Outside again, standing on the sidewalk, Raygor gave him a dozen more instructions that Lee didn’t listen to and then at last, having fulfilled his federal duty, he departed, leaving Lee on his own with a final admonition to stay out of trouble. Lee watched him pull away in his dirty Plymouth to head back across the empty desert, to harass some other unfortunate parolee. He’d been surprised when Raygor allowed him to keep part of his prison earnings. Lee had told him he needed to buy clothes, which the officer seemed to understand.
Now, alone at last, he wandered up the main street looking in the shop windows but his thoughts remained on the post office as the new job began to take shape. Yet at the same time, dark misgivings pushed at him, a fear of failure that wasn’t his doing, a dark and unrelenting message that this was not the right path to take. Angrily he shook away the invasive thoughts. Walking the wide main street, he passed a small grocery, an ice cream parlor, a drugstore, the broad windows of a dime store. He finally located a shoe repair shop about as wide as a tie stall. In the dim interior, he took a seat on the shoeshine chair. He removed his boots, sat in his stocking feet reading the local paper as the thin, bearded old cobbler put on new heels. He read about the 4H winners at the local fair, studied the picture of a pair of dark-haired sisters with their two fine, chunky Hereford steers. He read about the latest episode in the eternal battle over water rights, with statements by the mayors of four nearby towns, which Lee skipped. A local man had been assaulted by his wife, shot in the foot after he beat their two children. Thelocal sheriff had made him move out and issued a restraining order. The wife was not charged.
He watched the cobbler polish his boots, then pulled them on and paid him, asking for directions to the saddlery. He found it two blocks down, the storefront set back behind thick adobe pillars, the sidewalk in front piled with heaps of dead crickets. Stepping carefully to avoid staining his clean boots, he moved on inside.
The dim interior seemed almost cool, and smelled pleasantly of leather. Wandering toward the back, he found a table of Levi’s, found a pair that fit him. He picked out two cotton frontier shirts, and bought some shorts and socks. Elbowing among the saddles and harness, he picked out a good, wide-brimmed straw Stetson. The saddles, and the headstalls hanging behind them, smelled so sweetly of good leather they made him homesick. He looked with speculation at a couple of used saddles, their wool saddle blankets matted with horsehair and smelling comfortably of sweat. He looked, but didn’t buy. Not here in town, where he might be remembered later.
Leaving the saddlery, he had a good Mexican lunch at the same little caf? where he and Jake had eaten when he first arrived in Blythe, enchiladas rancheros, beans, tortillas, an ice-cold beer in a frosted glass. Then, with the afternoon to kill, he strolled the town letting his plan ease slowly together. Working out the details, he didn’t sense the cat padding alongbehind him.
Trotting invisibly up the sidewalk, the cat flicked his ears, lashed his tail, and kept his attention focused on Lee as the old convict thought about the post office, smiling at his foolproof getaway that would leave no possible trail. The cat had no notion whether this plan would work, but to try to prevent Lee from any future criminal activity at all would be futile. The cat, silent and unseen, was caught up with keen curiosity in Lee’s subsequent moves as the old convict put this one together.
Soon the faded storefronts gave way to small wooden cottages set on the bare sand as forlorn as empty packing crates. Some of the sand yards were picked out by low wooden or wire fences. The metal box of a swamp cooler was attached to each house, chugging asthmatically, their ever-dripping water cutting little rivers through the sand. In one small yard two husky little Mexican boys were hollering and jumping up and down throwing each other off a tattered mattress attached to rusted springs. A little girl, younger than the two boys, looked up from where she was playing in the dirt and caught Lee’s eye. She pushed herself up and toddled toward him, gray powder dust falling from her hair and torn dress. She stopped just short of the sagging picket fence that separated them, stared up at him, screamed, squatted, and urinated a little puddle in the dirt. Lee’s eyes flicked from the child to the porch where a black-haired woman sat on the steps holding a naked baby to her hanging breast. Her huge belly stretched her polka dot dress. Their eyes caught, she gave him a tired smile, then he moved on.
Beyond the houses rose the white wooden steeple of the Catholic church. The small sand cemetery next to it was, for the most part, raked and cared for, the individual plots cleared of weeds and debris, and decorated with pots of fading artificial flowers. A few graves were neglected, hidden by dry tumbleweeds and tall dead grass. A low, wrought-iron fence surrounded these, its curlicues woven with dry weeds. Five graves inside, the lettering on the stone markers worn nearly flat by age and by the desert wind. Lee stood at the rusty iron gate glancing around, looking toward the white Catholic church to be sure no one stood at a window looking back at him. When he was sure he was alone he swung open the squeaking gate and stepped on in, stood looking at the headstones choked with weeds, the neglected graves with, it seemed, no one to remember or claim them or to care. He studied the headstone of a child, and of a young man whose epitaph said he had left this world too soon. He paused at a grave marked James Dawson.
Dawson had been born September 10, 1871, the same year Lee was born. He died on November 3, 1945, nearly a year and a half ago. The lettering on this marker was sharp and clear, but from the looks of the grave, it had had no attention since Dawson was laid to rest. Maybe there was no one left, at least in this part of the country, to care or maybe even to remember him. Lee stepped close to the granite headstone, speaking softly.
“It won’t be long, Mr. Dawson, and it’ll be your birthday. You can’t really celebrate it anymore, can you? What did you do with your life? What places did you see?” Lee smiled. “Would you like to come out of there, leave your grave and live a little while longer?”
Lee pulled a weed from the mounded earth.“Would you like to step out now, and live part of your life over again? How would you like, Mr. Dawson, to walk around in my shoes for a while?”
Fishing the field tally pad from his pocket, he found the stub of pencil and copied the dates of Dawson’s birth and death. Slipping the pad back in his pocket, he stood a few minutes thinking, then he turned away, leaving the company of the dead man.
The cat watched him from atop a cluster of angels that guarded a family plot, his striped yellow tail hanging down over a stone wing, twitching impatiently. When Lee headed back for the center of town, again Misto followed trotting invisibly behind him, but once in town he gravitated to the roofs above and became clearly seen, stretched out in full view on the flat rooftop of the Surplus Department Store as he waited for Lee. Just another town cat taking his ease, letting the hot desert sun cook into his fur as cats so like to do. He watched Lee stop along the sidewalk beneath a spindly palm tree where he approached a pedestrian, a thin woman in a white dress, and asked for directions. She nodded and pointed, and Lee turned away smiling.
Lee found the library two blocks over, and pushed into its dim interior, the smell of the chugging swamp cooler wet and sour. Despite the damp air, the woman at the desk looked dried out, wrinkled from the desert sun. Her flowered cotton dress was limp with the breath of the cooler and with too many washings. When he asked for back issues of the local newspaper, she brushed her gray hair away from her glasses and gave him a tired stare.“What date you looking for?”