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

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.

3

Lee left his cell for the last time dressed in a prison-made pinstripe suit a size too big for him, the sleeves hanging down to his knuckles, a red-and-yellow tie so gaudy that a dog wouldn’t pee on it, and prison-made wingtip shoes that raised blisters before he ever reached the first door of the sally port, their squeaking soles providing his only fanfare as he headed out for the free world. Moving down the corridor of McNeil for the last time, toward the double-doored cubicle where he would receive his belongings and sign out, his nerves were strung tight. He’d be on his own in less than an hour. His previous five releases from the federal pens didn’t make getting out, this time, any easier. No one to tell him when to eat, tell him when and where to sleep, tell him where exactly to work each day and how to do his work. A man got out of practice making his own decisions.

At Admissions, a soft-faced officer with jowls like a bulldog produced the usual brown paper bag with Lee’s name scrawled on it, shoved it across the desk with a patronizing smirk. “Here’s your worldly goods, Fontana.” He looked Lee over, amused at the baggy pinstripe suit and fresh prison haircut, and at the one pitiful item he saw Lee take from his pocket and drop in the bag, the little framed picture of his sister, Mae, when she was ten. “Here’s your train ticket,” he said, handing Lee a plain brown envelope, “and your prison earnings. Don’t lose them, old man. And be careful, it’s a great big world out there.”

Lee moved away from the counter wanting to smash the guy. As to his prison earnings, there wasn’t much; they didn’t get paid for working the farm, only for splitting cedar shingles that the prison shop made from the trees that grew along the shore—most of that pittance, he’d spent on razor blades and soap, on cheap dime novels the guards would pick up on the mainland, and on candy bars. He wondered if the money was still stuffed into the toe of his boot, from all those years ago when he was brought into McNeil and stripped of his civilian clothes, when all his belongings but Mae’s picture were locked away as he changed into prison uniform. He hoped to hell the guards hadn’t found it. He needed cash for a gun, for any number of essentials to start life anew.

Now, as Lee headed for the sally port, the ghost cat followed him unseen, his attention on the child’s photograph that Lee had taken from his pocket, that he always kept close to him, the picture of Lee’s little sister, Mae, from those long-ago days in South Dakota. The child who looked exactly like Misto’s own Sammie, who lived now, in this time, in this moment, across the continent in Georgia. Sammie, with whom Misto had lived a short but recent life, and with whom, as ghost, he still spent many nights, unseen, purring close to her as she slept.

The exact likeness of the two little girls continued to puzzle the ghost cat, for even now in his free and far-roving state between his earthly lives, the tomcat did not have all the answers. He knew only that there was a powerful connection between Mae and Sammie, an urgent and meaningful adjunct to their lives of which Lee was the center, a connection that, the cat thought, might ultimately help to save Lee in his conflict with the dark power.

Lee, clutching his brown paper sack and brown envelope, stepped into the sally port glancing at the officer behind the glass barrier. Receiving a nod, he moved on out through the second door. He knew he should be happy at the sound of the metal gate locking behind him. But he felt only unsteady at his sudden freedom, at being turned loose with no barriers, no limits or rules, adrift and on his own after years of confinement, lost and rudderless in a vast and unfamiliar world.

The sky was gray, the morning’s heavy mist chilling him clear through. The small prison bus was waiting. He shoved the brown envelope with his ticket into his coat pocket, tucked the paper bag under his arm, climbed the three steps up into the stuffy vehicle, took a seat halfway back, nodding at the trusty who was driving and at the guard who sat angled where he could see the seats behind him. Lee was the only passenger. Earlier in the morning, and again in the afternoon, the bus would be full of schoolkids, children of the guards and prison personnel who lived on the island.

The bus rattled down the winding gravel road, past green pastures on both sides, past the reservoir and on down to the ferry landing where the SS Bennett, McNeil’s forty-foot mahogany powerboat, was tied. The churning waters of Puget Sound looked as cold and gray as death, the hills of the distant shore vague beneath the overcast, grim and depressing, the smear of crowded mainland houses, with taller buildings rising among them, all generated the prisoner’s fear of the vast and sprawling outside world. He knew the feeling would pass, it always did, but every time he was released he felt as off balance as if the cinch on his saddle had broken and he was scrambling to swing away from a bad tumble.

At the dock he left the bus, moved on down to the rocking launch where a uniformed guard and a trusty were coiling lines on the aft deck. The gray waters shifted and heaved as if forces deep down were restless. There was one other passenger, a prisoner chained to a bench on the foredeck sitting between two guards, a two-time felon who had made his third kill at McNeil and was being shipped off to Alcatraz. Lee crossed the wooden catwalk and stepped aboard, staying to the aft deck avoiding his prison mate. The hollowness in his belly was sharp with excitement but sharper with dread, leaving for the first time in ten years his secure cell, the farm where he’d felt comfortable, the animals he’d liked better than his fellow inmates—leaving the old prison tomcat, he thought, surprised he’d think of that. Leaving the old cat he’d come to care about more than he’d imagined. The yellow tomcat that had spent last night on Lee’s bed, easing Lee’s night-fears, somehow coming between him and the phantom that he hadn’t wanted to see or to hear. Now he was leaving the old tomcat that was, it seemed to Lee, the only real friend he’d had at McNeil, the only presence he could really trust. The old cat that had, some said, died and returned again. Sometimes Lee thought he’d been there all along, that what the guard and prisoners had buried had been one of his offspring. Other times, he wondered. Whatever the truth, Lee had a pang of regret and knew he’d miss the old fellow.