Cactus Jack

by Brad Smith

“You assumed right.” He took another sip. “I had fun last night.”

  “So did I,” she said. “Shooting pool and drinking beer and having sex—you really can’t go wrong. And you’re not even good at one of those things.”

  “Please tell me you’re talking about pool.”

  Now she smiled and drank her coffee. She could see now how young he was, not so much in appearance, but in every other way. She wondered if the ex-girlfriend back in Columbus had been his only experience with a woman. It seemed highly unlikely.

  “We could do it again,” he said.

  “You’ll have to work on your game.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t referring to the pool.”

  “I knew that,” she said and then she didn’t say anything else of an encouraging nature. She didn’t need a kid ten years younger than her falling in love with her, or even falling in infatuation with her, though it might be fun for a month or so. But she already had a stalker out there on the loose. She didn’t want to trifle with the kid’s emotions. Of course, she had to consider that maybe that was just what he was doing with her. Maybe he was just a horny kid who liked the idea of fucking an older woman for a few weeks. The very thought that she was suddenly the older woman hit her right between the eyes.

  “We need to go get my car.”

  Her phone rang then. Crossing to the counter, she picked it up and looked at the display, a Kentucky number she didn’t recognize. She considered not answering but she did, hearing a voice that was just vaguely familiar.

  “Yeah, this is Billie,” she said.

  As she listened, she crossed the room to sit down at the table again. She picked up her cup and then set it aside. Running her fingers across her forehead, she exhaled heavily, staring at the tabletop.

  “When?” she asked.

  Six

  THE ONLY BLACK DRESS THAT BILLIE owned was a cocktail number, quite short and cut low. She bought it for a friend’s wedding and had worn it three times since, twice more to weddings and once to a New Year’s Eve party at the local golf course in Chillicothe. It had been an unpleasant evening. The guy she was with got drunk and started a fight with the man who had married his ex-wife, even though it had been he who left the marriage, not the other way around. Apparently he hadn’t minded leaving his wife as long as she never dated anyone else for the rest of her life. Disgusted by the whole sordid mess, Billie had ended up taking a cab home.

  The dress was not suitable for a funeral. Driving to Marshall Thursday morning, she stopped at a mall on Lexington’s south side and bought a dress off the sale rack, a black shift that came to her knees and had a high scoop neck. She bought shoes, too. Given her time constraints, she wore the clothes as she left the store, stuffing her jeans and shirt in a bag. The counter woman who took her money regarded her like a woman on the lam from something. Billie could imagine her calling Homeland Security after she left.

  She’d worked the night before and left Chillicothe that morning, heading straight to the funeral. It was raining when she got up and it never let up as she drove west. At times it was a deluge, coming down in sheets. Twice, she was swamped on all sides by tractor trailers throwing rooster tails of water against the windshield of her Taurus. She’d had to pull over until the torrent subsided.

  Leaving the mall, her car turned over slowly three or four times and then stopped. She had cables in the trunk but it took her fifteen minutes before she could convince anybody to give her a boost. Most people looked at her as if she were trying to sell them something. Finally a man with a long gray ponytail agreed, pulling his van up close. Once the Taurus was running, the man launched into a story of how he’d driven across the country in 1967, looking for America. Billie had finally begged off when she realized that the story might just take as long as the trip itself.

  Her father was at the Browning Funeral Home in Marshall. It was the only funeral parlor in town and Billie had been there a number of times growing up. Because of the weather and the stop at the mall, she arrived fifteen minutes before the service was to begin. She was met inside the front door by a nervous-looking bald man in a navy-blue suit. Whether he was anxious about Billie’s late arrival or just in general, she couldn’t know. He greeted her solemnly and led her at once to the back of the home, where she was allowed to look at her father one last time before the casket was closed.

  The old man was dressed in a suit, a brown single-breasted that Billie recognized. White shirt and black string tie, his preference on the rare occasion he got dressed up. He looked older because Billie hadn’t seen him in ten years, and he looked bad, because he was dead.

  She stood by the casket for a couple of minutes while the bald man hovered nearby, his concentrated efforts not to be obtrusive making him even more so. Finally Billie reached forward and laid the palm of her hand on her father’s chest.

  There was a seat reserved for her in the front row of the chapel. As the man led Billie in, she noticed that the room was nearly full, although she didn’t really recognize anybody in the blur of faces. Already sitting in the row was a woman of about sixty or so, and Billie assumed the woman was her father’s girlfriend. Did people in their sixties and seventies use terms like girlfriend? Maybe Billie would have to learn things like that. Wasn’t it just a few days ago she had thought of herself as an older woman?

  “Billie, this is Marian Dunlop, your father’s close friend,” the man said. “Billie Masterson.”

  Her father’s close friend (apparently that was the accepted term, for today anyway) stood up to shake Billie’s hand.

  “Hello Billie,” she said. “I wish we were meeting under different circumstances.”

  Billie didn’t manage to say anything and afterward wondered why not. But what would have been appropriate? Delighted to meet you?

  As there was no other family present, it was just the two of them in the front pew. Billie had an aunt who lived in a nursing home in California, and there was an uncle, too—a perpetually broke dreamer that her father had never had much use for, living somewhere down south. Florida maybe. Neither was there, nor had Billie expected them to be. She was sure there were people in the chapel behind her who had been surprised to see her walk in.

  The woman beside her looked over and gave her a smile that was sad but somewhat reassuring. Billie reacted by looking away. She wasn’t in the mood to be reassured about anything, particularly not by the woman who had been sleeping with her father these past years.

  The man who had called her at home Monday morning was a lawyer named David Mountain Clay. He had been Will Masterson’s attorney and friend for three or maybe four decades and Billie remembered him quite well, even if she hadn’t recognized his voice on the phone. He stood several inches over six feet, and the last she’d seen him he had weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. When she was a little girl, Billie had been under the impression that one of his names was Mountain because he resembled one. On the phone three days earlier, he’d mentioned that her father’s girlfriend would be speaking at the service and asked if Billie wished to say something, as well. She’d declined. What would she say about the man she’d spoken to a half dozen times in the past ten years that wouldn’t sound like hypocrisy?

  A Baptist preacher led the service, offering the standard sermon, talking about a house with many rooms, one of which was apparently being prepared at that moment for Will Masterson’s imminent arrival. There was a hymn—“Just a Closer Walk with Thee”—sung by those present or at least those willing to join in, and a couple of prayers. The preacher had nothing of a personal nature to say about the deceased, which made sense because Billie suspected that the two men had never met. It was possible that her father had become devout in recent years, but she doubted it. After finishing the second prayer, the man introduced the woman sitting a few feet away from Billie.

  Billie watched closely as the woman walked up to stand in front of the gathering. She was quite lovely, with sharp features and a strong chin. She looked fit in
a black cotton dress that stopped above her knees. She had very good legs. Billie could see how her father would be attracted to a woman like that, although she wasn’t sure what the woman might see in a crusty old horseman set in his ancient ways and possessed of a stubborn streak as wide as the Mississippi.

  While Billie was wondering about the attraction, the woman at the pulpit proceeded to spend the next ten minutes explaining it, and in doing so she mentioned that the man in question was indeed a throwback and that he also had a stubbornness to him that would have made a mule blush, in her words. She talked as well about his kindness and his heart, which she said had a hard shell and a center of marshmallow.

  Sitting there listening, Billie began to resent the attractive woman with the strong voice and even stronger memories. She’d known for some time that her father had a girlfriend, but in her mind’s eye that woman had been a mousy little thing, subservient to Will Masterson, stopping by unannounced to clean his house while all the while hoping for a marriage proposal. That was not the woman speaking to the crowd of mourners this minute, telling of how she and Will, after too much wine one night, had fallen asleep in a hot tub and had awakened to find that the power had gone out, dropping the water temperature to a teeth-chattering level. The laughter in the room did nothing to quell Billie’s feelings of resentment.

  When the woman was finished and had returned to the pew, the preacher told the gathering the details of the interment, inviting any who were interested to attend. He then led the congregation in the Lord’s Prayer. The woman named Marian Dunlop recited it strongly and so Billie did not.

  Will had a burial plot behind the Baptist church in the village of Westbrook, fifteen miles west of Marshall. His parents were in the graveyard there, as were his grandparents and various aunts and uncles and a few cousins. Billie’s mother was not there. She’d left behind a will and in it she’d instructed that her ashes be scattered in a small lake where she had vacationed with her family as a child. A final “fuck you” to her husband, Billie had always assumed. The rain had continued throughout the service and seemed to pick up as the pallbearers carried the casket across the grass to the gravesite, where a tent had been erected. The mourners followed, at least those of them hearty enough to brave the storm, and they all crowded together beneath the tent as the preacher said the final words.

  Looking around, Billie recognized a number of the mourners, including the monumental David Mountain Clay, who caught her eye and nodded. He’d grown old, his face fleshy, his eyebrows as craggy as those of a musk ox. There were a few kids in attendance, which surprised Billie. They must have been dragged there by their parents or grandparents. Billie also noticed Reese Ryker among the mourners, standing directly across from her, beside a beautiful dark-haired woman about Billie’s age. Why would Ryker be there? Billie knew him mainly by sight. When she was a little girl, she and her friends would ride their bikes past the Ryker estate and stare at it in wonder—the fencing and the barns and the paddocks, the gardens around the main house. It was a place out of a story book. When Billie got older, she came to know that it was Reese’s mother who was the force in the family, and that Reese was, as Will Masterson described him, a fart in a mitten. Yet here he was today, watching the man who had opined that being laid to rest.

  The bald man from the funeral home had given Billie a red rose, which he told her she might place on the casket if she so desired. Not knowing what else to do with the flower, she obliged him and then Marian Dunlop did the same. The preacher invited all those assembled to the community center in Westbrook, for “a time of fellowship.” At that point, everyone turned and headed through the rain to their cars, parked in the church lot and along the road out front. Many people had brought along umbrellas and they shared them with those who hadn’t. Billie walked alone across the wet grass, angling to her car, parked on the roadside. The bald man had wanted her to ride in the funeral home limousine to the graveyard but she had begged off, saying that she didn’t want to have to return to Marshall afterward. In truth, she did not want to share the car with her father’s articulate girlfriend.

  She didn’t want to go into Westbrook for any fellowship either but she knew she should make an appearance. Glancing over to the church parking lot as she walked, she saw Reese Ryker talking to the woman Marian there, holding an umbrella over the two of them, while the dark-haired fashion model stood off to the side in the drizzle. So that’s why Ryker was there, Billie thought. He was obviously friends with the woman who had—according to her, anyway—captured Will Masterson’s heart. Billie couldn’t see her father moving in Ryker’s circle, or getting anywhere close to it, but then she’d been gone a while. Maybe the old man became upwardly mobile in his older years.

  But she doubted it.

  There was what appeared to be a new Porsche Carrera parked behind her car, and she didn’t have to speculate on who the owner would be. There were a lot of pickup trucks in the parking lot along with a few SUVs and smaller American cars. But only one brand-new Porsche. When she looked back toward the church, the car’s owner was still talking to Marian Dunlop, laughing about something one of them had said. Apparently to some people the day was a joyous occasion.

  The basement of the community center was low-ceilinged and quite small, and the crowd there, with the offer of free food and coffee, was standing room only. Billie poured a cup for herself and stood off to the side near the exit door, which she planned to use as soon as was politely feasible. A few people came over to speak to her—mostly men and women of her father’s vintage. They asked how she was, where she lived, what she was doing now. None seemed overly impressed with her position at Freddie’s Fish Shack.

  She saw David Mountain Clay when she arrived—he was hard to miss—standing near the dessert table talking to Marian, who seemed to know everybody in the place, including the churchwomen in the kitchen who had provided the meal and were even now making up more sandwiches and refreshing the coffee urns. Once the well-wishers had wandered off from Billie, Clay made his way over, the coffee cup in his huge hand looking like a child’s plaything, something from the Betty Crocker Kitchen set Billie had once owned. He extended his free hand.

  “How are you, Mr. Clay?” Billie asked.

  “Finer than frog’s hair,” the lawyer said. “I didn’t know if you’d remember me.”

  “You thought I might not remember the giant who sat at our kitchen table drinking whiskey and playing cribbage with my father until all hours of the morning, the two of you pounding the table and cursing like sailors?”

  Clay smiled. “Four bits a game, those were important contests.”

  His teeth had yellowed over the years and his jowls hung like a bulldog’s. In his halcyon days as a litigator he had worn a fringed buckskin jacket to court and kept his hair long, well past his collar. The jacket was not in evidence today but the hair was still shaggy, turned nearly snow white. He looked all right though, Billie thought, like a lion that had managed to survive the vagaries and pitfalls of a cutthroat career and life in general mostly intact.

  “How did you find my number?” she asked.

  “Your father had your number,” Clay said. “Along with his sister’s and brother’s. Your aunt couldn’t make the trip from the west and I couldn’t find your uncle. The number was no longer in service.”

  “That sounds like Uncle Randy,” Billie said. “His whole life has been a bunch of numbers no longer in service.”

  Clay drank off his coffee and looked for a place to set the cup. “And how is your life in Ohio?”

  “Peaches and cream,” Billie said.

  “Did you ever marry?” Clay finally put the cup on a chair rail along the wall, where it balanced precariously.

  “Not that I recall,” Billie replied. “What about yourself?”

  “Still blissfully wedded to the former Florence Raymond Townes,” Clay said. “God bless ’er.”

  Billie had no idea if the old lawyer was being sarcastic or not. She had neve
r been able to tell, even as a little girl, when he would regale her with improbable stories of his ancestors, most of whom he claimed to have been bosom buddies with, people like Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln himself.

  “Where is Mrs. Clay today?” Billie asked, looking around. She didn’t recall if she had ever met Clay’s wife. The lawyer and her father had been drinking buddies when Billie was young, but he and his wife hadn’t socialized with Billie’s parents. Her mother wasn’t much for Kentucky society, especially toward the end.

  “In Chicago with her sister,” Clay replied. “Shopping and theater and all that. Their annual pilgrimage.”

  A woman came out of the kitchen just then to retrieve Clay’s coffee cup from the chair rail, presumably before it fell. He watched her, smiling and ducking his head like an errant child. Will Masterson’s “close friend” Marian was busy laying out more food across the room. Billie gestured toward her.

  “What’s the story there?” she asked.

  Clay turned to look. “Your father had his gallbladder removed, I don’t know, four or five years ago. Marian was the attending nurse at the time. They hit it off, you might say.”

  “Isn’t that romantic?” Billie said. “She still a nurse?”

  “Retired now,” Clay said. “She’s quite active in the community, and with the church.”

  “Gosh, she and my father were soul mates,” Billie said.

  “Sarcasm is a poorly constructed cloak,” Clay said, turning back to her.

  “Was I being sarcastic?”

  “You know it and I know it,” Clay told her. “So what are your plans now?”

  “Heading back home,” Billie said. “Thinking I might sneak a couple of those brownies into my purse on my way out the door.”

  “Home being?”

  “Home being home,” Billie said. “Where I live. I seem to remember you being a lot smarter than this, Mr. Clay.”

  “And I remember your sass,” the lawyer replied. “No, I thought maybe you were referring to the farm, which was your home for many years. I thought you might stick around a couple of days.”