The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana

5

But the big yellow cat was near. He lay curled up on the dusty mohair seat, as invisible as the air around him, unseen but impressing the faintest telltale indentation in the rough gray cloth of the seat cushion. Knowing Lee’s fear and rage, the tomcat purred for Lee, a subliminal song too faint for Fontana to consciously hear, but a sound the cat knew Lee would hear deep inside himself, a purr that matched the rhythm of the rocking train, a rough-throated mutter of comfort meant to ease Lee’s soul, a rumble generated not only by love but by the joy of life itself that, even in his ethereal form, the ghost cat carried with him.

But now Misto purred out of discomfort, too, out of concern for the old convict. A cat will purr not only when he’s happy, he purrs when he’s frightened or distressed. A mortal cat will deliberately purr to himself when he’s hurt or sick, a muttering song to hold on to, perhaps to calm himself, to make himself feel less alone. Now Misto purred for Lee, wanting to hold him steady, wanting to drive away the old cowboy’s sense of that little man’s glinting, blue-eyed presence, to rid Lee of the evil that kept returning seeking to terrify or to win him, grasping hungrily for Lee’s soul.

The blue-eyed man was gone now, the incubus was gone, his black leather briefcase gone, too, the satchel he’d left behind on the seat when he followed Lee out to the vestibule. The moment he’d vanished from the train, the briefcase had dissolved, poof, as completely as a mouse might disappear into the tomcat’s sharp-toothed gulp. But though the man and his briefcase were no more, an aura of evil still drifted within the passenger car, a miasma as caustic as smoke, touching the other passengers, too. A sleeping man woke and stared up the aisle and twisted to look behind him, studying his companions, scowling at the tightly closed doors at either end of the car. Up at the front, a woman laid down her book and half rose up, looking around nervously. Two women stood up from their seats staring all around, seeking the source of whatever had made them shiver. Two seats behind Lee, a toddler climbed into his mother’s lap howling out his own sense of fear. And beside Misto, Lee Fontana sat unmoving, still pale from the encounter in the vestibule, still edgy with the sense of the dark spirit that he knew wouldn’t leave him alone, with the devil’s curse that would continue to follow Dobbs’s descendants.

Lee knew only rough details of the plan Satan had laid out for Dobbs’s heirs those many years ago. He knew only what he’d heard rumored among his neighbors, back on the ranch. Gossip that, when Lee entered the room, would make folks go silent. Stories that the devil had set Dobbs up to destroy a certain gang of brothers, but that during the train robbery as the devil planned it, Dobbs had turned the tables on Satan. That Dobbs’s deception had so enraged the devil, he had sworn to destroy every Dobbs heir, to force or entice each Dobbs descendant to drive their own souls into the flames, into the pit of hell itself. To destroy the soul of each, but particularly that of Lee Fontana who had so idolized the old train robber. As far as Lee knew, he might be Dobbs’s last heir, all Satan’s vindication against Dobbs’s supposed double cross could be focused, now, on Lee.

As the train slowed for the station ahead, Misto increased his purr, singing to Lee to soothe him; and as they pulled out again with barely time to take on one lone passenger, the cat purred until Lee settled back and dozed again; and beside him the ghost cat closed his eyes, lulled by the train’s rocking rumble.

The ghost cat did not need to sleep, sleep was a healing gift left over from life, a skill comforting and warm but not needed in the spirit world—a talent the newly released ghost must reconstruct from memory, must willfully summon back until he established the habit once more, if he chose to do so, if he wanted that earthly comfort. The yellow ghost cat had so chosen and, drifting now toward sleep, he purred to comfort himself as well as to comfort Lee.

The tomcat didn’t know what woke him. He rose suddenly, startled, half asleep. He shook himself and quickly left Lee’s side, drifting out through the wall of the passenger car, leaving a warm dent in the seat behind him. For a moment he rode the wind giddily, lashing his tail as he peered back in through the dirty window watching Lee, the cat gliding with pleasure alongside the speeding train, and then he somersaulted up to the roof, banking on the wind as agile as a soaring gull.

Landing lightly atop the speeding train, he settled down, still invisible, looking about at the world speeding by him, at the green fields beneath the snowcapped mountains and, off to his right, miles of green pasture and the dull and gentle cows; and they had left the dark, cold waters of Puget Sound behind them. But now, in the cat’s thoughts, he saw not the land that swept past the train, he saw back into a time long past, before ever that vast inland sea had formed, when all the land was dry, he saw into eons past, as it had been, saw a higher and mountainous shore, densely wooded, skirting the Pacific, a raised land with no hint of the deep bowl that would later be carved there to hold the deep waters of Puget Sound. He saw the great glacier to the north, easing slowly down over vast reaches of time, slowly scooping the land away, a gigantic beast of ice slithering and creeping down from the great northern ranges.

He saw a million years of time slip by as the glacier slowly toppled the ancient conifers and crushed them and dug away the land, as it dug the vast trench that would slowly fill with the waters of the sea and of the coastal rivers. He saw millions of years pass by, dwarfing all life into a speck smaller than the tiniest sneeze.

He shivered at the vastness of time, at the vastness of the earth itself, and at the short and tenuous span of life upon it. He perceived, as well as anyone could, that richly varied panorama of life forming and changing, that short span of the arrival of human life, of human evil and human good. He sensed as much of the grand design as his eager cat soul could embrace; but even so, he saw only a small portion of the grandeur which swept away to infinity, the vastness which no creature could truly comprehend.

Atop the train, the cat sensed when Lee woke. He knew when Lee sat up and looked around him, as the train pulled into the next small station. He knew Lee had been dreaming and that he was shaken, that he had experienced again an incident at McNeil that had greatly angered the old man. At once the cat returned to the passenger car, a whirl of air sweeping in through the dirty glass and onto the dusty seat: he was at once caught in Lee’s rage, in the aftermath of the prison rape in which Lee had faced off young Brad Falon.

Falon, a surly man less than half Lee’s age, had been Lee’s enemy ever since that encounter.

He had been Misto’s enemy far longer, yet for very different reasons. The tomcat had yet to make sense of the pattern between the two conflicts, but he knew that in some way they were linked together.

When Misto left McNeil for that short time after he died and was buried in the prison yard, he had fallen into a new life almost at once, he was born in a small Southern town, a squirming and energetic kitten who was soon picked from the big, healthy litter to be given as a birthday present to little Sammie Blake. He had grown up loved by the little girl and loving her, had grown into a strong, defiant big tomcat when he found himself protecting Sammie against Brad Falon and was murdered by Falon’s hand.

Falon had been the cat’s adversary in Misto’s last life, and he was bonded in some indecipherable way to Lee himself and to what would happen to Lee. There was a pattern building, a tangle the cat could as yet barely see, a relationship between Lee, and Brad Falon, and Misto’s little girl—the tomcat had yet to make sense of the pattern, but he didn’t like it much.

Sammie was five when her daddy brought the tiny yellow kitten home to her, just before he was sent overseas in the Second World War. Sammie’s mama worked as a bookkeeper in their little town of Rome, Georgia, and their small rented house seemed very empty, once Morgan had gone. Empty, and then soon vulnerable. The minute Morgan Blake left for the navy, Becky’s and Morgan’s old schoolmate began to come around, uninvited. Brad Falon was a well-muscled, pushy young man. In high school he had run with Morgan, but Becky had never liked him. Now he began to annoy Becky, coming to the door, frightening Sammie with his cold eyes and slippery talk. Becky never let him in, but he kept coming. The late night he came there drunk, pounding on the locked door, not beseeching anymore but demanding to be let in, and then breaking in, it was Misto who drove him off.

As Brad broke a window, reached in and unlocked it, Becky ran to the phone. Falon knocked out most of the glass, and swung through. He grabbed the phone from Becky, threw it against the wall. When little Sammie flew at him, he hit her hard against the table. He shoved Becky to the floor and knelt over her, hitting her and pulling up her skirt. As Becky yelled at Sammie to run, the big yellow cat exploded from the bedroom, landing in Falon’s face raking and biting him. Brad tried to pull him off then flicked open his pocketknife.

The cat fought him, dodging the knife. Becky grabbed a shard of broken glass and flew at Falon. He hit her, had her down again, cutting her. The cat was on him again when a neighbor heard their screams and came running; the wiry old fellow saw the broken window and climbed through, but already Falon had fled, banging out through the front door.

Behind him, Misto lay dying from a long, gaping wound that bled too fast, that bled away his life before anyone could help him. But even as Falon fled, Misto’s ghost rose and followed. He followed as Falon dodged the police, gained his car and took off fast heading out of Rome, heading for Atlanta. The Rome cops didn’t like Falon, they wouldn’t be gentle if they caught him, nor would the county D.A. Some of the younger officers, having gone through school with Falon, observing the trouble he had caused all those years, might indeed have turned to law enforcement careers in an effort to right the wrongs of the world.

At the airport south of Atlanta Falon bought a plane ticket and an hour later, nervously drinking coffee from a paper cup, he boarded a flight for the West Coast, where he had connections who could be useful in whatever venture he chose to pursue. As Falon settled into the dusty seat in the DC-4, Misto drifted into the plane and settled unseen beside him, not too close, but unwilling to lose sight of him.

Falon had friends in a number of West Coast cities. Why, the cat wondered, had he headed for Seattle? Had that urge been formed simply at Falon’s random choice? Or, by Satan’s wishes? Why Seattle, not twenty miles from where Lee was doing federal time at McNeil? The ghost cat couldn’t pretend to understand the forces at work here, but Falon’s destination distressed him. Lee had no connection to Falon, and no connection to Georgia where Falon had grown up. Lee might have no family left anywhere, as far as he knew. He had lived his life on the run, had left the home ranch as a hot-tempered sixteen-year-old, and had not kept in touch with his relatives.

Misto, even in his ghostly state, couldn’t know everything. There was, however, the one puzzling link: the mirrorlike resemblance between Lee’s little sister, Mae, and little Sammie Blake. Mae Fontana, born a lifetime ago, before Sammie, whose old tintype picture, taken at their South Dakota ranch, Lee had carried with him all these years, in and out of prison, the picture he still carried among his meager belongings. Two little girls more alike than twins, the exact same wide brown eyes, same little heart-shaped faces, same dimples cleaving deep, the same crooked smiles, the same long pale hair so painful to comb free of tangles. Two little girls from two different centuries, more alike than twins could be. Misto had known of no connection between Lee and Mae, and Sammie. Until now, when in some inexplicable manner Brad Falon formed the connection.

When Falon killed Misto, when Misto rose as ghost to follow Falon out to the West Coast, Falon soon committed a bank robbery in which he shot a guard in the leg. He was tried, summarily convicted in federal court, and was sent from Seattle to the nearest federal prison, at McNeil Island. Though his sentence was shorter than the U.S. attorney would have liked, there was no question in the ghost cat’s mind that forces beyond his ken had brought Falon and Lee together.

Did the dark spirit, with his persistent hatred of Lee’s ancestor, mean to use Falon against Russell Dobbs’s grandson, against the failing old man? But how was little Sammie a part of his plan, this child so like Lee’s sister? If she were in some unknown way also a descendant of Russell Dobbs, then she, too, would be in danger.

When, at McNeil, Lee’s emphysema grew worse on cold, damp days, but then he felt good again when sunshine warmed the island, he grew increasingly desperate about his old age, grew more determined to pull off one more job when he got out; he did not mean to face his failing years with nothing to support himself.

With sympathy the cat remained near him. Misto was witness when, not a week after Falon arrived at McNeil, the prison rape occurred that so enraged Lee, the conflict between Lee and Falon playing, clearly, into the dark web Lee’s adversary was weaving. As Lee confronted younger, stronger Falon, did the dark spirit expect Falon to kill Lee? More in keeping with the devil’s plans, the cat thought, would be that Lee kill Falon in a passion of unbridled rage that would destroy Lee’s own salvation.

Or was the confrontation between Falon and Lee intended to lay some pattern for the future, for a plan that would prove even more satisfying to the dark one? Though Misto could move back and forth within short periods of time, when it came to the complicated shape of the distant and tangled future, he was as lost as if trying to swim the heaving depths of Puget Sound.

But whatever the devil’s purpose in bringing Lee and Falon together, it was surely no accident, and the yellow tom grew increasingly wary for Lee—just as he worried for Sammie herself, who was somehow entangled with Lee’s own destiny.