The Cat, The Devil And Lee Fontana

2

Easing onto his bunk, Lee pulled the rough prison blanket close around him, though it did little to drive the cold from his bones. Maybe he was coming down with whatever was sending men off to the infirmary, their faces white as paste, doubled over hacking up yellow phlegm. In the old days when he was young, death from the flu was common enough, it would take a whole family, half a town, in one violent outbreak and there was nothing much a doctor could do about it. At least now the docs had what they called wonder drugs, for whatever they were worth.

Well, hell, so what if he did come down with the flu on his last day in prison, so he died from the flu rather than be strangled to death from the emphysema. Dead and buried at McNeil in a convict’s grave. As good as anywhere else, he guessed, because who would know or care? Reaching for his prison shirt and pants, that he’d left folded at the end of the small iron shelf, he spread them out over the blanket for extra warmth. They didn’t help much. Damn screws didn’t have the decency to run the furnaces, let a man sleep in comfort, the cheap bastards. The cell felt like a South Dakota winter, and he’d seen more than enough of those in his lifetime.

He guessed he should consider himself lucky to have a cell to himself, not shoved in with a bunch of young studs to hassle him, that he’d have to fight and then have to keep watching all the time because the bastards never would back off. Lucky to be on the ground floor, too, thanks to the prison doc. That climb to the upper tiers would take his breath, would make it impossible, on one of his bad days, to get a breath.

His cell was like any other, and he’d seen enough of those, too, stained toilet, stained sink, the narrow iron shelf to hold all his worldly belongings. His black prison shoes lined up side by side, just beneath. Smeared concrete walls where graffiti had been repeatedly scrubbed away. But it was better than some of the places he’d ended up, on the outside. Narrow sagging bed in some cheap boardinghouse, or the rotting floor of an empty miner’s shack, his blanket spread out among the mouse and rat droppings. He thought with longing of a bedroll on the prairie when he was running cattle, the smell of the cook fire and boiled coffee, a steer lowing now and then, the faint song of a herder to soothe them and to keep himself awake, the occasional rattle of a bit or a horse snorting to clear dust from his nose.

Strange, tonight the whole cell block seemed not only colder but unnaturally dark, too. Though there was never any real night under the hanging bulbs, never the night’s soothing blackness to rest your eyes and ease a person into sleep. New inmates, first-timers, found it hard to get used to, hard to sleep at all beneath the invasive lights running the length of the cell block ceiling like a row of bright, severed heads—though tonight even the overhead cones seemed blurred and dim, as if viewed through a layer of greasy smoke; and when he looked out through his bars, along the corridor, the four tiers of sleeping men were so shadowed and indistinct he wondered if his eyesight was failing. Shivering, he pulled the blanket tighter. So damn cold. A deep cold that had cut through his bones at intervals all day. He’d be warm for a while as he worked moving bales of hay, and then suddenly would be freezing again for no reason. He was so cold now that, staring up past the lights through the high, barred windows, he expected to see snow salting the night sky.

None of the other men seemed bothered. Nearby, where he could make out guys sleeping, their covers were thrown back, a bare leg or bare arm trailing over the side of a bunk, the sleeper snoring away happily, warm and content—as content as a man could be, caged in here like a captive beast.

Well, hell, he’d be out of here tomorrow. Leave the cold behind. Would be heading south to the hot desert, where he could bake in the hundred-twenty-degree sun, soak up all the heat he wanted.

His idea was to work a while down in Blythe, in the Southern California desert, the way his parole plan said, but to stay just a little while and then jump parole, pull one more job, and head for Mexico with a good stash tucked away. He wanted money for his last, declining years, he didn’t mean to end up a pauper, with no money for his needs, that dread was always with him; hard as it might be, he meant to do something about that. A few hundred thousand was what he had in mind, enough to live comfortably for the remainder of his life, for however long that was.

Who knew, once he got out of this damp cold, got down into the hot desert and got himself some cash, once he was settled in a place of his own, maybe the emphysema would get better as it sometimes did when he was comfortable and not stressed. Hell, maybe he’d forget about dying, maybe he’d live forever.

His written parole instructions were to get off the train at San Bernardino before heading on down to Blythe, check in there with his parole officer. Maybe he’d do that, and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe just stay on the rattler until he hit Blythe, go right on down to the job, such as it was, tell the parole officer, when he showed up in a few weeks, that he’d forgotten about stopping off, or maybe that he’d lost the paper giving him any such orders.

The job in Blythe was supposed to be permanent, but even if his old running partner had arranged it for him, they both knew Lee wasn’t about to work the vegetable fields for the rest of his parole time. That was migrant work, they had to like the hot, heavy labor just fine or they wouldn’t keep slipping across the border, hiding in the trunks of rickety old cars half smothered to death, heading up to the States, men wanting better pay and better treatment than they got at home.

He meant to work at the ranch a few weeks so he looked good to the parole board, get his bearings, lay out a plan to put his hands on some cash. Pull that off, and he’d be out of there, rich again and not a care to worry him. One big job, one nice haul, then on down across the border where he’d pick up a little adobe house and some land for a few bucks, enough to pasture a couple of horses. Find a little señorita to cook for him and take care of his needs, live on tortillas, good hot Mexican dishes. Maybe a last crack at good, hot Mexican love. If he could still handle that much excitement. He didn’t like thinking how the years lay on him. Even his spirit felt flat, worn out, not fiery, as when he was young. He was giving out, his body giving out, aches and stiffness, and the emphysema made it so hard to breathe that when he thought of pulling another job, he wondered if he could handle it, if he could still bring off a job with the decisiveness and fast moves it would take and still get away clean.

But he had no choice. One more big job, or just wither away to nothing like an old horse turned out on barren, grassless land and left to starve to death.

He wondered, too, if he’d be up to the modern ways. He was coming out of prison into a world he didn’t know anymore, a world of sleeker, faster cars than he was used to. Fast diesel trains that no man on horseback could take down the way you could halt a steam train, the way he used to do, and his grandpappy before him, neither of them ever expecting the steam trains to die out and a new kind of train to take over the rails. In the old days, in L.A., the vaqueros used to race their horses against the steam trains, their ponies faster in the sprint, but the locomotive taking over for the distance, leaving the riders behind. With these new trains, a horseman didn’t have a chance. This was the 1940s, everything fast and slick as he’d never imagined, the world turned into a place he didn’t know, and, in truth, didn’t want to know. The slick Chicago gangs all duded up in their fancy suits and greased hair, their high-powered machine guns and big fancy cars, their steel-fisted control of a whole city. Big crime, taking down millions of dollars, not the simple one-on-one robberies that Lee was used to.

The whole world had grown too big; it was overwhelming. The Great War, World War I, a war fought from the sky, from planes that, some said, would soon replace the trains, take you anywhere in the U.S. you wanted to go, in just a few hours. This was not his world. There was even talk of some new kind of camera invented, which one day soon would watch you enter a bank, watch your every move in there. A world of spying, more sophisticated fingerprinting, all kinds of technology the cops could use to trap you. It was hard to get his mind around the changes that had happened while he worked the prison farm, herded and cared for a bunch of sheep and milk cows. His own kind of life was fast vanishing, running cattle on thousands of miles of open range that were now mostly fenced, broken into puny little spreads, cut up and ruined. His kind of life had been sucked away into history like water sucked down a drain.

Tomorrow he’d step out into that world, a used-up old man. No new skills to cope with the changes, a dried-up old gunman with maybe nothing he could do but the field work where he was headed, hard labor that would leave him falling into bed at night aching in every bone and trying to get his breath. With all these fancy new ways, what kind of robbery was out there that he could even handle, anymore? When he hit Blythe, maybe he couldn’t do anything else but fall into the same life as the Mexican pickers, work among them, eat, and sleep, and work the fields until one day they found him dead among the cabbages, and no one to give a damn.

The cat, as Lee deliberated on his fate, dropped invisibly down from the shelf to the concrete and rolled over on the hard cell floor, watching Lee, knowing Lee’s thoughts and not liking them much.

A mortal cat would know distress at the nervous unease of the humans he cared about. But the spirit cat saw more, he understood more and, too often, he felt drawn to do celestial battle on Lee’s behalf. Now, flipping to his feet, restlessly pacing, he at last drifted up onto the iron shelf once more, above Lee’s empty shoes, lay down across the iron grid, invisible ears back, invisible tail twitching as he waited for what was about to occur, as he waited for the dark visitor to make himself known to Lee, as was the devil’s way.

Lee’s battered watch said twelve-thirty, but he couldn’t sleep. Still shivering, he dug the paperback western out from under his pillow and tried to read. He got through barely two pages before the print on the page began to blur, his eyes watering not from want of sleep but from the unnatural cold that shivered him, and from the harsh overhead lights that, even through the murky air, glared straight down into his face. He was idly turning the pages, trying to stay interested in the cheap pulp western and wishing he had another Hershey’s bar—he’d eaten the last three—when a whisper from the corridor brought him up startled, a voice as faint as a shifting breeze.

“Fontana. Lee Fontana.”

Easing up on one elbow, he looked out through the bars. He scanned the cells across the way, tier upon tier, but saw no one looking out at him, no one awake. Not a soul stirred, the prone bodies seemed as still as the products of a waxworks, or as if they floated in a chill suspension of time.

“Lee . . . Lee Fontana.” A whisper closer than those far cells, and as insidious as a rattler’s buzz. He couldn’t tell the direction, it seemed to come from all around him, from the ceiling, from inside the cell itself, and through the concrete walls on either side of him. Whatever thoughts slid into Lee’s mind at that instant, he pushed away, whatever images arose he didn’t want to consider. But then suddenly the prisoners’ snores began again, the coughs, the twang of flat metal bedsprings as some sleeper relieved his tensions or rolled over. Maybe he’d imagined the whisper he’d thought he heard, had imagined that seeming pause in time, as well. Reaching for his book again, he stretched out flat, pulled the blanket up, shivering, trying to get warm and to read and not look around him, to pay attention to nothing beyond the cheap novel. He was turning the page when the shadows in his cell shifted so violently that he jerked upright, staring around him.

“Fontana. Lee Fontana.”

No one was there beyond the bars. But a shadow lay across his blanket, the stark shadow of a tall man cutting across the dark stripes that were cast by the iron bars. He squinted, but still the corridor was empty, unbroken by any figure. No one stood peering in at him, no one to account for the dark shape cast boldly across his blanketed legs. But a heavy malaise pressed at him, weakening him so he had to ease back, to lie supine, watching the dark imprint, watching the empty space beyond the bars, the empty corridor. He remained as still as if he faced a coiled rattler, as if the faintest shift of his body would trigger a flash of attack.

Frozen, slowly he made himself look up through the bars at the harsh lights, hoping that when he looked back, the man-shadow would be gone. The acid glow of the overheads blinded him, he stared until his eyes watered and then looked down again, mopping tears with a corner of his blanket, hoping the specter would have vanished. His vision swam with red afterimages, and only after some moments could he make out the shadow still cast solidly across his bed.

But now, as well, he could see a faint darkness suspended beyond the bars, a gray smear as ephemeral as smoke drifting and moving in the corridor, hovering with a life of its own, some terrifying form of life that was watching him—but how could that thin and shifting smear cast the harsh black man-shadow that cut so starkly across his bed?

Silently he slid his hand under the pillow reaching for the sharpened metal rod he kept there. Whatever threw the shadow, whether he could see it clearly or not, maybe it could feel the thrust of a blade. His fingers touched the cold steel, but when he tried to grip the homemade knife his hand wouldn’t move, it was frozen in place. He tried to swing off the bunk but he couldn’t shift his legs, his body was immobilized, he could no more move than could a slab of stone dropped onto the sagging bunk. When he tried to shout for the guard, his voice was locked to silence within his constricted lungs.

And what would he have told the guard? That he saw a phantom, that he heard a voice out of nowhere? That he couldn’t move, that he was as silenced and locked in place as a sparrow he’d seen once, in dead winter, frozen upright to a telegraph wire. Phlegm began to build in his throat, phlegm from the emphysema, triggered by fear, mucus that would soon cause a spasm of choking that must bring him up off the bunk spitting, or would drown him. He began to sweat. He’d soon have to move or he would strangle. What the hell was this, what was going on? He wasn’t going to die here frozen like that sparrow, die on a prison bunk drowning in his own spit, unable even to turn his head and clear his mouth. Fear filled him and rage until, angry and straining, he was at last able to turn enough to cough onto his sheet. But still he couldn’t rise.

Hell, this wasn’t happening, he was Lee Fontana, he could still hit a pigeon at fifty yards with a forty-five, could still see a train scuttling across the horizon small as a black ant, see it way to hell before the rails started to hum at its approach, could still jump a steam train and stop it cold—if there’d been any more steam trains. He had, in his prime, stricken men with his own brand of terror, there’d been a time when he had only to stare at a train engineer and because he was Lee Fontana the man would lay down his rifle and pull the engine to a halt. He had sent strong men cowering from him, left them rigid with fear. He didn’t like it when that kind of terror hit him instead.

Sweating and straining, he was at last able to slip off the bunk, down to the cold concrete floor. Clutching the prison-made knife, he rose up, stood in the center of the empty cell facing the shadow—a naked, ludicrous figure wielding the knife as he glowered at the empty bars. A tall, flat-bellied old man, his tender white flesh tanned to leather only from his neck up and from his elbows down, where he rolled his shirtsleeves. Leathery brown hands marked by sixty years of rope burns and wire cuts, his face hard, wind-beaten, most of the rest of him pale and vulnerable.

When he approached the shadow, it thinned the way smoke thins when one walks into it but the chill deepened, and the instant he touched the cold metal bars, he faced not the corridor and the tiers of caged men, he faced a vast and empty space reeling away and soft laughter echoed inside his head, a sound that seemed to fill the world. “You think you’re something, old man. You’re no more than a speck of dust, you’re already a moldering corpse or nearly so. Dead soon enough, and no one to give a damn. You’re a worn-out has-been without the cojones anymore to pull another job.” And the creature’s laugh echoed coldly, deep into Lee’s bones.

“Get out!” Lee spat at the emptiness. “Whatever you are, get out! Get the hell out of my space.” Turning his back on whatever this was—and he knew too well what it was—he went back to bed, pulled the blanket up. He didn’t look again at the shadow but he felt it watching him, felt the ongoing intensity of its interest.

This wasn’t the first time he’d seen the shadow and felt its chill. The first time was long ago when he was only a boy. He was thinking back to that time when suddenly the prison cat appeared, lying on the shelf inside his cell, its yellow eyes on him, its yellow tail twitching as it looked him over. Leaning up, he reached to stroke it but the yellow tom leaped past his hand to the bunk, heavy and solid. It rubbed against him, its fur felt rough under his stroking, its purring loud as the tomcat settled down beside him, warm and yawning—and when Lee looked back at the bars, the figure had vanished. Across his blanket the spaces between the straight black lines were empty.

He heard the guard coming, making his regular round, his black shoes tapping on the concrete. The man glanced in at him, his fat face not changing expression as he took in every detail, looked at the sleeping cat, and shrugged. The cat roamed everywhere. How he got into the locked cell block was anyone’s guess but he seemed to have no problem. When the guard had passed, Lee lay stroking the cat and looking around at his cell, the stained toilet, the dented steel sink with his toothbrush balanced on the edge, the graffiti-smeared walls, the familiar stain on the concrete floor where a previous inmate had lost blood in some self-inflicted injury. His book lay facedown across the stain beside the three empty Hershey’s wrappers. Nothing was different, yet everything was different. The cell seemed without substance now, as if at any instant it might fade, and he with it. The intrusion of the specter had rammed his mortality home to him like a knife stuck in his belly. He lay the rest of the night thinking of that haunting, seeing his life vanish before its unearthly power like fragments of burned paper tattered on the wind. He lay there desolate and frightened, and with only the yellow cat to warm him, to somehow reassure and to comfort him.

The devil, in human form, left the cell block pleased with his night’s work. Moving unseen through the concrete walls, slipping through iron bunks and through the bodies of sleeping men so their dreams clutched suddenly at them and left them sweating, he drifted through the infirmary, the mess hall, the administrative offices, and down across the lawn that was kept neatly mowed by prison trusties, down to the edge of Puget Sound. There he stood, a wraith come out of eternity, staring out at the roiling waters that covered this small scrap of earth at this moment and at the distant smokestacks of Tacoma rising beyond—at the great bulk of Mount Rainier towering white and majestic over all that lay below, daunting even the devil in its rocky, snow-crowned dominance. Beside his left foot a rabbit crouched, so frozen with fear of him it was unable to run, riven with such terror that when he reached down and took it in his hands the little beast didn’t twitch. It died slowly and in great pain, emitting one high, terrified scream before Lucifer at last broke its neck and tossed it into the bushes.

He had subtler plans for Lee Fontana. Unlike the rabbit, he meant that Fontana would provide his own pain.