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

“It’s yours for seventy-five dollars.”

Lee was going to dicker, but then he saw several horses move into view from behind some tamarisk trees in the fenced pasture. “You wouldn’t have a horse to put in it? Nothing special, just a good saddle horse.”

The man grinned. “You ever know a rancher that doesn’t have a horse or two to sell? Could let you have either one of those mares. The black’s seven, the buckskin about nine.”

This meant to Lee they were both fifteen or better. He was about to dicker for the black mare when a gray gelding followed the mares, ducking his head, edging them aside from the water trough. He moved well, and looked in good shape, a dark, steel gray. “What about the gelding?”

Kendall paused a moment, looking Lee over. As if maybe he cared more about the gelding, didn’t want him used badly; but he must have decided Lee looked like an honest horseman. Leaving the truck he stepped to the barn door, shouted into the dim alleyway. “Harry! Harry, bring the gray in, will you?”

Lee watched a young boy, maybe twelve or so, halter the gelding, lead him across the field and out through the gate. No lameness, no quirks to his walk. Stepping out of the truck, Lee rubbed the gray’s ears, slid his hand down his legs and lifted his feet. He seemed sound, and he was shod, his feet and shoes in good shape. Opening the gray’s mouth, he looked at his teeth. The gelding was about twelve. Well, that was all right, they wouldn’t be together for long.

He dickered for a saddle and saddlebags, a bridle with a heavy spade bit, a halter, four bales of hay, and a sack of oats. He got that, the horse and trailer for two hundred dollars. He pulled out of Kendall’s ranch with a balance of two hundred and forty dollars left in his pocket, and he hadn’t touched his savings account, which would alert Raygor.

Conscious of the weight of the trailer on the old truck, he took his time driving back into Blythe. The gray pulled well, he didn’t fuss. In Blythe there wasn’t much traffic. Lee moved along in second gear until he recognized the side street he wanted. He parked along the curb near the post office.

The main section of the post office was closed on Sunday, but the lobby that housed the P.O. boxes was open. He filled out the title transfer section on the truck’s pink slip, using the name James Dawson and the Furnace Creek Road address. Lee would never receive the pink slip, but it wasn’t likely he’d need it. As he sealed the envelope he looked with some interest at the wanted posters hanging above the narrow counter. The newness of one caught his eye, and the word “Blythe.”

“Luke Zigler. Age 33. Five feet, ten inches, 190 pounds. Swarthy complexion, muscular build. Under life sentence for armed robbery and murder. Escaped Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary, March 20, 1947. Zigler’s hometown: Twentynine Palms, California. May attempt to contact friends there. Subject should be considered armed and extremely dangerous. Persons having any information are requested to contact the nearest office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or local law enforcement.”

Blythe wasn’t far from Twentynine Palms or from Palm Springs, the man could be anywhere in the area. Zigler’s eyes, vacant under bushy brows, stared coldly at Lee from the grainy black-and-white photograph. Lee had seen enough of his kind, in prison and out. But still, that look disturbed him. Haunted, half-crazy bastards, stick you in a minute for no reason.

He gave the poster a last look, dropped his envelope in the mail slot, and left the lobby. But all the way back to the ranch, among other thoughts he kept getting flashes of Zigler’s ugly face, and flashes of those he had known who were like Zigler, men he wouldn’t want to meet again. Driving and preoccupied, he was unaware of the ghost cat riding with him and that the yellow tom was as unsettled by Zigler as Lee had been, that the cat might be even more riveted than Lee by the evil in Zigler’s cold stare.

Lee drove onto the Delgado land by a narrow back road, keeping the tamarisk trees between him and the ranch yard, moving slowly to keep the dust down, turning at last onto a narrow trail he’d spotted days before, a track barely wide enough for the truck and trailer. The times he’d walked down here, he’d found no tire marks in the fine dust and no hoof prints as if Jake and Lucita might have ridden down this way. Usually they headed north, up between the planted fields. This trail led to the river, where mosquitoes could be bothersome.

Pulling in deep among the willows and tamarisk trees, he knew the truck and trailer were out of sight, tree limbs brushing the top of both, the strip of woods dim and sheltered until, farther in along the narrow track, he broke out into an open area of hard-packed earth some twenty feet across, the woods dense around it. He killed the engine and got out.

An overgrown footpath led down to the broad, turgid water of the Colorado. A circle of dead ashes shone dark in the clearing, tall weeds growing through the campfire of some forgotten hobo or migrant worker. Dropping the tailgate, he squeezed through to the gray’s head, and backed him out.

He tied the gelding to the side of the trailer, brushed off his back, and settled the faded saddle blanket in place. The gray swiveled an ear when he swung the saddle up, and filled his belly with air. Lee bridled him, led him out a few steps then tightened the cinch again. The gray looked around at him knowingly. Swinging into the saddle, Lee walked him around the clearing then moved him out toward the river at a jog. He cantered him, stopped him short, backed him, spun him a couple of times, let him jog out slow, and he felt himself grinning. He rode for maybe half an hour up along the river. It had been a long time since he’d felt a good horse under him. “You’ll do,” he told the gray. “I guess we both will.”

In the falling evening, as he unsaddled the gray and rubbed him down, his thoughts turned sharply back to the South Dakota prairie when he and Mae were kids, to the long summer days when, hurrying through his chores, they still had daylight to slip away while Ma and the girls were getting supper and his dad was maybe in town or busy with the cattle in a far field. He could see Mae’s smile so clearly, her dark eyes, her dimples deep as she stepped up onto her small cowhorse.

Why had he dreamed of Mae last night? And why had that other little girl, in town that day, stared up at him shocked, bringing Mae so alive for a moment? Why was his little sister, from half a century gone, suddenly so clear and real in his thoughts? Riding up along the river, he’d felt for a moment almost as if she rode behind him, her small arms around his waist, her head resting against his back as she used to do; the feeling had been so strong that near dark when he returned to the clearing he felt he ought to help Mae down off the gray before he stepped down, himself.

Shaking his head at his own foolishness, he tied the gelding to the trailer again, and then secured two five-gallon buckets to the side, one filled with water from the river, the other with a quart of oats. He heaved the hay from the pickup into the trailer, broke open one bale, pulled off two flakes of good oat hay, and dropped them on the ground where the gelding could reach them. He shut the tailgate so the gelding couldn’t get in at the rest. Leaving the quiet saddle horse with the truck and trailer, leaving him to sleep standing, he set out through the falling night on the two-mile hike back to his cabin, keeping his mind, now, on the job ahead.

28

Half an hour after Morgan was booked into the Rome jail, Jimson returned, moving in through the heavy outer door, looking in through the bars at Morgan. “Becky’s on her way. I couldn’t get her at home, she was at Caroline’s.” Morgan was surprised Jimson had bothered to call her. But he knew that wasn’t fair, Jimson was only doing his job, and when Morgan looked up at him now, some of the old warmth had returned.