The Lottery

Black Jack and Cactus Jack find themselves in hot water with a local charity after they're caught hosting an illegal lottery.

The sun was high on this little, miserable slice of desert life. 1:34PM—too late for lunch, too early to crawl into a bar and die quietly. Not like you’d get drunk on the piss water they called beer—fermented sewage filtered through a cowboy’s boot—but the slight buzz would slap you just hard enough to keep the heat demons at bay. Downtown Yuma sat still, the kind of quiet that hums with menace, where even the wind feels like it’s mocking you. A man could lose his mind waiting for something to happen out here, and maybe snag a mamacita or two while he’s at it, but probably not. Not today. Today, the poor drunkard souls staggered their way forward to the only real bar open—and it wasn’t even a bar. It was a radio station that sat on top of a hill like it was a bad joke nobody laughed at. The building looked half-abandoned, a sun-bleached stucco box with peeling paint and a blinking neon sign that flickered like it was giving up mid-sentence. The windows were smeared with a layer of dust so thick it could’ve been holding back the apocalypse, and the roof—patched with rusted sheet metal and optimism—threatened to blow away every time the wind howled.

The sign out front read “Dry Heat with Cactus Jack and Black Jack – 1600 AM,” but somebody—probably Scotty—had slapped on an old bumper sticker that read “Guns, Guts, and God.” Half the letters were sun-faded and cracked, but it felt right. Out front, an old, withered ‘57 Bel-Air Chevy slouched like a dying dog in the sun. The poor girl looked like a Frankenstein experiment to keep her alive—its once-vibrant red had bleached into a sunburned pink, a truly sickly color. White tape on the hood, like cheap bandages on a terminal case, held together a makeshift antenna that wobbled with the wind. And as if branding a corpse, scrawled in shaky white paint on the side, were the words: “The Drymobile.”

There was a makeshift brown box out front, hastily scribbled with a Sharpie and a dream: “SHOOTING RANGE CONTEST – PAY $3—NO PESOS—FREE BEER—$1K CASH PRIZE!” Now, whoever came up with the idea to hand out free beer to a gaggle of drunks at a shooting contest for cash clearly didn’t mind broadcasting their suicide so publicly. It was a miracle the sign didn’t already have a bullet hole through it. But the gang that decided to wave a thousand bucks in the face of heat-possessed drunks were the kind to court death with a grin—at least, that’s what they’d tell you as they casually hid their piss-stained pants from view.

Inside, the air conditioning wheezed like it owed someone money, and the faint smell of burnt coffee mixed with the metallic tang of busted electronics. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was their fortress of cynicism and cheap sound equipment, sitting high above the city like a prophet in cargo shorts, screaming into the hot, sandy void that reached from Yuma to Tucson, and Douglas to Flagstaff, every Friday. The studio was spacious, sure—spacious in the way a beat-up Walmart parking lot feels spacious. Three rooms divided the mess: the recording booth, the sound room (smelled like burnt coffee and anxiety), and some extra space with a video setup that looked like a CIA torture chamber from Guantanamo Bay.

And then there was Cecilia. Slouched in a busted office chair like a cat that’d been run over twice but still had enough life left to glare at you. She was plain—plain in the way a loaded gun sitting on a nightstand is plain. Pretty, if she gave a damn. But she didn’t. That was her whole thing: thick glasses smudged with fingerprints, hair that lived in permanent rebellion against a comb, and T-shirts so old they looked like they were stolen from Goodwill’s dumpster—specifically, a Garbage band T-shirt. Cecilia didn’t just run the soundboard—she owned it, flipping switches and twisting knobs like a disinterested God controlling the fate of your shitty podcast, or radio show—or whatever the fuck it said on the application.

Beside her was Scotty, bouncing his leg like a squirrel on caffeine and sweating through his shirt despite the wheezing air conditioning. Scotty always looked like he’d just woken up in the backseat of a car he didn’t own, his shaggy hair sticking out in odd directions like he’d lost a fight with a weed whacker. He wasn’t touching the soundboard—Cecilia didn’t let him anywhere near it—but he hovered close, fiddling with a stress ball he’d probably stolen from someone’s desk. Scotty was the kind of guy who could charm his way into a place but leave you wondering how he’d burned it down by the time he left.

Then there were the two jackasses themselves, Cactus Jack and Black Jack—two sides of the same rotten coin. One too stoned to care and the other too pissed off for his own good. But Black Jack is never angry for a reason, or at least, not a good reason. The towering lug with his dark messy hair like black strains of silk, his permanent scowl that tell that its sculptor well those passions read that yet survive.