Shirley Murphy - The Cat, the Devil, and Lee Fontana

The walls of the café were built of rough, dark wood. Down at the end, at one of three windows, a swamp cooler chugged away, keeping time to the Mexican brass, belching out cool, damp air. The tables were crowded with braceros and with a few dark-eyed women. They slid in at the only empty table, the oilcloth still damp from the waiter’s towel. When Jake reached for the chips and salsa, Lee tried not to look at the stump of his right hand where three fingers were missing, an accident Lee felt guilty for.

They’d taken down one of the last steam trains, a short run from San Francisco up the San Joaquin Valley. They got the only money bag they could find, had swung off the train when one glancing shot by a train guard hit Jake. Lee ran, in plain sight meaning to lead the cops away, hoping Jake would vanish around the far side of the train. He knew Jake had made it when he heard a horse pounding away. Lee made a lot of noise to draw them off, then slipped away on his own mount, moving silently in the dark.

He had ridden for maybe an hour, could still hear them behind him, but then their sound faded as they took a wrong turn. When at last Lee holed up, hid his horse in dense woods, and opened the canvas bag expecting a big haul, the bag contained a measly four thousand bucks.

Days later, when Lee thought the cops had eased off their searching, he’d gotten half of the money to Lucita. She kept it, but she was mad as hell. She wouldn’t tell him where Jake was, she said his hand, what was left of it, was healing just fine. She told Lee, snapping out the words, her black eyes flashing, that this was the last job they’d ever pull, that Jake was done with that life, done for good, or she’d send him packing and divorce him.

Lee didn’t hear from Jake for a long time after that, long after the marine payroll job and the bank fiasco when that damned teller nearly cut off his own fingers. Then, somehow, Jake heard where he was, maybe from someone they had worked with at one time, and Lee started getting a letter now and then, up at McNeil. A thin thread to keep in touch, but it had meant a lot to him.

Now, beneath the table, something brushed his leg, but when he lifted the red checkered oilcloth and glanced down, nothing was there. Only the faintest purr reached him, and in the shadows he saw a scrap of tortilla disappear into thin air. He dropped the edge of the oilcloth wondering, not for the first time, how a ghost could eat solid food.

But at McNeil when the cat had made himself visible in the prison mess hall, he’d gobbled up every handout he could beg. Well, hell, Lee thought, what did he know about the talents of a ghost? When the purring became louder, he scuffed his feet hoping to hide the sound; and then when the waitress approached, the cat silenced.

Not only was the beer ice-cold, the chiles rellenos when they arrived were light and fresh, the corn tortillas homemade. It was all so good Lee thought maybe he’d died and gone to heaven. If he could just make it from one small Mexican café to the next, without having to deal with the rest of the world, he could get along just fine. Jake, rolling beans and salsa into a tortilla, said, “Parole, rather than conditional release?”

Lee nodded. “Parole board didn’t much like my record. I’m beholden for this job at the ranch, Jake.”

Ellson shook his head. “Except for you, I’d have bought it when that guard shot at me, if you hadn’t led them off they’d have grabbed me. I worried a long time, hoping you got away. The two thousand dollars you got to me, I did a lot of thinking, after that.”

“And you took a lot of flack from Lucita.”

Jake grinned. “That was a long time ago.”

“More years than I like to count,” Lee said. “I’m sorry about Ramon, about losing your boy in the war. I’d like to have known him.” He wondered how that must feel, to raise a fine son, and then see him die so young, so brutally. When he thought about how that must have been for Lucita, pain twisted his belly and he felt a warm longing to comfort her. Though he had never made a play for Lucita, once she and Jake were engaged and then married, he’d never been near her without being tempted, without the heat rising.

“She’s up in Redlands,” Jake said. “Her sister just had gall bladder surgery, Lucita’s taking care of her. She’ll be home next week. She’s sure looking forward to seeing you, planning on cooking up a big dinner.” Jake motioned to the waiter for another bowl of salsa. “Both our girls are married. Carmella’s in San Francisco, her husband’s a fireman. Susanne’s in Reno.” He grinned. “Married to a sheep rancher.”

“Sheep?” Lee said.

Jake smiled. “He’s a good man. Basque. Good people.”

Lee watched Jake quietly. Jake’s family had lived a whole lifetime, the girls grown up into their own lives, Ramon shot down by a German sniper, buried and mourned, while Lee had gone on year after year pulling a few jobs, getting older, getting slower, and then back in the pen scrubbing prison latrines, sanding prison-made furniture, eating prison slop, and then finally out working on the McNeil farm. He’d had no ties at all on the outside except Jake and Lucita, no one else who cared, no family of his own that he’d ever kept track of. Only the thought of his little sister, as if Mae were still out there somewhere, as if she were still alive. But if Mae was still alive, and grown old, where was she? What kind of life was she living? And why had she never tried to get in touch? But how could she have done that when he was always on the move, leaving as few tracks as he could, ever traveling on, aimless as a tumbleweed? And why hadn’t he tried to get in touch?

Well, hell, he’d stayed in touch for a while. He’d write or make a phone call to the rancher, Sam Gerrard, who owned the land adjoining them, because Lee’s family had no phone. Years ago he’d called Gerrard when he read in the newspaper that his grandpappy was killed. He couldn’t believe it, shot to death during a train robbery, though Russell had taken three Pinkerton men with him. His grandpappy’s death had set Lee back some, he’d been a long time getting over the demise of Russell Dobbs—as if a whole stretch of history had collapsed, as if the whole shape of the world he knew had shifted and changed.

He’d given Gerrard a number where he might be reached now and then, a hotel in Billings where he had a lady friend. That was how he found out when his daddy died, had a stroke, they thought. Died out on the range alone. Must have been a bad one, to make him tumble off his horse. Horse came back to the ranch, and they’d gone looking. They found his daddy two days later lying among the boulders at the edge of a stony draw. After that, Gerrard said, Lee’s ma had left the ranch, sold it for what she could get, took Mae and their two older sisters back to North Carolina, to live with her sister. That was when he lost touch, didn’t try to contact them. He knew Mae would be all right if she was with family. But he thought about her a lot, he hoped she had horses as she’d always wanted, and he’d carried her picture and would look at it, at that bold little girl who wanted to learn everything herself, wanted to do everything her way.

Mae and her older sisters were allowed to ride but only decorously, at a walk or slow trot, and they were kept as far as possible from the cattle and the cowhands. When Lee and Mae could sneak off alone, when he saddled a real horse for her and not the poky pony, she wanted to do everything, she wanted to learn to rope, she wanted to work cattle, she wasn’t afraid and in a short time she handled a horse real well. Their mother didn’t know half of what went on, working in the kitchen or around back in the garden, trusting Lee to take care of his little sister, thinking he was carefully chaperoning Mae on the pony when, in fact, they were off beyond the nearby hills, Mae learning to rein and work a good cowpony, to spin and back him, to chase a calf and learning to handle a rope.