The Cat, The Devil, The Last Escape

7

WITH THE SUMMER heat soaking into Lee’s bones, with plenty of good food and rest and with the help of the prison doc, Lee’s condition slowly improved. As he grew stronger and wanted something to do, he was assigned light work on the prison farm. Feeding and caring for the four plow horses suited him just fine; they were placid, loving animals and he liked to baby them, to groom them, bring them carrots from the kitchen, trim their hooves when they grew too long. As fall approached, Lee settled comfortably into the pleasant routine of morning work in the stable, then breathing and gym exercises, and late afternoons on his cot with a stack of library books. He was in Dr. Donovan’s examining room when the blow struck, when his cozy life changed abruptly and not for the better.

Donovan, finished examining him, paused beside the table, his look solemn, his eyes way too serious. Lee waited uneasily. Were his lungs worse, even though he felt better? But then Donovan smiled, running a hand through his short, pale hair.

“I know you like it here, Lee. I hate to tell you this, but it looks like you’re being transferred.”

“What the hell? I’m just starting to get better. Transferred where? Why would—”

“Down to Atlanta,” Donovan said. “We’re receiving two dozen incoming patients, men from a number of states. They’re all pretty sick, we need every space we can muster.”

No one had asked what Lee wanted. His choices weren’t a concern of the U.S. prison system. Scowling at Donovan, he finished buttoning his shirt.

“You’re fit enough to move on, Lee. It’ll be cold here pretty soon, but should still be warm down south. Atlanta will be good for you.”

“Sure it will,” Lee said. “Thrown in a cage of felons again where every minute I have to watch my back.”

Donovan looked apologetic. Lee knew there was nothing the man could do. They said their good-byes, and early the next morning Lee was out of there, handcuffed, belly-chained, and shoved in the back of another big limo by two surly deputy marshals.

The deputy in the backseat took up most of the space and stunk of cigar smoke. The early morning road was empty, the yellow wheat towering tall on both sides of the two-lane. In the distance Lee could see a row of combines working, cutting wheat just as they would soon be doing outside the prison walls. Crowded into the small space, he couldn’t get comfortable, couldn’t move his arms much, and the belly chain was already digging in. Did they have to leave him chained like a mass killer?

His temper eased only when he felt a breeze behind him where there was no wind, then felt a soft paw press slyly against his cheek. He imagined the ghost cat stretched out on the wide shelf, enjoying the view through the back window—enjoying a little game, Lee realized when the deputy began to scratch a tickle along his neck. Lee hid a smile as the deputy scratched his ear, then his jaw. When the portly man slapped at his balding head, Lee had trouble not laughing out loud. When he scowled at Lee as if his prisoner was causing the trouble, Lee glanced sternly toward the shelf behind him—kitty-play was all right, but the cranky deputy looked like he wanted to pound someone, and Lee was the only one visible.

MISTO STOPPED THE teasing when Lee frowned. He rolled over away from the deputy, hissing softly at the way the heavy lawman hogged the seat, squeezing Lee against the door, deliberately crowding him in the hot car. When Lee’s companion lit up a cigar Misto wanted to snake out his paw again and slap the stogie from the fat man’s face.

And wouldn’t that make trouble, when the unpredictable lawman felt his burning cigar jerked from his mouth and saw it flying across the car—an armed and unpredictable lawman. Smiling, Misto guessed he wouldn’t try the man’s temper that far.

LEE SAID NOTHING about the cigar smoke, but sat trying not to cough. Neither deputy had said much to him and he didn’t want to get them started; he’d take the smoke and the silence. He looked out the window at the yellow wheat fields stretching away; he stared at the back of the driver’s head until the thin deputy met Lee’s eyes in the rearview mirror, his glance cold and ungiving. Soon the car was so thick with smoke that Lee couldn’t help coughing.

“Can I crack open the window? The emphysema’s getting to me.”

The fat deputy scowled, but grunted.

Taking that as a yes, Lee managed, despite the handcuffs, to roll down his window, and sat sucking in the fresh breeze. The warm wind made him think of the desert, of Blythe, of the buried post office money and the simple pleasures it would buy.

“What’re you smiling about, Fontana?” the fat deputy said. “You know something we don’t?”

Lee shrugged. “Hungering for a good Mexican meal. They ever serve Mexican in the Atlanta pen?”

In the front seat, the thin deputy drawled, “Atlanta, you’ll get Brunswick stew. That can be as hot as you’ll want to try.” When Lee began to cough hard despite the open window, the driver glanced back at his partner. “The doc at Springfield told you, Ray, no smoking in the car. That cough gets bad, he keeps it up, we’ll have to turn around and take him back.”

Scowling, Ray opened his window and threw the burning cigar out on the shoulder of the highway. Lee hoped to hell he didn’t set the wheat afire. This wasn’t going to improve the man’s temper, if he couldn’t smoke. And it was a two-day drive to Atlanta.

Soon, with the cigar smoke sucked away by the wind, Lee was able to breathe again. As he settled back, easing pressure off the belly chain, trying to get comfortable, he felt the weight of the ghost cat stretch out along his shoulder. Felt the insolent tickle of bold whiskers, and again he tried not to smile. Lee wished they were flying instead of driving, he liked looking down at the world below, the patterns of farms and cities, the snaking rivers. He’d been startled when, during the flight out from L.A. to Springfield, they’d passed right over the country he had known as a boy. He’d pressed his forehead to the plane’s tiny window seeing, in a new way, the wrinkled face of Arizona, the great plains broken by dry, ragged mountains. He saw Flagstaff, the San Francisco peaks rising behind. Where the highway moved north of Winslow, and the Little Colorado River made a sharp turn, a lonely feeling had clutched at him. Off to his left, three fields formed a triangle with trees marking their borders. Those had to be the north fields of the ranch where they’d moved when they left South Dakota, when his dad sold out, sold all the stock, hoping for a better living.

The ranch his father had bought was no better for grass except in early spring, and that new green grass had been without much substance to put any fat on a steer. Sparse grazing land again, hot as hell in the summers, and the well water tasted bitterly of iron. He’d worked long hours, as a boy, doctoring and branding their scruffy cattle. He could still smell the dust, could still feel his favorite bay gelding under him, could still bring back the sweet smell of new grass bruised by a horse’s hooves. He could taste the vinegar-soaked beefsteak his mother would cook for breakfast, for the few neighbors who helped each other during roundup, moving from one ranch to the next. Fresh-killed range beef was tough as hell if you didn’t soak it overnight in vinegar.

He’d been fourteen when they moved west to Winslow. His brother Howard was fifteen but as useless in Arizona as he’d been in South Dakota, making more work for others than if you did the job yourself. Ma had kept the girls busy tending the garden and chickens, and canning what she could from their pitiful garden. His two older sisters didn’t want to work with the cattle, but Mae had yearned after horses. She rode whenever she could sneak away, she would have grown into a good ranch hand if Ma had let her.

The year they moved to the Flagstaff land, Russell Dobbs had followed them all the way out from the Dakotas. Lee had been thrilled when his grandpappy showed up, but his mother was cold with rage. She’d been so relieved to come west to get away from her renegade, train-robbing father.

Grandpappy would be with them for a few days, then gone for a few. Shortly after he arrived, the Flagstaff paper reported a train robbery just north of Prescott. Two weeks later a second train was held up, east of Flagstaff. That was the start of a dozen successful jobs, all at night when Russell might have been there at the ranch, asleep in his bed. Russell knew, if the feds came looking, his daughter would lie for him despite her disapproval. It was at that time that Lee’s mother turned inward. She didn’t speak to her father much when he was at the ranch and she didn’t smile often. After Russell left them for good and moved on again, she lived the rest of her life blaming him for everything that went wrong in the family. It was his influence, she said, that had soured their lives.

As a boy, Lee had known exactly how his grandpappy felt, had known the wild need that kept Dobbs robbing the trains and moving on to rob again. On the ranch, even when Lee stood on a knoll looking across emptiness as far as he could see in every direction, he felt the same trapped need to move on. He could still see that look in Dobbs’s eyes, the intensity in Dobbs’s movements and in his impatient ways.

Lee, with his own hunger for the fast trains, would do anything as a kid to get into town to see the train pull in, to watch that thin line of smoke curling up from the bell-mouthed stack, the black engine belching steam, steam sighing from the big pistons and drive wheels. His father always wanted Lee to go with him to the stockyard, to take an interest in the cattle trading. But the minute their buggy hit town Lee would sneak off to the station and beg the engineer to let him aboard. He could still feel the warm iron floor under his bare feet as he stood inside the engineer’s cab looking at the bright brass gauges and levers, drinking in the power of the engine, a power that filled him right up like a dipper of water on a hot day.

But then his eyes would turn to the engineer’s heavy thirty-thirty hanging beside the seat in its scarred leather scabbard, and he would imagine that weapon turned on his grandpappy during a robbery, imagine his grandpappy shot, twisting and falling, and Lee’s excitement would turn to fear.

When the engineer shooed him off the train again he would wait beside the track feeling the ground rumble as the engine got moving, would stand there caught in the scream of the whistle and the jolt of the drive wheels as she gathered speed. Would stare up, entranced, at the big pistons pushing to a gallop and the rocking cars heaving past him.

Now, remembering that day flying from the West Coast to Kansas City looking down from the airliner at his old home, he had that same sense of living in two times. As if part of him was still a young man back on the prairie sixty years in the past, while part of him stumbled along toward the end of his life’s journey.

In the end, what was it all about? What did it all add up to?

But when he paid attention to the ghost cat draped over his shoulder, one paw resting playfully against Lee’s neck, to the frisky, small ghost, he knew what it all added up to: If Misto had transcended from earthly life into a vast and more complicated dimension, why would humans be different?

Lee felt uncomfortable thinking about such matters, but Misto was the living—more than living—example that something more lay ahead, after this life. Not just the dark weight of evil, that was only part of it. Something more, so bright it shamed the golden wheat fields through which the car sped. Crushed in the limo beside the cigar-stinking deputy, Lee was embarrassed by such thoughts, but the proof of a better life was right there, draped over his shoulder, warm, heavy, invisible.

IT WAS A long pull, a two-day trip moving south, crowded against the sweaty deputy. And the layover in Tennessee was no picnic. Lee was lodged in Jackson’s dirty county jail while the two deputies went off to a hotel and a steak dinner. Lee’s meal, shoved through the cell bars, was some kind of watery stew that had been around too long. The coffee was the color of dishwater and tasted like it. He ached from sitting in the car and his back was sore where the belly chain gouged him. He lay on the jail’s dirty cot thinking there wasn’t one damned person in the world who cared whether he made it to Atlanta or dropped dead before he got there. But then the ghost cat nudged him, and Lee smiled; and soon, eased by the insistent presence of the ghost cat, Lee slept.

The next day’s travel was worse than the first. The weather grew hot and humid, and Lee’s seat partner, without his smokes, grew increasingly cranky. They made half a dozen extra stops, pulling over at some turnout or campground so Ray could light up a stogy. Afterward he would heave himself back in the car stinking all the worse. At seven that evening when they pulled into Atlanta, Lee was done in. He wanted only to fall into a prison cot, to stretch out with no chains binding him, and ease into sleep. Moving through the city he could see, off to the right, a fancy section of big, beautiful homes with their spreading shade streets. “Buckhead,” the driver said when he saw Lee looking. “Too fancy for you, or me neither.”

They moved down Peachtree past closed, softly lit shops until they hit narrower streets, shabby little houses packed close together. In the fading evening, kids played ball in the street, running and shouting. The deputy honked impatiently at a bunch of Negro boys in a game of kick-the-can. Ahead loomed the penitentiary: thick concrete walls, one guard tower that Lee could see, the glint of rifles reflected from big spotlights glaring across the entry doors.

Belly-chained, Lee slid awkwardly out of the car and climbed the marble steps, aching tired. Once inside and through the sally port the deputy marshals freed him of the cuffs and chain. He stood rubbing his sore wrists where the cuffs had eaten in, rubbing his back, listening to the hum of the heavy barred gate sliding closed behind him.

Down both sides of the long passage were vaulted openings that led to the cellblocks. He followed along beside the uniformed admissions officer, a trim, dark-haired young man with a full mustache. Down at the end of the corridor he could see open double doors and could smell greasy dishwater and boiled cabbage, could hear pans clanging and male voices. The corridor was hung with inmates’ paintings, some crazy paranoid, some nostalgic. An oil painting of a cowhand riding across open prairie struck him hard.

When he had showered and been issued prison clothes he was led into a cellblock five tiers high. He had stuffed his savings book and Mae’s picture, which he was allowed to keep, into the pocket of his loose cotton shirt. He followed the officer up the metal stairs that zigzagged back and forth between metal catwalks. Some fifty feet above the main floor were barred clerestory windows, their glass arching up another thirty feet. He craned his neck to look up, the height dizzying him. “Some hotel, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, no elevator,” the officer said in his soft Southern speech. “You’ll be on the third tier.” They climbed in silence as the rumble of a train broke the night from behind the prison, its scream shrill and demanding. By the time Lee reached his tier he was breathing so hard he had to stop twice to get enough air. “Long drop,” he said when the train had passed and he could talk again. “Anyone ever cash it in and jump?”

“It’s happened,” the guard said. “Not often.”

At midpoint of the catwalk he was ushered into a single cell.

“You’ll see Mr. Hamilton, the section custodian, in the morning. Then the classification officer. After that you’ll be able to move around the prison.”

His cell was no different than the others he’d lived in: stainless steel washbowl, stained metal toilet. A cot bolted to the wall, with a cotton pad, a worn-out pillow, and a gray prison blanket. He didn’t bother to undress. He pulled off his shoes, lay down and drew the blanket up around him, listening to the familiar prison noises, men snoring, metal clanging, the crinkle of paper as a candy bar was unwrapped. Maybe life was just one long cellblock after another until they planted you outside the wall.

But this thought brought a flurry of hissing. The cat leaped heavily onto the cot, right in Lee’s face, as solid as any living beast. Solid and very visible, shocking Lee. Quickly he looked up and down the corridor at the cells on the other side.

He saw no one looking back, and saw no guard near. Misto grinned, flicked his tail, and vanished again—but when Lee lifted the blanket the invisible cat crawled underneath, warm against Lee’s shoulder, the comfort of his purr easing Lee into sleep.