“All right, here he is,” Uncle Stewart immediately spoke up. “It’s over. We can all calm down. Stop the presses, call off the dogs. Our wandering boy is home.” Sanford felt himself pushed into a corner. He went along with it and stood in his almost-invisible mode. Sometimes it helped to keep people from noticing that he was there.
Grandma Louise looked so frantic that she appeared to be coming down with a raging case of the trots. “Stewart, nobody was trying to betray you in any fashion. I hope you can calm down now.”
“Oh, I’m calm enough, now that he’s back. But don’t you dare tell me that nobody was trying to betray me. That is exactly what you did, all of you. Son of a bitch! My own family!”
Grandpa George slumped into his big chair and quietly rubbed the darkening spot on his face. “The boy isn’t going to talk, Stewart.”
“Of course not!” Grandma Louise chimed in. “Now do you see the wisdom in doing it the way that we did? We are all in this together!” She turned straight to him. “Sanford knows that anything that happens to us is surely going to happen to him as well. Don’t you, Sanford?”
He glared at her, knowing she would cut his throat to please her son if he asked her to do it. “I don’t know if I believe that,” he replied. He was surprised by his own ornery tone. But this business of surrendering his life seemed to have imparted an unfamiliar sense of power.
“Say!” Uncle Stewart remarked. “Look who’s turned into a tough guy overnight! Spends one night on somebody else’s sofa, and now he’s ready to talk all kinds of sass, eh?”
“That’s not it, Uncle Stewart,” Sanford answered him. “I just get tired of being shoved around all of the time. And you ought to forget about judging me—maybe worry about whoever’s going to judge
you.”
“What? You’ll hang right alongside of us, sonny boy! Bet on that!”
“Stewart!”
Jessie bellowed it so loud that everybody recoiled and reflexively turned to her. “I don’t know what this crazy talk about hanging is supposed to be about, but you might as well know that I am the one who arranged for Sanford to slip away because I wanted to avoid this very sort of a scene!”
“Well, thanks for saying so, at least, but I already knew that, Jessie. Dad would never have dreamed it up and Sanford’s a frightened little mouse who does what he’s told. It had to be you. He just can’t go anywhere, that’s all.”
“I see. But if you believe your own logic, he can’t talk about whatever you fear so much whether he’s here or not, since he will be pulled into it himself. Your guarantee works wherever he goes.”
“Sure it does,
in theory,
but out there, you know, in the wilds, a boy gets too much freedom, certain ideas start to bounce around in his head, maybe these ideas seem like they are good for him, but maybe the ideas are actually tricks and they will cause him to rot in a prison cell or swing from a rope.”
Jessie turned in her chair until she was directly facing him. “All right, I’ll put it this way. I don’t care what you have going on out there at that place. I am taking Sanford home with me.”
Uncle Stewart walked directly over to her and threw a roundhouse punch that caught her on the side of the head just above the cheekbone and drove her straight down to the floor. Sanford leaped for him but Grandpa George was quick enough to hold him back. An instant later, Sanford saw Jessie’s body spasm a couple of times before she got her senses back. Sanford was glad for that much. He could not help wondering if she was wise enough to have done it on purpose.
Grandma Louise already had her arms around Uncle Stewart. She buried her face in his neck and murmured to him, “Not her, son. Not her. You can’t do anything to her. I know you want to keep your freedom. Not her. Shhh. Not her. You want to keep your freedom, don’t you?”
“I do, Mother,” he whispered back, just as if they were the only people in the room. “You’re right.” He turned to Jessie and offered his hand to help her back up. “Sorry, Jessie. Lost my temper for a second.”
She recoiled from his outstretched hand and reached toward her brother instead. Sanford immediately stepped forward and helped her up, then put his arm around her and said to the others, “Let me talk to her outside a minute.” He turned to Uncle Stewart and said in a softer voice, “I’ll talk to her. I will. I’ll talk to her.” Then he quickly led her out the front door and toward the open yard.
“Somebody needs to,” Uncle Stewart managed to interject just before they got outside. Sanford nodded but kept on going, eager to be out the door.
Sanford and Jessie spoke only in urgent whispers while they walked around the block, even though they were both in a state of anger and outrage. In the Los Angeles of 1928, no adult who possessed the slightest degree of social refinement would publicly discuss personal matters. The act of keeping it to oneself was accepted as being every adult’s responsibility, to the point that the social damage caused by failing to maintain this standard placed the offender at the level of someone walking around with a jagged rip in the seat of their pants and the remains of a road apple coating both shoes. Only if a car or bus rattled by with an especially loud engine would they raise their voices to penetrate the noise. They circled the block three times and slowly worked their way through the effects of Uncle Stewart’s attack. Most of that time was consumed by long pauses broken only by short bursts of muted conversation.
“That’s just a taste of what he’s been doing to you,” Jessie said at one point, keeping her eyes straight ahead while they walked. “Isn’t it?”
“Jessie … I know it looks bad.”
She snorted at that. “Oh, you’re willing to give it that much, are you?”
“I mean, I
know
it’s bad. But the thing that matters is for you to go on home. And do it before there’s a conflict that we can’t get you out of.”
“I cannot believe that we are talking about a member of our own family, talking about having to protect ourselves from him as if he were some kind of complete
fiend.”
“Except ‘fiend’ is a word for things in the movies. He went way past being a ‘fiend’ a long time ago. Hollywood only makes movies to get ugly people to buy things, anyway.”
“Excuse me?”
“Skip it.”
They walked for another few minutes, then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small fold of cash. “I set this aside for you. It’s just enough to get you a train ticket up to Seattle.”
“Jessie, I can’t—”
“I don’t have enough for food. Try to take something with you when you go. If you can’t bring anything, go anyway. A little hunger won’t kill you.”
“Jessie….”
“I’ll leave later this morning. All you do is wait until I’m gone. I arranged to pay the fruit vendor on the corner to run you to the station.”
“Jessie, he’ll never let—”
“Listen! I am going to wait for you in Seattle. I don’t have any money to remain in that city. Everything we have left will go to get us back home, so you have to come right away. As soon as I’m gone and Uncle Stewart relaxes, you have to find a minute to break away. Just get down to the fruit stand there on the corner.” She handed him a small envelope with money in it. “The ten-dollar bill in the front is for him. He knows that he has to take you to the train station if he wants it. If he won’t do it for any reason, then you find a way to get there on your own, by God. You can do it.”
“Are you going to call the American police?”
“I thought about it. But I’m afraid that they might not want to listen to a woman from Canada about a boy who’s not supposed to be here in the first place. Besides, if they gave it away to Uncle Stewart somehow, then you would be stuck there alone with him. Trust me. This is the only way out for you.”
“There’s no way out for me at all, Jessie.”
“I swear, you stop talking like that or I won’t go. I won’t even leave you alone with him. No, never again. I don’t know and I don’t think I ever want to know just what in the Lord’s name has really gone on out there, but you are coming home one way or the other. Now.”
“You really wouldn’t leave here without me?” Sanford’s heart cracked open for her like an egg against the edge of a frying pan.
“Not unless you give me your solemn promise that you will be on that late-night train to Seattle tonight. Don’t leave me hanging alone up there by myself, all right? That’s not home for either one of us, up there.”
He felt a rush of gratitude for witnessing firsthand the kind of goodness and courage and decency that some people represent. It was a joy to help save her. It was an honor. “All right, Jessie. You’re right, then. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about it like that. You go straight on ahead and I will be on that train tonight.”
“You are looking at me and swearing your word, Sanford.”
He gazed straight into her eyes. “I know, Jessie.” His throat seized up when he tried to say “I love you,” but she got the idea anyway and wrapped him in a hug that squeezed the air out of him. It was excruciating and joyful at the same time to feel her arms around him. He would have loved for her to just keep on squeezing, stronger than a man, stronger than anything human. Just keep on squeezing until his bones snapped and crumbled and his flesh wadded into a ball. They could bury him out in the henhouse. Put him in the hole that would be easy to open because the dirt was already loose where he had been ordered to dig the graves for the Dahl family. A young woman with Jessie’s strength could easily scrape it back out.
How fine it would be, since there was no way to keep Jessie from knowing forever, if she could be the only one who knew. How extraordinary, how full of grace for him to only have to suffer the shame and humiliation of letting her know and of sharing the grief with her over the death on his hands. If she could be the keeper of his secret and bury him out there so that no one would ever know he was gone. It seemed plausible enough. If his uncle or grandparents never said a thing, who would complain? Except for Jessie, everyone in his family had allowed two years to go by without any contact except those absurd letters dictated by Uncle Stewart.
If only he could apologize to the world by letting her finish the job on him and drop him into the newly opened grave and maybe even throw dirt over his face so that he could expire by trying to breathe through it until he sucked it into his nostrils, his mouth, his throat, his lungs. Sanford’s apology to her, to the boys, to the human race, would be to die with fire in his chest and the torment of useless mortal panic exploding inside him while he forcefully shit himself and died in protest over what the demon had done to his boyhood.
“Jessie—” he began to protest, but that was as far as he got.
“Damn it! Damn it, Sanford, you do this! You
do
this! You get to that train station and get to Seattle. That is all that you have to do. You can do that. You can do that much. You have to do that much, Sanford. You see that there is no way I can just ‘go back home’ here, don’t you? I could do that on the same day that I sprout wings and fly around the moon. Now there is a late train tonight that goes all the way through. You tell me that you are getting on that train, come Hell or high water. And say it like you mean it!”
“Jessie … Jessie, there is so much that you don’t….” He stopped and took in a sigh so big that it creaked the muscles in his back when he exhaled. “All right. I’ll get on that train. If you’re already gone, he’ll let his guard down. Then when he’s not looking I can sneak away.”
“You can do this, Sanford.”
“Yeah, sure. No. I can do it,” he smiled back at her. It was true after all, as far as it went. He could do it, get to the station with or without the fruit-stand guy, take the money that she gave him and buy a ticket and ride all the way back up north to Seattle. Even if he had to make the trip without any food, it was less than three days. It would hardly kill him, and he might even be able to smuggle out something to eat that he could bring along.
If he was capable of taking advantage of it, Jessie’s help would enable him to break away and make it all the way back to Canada. He would have to live with his sister, but after everything that she had seen there, she would not refuse him. He could help with the household income and be an asset to her. There would be plenty of challenges, but they would have a chance at a life. Both of them. The plan could be made to work and his escape could be “pulled off without a hitch,” as his favorite pulp novels liked to put it.
If only he’d been just about any other living human being on the planet. If only he did not share in the guilt created by a loathsome monster named Gordon Stewart Northcott. If only there were not twenty or more dead kids tied to that demon. And most of all, most of all—if there were not three perfectly innocent and terrified little boys whose cruel end left a bloody trail running back to Sanford himself.
For that reason, it made no difference whether or not Jessie concocted the most brilliant escape plan ever conceived. It could not bear fruit. The roots were poisoned. Still, he noticed that Jessie’s attitude took a marked upswing as soon as he promised to go along with the plan. The change in her convinced him that he was right to make the choice to feed her a bunch of crap. He kept up the charade all the way to the train station, and even though Uncle Stewart was careful not to give them a moment of privacy, she managed a quick whisper while she hugged him: “Tonight. Seattle.” Sanford gave her a wink and a nod.