. “Sanford! You have to tell him I’m sorry! Tell him I’m sorry, so he’ll stop!” Walter’s little-boy emotions took control of him and he began to cry for just a couple of seconds, but a moment later he stopped himself cold. Sanford noticed it right away. The kid actually took a gulp and turned his own hysteria right back off. Sanford loved Walter for that. He would have traded hearts with him.
He hated to look right at the boy, though. It was worse than staring into a mirror. He told himself that it was okay not to look at Walter. He was naked, after all, trying to take a bath, and the decent thing to do was to avoid looking in his direction. When he spoke again, his voice felt weak under the weight of his shame. It absorbed nearly all of his energy. “You don’t have to be sorry for anything, Walter. Just keep washing, though, all right?”
Walter speeded up his process of absently wetting his hands and patting them over his shivering naked body, a little pink skeleton of a boy with a mop of brown hair. This halfhearted washing seemed to be the best he could do. He kept his eyes in rapid motion, staring out into space as if looking for the next direction of attack. “No! But if I’m sorry and he won’t be mad, then we can go now and I don’t care that there’s no pony. Tell him I don’t care, Sanford! I don’t even want to ride any more!”
“You’re forgetting to wash, Walter. You have to wash.” Sanford turned to Walter with the intention of meeting the boy’s eyes just for a second to help reinforce his message, but he was surprised to see that Walter wasn’t looking at him. The boy was staring around in all directions without really looking at anything. Sanford passed one hand in front of Walter’s face. The boy made no reaction, even though Sanford already knew that he could see. Walter had showed up at the ranch without glasses on and he could see just fine, looked straight at him when he talked. But now he just kept on staring around into the darkness. He resembled a terrified blind man.
“Sanford?” Walter whispered like he was telling a secret. “You’re not mad at me, are you, Sanford?”
“No, Walter. I’m not mad at anybody. Keep washing, though, all right? You need to get clean.”
“Can’t we go now? While he’s in there sleeping? Why can’t we just go now?”
“Walter, I am trying to help you when I say that you really, really do need to get nice and clean. It will make things better for you. I promise.” Walter resumed his useless patting of damp hands over his chest and arms, staring into the ni
ght like a blind man. His teeth chattered away. “Walter, can you see me?”
“Oh, yes. I see you, Sanford.”
“How come you’re not looking at me?”
The question confused Walter. He strained to think. Meanwhile, he resumed wetting his hands and patting the water over himself with more energy, as if he could physically work hard enough to force the answer from his brain. “Okay,” Walter replied.
“Okay what, Walter?”
“Okay, I am really gonna wash all clean, face and ears and hands and feet.” He cupped his hands, filled them with water, spilled it over his head, and immediately did it again, over and over, moving now as fast as he could.
“That’s good, Walter. You’re doing just right. It’s what you have to do, that’s all. Sometimes he goes softer on you when you do it all just perfect.”
“Do what perfect?”
“Anything he says. It doesn’t matter.”
“So as long as I get all clean like ready for Sunday School, he won’t be mad?”
“No. Not about that. But he can always get mad about something else. All you can do is see to it that he doesn’t have any reason to get mad after he said clear as day that he wants you clean.”
“Okay. I’m washing. Like this?”
“I think you’re getting there.”
Walter kept at it with vigor, breathing hard through his chattering teeth. “Sanford?”
“Come on, Walter. Let’s get finished up here.”
“Does he get mad at you?”
“Huh?” It was Sanford’s turn to be slapped by a question that stopped him cold. “Oh … yeah.”
“Okay, then! So you know! There must be something! What do you do? What do you do? To stop it?”
“God damn it, Walter! What did you come out here for, anyway?” Sanford shouted.
“It was supposed to be a ranch!”
“Chicken ranch! Chicken ranch, Walter! Stinking birds!”
“But there were horses! There was a pony that loved little boys because it broke its leg and a little boy saved it who looked just like me and so the pony was going to love me right off just like we were old friends.” He finally stopped, still staring around into the darkness.
Sanford found himself breathing so hard that it was making him dizzy. His chest was gripped in a corset of muscle tension. He leaned on the pump handle for support. “Listen, Walter. No—keep washing, don’t stop! He could be looking! Now it’s simple: you do whatever he wants. Damn it, don’t you know this shit by now? Do not ever argue with him! And most of all, Walter, never beg him for anything. Don’t beg! Even if you think you have to, never do it!” He swallowed hard and added, “It only makes him worse.”
That one hit Walter like a spear to the chest. “Oh, my Lord Jesus, Sanford. Oh, my Lord Jesus!”
“Keep washing! All right, listen: there is this one thing you can do—I learned it the hard way, let me tell you—when he hits you and knocks you down, what you do is, you kind of jerk your legs a couple of times. People do that when they get knocked out. It’s like little convulsions. He likes to see it.”
“I’ve seen people get knocked out in the movies. They never do that.”
“Movies are lies that Hollywood tells ugly people to make them feel so bad they go out and buy things to feel better. All you need to know is that it’s better for you when he’s happy. Keep washing.”
“I am washing. Sanford?”
“What, Walter? What?”
“Then when I do everything right, he’s going to let me go, isn’t he?”
“He always lets them go, Walter.” Sanford spoke with a certainty that he did not feel, but hoped it would comfort Walter a little.
“Are you sure?”
“You don’t see any others around here, do you? There’s been plenty of you guys here. He claims that the reason he brings you guys here in the first place is because he gets tired of me. When he has you here, he leaves me alone until he gets tired of you. I think his favorite thing is getting tired of somebody, doesn’t matter who—gives him an excuse to go all haywire.”
“How come you know this stuff?”
This time their eyes finally met straight on, but the connection was too hot for Sanford to hold. He had to turn back toward the desert. “… You missed a spot, Walter.”
For the first two days of Grandma Louise’s visit, everything came off without a hitch. She and Sanford stayed busy searching out any dead or dying birds so they could be separated from the others before they spread any illness around. The birds looked pretty good to Sanford, but when he mentioned it, Uncle Stewart threw three eggs at him, one after the other, that all hit him in the back and dripped down his shirt and coveralls. He was not allowed to leave work to go in and wash up. Sanford secretly railed at himself for slipping like that. It could have fatal consequences.
Uncle Stewart warned Sanford not to go near the shed for any reason. Sanford caught sight of Uncle Stewart making his way out to the supposedly empty shed on two different occasions, but he never saw him taking any food or water there. He told himself that he must have missed seeing the times when Uncle Stewart took some sort of nourishment out there. There was no purpose in starving Walter, and he would be less likely to complain to his family later on if he was at least well fed.
On the third day of Grandma Louise’s visit, just before Uncle Stewart was to give her a ride back into the city, Sanford set the table for a light supper. Uncle Stewart sat sipping coffee and waiting to be served while Louise was supposed to be out feeding the rabbits. He was facing the pantry when she entered the house, but the sounds of her feet stomping across the floor spun him around just in time to see her smack Uncle Stewart’s head with the flat of her hand. Sanford noticed that she did it the same way that Uncle Stewart did it to him.
“Hey! What the—?”
“You filthy bastard!” She fairly hissed. “Why don’t you just take out your gun and shoot every one of us right now?”
“What? Are you going nuts?”
“I swear to God, Stewart! Why in the name of Jesus Himself didn’t you just wait until we were asleep and then shoot us in the Goddamned head? Why?”
“Hey, you better tell me what you’re talking about before I start to take this personally.”
“Before you what? Oh, you better shut up this time, son. You don’t know how much I know already.”
“I know that it’s been a long time since I slapped you down to the—”
“I just talked to him, Stewart!”
There was a rancid pause. “I see. You, ah, you went out to my locked shed then, did you, Mother?”
“Locked, nothing! Don’t you forget who paid for this farm. Oh, I’ve watched you sneak out there more than once. Got curious about my boy’s special interest. You always have such interesting little projects. And then you keep the keys over there on the mantel? I thought that was an invitation to meet your new boy.”
“That kid? Walter? Oh, don’t tell me you believed anything he told you? He lies every time he opens his mouth! He’s as useless as a piss hard-on!”
“A piss hard-on. You’re joking at a time like this?”
“It was no joke, you should have seen it! Ha! No, really, though. What did he try to tell you?”
“He tried to tell me that he was sorry. Sorry, Stewart. He kept on saying it: sorry, sorry, sorry. He said his mother told him that you seemed nice. Oh, and he wants you to know that he doesn’t care that you don’t have a pony. Jesus, Stewart! A pony?”
“All right. I know how this has got to look to you.”
“Stop right there. Son, I have turned my back on your ‘special interests,’ year after year. We moved our family out of Canada and hoped to leave your ‘special interests’ behind. My advice and my protection has kept you out of jail because of your ‘special interests.’”
“I appreciate—”
“Now you have rewarded me by taking a risk with somebody
who knows you!”
“He doesn’t know me.”
“He’s got a mother out there who met you! Did you go retarded on us, Stewart? Did you do that?”
Sanford could only watch in horrified fascination while Uncle Stewart’s lower lip began to quiver. Seconds later, he burst into tears and embraced his mother. “Oh, all right, I can’t ever fool you, Mommie-mommie. I don’t know why I even try. You catch me in every lie I ever try to tell.”
“Don’t you ever forget that, either. Now. What did you go and do this time?”
Through his blubbering sobs, Uncle Stewart squeezed out the words. “I just lost control, Mama. You know I hardly ever do that any more, and this one time I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to, Mother. But by the time I woke up and realized what I had been doing to him, it was too late.”
“This is why you really wanted me here, isn’t it, Stewart?”
“It is, Mom. You’re right again.”
“All of that shit about sick birds. Do you know that I used up my days off for the entire month to come out here?”
“I don’t care how much people ever laugh at me for being sick in the head, Mama, I will always love you and be grateful to my sweet mother for all of her help.”
“Well, you better be.”
“I am.”
“All right. The quietest way to kill him is to use an ax. Every one of us will strike a blow on the boy so none of us can ever talk about it.” A wordless rush of air blasted out through Sanford’s lips. It was all the protest Grandma Louise would stand for. “Shut up, or you’re next. What kind of a boy are you that you don’t understand the bond between a mother and her son? Stewart, you pull Sanford along and meet me in the shed.”
“What are we supposed to tell the boy?” Uncle Stewart asked.
“Not a thing. He’s in there asleep. I stayed with him until he drifted off. So I’ll be the one to go out and brain him first. It will be an act of mercy for the poor child. A blessing that he fell asleep with me cooing to him, almost like his own dear mother. The next thing he knows, I will have personally delivered him unto the arms of the Lord.” She turned back to Sanford. “Then I am going to have to see you hit him too. I want you to hit him whether he’s dead or not.”
The Road Out of Hell Page 13