The Cat, The Devil And Lee Fontana

8

The train bucked and slowed, waking Lee as the conductor hurried through calling out, “Centralia. Five minutes.” Straightening up, he watched out the window as the mailbags were heaved off. Two passengers descended from the car ahead, hurrying inside the long, red-roofed brick building, then almost at once they were pulling out again, the white peak of Mount Saint Helens towering bright, to his left, against the heavy gray sky, bringing half a dozen passengers rushing to Lee’s side of the train to look. But soon Lee slept again, only vaguely aware of the frequent hollow rumbles as the train crossed the railroad bridges that spanned Washington’s swift rivers. When the sour smell of caged chickens filled the train, passing through Winlock, he looked out at the long, ugly rows of wooden chicken houses and, beyond them, a tractor and trailer spreading chicken manure on the vegetable fields. Not a job he’d want, not mired in that smell all day.

Soon, dozing, he woke again when they skirted the Columbia, the river’s giant rafts of logs moving below him, down toward Lake Vancouver headed for the sawmills. How would it be to settle down here along the shore somewhere in a little shack, get some sort of job, maybe taking care of someone’s horses, forget his grand plans for a hefty robbery and for that life-sustaining nest egg? Forget his urge to take on the feds one last time, to outsmart them once and for good? Along the green of the marsh, the train’s approach sent restless flocks of shorebirds exploding up into the sour mist, sweeping away beneath low, heavy clouds. There’d be a twenty-minute stop at Portland, where Lee thought to get off and stretch his aching legs. Sitting too long stove him up like a stall-bound cowpony that was never let out to run.

It was stormy coming into Portland, the afternoon sky darkening, the streets slick with rain. Ignoring the drizzle, he moved out into the train’s vestibule where he could get a good look. The streets were busy with fast, slick cars, so many of them, kicking up water along the gutters, streets lined with impressive new buildings sandwiched in between the comfortable old brick-and-stone structures from an earlier time. The train slowed approaching the three-story station, its peaked roof and the tall, handsome clock tower stark against the gray sky. But far ahead beyond the city, light streaked the sky where the storm looked to be clearing, to be moving on north passing over the train. The station lights glowed, the neon signs announcing, UNION STATION. GO BY TRAIN. Stepping back to his seat, he made sure his wrapped sandwiches were in plain sight on his two seats atop his neatly arranged newspapers, hoping to mark his occupancy.

Moving down the metal steps and into the station, he stood staring around the vast terminal, looking up at the high, domed ceiling towering above him, at its soaring structure of curved and interlaced crossbeams. The sound of other trains departing and arriving was only background to the loudspeaker’s harsh and metallic commands. People hurried past him talking quickly, hauling luggage, shouting to others ahead of them. When he didn’t move out of the way, they shouldered past him, scowling, busy travelers louder and more intense than a crowd of inmates, and way less disciplined. Women laughing, folks in little clusters talking frantically, kids running in and out between them not caring if they stepped on your feet. He wandered, pushing through, battered and pummeled. Maybe he should have stayed in his seat, quiet and away from people. Feeling in his pocket to be sure he had his ticket, he at last retreated into a small tobacco shop, a crowded little cubicle.

The smell of the rich tobacco was homey and welcoming though he’d never smoked or chewed, a heady scent that stirred something from the past he couldn’t place. A woman stood behind the little counter, one hand on the cash register. Young, skinny, red hair to her shoulders, freckles heavy across her nose and cheeks. A baby in a carriage behind the counter, tucked up in its blue blanket and, when he glanced down over the counter, a little girl sitting on the floor playing with a set of jacks. He felt embarrassed coming in here when he didn’t mean to buy anything.

“To get out of the crowd,” he said shyly, looking at the young woman. “Too many people out there.”

At the sound of his voice the child behind the counter looked up at him. Her gaze never wavering, she stood up clutching the edge of the counter, staring up at him with a steady, bold look that shocked him. Her look was so like his little sister Mae’s, that he took a step back. Well, she didn’t look like Mae, she had carroty red hair like her mother, a pale, freckled face that would have burned easily in that long-ago South Dakota sun. But beneath the child’s black lashes, her brown eyes proffered the same challenging gaze as Mae’s bold assessment: curious about him, unafraid but with a look deeper down that said if anyone reached to hurt her she’d kick and bite as desperately as a roped mustang. A look that put him in mind of the first time he put Mae on the back of a horse, a small old cowpony, back behind the hay barn where their mother wouldn’t see. He’d started to lead her along, walking beside her, holding her firmly in the saddle—with disdain she had taken the reins from his hand, pushed him away, kneed the cowpony as if she’d done that all her life, and moved on out at a nice fast walk, legs and heels where they should be though her feet didn’t reach the stirrups, a nice easy seat that told him she’d been watching the cowmen since she was big enough to look out the window, that she had absorbed what she wanted from them and didn’t want his interference. Though later, learning to rein a cowpony, spinning him, hopping over logs, opening gates and then learning to rope, she’d listened and followed what he showed her.

This child wasn’t anything like Mae but the same strong spirit was there in her eyes and a belated grieving hit him, a terrible longing for his small sister that nearly undid him. He bought two candy bars from the young mother, where she kept a little shelf of treats and a few magazines among the cigars and cigarettes and cans of tobacco and bags of Dull Durham. He left the shop quickly. When, once, he looked back, the child was still staring. He hurried on to the train, hoping his seat wasn’t taken.

Lee dozed out of Portland, dreaming of his childhood and of those early days when he left home at sixteen, horse and saddle and a few coins in his pocket, going out on his own. Leaving his little sister behind, and that was the last he ever saw or heard of her. He didn’t know why he hadn’t kept in touch, written to her once in a while. He was young and hotheaded and too busy making his own life, trying to survive among grown men, some of them cruel as a hungry buzzard. He knew Mae was all right, there at home, and he knew she could take care of herself.

He woke to darkened windows, night drawing down. He ate another ham sandwich and the two candy bars. The few farm lights he could see far off were dim and scattered. The passengers around him snoozed, lulled by the train’s hypnotic rhythm. The crowding of strangers together into a protected metal womb that raced free across the dark land seemed strange and unreal, as if they were all caught in the same inexplicable dream. The passengers around him had pulled on sweaters, opened their traveling bags to strew jackets and personal belongings out across the few empty seats. The little toddler up front seemed the most alive, whining and squirming. When the boy made a bad smell, his mother grabbed him up, snatched up her carryall, and hurried him off to the restroom. That stink, mixed with the stale-sandwich smell and the gathering odor of stale sweat, grew so heavy that at last Lee returned to the vestibule, where he could breathe, stood looking out at the night, sucking in the good cold wind.

He remained there alone, wary that the invasive shadow would return, but more caught up in the long-ago nights of the past when he rode balanced on a galloping train, waiting for the moment when he would enter the engineer’s car, force the frightened man to stop the train, when he and his partner would tie up the engineer and the one or two guards, would relieve them of the mail and money bags, would step down again into the night and be gone before their victims could free themselves.

He remained in the vestibule until he was freezing, then headed back to his seat. Buttoning his jacket tight, he settled down, pulling the newspapers over him. When sleep took him, no dark spirit bothered him; waking sometimes, he saw only his reflection in the glass, against black emptiness—but then he woke suddenly to see the moon had risen, and he sat up startled, staring out.

A foreign land lay beyond the glass, a nightmare vision as twisted and unnatural as the face of the moon or of some distant and virulent planet: moonstruck lava ridges rising up twisted into phantasmic shapes casting unearthly shadows around them, towering, twisted specters sprung from bare earth where no tree, no bush, or blade could survive, only those monstrous twists of rising stone formed eons ago, by the ancient volcanoes that still marched across this land and north into Canada. The stark remnant of times long past held him, too fascinated to look away. How long he watched he wasn’t sure before he felt suddenly the weight of the ghost cat pressing against him, warm against his jacket, and could hear him purring. When he looked down, Misto was there looking up at him; the ghost cat twitched a whisker, making Lee smile.

Did Misto mean to travel with him clear to his destination, clear to Blythe? Lee hoped that was his intention, though he didn’t know why the big yellow tom would want to head for that parched desert, he didn’t know why Misto was so determined to stay with him. Whatever the reason, the security of the big tomcat eased him—a bold guardian against the dark thoughts that too often pushed and prodded at him. Lee was learning to depend on that steadying sense of rightness that the burly beast lent him, that sense of stubborn protection that Lee found so comforting.

Misto dozed warm and close against Lee, purring as the cat idly dipped into his own memories, into thoughts of his own past lives. He thought about Lee and Mae as children, and then remembered lives lived long before that one, recalling dark medieval times when cats were thought to be witches’ familiars, when he had barely escaped murder as one of these, and he remembered another time when he hadn’t escaped, when he had been hanged with the so-called witch beside him, a lovely, dark-haired young woman whose spirit, too, had moved on into a happier realm.

How variable the fate of cats, and of their consorts, over the centuries, from those times of bloody cruelty, to the luxuriant idolatry a pampered cat knew in ancient Egypt. How indecipherable the vicissitudes of time, how mysterious the meaning of life for all living creatures. Drifting off into sleep, Misto wondered at how unfathomable life was, and of the far more vast spirit, wondered at the mysteries in all their eternal truths that not even the far-seeing ghost cat could decipher.

When Lee woke, the cat was gone. Only the sense of him remained and a lingering warmth against his jacket. The sun was up, the Oregon smog vanished, and the smell of the sea came strong. He looked out at the rolling waves brightening the Pacific, and at the green hills and tall forests north of San Francisco; and on a whim, knowing he shouldn’t spend the money, he thought of having breakfast in the fancy dining car. Rising, he went to wash himself in the restroom. He shaved, cleaned up as best he could, and then headed up through the passenger cars and the sleeping cars with their little, closed cubicles.

In the dining car, he expected to have to stand in line but it was early, the waiters were just getting set up, laying out heavy silverware, fine glasses, and white napkins on bright white tablecloths. He was seated alone at a small table. The East Bay hills swept by on his left, a glimpse of the sea and dark redwoods across to his right. Sipping the best coffee he’d tasted in ten years, he ordered three fried eggs, hash browns, bacon, and a biscuit with gravy. He hadn’t dined like this since well before McNeil, and he didn’t expect to do so again, not in the foreseeable future.

He returned to his seat heavy with too much food, and as they made their way down the coast he tried not to sleep, he sat enjoying the bright green of the hilly pastures and the fat livestock. There were new calves everywhere, and a bull mounting a cow not a hundred feet from the train brought embarrassed giggles down the length of the car.

It was dusk as they approached the outskirts of L.A., too overcast to see the great letters marking the Hollywood Hills, but the nearer lights of the small towns swept by clear enough, picking out homelier neighborhoods, small businesses, and little wooden cottages tucked among tall Victorian homes. He tried to read the cheap dime novel he’d brought, but now he kept envisioning, at every scene he read, a crueler way to handle the action, a colder and more sadistic turn that the writer should have thought of himself.

Approaching the L.A. station, the train edged slowly through what seemed miles of lighted freight yard. As soon as they came to a halt and the conductor stepped aside, Lee swung out of his seat and down the steps, carrying his few belongings. Inside the station he ignored the crowds that pushed around him as he walked the length of the big building trying to ease his aching legs, trying to come fully awake, after sitting too long on the train.

He had a long layover here. He asked questions, found the gate where he’d board, found a wooden bench to himself, and at last he spread out his papers, and settled in. He’d be glad when he hit Blythe. Right now, he never wanted to see another train. Not as a passenger, shut in with a bunch of strangers, and not with even one whining kid. He lay down on the bench trying to sleep, trying to ignore the noise of people hurrying around him, but he had slept too much on the train. Restless, he read for a while, in the poor light, and then rose and paced the station again, trying to make the hours go faster. And then at last, tired out, he found another bench, lay down again covered with his papers and coat, lay waiting for morning, waiting for his train to Blythe.