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

“What were you in for?” Delgado continued. “Jake mentioned bank robbery.”

Lee nodded, drew his thumbnail down his beer bottle, crumpling the label away from the glass. “A job I messed up on.” He had to try harder not to show his anger. He was, after all, working for the man, he guessed Delgado had a right to ask questions. “It was the first bank robbery I ever tried,” Lee said, keeping his voice mild, trying to act like they were having a normal conversation. “And it was sure as hell the last.”

“You liked the trains better,” Delgado said, smiling.

Lee nodded. “The old steam trains. Those days are gone.”

“Not many big shipments of gold, either,” Delgado said. “All bank drafts or paper money, marked money, not like it used to be. And the diesels too fast for a man on horseback.” His blue eyes burned into Lee. “You’re thinking to stay straight, now? Thinking not to cross the law anymore?”

“That’s my plan,” Lee lied. “I’m getting too old for that life. My lungs are too sick, I can’t take the abuse anymore.” But not quite the last job, he thought, looking steadily at Delgado. As he watched this man, with his riches, with his great spreads of land and hundreds of men working for him, men under his complete control, Lee’s dark urge pressed in at him, wanting part of what Delgado had, no matter who he hurt. If the other three operations, plus the date groves at Hemet, were as large as this ranch, that could total over six hundred workers. Say each man averaged around twenty-five dollars a week, depending on how much he picked, that would add up to some fifteen thousand dollars. Add in the salaries of Jake and the other ranch managers, and their foremen, and that still wouldn’t be enough to retire on, even in Mexico, for whatever time he had left.

But then when he thought about betraying Lucita and Jake, he felt his face heat with shame. The cat was right, if he stole from Delgado he’d put a knife in the hearts of his friends. Shaken, not knowing what he wanted, he soon left the two men to their account books, the dirty dishes and empty beer bottles piled at one end of the table. Crossing Lucita’s comfortable living room to let himself out. Looking at the deep leather sofa with its tumble of soft pillows, he had a sudden vision of lying there with her, holding her close, a thought that brought heat again.

But which dominated? The heat born of lust? Or of shame? He’d never known himself to be so uncertain. Was this a part of getting old? Old, and too weak to know what he wanted? Too old and uncertain to resist whatever notion might, at any given moment, pass through his aging brain?

Dark of mood, he pushed out into the night, the day’s searing heat vanished but the evening air still warm. A thin moon was rising over the melon fields, silvering the tamarisk trees beyond, along the riverbank. He could hear coyotes singing off in the distance, somewhere this side of the mountains. Looking out across the desert toward the wide Colorado River that fed the vast rows of crops, he had a sudden sense of what Jake had told him about Ramon Delgado, about how Delgado had built up this land by backbreaking hard work, and a sudden sense hit Lee of what Delgado might, in fact, feel for the land; and Lee felt a hint, deep inside, that what he had chosen to see in Delgado might be warped, twisted by the way he wanted to see it.

His cabin windows were black, but moonlight touched the porch. A tall shape stood waiting in the shadows beside the door, sending goose bumps up Lee’s arms, a fear flashing through him that made him grip the switchblade in his pocket. The same fear he’d known back at McNeil when the dark wraith moved in through the bars to stand at the foot of his bed. He told himself it was only a shadow, that it had no power over him except that which he allowed it to have. He moved on up the steps and past it, stepped on in through his unlocked door, closed the door, and switched on the overhead bulb.

Nothing in the room seemed disturbed, everything looked as it should, his folded clothes and towels, Mae’s picture on the white-painted dresser, the straight-backed purple chair standing where he’d left it, the quilted coverlet rumpled on the iron bedstead where he had sat to pull on his boots, the coverlet made by Lucita’s hand. The yellow tomcat lay curled in the middle of the bed, blinking up sleepily at him. Again he was surprised at how glad he was to see Misto there, so pleased that Lee almost spoke to him, then thought better of that idea. He didn’t feel like a lecture. Stripping off his boots and socks, his pants and shirt, he turned the quilt back as best he could without disturbing the beast, turned out the light and slid under the covers leaving most of the space to the cat. If, tonight, the dark spirit slipped into the room to torment him, so be it, he was too tired to care; he was too conflicted by the devil’s hassling to deal with it tonight, he wanted only to be left alone, except for the ghost cat. He badly wanted Misto to stay. Though the big feline, who had taken solid shape tonight in all his shaggy glory, was damnably heavy as he stretched out across Lee’s feet. Amused, but eased by Misto’s boldness and warmth, reassured by the cat’s presence, Lee drifted off into sleep, into dreams that made the dark spirit seem less threatening. That made Satan seem less powerful, tonight, than the spirit of the wily yellow ghost who lay wakeful, watching over Lee, though much of Misto’s attention turned now, as well, to Georgia, to the dark spirit’s keen interest in the family of little Sammie Blake.

14

It was hot in Georgia, too, but more humid. Earlier that same day, as a little breeze stirred the oak leaves, high among the branches Sammie sat straddling a gnarled limb, her bare feet swinging, her long pale hair tangled in the twigs and leaves. Life was good, her daddy was home now, at work at his auto shop just a few blocks away. Later in the afternoon she and Becky would walk down to join him and they’d head over to Grandma’s for dinner. Below her at the picnic table her mother had laid out the monthly figures for Thrasher’s Drugstore, her papers weighted with rocks, her ledger shaded by the sprawling tree.

Looking up, Becky watched Sammie with interest, the child completely absorbed in moving a little metal car along in the air above a leafy branch—she had attached a pair of paper wings to the car, stuck on with tape so it was now an airplane, and she had filled the hollow metal plane with white flour. Becky didn’t know where Sammie’s interest in flight came from, there weren’t many planes around Rome, just a couple of small ones that enthusiastic young men were learning to fly. She watched Sammie pass the little plane over a branch, shaking it so the flour would drift down and cover the leaves. “Dusting the crops,” Sammie said. Becky could swear Sammie had never seen a crop duster. Somehow, the child’s use of the word, her knowledge of the word, made her uneasy.

She was probably reacting to nothing, maybe to some chance remark by a neighbor that Sammie had overheard, but still she wondered. With Sammie, any unusual reference, like so many of her dreams, might have far more meaning than seemed obvious. Sammie’s dreams could affect their lives in ways that were far more real than the ephemeral world of nighttime fantasies.

Though many of Sammie’s visions were small, unimportant events, a neighbor’s truck breaking down late at night; the neighborhood cat who birthed five kittens, two black, three striped, just as Sammie foretold. Becky was used to those dreams, Sammie would tell them to her, then later would smile at her knowingly when the kittens were born just as Sammie said, or the truck broke an axle just before midnight and the neighbor called Morgan for help.