Cactus Jack

by Brad Smith

  “I’m going to Chestnut Field after lunch,” she said. “First we’ll go to town and you can open an account.”

  Jodie took a breath, obviously daunted by the task. “Is it hard to do?”

  “Not when you have a check for a thousand dollars. They’ll probably give you a toaster.”

  “A toaster?”

  “Never mind.”

  Kentucky First National had been Billie’s bank when she was a kid and she decided it would do as well as any other for Jodie. It was downtown, in a four-story granite building with a cornerstone that read 1892. It turned out that Jodie needed the signature of either a parent or a guardian. Billie offered to cosign but was rebuffed.

  “My mom will sign,” Jodie said.

  Billie wasn’t happy with that scenario—she suspected that the thousand dollars might not last long around the little girl’s mother—but there was nothing she could do about it.

  Billie intended to drop the girl off at the farm when they had finished her business and told her so as they walked to the parking lot.

  “Why can’t I go to Chestnut Field?”

  “Because it’s not a place for kids,” Billie told her.

  “Will used to take me.”

  “Good for Will.”

  “He told me he used to take you.”

  They were driving out of town in Will Masterson’s truck. The salvaged battery in Billie’s car had lasted until her return from Missouri, and when it went dead she gave up and moved on to the old man’s truck. It was a five speed on the floor. It had been years since Billie had driven a stick but after a few lurching stalls, she found it was like riding a bike. An old bike with fading paint and an engine that smoked when first started up.

  Billie glanced over at the kid, who was buckled in the passenger seat and staring straight ahead.

  “I said, Will used to take you,” the girl repeated.

  They were at a stop sign by the highway. Left was Chestnut Field and right was back to the farm. Billie hesitated before turning left.

  “You’re a pain in the ass,” she said.

  At Chestnut they parked in the lot reserved for owners and trainers and riders. Might as well stake my claim, she decided. She was already on the shit list there, through no fault of her own. There was a card at the track that night, but for now the clubhouse was nearly empty. Walking through the doors, she spotted Caldwell standing near the wickets, talking to a security officer in a blue windbreaker and baseball cap, a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. As Billie approached, Caldwell finished his conversation and dismissed the man. Billie didn’t wait for him to speak.

  “I’ll be trailering a horse here in the morning,” she said. “And I’ll be using the stall my father paid for. If you intend to stop me, you’d better have the cops on hand. And maybe your lawyers too, for that matter.”

  “Oh, relax,” Caldwell said. “Nobody’s calling the cops.”

  “Good,” Billie said, backing up a bit. “I’m just saying I don’t expect any trouble from you. You got that?”

  “I got it,” Caldwell said. “I got it when you sent your muscle this morning. Why are you even telling me this?”

  What muscle? Billie thought.

  “You’d better watch your step,” Caldwell said. “That’s all I have to say. I have powerful friends, too.”

  He walked off without saying any more. Billie glanced at Jodie, who’d been standing behind her.

  “What the hell was that?” she asked.

  The girl shrugged her small shoulders. Billie decided to go out to the shed row, to be sure the stall was empty. Caldwell had backed down a little too quickly for her liking and she suspected he was up to something, but the stall was vacant and clean.

  “So are we going to bring Cactus Jack here tomorrow?” Jodie asked.

  “We aren’t doing anything of the kind.”

  Walking out, they came upon Skeeter Musgrave. He was sitting on a bench in a shaded area between the clubhouse and the track, wearing a denim jacket and work pants.

  “Hey,” Billie said, approaching. “What are you doing?”

  Skeeter shifted his weight, leaning to one side. “Just stopped to rest this damn hip. Feels like we got some weather coming.”

  “I was going to try to find a phone number for you,” Billie said. “You want to breeze a horse for me in the morning?”

  Skeeter thought it over before nodding. “Sure.”

  Walking closer, Billie saw the neck of a flask protruding from the jacket pocket. The man was sober, though.

  “Hey, Jodie bug,” he said then.

  “Hey, Mr. Skeeter,” she replied.

  Billie glanced from the old man to the girl. “Okay, I’m going to trailer the colt here first thing. Where do I bring him?”

  “Jodie can show you.”

  “I’ll be alone.”

  “I want to come,” Jodie said. “I know what to do.”

  Billie ignored her and kept looking at Skeeter. He pointed to the track, by the three-quarter turn. “There’s a gate over there where I can meet you. What time?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Six?”

  Christ, Billie thought. “Six it is.”

  “I thought I’d be seeing you,” Skeeter said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I saw what happened this morning. I was hanging around the barns and after a bit I come to the clubhouse to get a coffee and a fried egg sandwich. That’s when I saw the giant.”

  Jodie’s eyes widened.

  “You saw a giant,” Billie said.

  “Yup,” Skeeter said. “A giant with long white hair, and he had that peckerwood Caldwell backed into a corner by the front office and man, if he wasn’t making that boy eat a bucket of shit.” Skeeter glanced at the girl. “I mean a bucket of poop.”

  “What were they talking about?” Billie asked.

  “They were talking about you.”

  Billie considered that. “Specifically?”

  “Specifically about the stall your father rented for the season. The giant was explaining to the peckerwood how it was.”

  “And what was the peckerwood saying?”

  “He was agreeing most wholeheartedly with the giant.” Skeeter smiled. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I would,” Billie said, picturing the scene in her mind. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Jodie didn’t say anything until they were almost to the farm. Billie was quiet too, thinking the day had gone better than most she’d had of late. Finally the girl looked over at her.

  “Was the man really a giant?”

  “No.”

  “What was he?”

  “He was a lawyer,” Billie said.

  They raced on Saturday at a track east of Nashville, near the town of Lebanon. Luke rode his bay gelding and won big. Steve’s mare pulled up the first time out and he had to scratch her. It looked like a tendon problem but he wasn’t sure. If it was bad, he’d be in the market for another horse to run.

  That evening they ended up at a bar in Nashville. There was a pretty good band, playing old school country, and dancing, with lots of pretty women doing the dancing. They’d left the horses at a friend’s farm a half hour out of the city and rented rooms at a motel on the north side of the city. It was late when they got back.

  Luke’s room faced east and on Sunday morning the bright sun sliced through the open blinds, crossing his face like parallel lasers. Waking, he opened his eyes and closed them at once. He could smell the woman’s perfume on the pillowcase and the sheets. He tried to will himself back to sleep, wishing he had some Oxy or even a couple aspirins. He’d had a scrip for Oxy, for his knee, but it had expired. The doctor was a suspicious type who didn’t want to write another.

  After a while he rolled over onto his back and reached for the woman but came up empty. He sat up and looked around the room. Her purse and jacket were gone and so was she. He put his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, relieved that she had left. He wasn’t
up for any shenanigans this morning and he didn’t feel like talking to a stranger at that hour, either.

  He managed to fall back asleep. When he awoke for the second time the sun had cleared the window and the room was in half darkness. He got up and had a leak, then stepped into the shower. When he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later he noticed his wallet, lying on top of his clothes where he had tossed them the night before. He opened it up; the money was gone.

  He met Steve for breakfast at the motel coffee shop.

  “How much was there?” Steve asked.

  “The four hundred I won,” Luke said. “Minus whatever I spent last night in that honky-tonk.”

  “When are you gonna fucking learn?” Steve asked.

  “Learn what—not to trust people?”

  “Not to let your pecker do your thinking for you,” Steve said. “How you going to find this woman? Do you even remember her well enough to tell the cops what she looks like?”

  “I’m not calling the cops,” Luke said. “Maybe she needed the money for something.”

  “You are unbelievable.”

  “Hey—twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t have that money. I still don’t. Easy come, easy go.”

  “The Luke motto.”

  Luke had some scalding coffee. He’d bummed some aspirin from Steve and his head was beginning to clear. He hoped that he spent a lot of money at the bar last night. That would mean he’d only lost a little bit to the woman.

  “I’m heading to Kentucky today,” he said. “Can you get the horses? I’ll catch up with you in Indiana.”

  “Yup. What if you hire on with Billie?”

  “I ain’t training no thoroughbred,” Luke said. He glanced out the window to where his Ford pickup sat in the parking lot. He was low on gas. “You got a hundred you can lend me?”

  Steve gave him the “when are you gonna learn” look again. The waitress came over, carrying a pot of coffee. “You all need a refill?”

  Luke pushed his cup forward. As she poured, he kept his eyes on her face.

  “You’re a very beautiful woman,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be modeling someplace?”

  The woman smiled just slightly before glancing at Steve, her eyebrows rising. Luke sipped the hot coffee and watched her walking away.

  “You are pathetic,” Steve told him.

  “’Cause I like women?” Luke asked. “What’s pathetic about that? Now what about that hundred, bud?”

  Fourteen

  THAT NIGHT BILLIE WAS SITTING ON the back deck, listening to the crickets and smoking cigarettes. She had decided she would quit the latter, and every time she thought about it, she lit one up. She was bored with thinking of all the things she was required to think about. Bored with worrying that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. She didn’t know enough about the racing game to fool herself into believing she could make money from it. Her father knew the business inside out, upside down, and all around, yet he had operated on the thin edge of bankruptcy his entire life. And if Billie thought that pretty colt trotting back and forth along the fence in the front pasture would be the great leveling agent in all of this, she needed to think again. There had been dozens of colts and fillies over the years, all pretty, all destined for greatness, and every damn one coming up short.

  A little past eight she got into Will’s truck and drove into Marshall. She found a bar she’d never seen before in a strip mall west of town, a place called Sneaky Pete’s. She sat in the truck for a few minutes, wondering why anyone would call their bar sneaky. Was that supposed to represent something positive to people? Billie wouldn’t buy a car from someone who called himself sneaky. She wouldn’t go to a sneaky doctor, or a sneaky accountant. She might hire a sneaky private investigator, but that seemed the exception to the rule.

  She went inside anyway. There was music playing and a large dance floor. She stayed until past midnight and almost went home with a guy she danced with a half dozen times. He said he sold software and was in Kentucky a couple days every month. Such noncommittal opportunities usually appealed to Billie; she probably would have taken this one if she didn’t have to be up at dawn to trailer-load the colt. Not only that, but she stopped drinking around eleven o’clock, switching to tonic water. Before heading home, she necked with the guy in the parking lot for a while before politely turning down his request for a blow job. He had seemed like a nice guy up until the last, and maybe he was. Billie had been hearing that these days blow jobs were like handshakes to teenagers, but she wasn’t subscribing to that adjustment of social mores. Maybe because she wasn’t a teenager.

  Five still came early. She made coffee in the half light, her head groggy from the beer and the hour. She would eat later. Carrying her cup down the hill, she watched as the colt came loping toward her, obviously more awake than she was. The broodmares, maybe aware they weren’t going anywhere, were grazing along the far edge of the field. Billie had hooked the horse trailer to her father’s truck the day before. The rig sat parked by the machine shed, under the brightening sky.

  Jodie was leaning against the fender of the truck, her thin arms crossed, eyes defiant. She wore faded jeans and a jacket. She must have gotten up at half past four to get there.

  “You’re here early to tend to your little flock,” Billie said and walked past her to the rear of the trailer.

  “I’m going to Chestnut Field.”

  “Not with me, you’re not.” Billie swung open the doors and dropped the ramp.

  “He knows me better than you.”

  “Who does?”

  “Cactus Jack.”

  “Well, he’s going to be disappointed,” Billie said. “’Cause today it’s just me and him.”

  When Billie walked to the pasture gate the horse trotted over to her, as was his nature. She led him out of the pasture and across the lane to the trailer. There he stopped dead, looking into the trailer’s dark interior. Billie stepped onto the ramp and pulled, but the horse would not move.

  “Come on!” she urged.

  “He won’t go in,” Jodie said.

  “He has before, obviously. I doubt the old man walked him twenty-five miles to Chestnut.”

  She pulled again. The colt outweighed her by roughly eight hundred pounds; she was not going to move him. Jodie turned and went into the barn and came out moments later with a grain pail containing a couple of handfuls of oats. She stepped past Billie and showed the colt the pail before moving deeper into the trailer. The horse followed her, bumping Billie aside in his haste. The girl clipped the trailer leads on either side of the halter while the animal buried his nose in the pail. Walking out, she gave Billie a look.

  Billie said nothing as she pulled up the ramp and closed the trailer doors. She was moving around to the driver’s door of the truck when she heard the girl’s small voice.

  “You’re not taking any tack?”

  Billie stopped. “Wouldn’t Skeeter have it?”

  “No.”

  Billie went into the tack room at the front of the barn. There were a half dozen saddles there and as many bridles. After a moment the girl came in behind her and pointed to a saddle before lifting a bridle from a peg on the wall. Billie carried the tack outside and put it in the box of the pickup, then moved to the door again.

  “You need hay. And a water bucket.”

  Billie exhaled and turned back to the barn again. She didn’t look at Jodie as she threw four bales of hay into the truck and climbed into the cab. As she drove off, she glanced in her rear view and saw the girl standing there in the lane, watching.

  When she got to the end of the lane, Billie stopped. There was no traffic at that hour. Half of the red sun was showing on the horizon, casting the fields and forests to the east in an ethereal pink light. She sat there idling for a full minute and then got out.

  “Well, come on,” she called.

  On the drive to Chestnut Jodie was happy, as a kid might be who had gotten her way. She told Billie in great detail about a movi
e she had watched with her aunt the night before, something about a whale and a mouse. After the movie review, she began a story about her next-door neighbor, who sometimes hoed his garden in his underwear.

  “Do you have a vegetable garden where you live?” she asked when she finished.

  “No,” Billie said.

  Jodie sighed, looking out the windshield to the morning sky. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  Billie nodded.

  “Red sky though,” Jodie said. “Will said red sky in the morning meant we could get rain.”

  Billie had heard that too, from the same source. “Listen, kid, I really don’t have a lot to say in the morning.”

  The girl was quiet for a few seconds. “You don’t have a lot to say in the afternoon, either.”

  Skeeter was waiting at the gate, as promised, sitting in his truck. When he saw them, he waved them forward and then led the way to the shed row. They put the colt in the stall and fed him hay. There was a tap along the wall outside the stall. Jodie filled the bucket without being told to and hauled it inside. Billie stacked the rest of the hay alongside the shed and pulled a tarp over it.

  “When do you want to take him out?” Billie asked, watching the horse. He had ignored the hay and was pacing about in the stall.

  “In a bit,” Skeeter said. “Let him settle down first, get used to where he’s at. He hasn’t been here for a couple weeks.” He watched the horse for a moment, then indicated the clubhouse in the distance. “You guys eat anything? Coffee shop will be open. Let’s get a cup of joe and a sticky bun.”

  The sun was full up by the time they had their food. They walked outside to sit on the benches along the track to eat, not far from the finish line. Billie noticed that Skeeter sat with his right leg straight out, favoring the hip.

  There were a dozen or more horses out on the dirt, running under the gaze of owners and trainers who each held cups of coffee in one hand and stopwatches in the other. The track was largely silent apart from the rhythmic thudding of the horses’ hooves. It was a sound Billie had always liked. There was a musical cadence to it, something primal and soothing. She could remember mornings like this with her father, when he was one of the men with a coffee and a stopwatch, and Billie would be beside him, huddled against the cold dawn, watching her breath on the air and listening to the sound of the hooves. The men would get to talking and sometimes they’d forget that Billie was there. They might be telling a story about what they’d gotten up to the night before, with a girlfriend or a woman they’d met in a bar. Before things got too raunchy, Will Masterson would cut them off.