Cactus Jack Read online

  Other novels by Brad Smith

  The Goliath Run

  The Return of Kid Cooper

  Hearts of Stone

  Rough Justice

  Shoot the Dog

  Crow’s Landing

  Red Means Run

  Big Man Coming Down the Road

  Busted Flush

  All Hat

  One-Eyed Jacks

  Rises a Moral Man

  Copyright © 2020 by Brad Smith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Print 978-1-950691-45-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-950691-53-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Brad Smith

  One

  THE BLIND OVER THE WINDOW HUNG by just a corner, allowing the midmorning light to stream into the room and across the bed where Billie lay, her right arm flung over her eyes to ward off the combination of the sun’s rays and the fierce hangover she entertained. She was awake but fervently wished she wasn’t. She needed to pee and she needed aspirin or something for her head, yet she couldn’t bring herself to get up. She knew that both relieving her bladder and relieving the pain in her skull were good ideas, just as drinking tequila shooters for three hours the night before had been a bad one. Her entire head hurt, but after a moment she came to realize that her left eye was particularly sore. She gingerly touched her face, felt the contusion around the socket.

  Beside her, Rory rolled onto his back and immediately began to snore, which was finally reason enough for Billie to get out of bed. She was wearing only jeans and a bra. She walked into the bathroom across the hall, her head pounding with every step. She washed down three ibuprofens with water directly from the faucet, holding her hair back with one hand as she drank.

  She ran more cold water and splashed it across her face. She took a breath and looked into the mirror, staring at her swollen eye for a moment, turning her head one way and then the other as she tried to remember.

  The tequila she recalled. The shots had been part of a juvenile drinking contest, something called the Name Game. Billie had played softball after work and in the bottom of the fifth inning she’d heard the rumble of the glasspacks and looked over to see Rory pull up onto the grass behind the bleachers in his Corvette. He wouldn’t park in the lot with the rest of the cars and trucks; he was under the impression that the car was worthy of special attention and the rise behind the screen was just the place for showcasing. Typically, before cutting the ignition, he revved the engine loudly for ten or fifteen seconds, just in case there was somebody within a quarter mile who hadn’t noticed his arrival. He shut it down and got out to lean against the hood (something no other living soul would be allowed to do), where he spent the next half hour smoking cigarettes as he watched the game.

  Billie’s team, the Broken Bombers, lost by a score of eleven to eight. They usually went to the Broken Rail—the bar that sponsored them—for wings and beer afterward. On the bench, Billie put her glove and cleats in her sports bag, keeping her head down, hoping to hear the rumble of the Vette’s engine as it chugged away, but knowing that she wouldn’t. Rory would want to come to the bar. He himself didn’t play sports and in fact had no interest in baseball or anything other than cars and drywall, but he was jealous of Billie’s time with the team and he also knew that the men’s teams in the league hung out at the Rail. He was jealous of them too. He’d also been jealous of Billie’s cat until it ran away. At least she told herself that it ran away.

  She heard him calling to her as she made to leave and she walked over, trudging up the grassy slope. He was still leaning against the car.

  “What’s up?”

  “Going to the Rail for beers,” she told him. As if he didn’t know. She went to the Broken Rail every Thursday night after softball.

  “I was thinking we could get a pizza.”

  “I’m going to the Rail.”

  He shrugged. “That’s cool by me.”

  She didn’t bother to try to dissuade him. Such attempts in the past had only made him more possessive and suspicious. He didn’t like her being on the team and had taken to asking her to do things on Thursday nights, hoping she’d choose him over softball. He rarely asked her to do anything the rest of the week, other than drink beer at his place and fuck. They’d been seeing each other for six months; she’d agreed to go out with him during the winter, when she’d been particularly bored with her lot in life. He was good-looking and physical and had come off at first as supremely confident, all things she liked in a guy. His insecurities had revealed themselves over time. Of course, that was the way it was in most relationships, but Billie had to wonder why it was always bad things that eventually came to the fore. Just once she’d like to date a guy and find out he’d been hiding the fact that he was really Francis of Assisi.

  Rory, clearly not of Assisi, wanted to be around her whenever he could, even though he didn’t want to do anything. He didn’t have many friends of his own. Even the piston heads in Chillicothe avoided him once they realized he wanted only to talk about his own car. Theirs were of zero interest to him.

  In the bar the team sat at a long table in the rear. They ordered beer by the pitcher and wings by the dozen. Rory sat beside Billie with his arm around her. She could actually feel herself cringe when he first did it and wondered how he didn’t notice. His sole contribution to the conversation was to mention every ten minutes that Billie had struck out to end the game. The mentions got progressively less funny as the night moved forward.

  Billie decided early on to have a couple of beers and a few wings and then leave. Then someone suggested the drinking game, and soon the shots arrived. After that, things grew real fuzzy real fast. For the game, teams of four were made up; each team wrote down ten names on slips of paper and threw them in a hat. As each slip was drawn, an opposing team had to guess the name from clues given. The losers chugged tequila.

  The competition—what Billie could remember of it—required a certain level of intelligence as well as general knowledge, and as such Rory hadn’t done well, especially considering that none of the names in the
hat happened to be Corvette or Stingray. Fueled by the Cuervo, Billie had begun to mock him, paying him back for his comments about her striking out, and he’d gotten pissed off, cracking back at her. The spat carried on when they got back to the house. The only reason she’d gone home with him was that she’d been too drunk to drive herself. When they got there, he started in on how she’d shown him up in front of her friends and how she had no respect for him. Finally Billie had told him to fuck off and said she would walk home. He’d caught up with her as she was going down the front steps.

  Now she went back into the bedroom and picked up her team shirt from the floor. It smelled of beer. Rory was snoring, mouth wide open, a thin line of saliva running down his neck. She looked at him in disgust. Had she been that bored back in January?

  She went out to the kitchen and put water on for instant coffee, then sat down, running her fingers over her cheekbone as she waited for the kettle to boil. After a bit she got up and looked in the fridge, but there was nothing there but leftover pizza and salami and cheese slices and beer. She wasn’t hungry anyway. She made coffee and hoped that the painkillers would begin to work.

  Carrying a mug, she walked out onto the back porch and sat down on the steps, the events of the night before weighing heavily on her. Rory’s work truck, with A-1 DRYWALL printed on the door, was parked in the drive there, the box loaded with twenty or thirty pieces of sheetrock. The driveway sloped down toward the road out front. The yellow Corvette was parked at the bottom of the hill. As a rule, Rory put it in the garage every night, but she assumed he’d hadn’t bothered when they got home from the Broken Rail. He’d been drinking as much as her and wouldn’t have wanted to move the truck out of the way. Plus, they were still bickering and that would take preference over any shuffling of vehicles. Still, it was a rare occurrence, him leaving his precious baby out in the elements.

  Billie sat there, looking at the car. She knew more about it than she did all the other vehicles she’d ever ridden in combined. It was a 1973 Anniversary model in canary yellow. The engine was 354 cubic inches and it put out 275 horsepower. Rory had spent nearly two thousand dollars on an after-market stereo system. For Billie’s birthday in April, he’d bought her a thirty-dollar panties and bra set from Walmart. The underwear was also yellow. Just like the car.

  Her head began to clear. Finishing her coffee, she shifted her gaze to the truck, reaching up to touch her cheekbone once again. After a while she got up and went into the house for her purse. It was on the floor by the couch. She looked around to see if there was anything else of hers in the house, anything she would ever need again.

  The truck was a standard, floor shift. Billie put the transmission in neutral and released the parking brake and then got out. She stepped back as the truck began to roll forward, slowly picking up speed as it did. It was a heavy vehicle, a GMC three-quarter ton, made even heavier by the couple thousand pounds of sheetrock in the back. The Corvette was constructed mainly of fiberglass and plastic and was no match for the rumbling two-ton mass that smashed into it, crumpling the front fenders like tissue paper, crushing the hood and smashing the windshield like it was cellophane.

  Billie assumed that the noise would be more than enough to wake Rory, so she cut across the lawn to the road and started walking quickly north, heading for home. She looked back a few times, expecting to see him in pursuit, but he never appeared. Apparently he slept through what, in his mind, when he finally awoke, would be nothing short of a holocaust.

  Will got up to pee at around one o’clock and again at three. The only bathroom in the house was on the ground floor and he made his way down the stairs in the pitch dark, the loose treads complaining beneath his bare feet, the air inside the house still heavy with the humidity of the day. Both times after going, he drank from the bathroom faucet, the well water cold and chalky in his mouth, before going back to bed and uneasy sleep.

  At twenty past four he was awake for good. He lay there in the big four-poster, the bed Marian had picked up at an auction outside of Junction City a couple of years earlier, wanting another hour or so of sleep he knew he wouldn’t get. Lay there atop the sheets in the July heat, facing the wall rather than the window, not wanting to witness the coming dawn, knowing damn well that the morning sky would be yellow and cloudless, the air as dry as the Mojave. Just as it had been the day before and the day before that and all the days of the past seven weeks.

  He got out of bed with the dawn, dressing in the half light, pulling on brown Carhartt pants and a faded blue shirt. In the kitchen he put coffee on and washed down his morning pills with a glass of orange juice while looking out the window to the outbuildings and paddocks down the hill. The farm occupied a corner between two roads and had two driveways, the main one off the county road that led to the house and a second two-track lane, running from the side road to the west, leading to the barns.

  The two mares were standing in the shade of the big barn, head to flank, tails swishing the flies away. The gray colt was off on its own, in the corner of the front pasture nearest the road; it was looking west, as if in anticipation of something. Maybe the animal knew something that Will didn’t. The grass in the pasture was nonexistent, nothing more than brown and brittle stubble poking through the red dirt.

  When he finished the juice, he walked down the hill and ran water until the trough in the lee of the barn was half full, then tossed half a bale of hay over the fence, the sheaves kicking up dust as they landed. The colt, seeing the feed, came through the open gate to investigate while the two mares looked like they were deciding whether to leave the shade to come eat. The temperature, with the sun just now showing half on the horizon, was already in the upper eighties. Will watched the colt as it pushed the hay with its nose, not really eating so much as exploring. At two years and a few months, the animal was already sixteen hands, his barrel and chest heavily muscled. He was a dark steely gray and moved with a confidence borne of something Will had rarely come across in his seventy-three years, a quality innate to certain athletes and even in nonathletic types—salesmen and politicians, carpenters and mechanics, doers and watchers—whether they were good or bad or halfway in between. Whatever the quality, it was inherent. The colt had slid out of the birthing canal with the attitude.

  The donkey began to bray from inside the barn then, no doubt sensing Will’s presence. Will went and opened the door to the rear paddock, then let the jack and the nanny goat and the brown-and-white pony outside. The girl could tend to them when she got there. The donkey continued to complain as Will made his way back to the house for his own breakfast.

  Marian had in the past few months pretty well cleared everything out of the fridge and cupboards that Will considered to be real breakfast food and replaced it with oatmeal and wheat germ and something called quinoa. After gazing unhappily into the pantry for a minute or so, he grabbed the keys to his truck and headed west to the Crossroads Café, five miles away at the intersection of the county road and Burton’s Pike.

  The place opened at six and was already half full when Will settled in at the counter. There were no surprises at the Crossroads, neither the food nor the conversation. Will could pick up the odor of frying bacon before he walked in, and as he sat on his stool sipping his coffee he could hear the popping of the grill, smell the grits and scrambled eggs even as he listened to varying opinions of the federal government, the goddamn Chinese, the lack of rain, and the possibility that Buck Barwell’s wife did not leave him because she was screwing Larry Cantor, but rather because she was sleeping with Larry’s daughter, the artist, newly returned from living a few years in London. Apparently the people seeing her coming and going from the Cantor place had jumped to the wrong conclusion. None of these news items would have been available to Will at home, hunched over a bowl of oatmeal sprinkled with quinoa and not enough brown sugar to satisfy a kangaroo mouse.

  Bonnie, the owner, was working the fry pans and the grill, while Shannon, a university student and some distant kin to
Bonnie, did the waitressing. By the time Will’s breakfast arrived, the talk had moved past the sexual proclivities of Sally Barwell and landed on the topic of Mac McCoy’s prostate. Mac, while studying the same menu he had read a couple of hundred times in the past year alone, decided to inform Shannon, impatiently awaiting his order, that his PSA number was an alarming seventy-three. Shannon, with a full diner to serve, had little time for discussing Mac’s condition, even if she had any idea what the number might represent, which she did not.

  “That number don’t mean shit,” Sudsy Jones announced from a corner table.

  Mac ordered the country special, which he always ordered, before turning to Sudsy. “How’s that?”

  Will dipped the corner of his toast—whole wheat, one concession he’d make to Marian this morning—into the creamy yolk of an egg and ate while he listened.

  “Forget about them numbers,” Sudsy told him. “My daddy had a PSA of near two hundred and he told his doctor to stick his treatments up his ass. They was going to give him radiation and chemotherapy both. He didn’t do nothing and he’s still going strong. Eighty-eight years old.”

  Mac glanced at Shannon, who had moved off and was no longer even pretending to be interested. “But does everything . . . work?”

  “What do you mean?” Sudsy asked.

  At that, Mac clenched his fist and raised his forearm dramatically, the universal sign indicating an erection.

  “He’s eighty-eight!” Sudsy said. “What’s he gonna do with a hard-on?”

  Bonnie, scrambling more eggs, gave Will a look as he took a mouthful of grits, a look that said, You see what I put up with every day? But Will was pretty sure that Bonnie arrived every morning before the sun was up to pop biscuits in the oven and perc coffee and mix pancake batter because she wanted to do those things. She’d had plenty of offers on the place over the years and apparently never had the urge to bite. Her husband, Tim, was a scrap dealer with limited ambition. He was as likely to be found at home drinking beer in a lawn chair as he was out on the road, collecting junked farm equipment. Will suspected that Bonnie had little desire to join him in the yard. If the trade-off was listening to the occasional speculation about the virility of an octogenarian, then so be it.