The Road Out of Hell (6 page)

But then what do I tell them?
The words for what had been done to him, at least the words that he knew, could not be spoken. Shame and disgust sealed his lips in a way no threat ever would. If he softened up the story and left out certain dark information, if he only complained of being beaten, any adult was likely to laugh at him. Casual violence was a part of harsh rural life: most children were frequently cuffed, slapped, or even punched. In this world, a boy of thirteen was nearly a man. It did not matter that Sanford was small even for a thirteen-year-old and that he was rapidly losing weight. People were likely to tell him to learn how to defend himself, by God, if he didn’t like people beating on him.

If he did mention any unnatural behavior, he would have to say that he had gone along with it. Nobody was going to want to hear any more about it. At the same time, he feared that if he did put his story into words, it would somehow make it all the more real. To speak of such things would give the story additional power over him, even as it drove the listener away in repugnance and left him isolated once again.

Uncle Stewart’s car returned a couple of hours later. Sanford was barely aware of the sound. He had lapsed into a dreamlike state that shielded him from the worst of the turmoil, even though it also prevented him from making any headway on the big question of what the hell he was supposed to do next.

He heard two voices, Uncle Stewart and somebody else. A boy’s voice, speaking broken English in the rolling rhythms of Mexican Spanish.

He heard Uncle Stewart walk the boy over to the first coop, the one that they had built when their energy was still high and Grandpa George was pitching in. The coop was framed in two-by-fours and covered in wooden sheets. The solid wood walls hid everything inside. Its chicken-wire roof allowed air and light in for the birds, while the two-by-four crossbeams braced the wire so well that animals couldn’t get in or out. He heard the wooden door close and knew that Uncle Stewart was now blocking the only exit.

That was the moment when the full answer blew through any remaining layers of denial that had shielded him: the only believable reason for Uncle Stewart to start up the entire enterprise.
It’s all an excuse to be isolated out here.
The realization plunged him into an invisible frozen cave. He sat there unmoving, barely allowing himself to breathe, while the terrible cold pulled the life force out of him and left behind nothing but mortal fear.

Screams punctured his daze. Three of them, one right after another. It sounded as if the boy screamed until his lungs were empty, gasped in as much air as he could, then went right back to screaming again. The third scream was choked off. There was silence for a few moments.

Sanford recognized the sounds that came next. They were from Uncle Stewart. He was in his frenzy now. Sanford knew the frenzy. He knew that the boy was being shoved face first into Hell at the hands of his own personal tormenting demon. Even though the wooden walls hid everything from sight, it was impossible not to imagine Uncle Stewart in his wild-eyed fit of sexual violence. There was the same thick-throated voice and it was growling the same inhuman threats and filthy insults. Uncle Stewart coaxed the same screams and pleas from the boy that Sanford recalled having made himself. They had done no more to stop Uncle Stewart than this boy’s did.

“What the hell are you doing out here, anyway?” Sanford whispered into the darkness without meaning to speak. “Why the hell would you come out here like that?” The dreadful noises began to cause the hens in the other coops to squawk in alarm. After that, the mix of human and animal sounds was hellish. Sanford tried to cover his ears, but it did no good. It was as if every living thing on the ranch, animal or human, was being killed at the same time.

It went on and it went on. He had no clear sense of how long his own assault had lasted, but he would have guessed that it had been shorter than this one. Then he realized that it had to have been pretty much the same, since everything he was hearing was familiar. It was like listening to a radio play that he already knew. The full scope of his personal danger seized him. He could feel that his body possessed no strength or speed sufficient to do anything about what was happening. Sanford had never felt his small stature or his thinness so clearly as he did in that moment. If he cried out to Uncle Stewart in an attempt to stop this attack, he felt in his bones that it would only draw the madness back down onto him.

Sobs began to tear through him. He could not stop them; they were relentless as a waterfall. He did not dare let Uncle Stewart hear him. Uncle Stewart hated crying, as Sanford had learned the day before. “If you’re crying,” Uncle Stewart told him, “that just means that you’re trying to trick somebody into letting you off easy. You’re trying to duck out on your responsibility out of
pity!”
He spat the word like a bad taste. For now, Sanford got away with crying because the sounds from the other coop hid his own. His heart broke open under the weight of the boy’s desperate wailing and the knowledge that there was nothing he could do to stop this. His throat burned while he imagined himself screaming at his mother for ever sending him away to such a place, screaming and screaming.

Silence eventually returned to Uncle Stewart’s chicken ranch, even though it took its time in arriving. At some point after that, the wooden door of Sanford’s smaller coop opened again and Uncle Stewart leaned through the door. He cheerfully called that it was time to come on out. “You can relax,” he sneered, anticipating Sanford’s dread. He pushed himself back out of the doorframe, calling, over his shoulder, “So get out of there.”

Sanford tentatively emerged on legs that barely supported him. Outside the door, Uncle Stewart placed his hand on his shoulder in a friendly way, but Sanford reflexively recoiled so hard that he stumbled backward and fell flat on the ground. Uncle Stewart gave out a good-natured laugh, more relaxed than he had been in a long time. He just turned around and walked back toward the fire pit, calling over his shoulder for Sanford to go around and check all the feed levels. For the remainder of the night, everything was quiet. Sanford knew that Uncle Stewart would be too busy to bother him, so he was able to get some sleep for the first time in a while.

The strange sounds went on inside the large henhouse for days. It could have been a week or more. Sanford lost track. One day was pretty much like the next. Guilt continually swarmed over him because of his relief at being left alone. Uncle Stewart kept to himself and just ordered Sanford to keep all the farm routines going, adding that he was keeping the boy bound and gagged during daylight hours while George’s workers finished up the house. Sanford worked at his chores alone, enough to keep him on the move throughout the daylight hours and into the darkness. The labor provided a welcome distraction. At night, he kept his sanity only by tuning the noises out, just like changing the station on a radio, but his mixture of helplessness and outrage was so painful that it nearly crippled him.

He accidentally made it worse by being too obvious about avoiding contact with the boy, to the point that Uncle Stewart noticed and called to him one night with a malevolent grin. He handed Sanford an opened can of beans and casually told him, “Take it out to the boy in the coop.” He offered no explanation, but he flashed that threatening look that Sanford had learned to equate with a warning. It usually meant that if he moved quickly enough he could get away without being struck, or at least not too hard.

He took the can and walked toward the coop with a growing sense of unreality. Uncle Stewart’s way of carrying on was so strange—just as if nothing had happened. Sanford had no idea how else to react but to go along with it himself. He had already learned that whenever Uncle Stewart was in the mood to act civilized, it offered a moment of safety. It was always a good idea to stretch those moments out in any manner possible. So he carried the opened can as carefully as he could, making sure not to spill a drop or to do anything else that might set off another one of those animal frenzies.

When he pulled open the reinforced door, he heard the soft whimpering sounds even before he entered. A bright shaft of light played across the floor and revealed a young Mexican boy. His face looked as if he might be a year or two older than Sanford, but he was just as small and thin. The boy’s appearance stopped him cold. He cowered on the ground as if expecting an attack. In that instant, everything that Sanford had managed to push out of his thoughts until then sprang up before him. The boy was in terrible condition, much worse than his own, with his face distorted under bruised and swollen flesh. Sanford realized that the boy was holding onto one of his arms as if it was broken. And then his eyes adjusted to the gloom enough to reveal that the boy’s legs were chained to a heavy post sunk into the hardpan soil.

The post was new.

Sanford’s legs began shaking so tremulously that he nearly fell over. He squatted onto the floor next to the boy and steadied himself with one hand while he set down the beans with his other. He held up both hands to the boy, palms open. It took the boy another moment to grasp that there was no attack coming. Sanford tried to give him a little smile, then picked up the can and held it out to him. The boy tentatively reached forward to take the food with his good hand. But when he leaned forward to accept it, he suddenly gasped and froze in place. His hand stopped in midair. He peered up and down Sanford’s body, taking in the sight of the torn clothing and of Sanford’s own bruises. In a flash, the boy’s eyes doubled in size and he blurted out something in rapid Spanish. Surprised and excited, he then gestured back and forth, crying “Yoomee, yoomee!”

Sanford realized that the boy was trying to use English.
“You me! You me!”
It was enough. He understood. The knowledge was a blade through every comforting layer of denial that separated him from the situation. There was nothing that he could do to ignore it any longer. He was face to face with a terrified boy from another country who could just as easily have been him.

His own pulse rocked him. It sent heated throbs through his face and his ears. He nodded to the boy and tried to encourage him by pushing the little offering of food closer, but the boy’s eyes flashed. He knocked the can aside and the beans cut an arc across the wall. The boy frantically indicated his chains, jabbering away in Spanish and forgetting any attempt at English. That didn’t matter; his meaning was plain:
Get me out of here! Find something to break these chains! We both have to get away! You and me! We have to run! You and me! You and me!

The boy lunged forward the full length of the chain and grabbed on to Sanford’s arm. But Sanford recoiled and backed away, unable to bear anyone’s touch, not even another boy who knew why he was hurting. He took another step back while the boy kept up his rapid-fire appeals. He studied the problem with the same sense that he used to study Uncle Stewart. The obstacles were plain: thick chain, steel padlock. He needed tools. It would take time. It would make noise.

It would bring Uncle Stewart.

He backed to the door, eyes riveted on the captive Mexican boy. The boy’s pleas rose to hysteria when he saw him start to go. Sanford tried to reassure him by holding up his hands in the same reassuring gesture, but he wasn’t clear on whatever it was that he was supposed to be telling the boy. Was the message that he should not worry? And why was that? If the message was that Sanford intended to come back with a hacksaw, then yes, he could do that. He could come back with the damned hacksaw. But then what?

He had to think, make a plan of some kind, find a way to do this without getting both of them hurt in the process. Or worse. But Sanford was still in such rough condition himself that he was having a hard time getting his thoughts to stick together. He sensed that the only way for him to get enough time to accomplish anything was to go back to the campsite right now. Pretend that nothing unusual had happened out here. Keep Uncle Stewart happy as well as he could for the rest of the evening, and then after he fell asleep, maybe Sanford could find a way to get into town and somehow get somebody in authority to care about the fates of one young boy from Mexico and another from Canada, both of whom were breaking the law just by being in the country.

By the time he returned to the campsite, Uncle Stewart had cleaned himself up and was getting ready for bed. His mood was still chipper. “Sanford! You can go ahead and get some sleep tonight, but as soon as you get up I want you to draw enough water from the well to get thoroughly bathed. Do it before you start breakfast, even. I want you in presentable condition.” He grinned at him and winked. “Getting tired of the dirty ones.” He stepped into the tent but left the flap up for Sanford.

There was a blanket wadded up in a corner of the tent, so Sanford lay down on that spot and pulled it over to him. His body throbbed and burned in half a dozen places. The sting in his backside became more noticeable after he lay still for a while, but he wished so hard for it not to be there that his mind gained some power over the pain. It hovered at a tolerable level. Everything seemed safe enough for the moment. The sense of peaceful rest gave him a whiff of optimism. At least he was forming a plan, and that in itself was something. He extinguished the lantern. Now all he had to do was lie still and wait for Uncle Stewart to go to sleep, quietly cut through that boy’s lock, even if it took him all night, then figure out what to do about the boy and about himself.

He made it a point to trick Uncle Stewart into thinking that he was falling asleep by allowing his breathing to fall into a deep and regular rhythm. The pretense got much easier. It became so effortless that he was unaware when fatigue plunged him into sleep.