5
But the big yellow catwas near. He lay curled up on the dusty mohair seat, as invisible as the air around him, unseen but impressing the faintest telltale indentation in the rough gray cloth of the seat cushion. Knowing Lee’s fear and rage, the tomcat purred for Lee, a subliminal song too faint for Fontana to consciously hear, but a sound the cat knew Lee would hear deep inside himself, a purr that matched the rhythm of the rocking train, a rough-throated mutter of comfort meant to ease Lee’s soul, a rumble generated not only by love but by the joy of life itself that, even in his ethereal form, the ghost cat carried with him.
But now Misto purred out of discomfort, too, out of concern for the old convict. A cat will purr not only when he’s happy, he purrs when he’s frightened or distressed. A mortal cat will deliberately purr to himself when he’s hurt or sick, a muttering song to hold on to, perhaps to calm himself, to make himself feel less alone. Now Misto purred for Lee, wanting to hold him steady, wanting to drive away the old cowboy’s sense of that little man’s glinting, blue-eyed presence, to rid Lee of the evil that kept returning seeking to terrify or to win him, grasping hungrily for Lee’s soul.
The blue-eyed man was gone now, the incubus was gone, his black leather briefcase gone, too, the satchel he’d left behind on the seat when he followed Lee out to the vestibule. The moment he’d vanished from the train, the briefcase had dissolved, poof, as completely as a mouse might disappear into the tomcat’s sharp-toothed gulp. But though the man and his briefcase were no more, an aura of evil still drifted within the passenger car, a miasma as caustic as smoke, touching the other passengers, too. A sleeping man woke and stared up the aisle and twisted to look behind him, studying his companions, scowling at the tightly closed doors at either end of the car. Up at the front, a woman laid down her book and half rose up, looking around nervously. Two women stood up from their seats staring all around, seeking the source of whatever had made them shiver. Two seats behind Lee, a toddler climbed into his mother’s lap howling out his own sense of fear. And beside Misto, Lee Fontana sat unmoving, still pale from the encounter in the vestibule, still edgy with the sense of the dark spirit that he knew wouldn’t leave him alone, with the devil’s curse that would continue to follow Dobbs’s descendants.
Lee knew only rough details of the plan Satan had laid out for Dobbs’s heirs those many years ago. He knew only what he’d heard rumored among his neighbors, back on the ranch. Gossip that, when Lee entered the room, would make folks go silent. Stories that the devil had set Dobbs up to destroy a certain gang of brothers, but that during the train robbery as thedevil planned it, Dobbs had turned the tables on Satan. That Dobbs’s deception had so enraged the devil, he had sworn to destroy every Dobbs heir, to force or entice each Dobbs descendant to drive their own souls into the flames, into the pit of hell itself. To destroy the soul of each, but particularly that of Lee Fontana who had so idolized the old train robber. As far as Lee knew, he might be Dobbs’s last heir, all Satan’s vindication against Dobbs’s supposed double cross could be focused, now, on Lee.
As the train slowed for the station ahead, Misto increased his purr, singing to Lee to soothe him; and as they pulled out again with barely time to take on one lone passenger, the cat purred until Lee settled back and dozed again; and beside him the ghost cat closed his eyes, lulled by the train’s rocking rumble.
The ghost cat did not need to sleep, sleep was a healing gift left over from life, a skill comforting and warm but not needed in the spirit world—a talent the newly released ghost must reconstruct from memory, must willfully summon back until he established the habit once more, if he chose to do so, if he wanted that earthly comfort. The yellow ghost cat had so chosen and, drifting now toward sleep, he purred to comfort himself as well asto comfort Lee.
The tomcat didn’t know what woke him. He rose suddenly, startled, half asleep. He shook himself and quickly left Lee’s side, drifting out through the wall of the passenger car, leaving a warm dent in the seat behind him. For a moment he rode the wind giddily, lashing his tail as he peered back in through the dirty window watching Lee, the cat gliding with pleasure alongside the speeding train, and then he somersaulted up to the roof, banking on the wind as agile as a soaring gull.
Landing lightly atop the speeding train, he settled down, still invisible, looking about at the world speeding by him, at the green fields beneath the snowcapped mountains and, off to his right, miles of green pasture and the dull and gentle cows; and they had left the dark, cold waters of Puget Sound behind them. But now, in the cat’s thoughts, he saw not the land that swept past the train, he saw back into a time long past, before ever that vast inland sea had formed, when all the land was dry, he saw into eons past, as it had been, saw a higher and mountainous shore, densely wooded, skirting the Pacific, a raised land with no hint of the deep bowl that would later be carved there to hold the deep waters of Puget Sound. He saw the great glacier to the north, easing slowly down over vast reaches of time, slowly scooping the land away, a gigantic beast of ice slithering and creeping down from the great northern ranges.
He saw a million years of time slip by as the glacier slowly toppled the ancient conifers and crushed them and dug away the land, as it dug the vast trench that would slowly fill with the waters of the sea and of the coastal rivers. He saw millions of years pass by, dwarfing all life into a speck smaller than the tiniest sneeze.
He shivered at the vastness of time, at the vastness of the earth itself, and at the short and tenuous span of life upon it. He perceived, as well as anyone could, that richly varied panorama of life forming and changing, that short span of the arrival of human life, of human evil and human good. He sensed as much of the grand design as his eager cat soul could embrace; but even so, he saw only a small portion of the grandeur which swept away to infinity, the vastness which no creature could truly comprehend.
Atop the train, the cat sensed when Lee woke. He knew when Lee sat up and looked around him, as the train pulled into the next small station. He knew Lee had been dreaming and that he was shaken, that he had experienced again an incident at McNeil that had greatly angered the old man. At once the cat returned to the passenger car, a whirl of air sweeping in through the dirty glass and onto the dusty seat: he was at once caught in Lee’s rage, in the aftermath of the prison rape in which Lee had faced off young Brad Falon.
Falon, a surly man less than half Lee’s age, had been Lee’s enemy ever since that encounter.
He had been Misto’s enemy far longer, yet for very different reasons. The tomcat had yet to make sense of the pattern between the two conflicts, but he knew that in some way they were linked together.
When Misto left McNeil for that short time after he died and was buried in the prison yard, he had fallen into a new life almost at once, he was born in a small Southern town, a squirming and energetic kitten who was soon picked from the big, healthy litter to be given as a birthday present to little Sammie Blake. He had grown up loved by the little girl and loving her, had grown into a strong, defiant big tomcat when he found himself protecting Sammie against Brad Falon and was murdered by Falon’s hand.
Falon had been the cat’s adversary in Misto’s last life, and he was bonded in some indecipherable way to Lee himself and to what would happen to Lee. There was a pattern building, a tangle the cat could as yet barely see, a relationship between Lee, and Brad Falon, and Misto’s little girl—the tomcat had yet to make sense of the pattern, but he didn’t like it much.