Scowling, Ray opened his window and threw the burning cigar out on the shoulder of the highway. Lee hoped to hell he didn’t set the wheat afire. This wasn’t going to improve the man’s temper, if he couldn’t smoke. And it was a two-day drive to Atlanta.
Soon, with the cigar smoke sucked away by the wind, Lee was able to breathe again. As he settled back, easing pressure off the belly chain, trying to get comfortable, he felt the weight of the ghost cat stretch out along his shoulder. Felt the insolent tickle of bold whiskers, and again he tried not to smile. Lee wished they were flying instead of driving, he liked looking down at the world below, the patterns of farms and cities, the snaking rivers. He’d been startled when, during the flight out from L.A. to Springfield, they’d passed right over the country he had known as a boy. He’d pressed his forehead to the plane’s tiny window seeing, in a new way, the wrinkled face of Arizona, the great plains broken by dry, ragged mountains. He saw Flagstaff, the San Francisco peaks rising behind. Where the highway moved north of Winslow, and the Little Colorado River made a sharp turn, a lonely feeling had clutched at him. Off to his left, three fields formed a triangle with trees marking their borders. Those had to be the north fields of the ranch where they’d moved when they left South Dakota, when his dad sold out, sold all the stock, hoping for a better living.
The ranch his father had bought was no better for grass except in early spring, and that new green grass had been without much substance to put any fat on a steer. Sparse grazing land again, hot as hell in the summers, and the well water tasted bitterly of iron. He’d worked long hours, as a boy, doctoring and branding their scruffy cattle. He could still smell the dust, could still feel his favorite bay gelding under him, could still bring back the sweet smell of new grass bruised by a horse’s hooves. He could taste the vinegar-soaked beefsteak his mother would cook for breakfast, for the few neighbors who helped each other during roundup, moving from one ranch to the next. Fresh-killed range beef was tough as hell if you didn’t soak it overnight in vinegar.
He’d been fourteen when they moved west to Winslow. His brother Howard was fifteen but as useless in Arizona as he’d been in South Dakota, making more work for others than if you did the job yourself. Ma had kept the girls busy tending the garden and chickens, and canning what she could from their pitiful garden. His two older sisters didn’t want to work with the cattle, but Mae had yearned after horses. She rode whenever she could sneak away, she would have grown into a good ranch hand if Ma had let her.
The year they moved to the Flagstaff land, Russell Dobbs had followed them all the way out from the Dakotas. Lee had been thrilled when his grandpappy showed up, but his mother was cold with rage. She’d been so relieved to come west to get away from her renegade, train-robbing father.
Grandpappy would be with them for a few days, then gone for a few. Shortly after he arrived, the Flagstaff paper reported a train robbery just north of Prescott. Two weeks later a second train was held up, east of Flagstaff. That was the start of a dozen successful jobs, all at night when Russell might have been there at the ranch, asleep in his bed. Russell knew, if the feds came looking, his daughter would lie for him despite her disapproval. It was at that time that Lee’s mother turned inward. She didn’t speak to her father much when he was at the ranch and she didn’t smile often. After Russell left them for good and moved on again, she lived the rest of her life blaming him for everything that went wrong in the family. It was his influence, she said, that had soured their lives.
As a boy, Lee had known exactly how his grandpappy felt, had known the wild need that kept Dobbs robbing the trains and moving on to rob again. On the ranch, even when Lee stood on a knoll looking across emptiness as far as he could see in every direction, he felt the same trapped need to move on. He could still see that look in Dobbs’s eyes, the intensity in Dobbs’s movements and in his impatient ways.
Lee, with his own hunger for the fast trains, would do anything as a kid to get into town to see the train pull in, to watch that thin line of smoke curling up from the bell-mouthed stack, the black engine belching steam, steam sighing from the big pistons and drive wheels. His father always wanted Lee to go with him to the stockyard, to take an interest in the cattle trading. But the minute their buggy hit town Lee would sneak off to the station and beg the engineer to let him aboard. He could still feel the warm iron floor under his bare feet as he stood inside the engineer’s cab looking at the bright brass gauges and levers, drinking in the power of the engine, a power that filled him right up like a dipper of water on a hot day.
But then his eyes would turn to the engineer’s heavy thirty-thirty hanging beside the seat in its scarred leather scabbard, and he would imagine that weapon turned on his grandpappy during a robbery, imagine his grandpappy shot, twisting and falling, and Lee’s excitement would turn to fear.
When the engineer shooed him off the train again he would wait beside the track feeling the ground rumble as the engine got moving, would stand there caught in the scream of the whistle and the jolt of the drive wheels as she gathered speed. Would stare up, entranced, at the big pistons pushing to a gallop and the rocking cars heaving past him.
Now, remembering that day flying from the West Coast to Kansas City looking down from the airliner at his old home, he had that same sense of living in two times. As if part of him was still a young man back on the prairie sixty years in the past, while part of him stumbled along toward the end of his life’s journey.
In the end, what was it all about? What did it all add up to?
But when he paid attention to the ghost cat draped over his shoulder, one paw resting playfully against Lee’s neck, to the frisky, small ghost, he knew what it all added up to: If Misto had transcended from earthly life into a vast and more complicated dimension, why would humans be different?
Lee felt uncomfortable thinking about such matters, but Misto was the living—more than living—example that something more lay ahead, after this life. Not just the dark weight of evil, that was only part of it. Something more, so bright it shamed the golden wheat fields through which the car sped. Crushed in the limo beside the cigar-stinking deputy, Lee was embarrassed by such thoughts, but the proof of a better life was right there, draped over his shoulder, warm, heavy, invisible.
IT WAS A long pull, a two-day trip moving south, crowded against the sweaty deputy. And the layover in Tennessee was no picnic. Lee was lodged in Jackson’s dirty county jail while the two deputies went off to a hotel and a steak dinner. Lee’s meal, shoved through the cell bars, was some kind of watery stew that had been around too long. The coffee was the color of dishwater and tasted like it. He ached from sitting in the car and his back was sore where the belly chain gouged him. He lay on the jail’s dirty cot thinking there wasn’t one damned person in the world who cared whether he made it to Atlanta or dropped dead before he got there. But then the ghost cat nudged him, and Lee smiled; and soon, eased by the insistent presence of the ghost cat, Lee slept.
The next day’s travel was worse than the first. The weather grew hot and humid, and Lee’s seat partner, without his smokes, grew increasingly cranky. They made half a dozen extra stops, pulling over at some turnout or campground so Ray could light up a stogy. Afterward he would heave himself back in the car stinking all the worse. At seven that evening when they pulled into Atlanta, Lee was done in. He wanted only to fall into a prison cot, to stretch out with no chains binding him, and ease into sleep. Moving through the city he could see, off to the right, a fancy section of big, beautiful homes with their spreading shade streets. “Buckhead,” the driver said when he saw Lee looking. “Too fancy for you, or me neither.”