Cactus Garden

by Ward, Robert

  They walked above crystal blue Echo Lake among a field of wild blue and red flowers. The sun was sinking fast, and Charlotte Rae had bundled up in a brilliantly colored Indian sweater. They maneuvered their way up a rocky ledge, and she climbed ahead of him in long, confident strides. Jack found it difficult to keep up the pace.

  “What’s the matter, Jack, you out of shape?”

  “How high up are we?”

  “Just ten thousand feet. By tonight you’ll be like a mountain goat. Come on.”

  They came to a switchback, and she seemed to float up it. Jack attempted to stay with her and lost his footing. He felt a moment of terror as he slid backward, but she was above him then, offering a hand. He took it and she pulled him up. She was remarkably strong.

  “Thanks,” he said, looking at the sharp rocks below. “I don’t have my aviator’s license.”

  She smiled, and they let their fingers stay together longer than was necessary. She turned and went up a little higher and found a great slab of white rock, which overlooked the west end of the lake. She sat down and opened the picnic basket, and Jack joined her, out of breath, glad for a chance to rest.

  Inside the basket was a bottle of Pinot Grigio, some French bread, cheese, a Cornice pear, and a paring knife.

  “I love it here,” she said, fixing Jack’s food as he uncorked the wine. “It’s like the rest of the world doesn’t exist.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “This is stone perfect.”

  She looked at him and smiled.

  “Do you really like it?”

  “Sure, why?”

  “You seem like such a city boy. I bet if you were up here for more than a day, you’d go nuts, like Buddy. I took him up here once last year, and he looked down and said, ‘Now we could build us a nice little dock here, maybe get a helio pad over there, and maybe we could build us a restaurant, Buddy’s Lakefront.’ “

  “Buddy, Buddy,” Jack said.

  She looked at him and shook her head.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “You can ask. Eventually everybody does.”

  “What you’re doing with him? It’s not my business.”

  “But aren’t you a little curious? We don’t seem like oil and water to you?”

  “No,” Jack said. “I wouldn’t say so. Not at all. I know he’s a smart cookie underneath all that redneck jive.”

  She raised an eyebrow, licked her forefinger, and painted an imaginary one on an invisible blackboard.

  “Score one for you. Most people see only the smoke screen, and that’s when Buddy nails them. Let me tell you about me and him. I grew up in a place in Texas called the Army and Navy Home for Orphans. It wasn’t exactly The Bells of St. Mary’s, though the nun who ran it, Sister Jane, liked to show that picture to us every Christmas. She had a thing for Ingrid Bergman.”

  She looked down at the lake below, picked up a stone, and threw it down to the crystal blue water.

  “While I was in there, I began to develop physically faster than the other girls. I saw the way the nuns looked at me, but they didn’t win the derby. No, I was raped three times by the parish priest. He said if I told anybody, Satan would force him to cut my tongue out of my head.”

  “Jesus,” Jack said.

  She smiled sadly and sipped the wine.

  “At fourteen I decided I’d had enough of life in the kindly orphanage, so I escaped. I knew I had one relative in Houston, my aunt Clara, so I headed there. Figured I might be able to find my mother. I did. My aunt finally introduced me to my dear, kind sweet junked-out mom, the lady who gave me away. She was a woman who worked at a truck stop waitressing, except she spent most of her time in the cabs of trucks. It paid a lot better than serving chicken-fried steak ever did. My old man was one of maybe fifty truckers who came through there. I’ve always had a soft spot for tanker trucks though.”

  She stopped talking, collecting herself. Then she took another sip of wine, broke off a piece of bread, and smeared it with rich goat cheese.

  “French wine and this delicious food,” she said. “Who would have thought I would have ever been living like this?”

  “What happened when you met your mother?”

  “She was about half dead from rotgut. They didn’t want her at the restaurant anymore, and they didn’t want her in the parking lot either. Three months after I found her, her liver gave out.”

  “Did you ever talk with her?”

  “You mean, did we have one of those magical moments, like in the television movies, where she held me and said, ‘I always loved you, I just didn’t feel worthy to have a baby?’ No, I’m afraid not. She did give me two bits of advice. A man will do anything for you if he thinks you’ll give him head, and always drink bourbon with ice and you’ll never get the spins.”

  She sighed deeply and looked out over the clear blue water.

  “Yeah, I showed up just in time to bury her. All those truckers, all those men she gave pleasure to. None of ‘em came to the funeral. My aunt and I were the only ones at the grave.”

  “I’m sorry …”

  Charlotte Rae stopped talking now, and the tears rolled down her cheeks. She reached over and took Jack’s hand. There was nothing sexual in it; rather, she seemed to him like a needy child.

  “Hey, it’s all right if you don’t want to talk about it,” he said, squeezing her hand.

  “No,” she said. “It helps. After that I took a bus to Dallas and started dancing in bars. I drank, did enough cocaine to send the Apollo to the moon. Saw guys. Lots of guys.”

  She hesitated and looked at Jack briefly, as if she was waiting for him to scold her, but he met her gaze without flinching.

  “There was one guy there, Billy Tatum. He decided I was going to be his girl, though I told him to get his ass away from me. That pissed him off, so one night after everybody was wasted, and we were having a private employees’ party, he took me off into a back room and beat the shit out of me.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Jack said, quietly.

  “Two nights later I was coming out of the club … the back alley exit, and he was there waiting for me. Said he was going to give me one more chance.”

  She sighed and looked down at the lake. A couple of tears rolled down her cheeks. Jack reached over and wiped them off, and she burrowed into his side. Now he could smell her skin, as intoxicating as the clear water below.

  “I don’t know what got into me, but I told him to go fuck himself. Then I saw the look on his mean little face. There was no doubt about it. He was going to take me out on the road somewhere and kill me. He was moving toward me, when this little fat guy showed up … like outta nowhere … I mean poof … this fat little prince … and he was standing there between me and Billy, and he said to Tatum, ‘Get the fuck outta here, Billy, or I will stick you in that Dumpster with your short little dick in your mouth.’ Hey, it wasn’t poetry, but to me it sounded like Sir Lancelot. Tatum was not used to being told what to do. He looked shocked. He reached into his pocket and he pulled out a knife, a push-button … it had a six-inch blade. God, I was shaking … but he never got a chance to use it. Buddy hit him in the throat with a karate blow … and he fell on the ground gagging and holding his Adam’s apple. Then Buddy kicked him in the ribs three times. The son of a bitch Tatum was in the hospital for three months and still talks like he’s got throat cancer. That’s how I met Buddy Wingate, and I’ve been with him ever since.”

  “That’s quite a story,” Jack said. “And does he treat you right?”

  She squeezed Jack’s hand.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He treats me fine.”

  She was lying. Jack could hear it plainly in her voice. But now was not the time to push it.

  “Then, here’s to white knights and complicated relationships,” Jack said.

  Charlotte Rae looked up at him shyly and smiled softly at that. They clicked glasses as the sun began its final descent over the green hills.

  Chapter 8

  The gaudy lights of Ta
hoe were a jarring contrast to the serenity of Lake Echo. As Wingate drove Jack and Charlotte Rae down the crowded highway outside of town, it seemed to Jack that there was a special perversity in placing Tahoe in the middle of one of God’s most perfect natural creations.

  He looked out the window and saw the gaudy red and blue lights that spelled out Harrah’s, the wasted-looking patrons, coming from their old cars, many of their faces lined from years of hard work. They came for excitement, the chance for the big score. They went home full of cheap booze and with nothing but lint in their pockets. He sighed. Gamblers were the twin brothers of junkies, and equally pathetic.

  Jack shook his head. He had to get that kind of morose compassion out of his brain. He was, after all, supposed to be having fun, with his good buddy, Buddy-boy himself. Buddy-boy, who was dressed to kill tonight, with a black linen banker’s cowboy suit, a handsome mother-of-pearl bolo, and a jet-black ten-gallon hat. On his feet were cowboy boots made of rattlesnake hide; the toes of each boot featured the actual head of a rattlesnake. By contrast, Charlotte Rae looked elegantly understated. She had on a black Dior gown, a simple strand of white pearls, and black Manolo Blahnik high heels. Beauty and the Beast.

  Buddy took her arm as the parking lot attendant took their keys. In Buddy’s left hand was an expensive leather briefcase, which was filled with hundred dollar bills and a plastic gray Glock ten-millimeter handgun. As they came within twenty yards of the main door to Harrah’s, Buddy veered off and went around a stand of evergreens to a stairway that lead to a red basement doorway. A uniformed doorman led them directly in; he nodded to Wingate and Charlotte Rae:

  “Nice to see you, Mr. and Mrs. Wingate.”

  “Good to see you, Don,” Wingate said. “This is a good friend of ours.”

  Jack followed Wingate and Charlotte Rae down a short hallway and through a double-glass door into the main gaming room. Jack noticed that the last door was conveniently located equidistant from a small bar and the blackjack tables.

  “You ever play any blackjack?” Wingate asked.

  “Badly,” Jack said. “Cards aren’t my thing.”

  “They aren’t Buddy’s either,” Charlotte Rae said, “but that doesn’t stop him.”

  Buddy turned and looked at her with his little razorback squint, then caught himself again and turned his fury into comedy.

  “The truth is I am one hell of a blackjack player,” he said, walking up to the table. “Just that I have been on a bad run of luck lately. Happens to the best of them.”

  Charlotte Rae rolled her eyes at Jack, then turned her attention to a stunning blonde waitress who appeared to take their drink order. Jack ordered vodka straight up, Charlotte Rae had champagne, and Wingate, a double Jack Daniel’s.

  “Loosens me up. Get the blood flowing to my cerebellum.”

  “Buddy?” came a happy cry.

  The pit boss was a gray-haired man of about fifty-five, dressed in a tux. His thinning hair was combed straight back, so that he had a rooster crest on his forehead.

  “Enzio,” Wingate said, hugging the man.

  “Your usual place at the table, Buddy,” he said.

  “Let’s hope it brings me a little luck tonight,” Wingate said, as he smiled at the sexy blonde dealer.

  “The dealers get younger every time we get in here,” Charlotte Rae said. “Eventually they’re gonna attract Woody Allen to this game.”

  Jack laughed.

  “You don’t think they do that to distract the players, do you?” he said.

  “Maybe,” Charlotte Rae said. “Which is bad news for Buddy. ‘Cause he needs to pay all the attention he can.”

  Jack watched as Wingate snapped opened the briefcase and took out pile after pile of wrapped one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “The man comes to play.”

  “Doesn’t he though,” Charlotte Rae said. She sipped her champagne and let out a great sigh.

  When Wingate had taken all the money out of the case, he shoved it across the table toward the blonde dealer.

  “Here you go, darlin’,” he said. “One hundred thousand large. I’d like my chips now, if you please. By the way, what’d your mama name you, honey?”

  “Lu Anne Philips, Mr. Wingate,” the dealer said, smiling in a way that seemed to promise more than cards.

  “How many hands will you be playing, sir?”

  “Start with one,” Wingate said. “ ‘Cause I got a feeling this is gonna be my night.”

  The dealer took the pile of cash and placed it in a mail chute that was attached under her side of the table. She had no sooner gotten it inside when an armed uniformed guard came to take the money away.

  “Efficient, aren’t they?” Charlotte Rae said.

  Buddy turned around quickly.

  “I could use a little support here,” he said.

  Charlotte Rae said nothing to that but put her right hand on Wingate’s shoulder.

  Jack turned and looked at the little string of hangers-on who had left the surrounding tables and were watching Wingate play his big hand. There was a fat woman with a red Saran Wrap dress that revealed all her unsightly bulges. Next to her was her husband, a man not more than five foot three without his elevator shoes. He wore a short-sleeved shirt that was made out of a crude oil product, and Jack wondered how fast he would go up if someone lit him. Next to him was a short man with his hair conked up so high that it looked like a plate of black spaghetti. He had a smile that looked more like a cry of pain. These were Wingate’s people, his gallery of the grotesque, their faces leering, the smell of sweat and envy and raw need coming off of them as strongly as musk reeked from an ox. They offered little cries of support for Buddy Wingate, but it was obvious to Jack that they didn’t care whether he won or not. They were there because they needed action, any kind of action. They needed the cards to fly, the money to change hands, the tension of the game. Jack looked at them all, hunched behind Wingate, and he felt his emotions run the gamut, from an almost physical revulsion, to something else—terror. For, as grotesque as they were, how different were they from him? They were night people like him; they probably went through their day lives as he went through his paperwork, in a half trance. They waited for the heat of the blackjack table, the roulette table, the same way he waited for the smell of the kill. They had to be here to stay alive and so did he. They were all of them junkies of the night.

  The first bet was five thousand dollars.

  Jack watched as Lu Anne dealt herself a hole card down, and Buddy’s first two, straight up. This hand was over before it began. Buddy hit for an ace and a queen, and the dealer’s second card was merely a six, her hole card a ten. Buddy won easily, 20–16 and quickly pocketed seventy-five hundred bucks. The table was buzzing, and Buddy lit a Cuban cigar.

  “It’s flowing, baby. It’s all flowing. Right through these fat little digits,” Buddy said, turning and smiling at Jack and Charlotte Rae. There was a kind of goofy haze on his eyes, as though he was stoned. Stoned on risks, Jack thought as he looked at Charlotte Rae, her eyes and skin translucent, as though someone had lit a candle inside her.

  The tension began to build as Jack watched the second hand unfold. Buddy’s first card was a king, and he wasted no time signaling for a hit by scratching the table with his fingers.

  The second card came: a nine. Nineteen.

  Buddy turned and looked at Charlotte Rae.

  “I believe I’ll stand pat,” he said.

  Lu Anne smiled. And took a hit. A four. Now Buddy’s chances seemed better than ever. The dealer shrugged, as if all was lost, so why not take a spin. She gave herself another hit and drew a jack. With consummate professional understatement she turned over her hole card.

  “Sorry, Mr. Wingate. Your bad luck.”

  “Twenty,” Buddy said. “Damn. What was the odds of you pulling that card?”

  “About three to one,” she said, smiling.

  From being twenty-five hundred dollars up, Buddy Wingate was now down twelve t
housand five hundred.

  Charlotte Rae signaled for the waitress to come over.

  “As they say at the table, hit me. Champagne, please.”

  Jack declined to have another drink. He watched as more people drifted over to the table and found himself caught up in the action of the game. He had been to a couple of high-stakes poker games in the Valley on his last assignment, and he recalled a player named Hector Cortez who always seemed to win. A huge man with a violent nature, Cortez was coolness personified at the tables. When Jack had asked him one night what he attributed his winning ways to, he had simply said, “Memory and instinct, in that order. I remember every card played. I know the probabilities of each card showing up. The instinct comes in when you know the person you are playing, but in blackjack it’s mainly memory. That and don’t split your cards. That’s for suckers.”

  Jack thought of that advice now, for Buddy Wingate had drawn a pair of eights and chose to split them. His bet this time was a mere five thousand, but he took a sip of his drink, flashed his brown eyes at the dealer, who flirted back at him.

  “Let the five ride for ten, sweetheart,” Buddy said. Two for one. Jack watched with fascination and, in spite of himself, began to root for Buddy against the house. On the first hand Buddy drew a ten.

  Ordinarily, though, an eighteen stood a good chance to be a winner.

  But once again luck was with Lu Anne. She drew a ten and had a nine in the hole. Nineteen, and Buddy had blown the double.

  He sighed deeply, and Jack saw him slump forward in his chair, as though someone had kicked him in the ribs.

  “Buddy,” Charlotte Rae said, as he ordered another whiskey. “You’re already down twenty thousand. Don’t you think we ought to quit. Or at least change tables.”

  “Bullshit,” Buddy said. “What we wanta do here is peel the deck. You hear me, lady?”

  He stared at Lu Anne with animal ferocity.

  The dealer looked over at the floor manager, Enzio, who had already overheard Buddy’s request. He smiled and gave a world-weary nod of his head.