Who knew, once he got out of this damp cold, got down into the hot desert and got himself some cash, once he was settled in a place of his own, maybe the emphysema would get better as it sometimes did when he was comfortable and not stressed. Hell, maybe he’d forget about dying, maybe he’d live forever.
His written parole instructions were to get off the train at San Bernardino before heading on down to Blythe, check in there with his parole officer. Maybe he’d do that, and maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe just stay on the rattler until he hit Blythe, go right on down to the job, such as it was, tell the parole officer, when he showed up in a few weeks, that he’d forgotten about stopping off, or maybe that he’d lost the paper giving him any such orders.
The job in Blythe was supposed to be permanent, but even if his old running partner had arranged it for him, they both knew Lee wasn’t about to work the vegetable fields for the rest of his parole time. That was migrant work, they had to like the hot, heavy labor just fine or they wouldn’t keep slipping across the border, hiding in the trunks of rickety old cars half smothered to death, heading up to the States, men wantingbetter pay and better treatment than they got at home.
He meant to work at the ranch a few weeks so he looked good to the parole board, get his bearings, lay out a plan to put his hands on some cash. Pull that off, and he’d be out of there, rich again and not a care to worry him. One big job, one nice haul, then on down across the border where he’d pick up a little adobe house and some land for a few bucks, enough to pasture a couple of horses. Find a little se?orita to cook for him and take care of his needs,live on tortillas, good hot Mexican dishes. Maybe a last crack at good, hot Mexican love. If he could still handle that much excitement. He didn’t like thinking how the years lay on him. Even his spirit felt flat, worn out, not fiery, as when he was young. He was giving out, his body giving out, aches and stiffness, and the emphysema made it so hard to breathe that when he thought of pulling another job, he wondered if he could handle it, if he could still bring off a job with the decisiveness and fast moves it would take and still get away clean.
But he had no choice. One more big job, or just wither away to nothing like an old horse turned out on barren, grassless land and left to starve to death.
He wondered, too, if he’d be up to the modern ways. He was coming out of prison into a world he didn’t know anymore, a world of sleeker, faster cars than he was used to. Fast diesel trains that no man on horseback could take down the way you could halt a steam train, the way he used to do, and his grandpappy before him, neither of them ever expecting the steam trains to die out and a new kind of train to take over the rails. In the old days, in L.A., the vaqueros used to race their horses against the steam trains, their ponies faster in the sprint, but the locomotive taking over for the distance, leaving the riders behind. With these new trains, a horseman didn’t have a chance. This was the 1940s, everything fast and slick as he’d never imagined, the world turned into a place he didn’t know, and, in truth, didn’t want to know. The slick Chicago gangs all duded up in their fancy suits and greased hair, their high-powered machine guns and big fancy cars, their steel-fisted control of a whole city. Big crime, taking down millions of dollars, not the simple one-on-one robberies that Lee was used to.
The whole world had grown too big; it was overwhelming. The Great War, World War I, a war fought from the sky, from planes that, some said, would soon replace the trains, take you anywhere in the U.S. you wanted to go, in just a few hours. This was not his world. There was even talk of some new kind of camera invented, which one day soon would watch you enter a bank, watch your every move in there. A world of spying, more sophisticated fingerprinting, all kinds of technology the cops could use to trap you. It was hard to get his mind around the changes that had happened while he worked the prison farm, herded and cared for a bunch of sheep and milk cows. His own kind of life was fast vanishing, running cattle on thousands of miles of open range that were now mostly fenced, broken into puny little spreads, cut up and ruined. His kind of life had been sucked away into history like water sucked down a drain.
Tomorrow he’d step out into that world, a used-up old man. No new skills to cope with the changes, a dried-up old gunman with maybe nothing hecould do but the field work where he was headed, hard labor that would leave him falling into bed at night aching in every bone and trying to get his breath. With allthese fancy new ways, what kind of robbery was out there that he could even handle, anymore? When he hit Blythe, maybe hecouldn’t do anything else but fall into the same life as the Mexican pickers, work among them, eat, and sleep, and work the fields until one day they found him dead among the cabbages, and no one to give a damn.
The cat, as Lee deliberated on his fate, dropped invisibly down from the shelf to the concrete and rolled over on the hard cell floor, watching Lee, knowing Lee’s thoughts and not liking them much.
A mortal cat would know distress at the nervous unease of the humans he cared about. But the spirit cat saw more, he understood more and, too often, he felt drawn to do celestial battle on Lee’s behalf. Now, flipping to his feet, restlessly pacing, he at last drifted up onto the iron shelf once more, above Lee’s empty shoes, lay down across the iron grid, invisible ears back, invisible tail twitching as he waited for what was about to occur, as he waited for the dark visitor to makehimself known to Lee, as was the devil’s way.
Lee’s battered watch said twelve-thirty, but he couldn’t sleep. Still shivering, he dug the paperback western out from under his pillow and tried to read. He got through barely two pages before the print on the page began to blur, his eyes watering not from want of sleep but from the unnatural cold that shivered him, and from the harsh overhead lights that, even through the murky air, glared straight down into his face. He was idly turning the pages, trying to stay interested in the cheap pulp western and wishing he had another Hershey’s bar—he’d eaten the last three—when a whisper from the corridor brought him up startled, a voice as faint as a shifting breeze.
“Fontana. Lee Fontana.”
Easing up on one elbow, he looked out through the bars. He scanned the cells across the way, tier upon tier, but saw no one looking out at him, no one awake. Not a soul stirred, the prone bodies seemed as still as the products of a waxworks, or as if they floated in a chill suspension of time.
“Lee … Lee Fontana.” A whisper closer than those far cells, and as insidious as a rattler’s buzz. He couldn’t tell the direction, it seemed to come from all around him, from the ceiling, from inside the cell itself, and through the concrete walls on either side of him. Whatever thoughts slid into Lee’s mind at that instant, he pushed away, whatever images arose he didn’t want to consider. But then suddenly the prisoners’ snores began again, the coughs, the twang of flat metal bedsprings as some sleeper relieved his tensions or rolled over. Maybe he’d imagined the whisper he’dthought he heard, had imagined that seeming pause in time, as well. Reaching for his book again, he stretched out flat, pulled the blanket up, shivering, trying to get warm and to read and not look around him, to pay attention to nothing beyond the cheap novel. He was turning the page when the shadows in his cell shifted so violently that he jerked upright, staring around him.
“Fontana. Lee Fontana.”
No one was there beyond the bars. But a shadow lay across his blanket, the stark shadow of a tall man cutting across the dark stripes that were cast by the iron bars. He squinted, but still the corridor was empty, unbroken by any figure. No one stood peering in at him, no one to account for the dark shape cast boldly across his blanketed legs. But a heavy malaise pressed at him, weakening him so he had to ease back, to lie supine, watching the dark imprint, watching the empty space beyond the bars, the empty corridor. He remained as still as if he faced a coiled rattler, as if the faintest shift of his body would trigger a flash of attack.