The Road Out of Hell (25 page)

Maybe his uncle would kill him outright this time, but at the moment, the feeling of saving the Dahl family was so good that it overrode his fear of death. He moved his torso to the side just enough to brush away a pebble that was digging into his back. The result was a slight improvement in comfort, almost like lying on sand. Waiting wouldn’t be too much of a problem, as long as he kept the natural sense of panic pushed down inside of himself. What he had to do was to disregard being trapped in that small hole. He figured that he could do it for several hours, maybe a whole day before he would have to resort to lying in his own waste. If he needed to piss he could just soak his jeans. They would dry soon enough. The rest of it, he knew from experience, was mostly a matter of concentrating on his breathing to keep the panic at bay. So far, the day was turning out a lot better than he would have guessed.

Ten

Nearing Los Angeles, Jessie’s ship passed a flotilla of luxury gambling ships anchored three miles outside the international boundary to avoid the U.S. anti-gambling laws. Eager customers flocked from the mainland. It was a perfect gambler’s era. A wave of prosperity provided the post-war glow of optimism that the people had been promised back during the darkest of days. They drank deeply of its accompanying sense of increasing prosperity and worldwide human coexistence. The golden era of the Roaring Twenties swept North America and Europe; in the middle of the summer of 1928, all systems were running wide open.

Jessie stood on the top passenger deck and watched her ship being towed into its berth at the docks. She was not going to let any lastminute nerves turn her away. Her straight-ahead attitude matched the prevailing public sentiment that there were no limits to what a person could do. Society was busily failing to anticipate the coming of Black Monday, while Jessie in particular had no way of imagining what she was about to walk into at Uncle Stewart’s little desert enterprise. Her parents had shown no particular reaction when she revealed that she had saved enough by mid-summer to go down and check in on Sanford. Their marriage was in such a disastrous state by then that they just waved her on and went back to their grappling.

She knew better than to allow herself to look like someone who was traveling alone. Intuition told her to harden her heart, make believe that she had a personal army to protect her. Look everybody straight in the eye. The act suited her—she was in no mood to be agreeable about anything. Once ashore, riding the Redline bus out to Pasadena, she got into a conversation with an aspiring movie actor who rhapsodized about a new stunt double for actor Tom Mix who had just completed a solitary horseback ride from New York City all the way to Hollywood. The young man spoke about the long ride with the reverence of a devotee describing a spiritual apparition, until Jessie asked him how anybody could tell whether or not the rider really had done it, if it was just him and his horse. He gave Jessie a cold stare. “You know something? You do not have the necessary stuff for a future in the business of storytelling through moving images of light and shadow: The Lie of Truth. Don’t tell me that you aren’t interested, either. You’re a young woman, this is Hollywood: it’s only natural for you to wonder, no?”

“Movies?” she asked.

He gave her a wan smile and got off at the next stop.

Sanford lay motionless on his back, concentrating on his breathing. The pit was dark. He nearly floated in the isolation. He felt peaceful enough there, and he needed peace more than he needed to live. The peace that came to him in that hour was from the simple fact that he had willingly climbed down into the pit, ready to meet his own end there rather than endure one more day of Hell on earth. Terror could stab him with cactus needles, but he was not going to flinch. His survival instinct had lost all its power over him.

The natural sounds of the desert night were faint and few. He would hear the car returning to the ranch and then his uncle’s footsteps on the sandy hardpan soil once the car’s engine died. But the desert quiet was broken by the loud scraping sounds of the boards being pulled away from the pit with no warning whatsoever. The sense of transformation to waking reality was strong. It was apparent that he had been sound asleep and only dreaming that he was listening to his uncle.

The chain was still wrapped around his neck, but now the pit was flooded with bright daylight. That meant that hours had passed. He could not explain the passage of time. It was like a raw splice in a piece of film. He squinted into the glare, which decreased the brightness just enough for him to see the shadowy silhouette of Uncle Stewart’s face. It hovered directly over him while his arms reached in and keyed open the lock on Sanford’s neck chain.

“Hey, Lucky!” Uncle Stewart was shouting, for no apparent reason. “Looks like my ignorant whore of a niece just saved your life! Tell me, what kind of young woman travels long-distance by herself in this day and age? It gives men the wrong idea, I can tell you that. You better have a heart-to-heart with your sissy, tell her what happens to whores in this world.”

Sanford was relieved that at least Uncle Stewart didn’t have that smell, but he could not make sense of what he was hearing. “What did you …?” He shook his head to clear it, turning away from the harsh glare.

“Your sister. Got it? What a pair you two make! I can’t believe either one of you is related to me. Come to think of it, she’s actually so clumsy that she’s brilliant. Maybe I’ll do her and let you watch. Just kidding. But I think she blundered in here just in time to force me to march you out on display, all clean and shiny. Stupid thing sends a telegram to my mother telling her that she is on her way,
then
gets right on a boat before anybody can respond.”

“Jessie?” Sanford asked, unsure of what he was hearing.

“Yes—how many sisters do you have, idiot? Jessie! She sailed in yesterday and took a bus out to Pasadena, and
then
she goes and sends another telegram to my mother from her hotel. She says that she’s going to wait for me at this café near the Wineville bus terminal at noon. She says if I don’t come and pick her up, she’ll arrange for a taxicab and come out here on her own.”

“Jessie’s coming to the States? By herself?”

“Hey,
wake up!
She’s already here!” Uncle Stewart pulled him to his feet and helped him out of the pit. “So that’s why this is your lucky day, Lucky. Otherwise, we would not be forgetting about how you completely screwed up my supply of fresh meat. I’ve been working that family for weeks. Months! I still might have to make you pay.”

“You never said anything about those people to me.”

“And I
told
you, you don’t get to know everything! You know too Goddamned much already.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Don’t get smart! Fill this hole back up and set all those boards out back. Then put some of the hens back in here, for Christ’s sake. This place still has a stink to it.” Uncle Stewart started toward the house, calling back, “After that, come on and fix some dinner. C’mon, let’s go, Lucky! Maybe I should just call you Lucky from now on, ha-ha-ha! Let’s go, Lucky!”

Sanford’s stomach turned in a continual series of somersaults after being snapped back to waking reality combined with this dramatic new turn of events. He got busy following Uncle Stewart’s orders, shoveling the loose dirt back into the hole that apparently was not his grave, after all, today. Then he immediately fell into working on his chores, just to have something familiar to cling to. His mind raced.
Jessie’s coming, Jessie’s here, Jessie’s coming, Jessie’s here.

The thoughts spun in circles until the Big Question hit him. The impact nearly made him throw up. He stopped, dropped the shovel to the ground, and put his hands over his face. The Big Question pressed down on him, the weight of it dropped him to his knees in the dirt pile: What could he tell Jessie? What in God’s name was he supposed to say to her?

But even there on his knees in his moment of despairing, the weight of the Big Question doubled again, nearly enough to drive him flat to the ground.
What if Uncle Stewart gets scared that Jessie knows about his demon work? What would he do to her?
If Sanford allowed anything to happen to her, that would mean that he had brought this evil situation to the only person in the world who had ever stood up for him—the only one who was bothering to come and check up on him in this place.

Then the question collapsed under its own weight because its answer was so simple. There was no longer anything to tell Jessie at all. If she learned any part of it, even the smallest details, she would certainly get pulled into the knowledge of everything. Uncle Stewart would draw her into the flow of guilt using some trick or other. It didn’t matter how he did it; he could spread his evil just by exhaling. It was never safe to get close. Sanford saw in a flash that something like that was sure to happen if Jessie started poking around there, unless he got her to turn around and go back home as soon as possible.

That realization thrust him face-first into the one thing that was worse than the fear of death or even the fear of his further suffering at Uncle Stewart’s hands—he could not allow himself to be the cause of his sister’s damnation in that stinking place. This was the most terrible fear that his imagination could produce. Along with it came the first grain of raw courage that he had felt in a long time.
It does not matter what happens to you—you have to get her out of here.

He would do anything he had to do, say whatever he needed to say, in order to convince her that things were all right. Then he would get her the hell out of there before she got wind of anything. On Uncle Stewart’s chicken ranch, that meant working fast. Jessie was too smart to be around Stewart’s foulness for very long without noticing something. And once Jessie’s curiosity was engaged, she would latch on like a hunting dog.

Sanford stood up again. This time there was an enormous difference in the way he felt. Fear had entirely left him. It was as if a new blood system had just replaced his own, pumping new strength through him. He grabbed the shovel and set back to work filling the hole. Uncle Stewart was not going to be needing any new graves, because Sanford would find a way to turn his sister around and get her out of there. After that, it did not especially matter if he ended up back in a pit like that one. There was nowhere left for his life to go anyway. One grave seemed about as good as the next.

The warm smell of grilled bacon and oven-baked toast filled the cafe air while Jessie sat in a rolled-leather booth next to the large window that looked out onto the street. The view allowed her to keep an eye on approaching traffic and the Wineville bus stop, where she had just concluded the forty-mile ride from her Pasadena hotel. It was already twenty minutes past noon and Uncle Stewart was nowhere to be seen. Jessie decided to silently count to one thousand. If he had still not arrived by that time, she would take a taxi out to the place on her own. She realized that it was extremely rude to do such a thing, but she was completely fed up with trying to get any cooperation. And she was going to speak face to face with her brother that day, no matter what.

The more immediate problem was that even though the little restaurant was only doing a modest lunch business, of the dozen or so patrons currently at the tables, one of the men was already on her like a June bug. This one had ridden in on the bus from Pasadena with her and seemed to regard that as a common ground. She shook her head slightly while she listened to his story, waiting for a polite moment to interrupt and get him out of there. Even though she was still modestly attired in her other neck-high traveling dress, that did nothing to discourage the sort of attention that was coming her way.

“Here, I can see that you’re hesitating to invite me to sit, so let me leave you with my card.” He produced his business card with a flourish and placed it on the table in front of her. “The name is E. G. Guernsey. The Human Betterment Association of Pasadena. But you can just call me ‘Mr. Guernsey,’ ha-ha! Good one, don’t you think?”

She did not pick up the card.

He blushed at that and continued, “Since your brother works for the Chief of Police here, I’m surprised that you’ve never heard of me. Eugenics? The field of eugenic standards? None of that rings a bell?”

“Why would it, Mr. Guernsey?”

“Please! Just call me ‘Mr. Guernsey.’ Ha-ha-ha! Got you again, right? … Well, no. It’s just, you know in police work, they are starting to support eugenics.”

“Killing babies?”

“What? Goodness,
no!
Wherever did you—no! Of course not! Killing babies. No, in the field of eugenics we recommend sterilizing feeble-minded men and women so that they don’t have babies that need to be killed in the first place.”

“I see. And you want to do this to what kind of people, again?”

Mr. Guernsey’s eyes twinkled and he leaned in close to her and whispered, “Feeble-minded. Of course we don’t say ‘feeble-minded’ in the trade. We call them ‘feebs.’ Your pinheads, your mouth-breathers.”

Jessie stared at him for a moment with a completely blank face, then slowly stood up and leaned directly into his face. She curled her arms up under her chin in an awkward position and made the ugliest face that she could squeeze onto her features. She held his gaze and kept the stupid expression plastered on her face.