The Cat, The Devil And Lee Fontana

6

After Lee’s encounter with Brad Falon he’d found himself watching the shadows more carefully, and he didn’t like this kind of fear. He had been headed for the laundry that afternoon, had started to cut through the exercise room when he saw half a dozen jocks in there pumping iron. One of them, a new arrival, had eyes as cold as a hunting vulture. Brad Falon had already gathered a cluster of followers around him, and Lee didn’t want to mess with him. His good sense told him to turn back and go a different way, to avoid trouble, but he stubbornly pushed on in. Afterward, hours later, he wondered why he’d done that. The men watched him expressionlessly from where they worked the weights, the press, their rhythm never ceasing but their eyes never leaving him, their stripped bodies sleek with sweat. Lee moved on past, knowing this wasn’t smart, feeling Falon’s stare and not liking it. When, behind him, the rhythm of the weight machine stopped, he tightened his grip on the knife in his pocket, didn’t falter or let his glance flicker.

He entered the auto shop skirting a battered touring car set up on blocks waiting for a rebirth. No one entered behind him, and he could still hear the steady rhythm of the exercise equipment. Passing the touring car—a badly dented relic, one fender twisted, paint peeling over heavy rust, cloth top in tatters—he heard a faint moan.

Beyond the car against the wall lay a power sprayer beside half a dozen cans of paint. A motor block hung suspended from chains over a greasy tarp. He heard the moan again, a wrenching cry from among a stack of cardboard cartons. He glanced back toward the exercise room, then moved fast.

Behind the boxes lay a young inmate curled into the fetal position, his face covered by his pulled-up shirt, his naked ribs sucking in quick, shallow breaths. Bloody scratches covered his back. Lee had seen him around the prison yard. Randy Sanderford, a clean-faced boy doing three for an identity scam. His pants and shorts had been pulled down around his ankles, his blue shirt jerked over his face and mouth, likely muffling his yells. Bright red blood and semen spread from his rectum down his inner thighs.

Lee lifted and half carried him to the shower between the shop and the exercise room. Now he could sense a stirring among the jocks. The machines were silent. Listening warily, he stripped Randy down and turned the warm water on him, shoved the lye soap at him, told him to scrub, and where to scrub. The youngster hadn’t spoken. He gripped the soap, shivering, began to wash, wincing at the pain. Above the shower Lee could hear the men moving around again, heard the outer door pop air as it closed. Randy whimpered once, then was quiet. Lee stood watching him, filled with rage at the useless jocks but with rage at the kid, too, for being so stupid, for letting this happen to him. The water stopped at last. Randy came out shivering. Blood still flowed, thinned by the water on his body. The boy stared at Lee, frightened and ashamed.

“What did you do, go in there to work out with that bunch? No one has to tell me this is your first time in the joint.”

The boy began to cry.

“I’m going to tell you something, Sanderford. When you come into a place like this you’d better have one of two things with you, an ice pick or a jar of Vaseline. You’re going to need one or the other.”

Randy dried himself off with his shirt, staining it with blood. “I just came down to work out, I didn’t . . . I was working the bench press when they grabbed me . . .” His face flushed.

“What the hell did you think would happen? You thought they were just a bunch of nice guys in there working out, that you’d waltz in, introduce yourself, and you’d all be friends?”

Randy looked so shamefaced that Lee wanted to smash him. Didn’t the kid have any sense? Where the hell had he been all his life? What had he learned in his twenty-some years? “Hell, Sanderford. These prison turks aren’t little kids playing dirty games in the barn.” The baby-faced kid looked like he’d never been anywhere, like he’d had his nose wiped all his life by his rich mama. Sanderford wiped his mouth and smoothed back his hair.

“These men don’t just rape, Sanderford. They’d think nothing more of killing you than of crushing a cockroach.” Lee stared down at his own clenched fists, stifling an alarming desire to work Sanderford over, to beat the hell out of the kid, beat some sense into him. Shocked by his own rage, he stared hard at Sanderford, and turned away.

He had no reason to feel this boiling rage, this wasn’t his normal response to a dumb kid, this kind of anger. He stood puzzled, watching Sanderford pull on his clothes. “You’d better do some thinking, kid, better decide how you’re going to stay out of trouble in here, how you’re going to defend yourself if you mean to survive in this joint.” Trying to get his anger under control, Lee saw again Brad Falon’s stare, felt again the cold threat, was so enraged that heavy coughing rose up in his sick lungs, choking him.

He walked Sanderford back to his cell, got him there in time for the afternoon count. He traded a pack of cigarettes to a reliable inmate for a small bottle of iodine, and paid a second pack to get the iodine smuggled in to Sanderford. Lee didn’t smoke, the coffin nails were for trading. Tired and irritable, he went on to his own cell and lay on his bunk coughing and spitting up phlegm. The day hadn’t started out good, and the next days didn’t get any better. He was sick enough, the doc pulled him off farmwork for a week. Sanderford followed Lee like a lost puppy, after he was raped. The kid was grateful, but mostly he wanted protection. And, whether Randy was following him or not, Lee would catch Falon watching him from across the yard, a calculating coldness that made him want to waste Falon. He felt a threat from the man that wasn’t just prison fear and wariness. Something more, as if the very shadows where Falon sometimes stood, watched him, too. And Falon’s derision was magnified when Sanderford was hanging around. Lee sent Randy packing twice, but the kid kept coming back. He had lost patience when Sanderford, in desperation, began laying out scams to him.

Some of the moves were new to Lee, they were good ones and he found himself listening. The kid seemed to know his way around businesses and banks, though his easy life hadn’t taught him much else. A dropout from UC Berkeley, whose pronounced heart murmur had kept him out of the service, the kid had disowned his family, hating their values, hating everything he called the establishment. He had blown the money his father gave him on women and on three expensive cars that he demolished one after the other while drunk. For kicks, he began ripping off the colleges his father forced him to enter. When he got into big trouble at Cal, his father at last threw him out and cut off his allowance. Within a week Randy had gotten a job as salesman at a small jewelry store. Within six months he had taken the owner for ninety thousand dollars and disappeared. Then, while living on the interest from the ninety thousand, he began ripping off banks. The boy had talent, Lee gave him that. He was clever and inventive, and Lee tucked away the scams for future use. If things were real changed on the outside, if he couldn’t pull the kind of job he had in mind, maybe he’d have a go at the traveler’s check operation.

“All you have,” Randy said, “is the little transaction slip you get from the first bank, with the numbers of the traveler’s checks on it, to show the second bank.

“Two things are important at the second bank, the way you give your sob story, and the bank’s willingness to please without checking out your story. You have to be subtle. Honest and quiet, and not too quick with the charm.” Lee thought Sanderford, with that innocent face and big blue eyes, would have little trouble conning some young teller.

“I always pick large, busy banks in big cities,” Randy said. “They want your business, they’ll bend over backward to please the customer. If you need a few hundred bucks, that’s the way to do it.” The boy gave Lee an innocent smile. “Good idea, though, to have false ID. The second bank always wants to see something.” He shrugged. “I’ve never been questioned. Every time, I just walked out of there cool as you please with the cash in my hand.”

But Sanderford had been arrested and imprisoned for a different kind of forgery that, Randy said himself, was amateurish and stupid. He had been so intent on the convertible he had stolen that he had let his attempt to cash a simple forged check trap him, he said he never would have stolen the car in the first place if he hadn’t been drunk. Lee thought maybe if Sanderford left the booze alone he’d make a first-rate con man. But Lee didn’t like the kid. Sanderford was intelligent, very bright. But if he hated the world so much, why didn’t he give up the booze, knuckle down, and really milk the humanity he despised? Watching the baby-faced boy, Lee felt only disgust for him.