The local motels and restaurants wouldn’t have the kind of cash he needed, not there on the premises. And if he hit a bank, pulled a federal crime and got caught, he’d spend the rest of his life, for sure, in the federal pen, would most likely die there, breathe his last gasp on some hard prison cot with no one to give a damn. The minute he got stressed trying to work out a plan, his breathing got worse; he knew that only part of his coughing and lack of breath was the dust. Why he had thought the blowing desert sand wouldn’t irritate his lungs, he had no idea. And the Federal Bureau of Prisons wouldn’t care, why the hell would they? He’d agreed when they said the heat would help him, and he’d thought it would be easy work, driving the truck back and forth, he hadn’t thought any further than that. But now, with a new robbery to plan, he could feel the pressure constricting his lungs again, and he knew he’d better get on with it, better figure out what he wanted to do before the emphysema took a turn for the worse and he wouldn’t have the strength to even hold a gun steady.
16
The harder Satan pressed Lee, the stronger the cat seemed to grow. No matter how Lucifer tried to manipulate Fontana, either the cat or Lee himself found a way to best him. Misto’s exuberance for life, even when he traveled between lives, the ghost cat’s love for the living human spirit was poison to Satan, Misto generated a joy so willful and strong, so stubborn, that the dark spirit at last backed away—for the moment. Repulsed and defeated, Satan melted from Lee’s cabin out into the night where he restlessly wandered the ranch yard looking for lighter entertainment, seeking some mindless diversion to cool his seething rage.
At last, smiling, he took the form of a coyote, rank and mangy and flea-ridden. Slipping in through the walls of the nearest bunkhouse, he amused himself for a while weaving terrifying dreams among the sleeping workers, bloody nightmares that stirred memories of childhood hunger and beatings in the tired men, of adolescent atrocities, the pain from knives and attacks with broken bottles. He rekindled terrors that made the dreaming men shudder and cry out and made the shaggy carnivore smile, yellow toothed, grinning with the lusty evil that was so easy to press into the simple minds of these otherwise happy-go-lucky men.
When he grew bored with these mind games, he wandered across the ranch yard leaving no tracks in the sand, and in through the locked door of the Ellsons’ house, into Jake and Lucita’s bedroom. They slept twined together, dreaming, after a long and easy lovemaking, and here again he sought to drive fear into his quarry, to shatter their happy slumber.
But in the cloying atmosphere of happiness, his attempt at nightmares failed. The two slept undisturbed and peaceful except for Lucita’s occasional soft moan, her hand brushing Jake’s cheek but then pulling away again, tucking her hand under her own cheek. Her dream was a scenario Lucifer couldn’t read or seem in any way to alter, and that, too, maddened him. The night had not gone well. If he were a human trespasser, armedand in a killing mood, if he had entered the room to shoot them in their sleep it would have gone better, though even then he thought he might have had a battle, eyeing the pistol Jake kept beside his bed.
Annoyed with the recalcitrant attitude of those in the upper world, Satan left the Ellsons’ at last and quit the Delgado Ranch, abandoning this world for the moment in a swirl of wind to vanish down through packed sand and desert rock, through miles of stone and undersea rivers and molten beds of plasma. Fast as the wind he fled down and down into the hot and fiery regions where he could nurse his frustrations in his own surroundings. There, taking his ease among the familiar fires, gathering strength from hell’s searing flames, he laid out plans for his imminent return.
The devil is not one entity. Like the hundred eyes of the fly multiplied ten trillion times, he is everywhere he chooses to be, everywhere at once, growing stronger where he is welcomed, fading and weakening when he is willfully rebuffed. Now down among the flames and comfortable once more, he thought that when he returned to the world above he would attend once again to the events in Georgia, to the Blake family where the scenario he had set in place was developing nicely, to the little family that was so interestingly connected to Lee Fontana. Though he would continue to haze Fontana, too, of course, searching for weaker elements in Lee’s nature. The pieces were coming together very well, the results of his work were gathering in myriad ways toward an explosion of satisfying destruction. With the help of Brad Falon, that lustfully eager pawn, a final retribution was building, a last determination for the heirs of Russell Dobbs,a crushing conclusion to the lives of the final descendants of this one distasteful enemy. Soon he would destroy the last trace of Dobbs, would turn to dust all that Dobbs had begotten in his defiant human life.
The cat, having faced off the devil with a power that seemed to Misto greater than he alone could have mustered, smiled with pleasure at Lucifer’s departure. Whatever had happened tonight, Lee and the cat together had bested the dark one with a triumph that made Misto feel he could whip immense tigers, could defeat blood-hungry carnivores from far crueler ages, long past.
Once the devil was gone, Misto waited on Lee’s bed only long enough to see that Lee slept soundly for the few hours remaining of the night, then he left the old convict and faded out into the cool dark. Above, on the roof of the building, digging his claws into the heat-softened shingles, he was still smiling a sly cat smile at the dark wraith’s retreat, at knowing that he and Lee, armed with a fierce anger born of love, could weaken the prince of malevolence. From the rooftop he watched the coyote enter the bunkhouses, watched the devil’s cold manipulation of the work-tired men, watched Satan’s failure to reach or make any impression on Jake and Lucita Ellson. Above Misto the stars sparked and gleamed, and a low moon hung over the desert hills, its thin curve picking out mirrored reflections in the black and glassy surface of the great Colorado River that flowed away beyond the ranch. Happily twitching his tail, the ghost cat immersed himself in the glory of the earthly world, a world so intricate, so complicated, so dazzling a panorama with its billions of living forms all so cleverly designed, all unique and all so freely given. To the cat, this world was a great and ever-changing wonder, he felt now the same joyhe had indulged in while riding atop the southbound passenger train down the coast, a giddy madness of pure pleasure. And now again he let his thoughts turn back in time, let his vision sweep back into a past when this whole vast valley lay deep beneath the sea, when these fields and low hills werepart of the sea floor, grazed by fishes instead of sheep, the undersea hilltops scoured by schools of Pleistocene sharks hunting their fishy prey. And then his vision leaped ahead to see the earth heave up and the sea floor violently lift, mountains rising as the earth’s plates buckled, the wrinkled coastal range pushing up and up and the sea draining away from the newly emerged land, sucked away in foaming rivers.