Читать книгу False River - Stinson Carter - Страница 6

“How much are your rooms?” he asks, after waiting behind yellow velvet ropes for a loud Texan couple slurping drive-through daiquiris to check in.

“Only have suites left,” snaps the guy behind the front desk.

“What do those go for?”

“They start at one-ninety-nine.”

Cam pulls the thick bank envelope from his pocket. “Make sure it has a Jacuzzi.”

The man eyes the cash and goes to work on his computer keyboard with newfound humility. After ignoring a few things about checkout time and incidental expenses, Cam signs something without reading it and trades three bills for a credit card key and about fourteen bucks in change.

The key gets him into a two-room suite on the tenth floor with His and Her robes in the closet, six feather pillows on the bed, and a second phone by the toilet. Cam fills the Jacuzzi tub, strips naked and puts on the robe. He didn’t get a key for the minibar because he paid in cash and didn’t want to leave a deposit. So he orders up a Jack Daniel’s with a side of rocks from room service while he’s sitting on the toilet, just because he can.

Ten minutes later, he’s sipping a ten-dollar glass of whiskey and adjusting his back to the tub jets. The bathroom door is open so he can look across the room at the window––with curtains pulled back––and out at downtown Shreveport. He’s about even with the giant clock on top of his grandfather’s bank, which catches his eye every time it flickers between the time and the temperature.

He’s never had any real privacy in his life. He grew up sharing a room, moved away to share a barracks, then moved back home to share an apartment. When you make yourself a little privacy, he decides, is when you make yourself a man.

When he gets to the bottom of his whiskey, the fingers cradling the glass are prunes. He climbs out of the tub and drips across the marble floor––enjoying the luxury of knowing someone else will have to wipe it up––and then lays diagonally across the king-sized bed to dry himself on the sheets and channel-surf on the big screen TV. Pretty soon it’s a back and forth between the same channels he watches with his mother at home. He gets out of bed and dresses for a trip downstairs.

He’s bored by the gambling after winning forty dollars in three hands of Blackjack, and wanders the casino on a search for girls to talk to. The only cute ones are attached to weekend cowboys and Barksdale airmen who look like the only thing they enjoy more than drinking and gambling is fighting over their girlfriends.

Cam leaves the casino boat through the wide covered gangway to a western-themed cocktail lounge hosting a Karaoke night, where men in Wranglers sing Johnny Paycheck and dance with each other’s wives. All that’s young and female in the bar is sitting on either side of a stone-faced guy with jittery legs and scabs on the knuckles of his right hand. Cam wonders if there’s an angle to be worked there, but he knows that even with a girl to spare, sharking men hate other sharking men. He learned this in the Marines, where a guy would sooner give up his life to a buddy in combat than he’d give up a girl to one on weekend liberty. So Cam lets the trio be and finds a stool at the bar.

He orders another Jack rocks and breaks another hundred paying for it. Then he swivels the stool around to face the bar and watches a woman giving a walk-out performance of These Boots Were Made for Walking. The bartender pawns an unwanted regular off on Cam. She has cocktail onion breath, dye-damaged hair and a faded Scorpio tattoo peeking out of the fringed shoulder of her cutoff denim shirt. She slides the karaoke songbook across the bar to Cam on the bartender’s advice, but Cam rejects both her and the book with a smile and a shake of his head.

“Cam!” a voice yells over the music.

The guy with the two girls waves him over. Cam stares but nothing registers.

“Johnny Haughton,” he says.

“Crazy Johnny!” says Cam, as he hops off his stool and approaches the guy.

Johnny stands up and gives Cam a knuckle-cracking shake. “I heard a fucked-up rumor you’re military now.”

“Was.”

“They throw your ass out or what?”

“Threw myself out.”

“That’s my boy!” Johnny slaps Cam on the back. “Sit down,” he says, grabbing a chair from the next table without asking the people sitting there.

Cam asks them if it’s free and takes a seat on their nod.

“I’m Mary Beth,” says the pretty brunette at Johnny’s side, in a voice too raspy for a girl who couldn’t be more than twenty-five.

“I’m Cam.”

“That short for somethin’?”

“Yeah, but my parents never told me what.”

“Shut up.”

“Is she always this mean?” asks Cam, with a look to Johnny.

“Any friend of Johnny’s probably deserves it,” she says.

Cam chuckles and looks at the other girl.

“Colleen,” she whispers, a just-cute-enough strawberry blond with uncertain eyes, wide rosy cheeks and a tiny mouth that looks like a well-healed scar grazed by a single stroke of lipstick.

“When’d you move up from Mad Dog?” asks Johnny, pointing at Cam’s whiskey.

Cam cringes. “Soon as I could afford Jack.”

“You sure liked it when you were fifteen!” Johnny turns to the girls, “I taught him how to drink. Used to go to Niggertown and spend our lunch money on Mad Dog, get lit up to high heaven and I’d drop him off at football practice with the spins.”

Cam’s nod of agreement doesn’t pack any pride like it used to. Johnny Haughton, or Crazy Johnny as the South Highlands kids knew him, was always spoken with a sneer. So Cam decided he’d be the one to say it with a grin. Johnny was in Andrew’s year at South Highlands High, and Andrew gave his little brother all the dirt he knew on the guy thinking it would turn Cam off.

Johnny had to take his mother’s maiden name of Haughton when he was born. She got knocked up when she was off at a Baptist college in Mississippi and sent baby Johnny home to her parents so they could take care of him until she graduated. But she met another man before that ever happened and kept Johnny a secret from him, then ran off with the new guy and left Johnny with her parents. They tried to raise him like Southern gentry, but the right schools and the right zip code couldn’t make Johnny right. His grandfather died when Johnny was in high school, and it was said that Johnny put him in the hospital after they fought over twenty bucks. His granddad never left the ER.

Johnny was either hated or feared by the kids in South Highlands, and surely both by Andrew. He was too much for the other kids, the guys couldn’t hang out with him without getting into a fight and the girls couldn’t trust him alone. But the fact that Cam hung out with the infamous senior when he was just a freshman boosted Cam’s mixture of blueblood and bad blood that everybody seemed to love him for back then. Cam can tell by the way Colleen ignores Johnny’s questions but hangs quietly on his answers that she’s taking the same bait all those South Highlands girls used to go for. But Mary Beth’s attention doesn’t sway from Johnny, no matter how much of his trademark bashful mischief Cam tosses her way.

The cocktail waitress passes the table and Mary Beth waves her down. “Stoli Razz and cran.”

“Tang neat,” says Johnny.

“Jack rocks,” says Cam.

She scribbles the order onto her pad and scratches a run in her black fishnets on her way back to the bar.

“You back for good?” asks Johnny.

“Hope not.”

“Shit, I hear you. I’m moving down to New Orleans in a few weeks.”

“My brother’s down there,” says Cam.

Johnny smirks to himself and Cam notices the lines around his eyes; the years haven’t been kind to Johnny. He still has all the confidence that went along with his sharp blue eyes, close-to-the-surface cheekbones and dimpled chin. But his eyes are cloudy now and his skin has the scarred toughness of an old boxing glove. Cam recognizes a scar on Johnny’s chin from a fight he watched outside Cadillac Grill, when a beer bottle Johnny swung at some guy was shoved back into his face. Cam reckons the stories behind the new scars are probably even worse.

Mary Beth pulls a fresh pack of Marlboro Mediums from her purse and unpacks them with a few practiced smacks against her palm. As she pulls out a smoke, Johnny leans over with a party-trick flip of his tarnished brass Zippo. Cam has seen this lighter do this trick hundreds of times for girls. But the hands are a little shakier now, and the girl already knew it was coming.

When the waitress comes back with a full tray of drinks Cam pays the tab and Johnny doesn’t give any protest.

“Why the hell’d you come back to Shreveport anyway?” asks Johnny.

“For school.”

“Why aren’t you down at LSU?”

“Goin’ AWOL’s a felony, can’t get much student loan money.”

“Well I guess I’m not goin’ to college,” Johnny laughs. “Can’t your granddad just write ‘em a letter?”

“He passed away,” says Cam.

“Well, that ought to be worth somethin’.”

Cam gives Johnny a stare to make him see he’s not laughing.

“You at LSUS?”

“Nah…” Cam mumbles.

“You’re not at Tech, are you?”

Cam hides his nod behind a sip of whiskey.

“That ain’t college. Shit, that’s just a waste of time. Buddy of mine says he can get me a job at a restaurant in the French Quarter. Good fucking money with all the tourists.”

“I’m sure,” says Cam.

“Tech… Shit, I could go to Tech if I wanted to,” Johnny trails off and his focus drifts over to the Karaoke DJ. “Dire Straights!” he yells. The DJ yanks off his headphones and tells him to shut up, interrupting a middle-aged cattleman’s crooning of D-I-V-O-R-C-E, with enough giggling between verses to kill any humor of a man singing it.

“This band sucks.”

“It’s Karaoke, Johnny,” says Mary Beth.

“You mean that ain’t Tammy Wynette?” Johnny shoots back dryly.

“I thought you were…” Mary Beth cuts herself off with a sip of her Razz and cranberry.

“Let’s go somewhere decent, we got a welcome home party to throw,” says Johnny.

“I got a room upstairs,” says Cam.

“Bullshit,” says Johnny.

Cam pulls his key out of his pocket and drops it on the table.

“Ladies…” says Johnny, as he stands up from the table. They stand up and Cam leads them all out to the elevators.

––––––––––––––

“This must be the honeymoon suite,” says Mary Beth, grinning at the king bed like she’s imagining all the positions it could handle.

Colleen stares out at the city with her nose to the window. “I’ve never been this high before without bein’ on an airplane,” she says, leaving a small patch of steam on the glass in front of her face that disappears as quickly as her attempt to join the conversation.

“That’s amazing, Colleen,” Johnny mutters, as he kicks a sweet spot on the side of the minibar fridge that pops the door open. Then he helps himself to both of the baby Tanqueray bottles––whatever he’s not immediately drinking goes into his pockets. The girls each take a bottle of vodka and a bottle of cranberry juice and mix Cape Cods in their mouths, sip by sip. Cam cracks open a mini-bottle of Jack Daniel’s and pours it into his room service glass from earlier.

Johnny fishes a tiny glass vial from the front pocket of his gray Levi’s and empties white powder onto the laminated room service menu on the desk.

“You first, Daltry,” he says, as he cuts out a few lines with his license––all four edges frayed and stained white.

“Is that speed or blow? asks Cam.

“Ask me in about five minutes.”

Mary Beth cackles and Johnny pulls a crumpled single from his pocket and rolls a crude straw. He leans over the desk and two lines disappear. He straightens up from the desk with the sniffles and passes the bill on to Mary Beth. She tries to re-roll it but it’s nearly gone to cloth by now. As she fishes through her purse for a better one, Cam reaches into his pocket and slides out a crisp hundred.

“Try this one,” he says, coolly.

“You hit the jackpot down there or what?” asks Mary Beth.

“He hit the jackpot when he was born in South Highlands,” says Johnny.

“There wasn’t jack in it by the time I showed up,” says Cam.

“Shit, your last name alone’s got dollar signs in it,” says Johnny.

“You’re from South Highlands, too, man.”

“His momma sure picked a good doorstep to leave him on,” says Mary Beth.

Cam’s breath locks up in his chest as Johnny levels a hard stare on Mary Beth. She ignores it and leans over the desk to polish off a line, then casually thumbs her nostril and hands the bill back to Cam.

Cam avoids Johnny’s stare as it shifts from Mary Beth to him. He cautiously unrolls his hundred on his thigh, wipes the residue off on his leg and returns it to the envelope in his pocket.

“Jesus, Johnny, take a joke,” she says, with a hint of fear breaking through her sass.

“I got a few of those you wouldn’t take that well, neither.” he says, straight-faced.

Mary Beth’s smile drops completely and her eyes lose their shine.

“Don’t I?” says Johnny.

Mary Beth lowers her eyes to the chipped-away pedicure poking out of her tired black open-toed flats, and gives Johnny a slow nod.

“You got any ice?” Johnny asks Cam.

“Man, I didn’t mean to––“

“You got any ice?” he repeats, firmly.

“There’s a machine down the hall,” Cam says quietly.

“You mind?”

Cam shakes his head.

Johnny picks up the leatherish ice bucket off the desk and hands it to Cam. “Why don’t you go with him, Colleen,” he says.

She nods and follows Cam out into the hall. Cam peers in at Mary Beth and Johnny as the door swings to.

“Is he mad at her?” asks Cam.

“Why?”

Cam listens at the door.

“What?”

“Nothing,” says Cam, starting down the hallway with her at his side.

“That’s a real nice room,” she says.

“Wish I had it for more than a night.”

“I don’t get why you’d stay at a hotel in your own town?”

Cam shrugs. “Just ‘cause it’s somethin’ I’ve never done before, I guess.”

“That’s a weird reason to do things.”

Cam chuckles to himself. “I know.”

They reach the ice alcove and Cam drops a load of ice into the bucket. When they get back to the room, the clock radio on the bedside table is bottoming out from a hip-hop radio station rattling through it at maximum volume. Johnny is wiping a licked finger on the room service menu and rubbing it on his gums, smiling toothily at Cam as they come back in. Mary Beth is holding a stare out the window that doesn’t waver at the sound of their return.

“Thanks, man,” Johnny says, but he doesn’t come over to get himself any of the ice.

Cam pulls the paper hat off the top of a courtesy glass on the desk, dips it into the ice and makes Colleen a proper drink.

Mary Beth comes over from the window, grabs Colleen’s glass out of her hand and takes a healthy sip.

“Want me to make you one?” asks Cam.

“I’m fine,” she says, returning the glass to Colleen with a third of it gone. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand and wanders into the bathroom.

“Nice Jacuzzi,” she says from inside.

Johnny puts a hand on Colleen’s shoulder that surprises her, and leads her over to the couch. Cam starts to follow them, but catches movement in the corner of his eye and looks over at the bathroom doorway as Mary Beth gives him a little quick “C’mere” flick of her head.

“Can I take a bath,” she whispers, as he gets within whisper range.

“Just a little one,” she says, off his reluctance. “How do you turn it on?”

“Just fill it up and press that button in the corner. You can unscrew that cap inside if you want more bubbles.”

She pulls a towel down from the rack and lays it over the crook of her arm, then turns on the faucets and adjusts the temperature against her palm until it’s right.

“Thanks,” she says.

He turns to leave as she unbuttons the top button of her jeans.

“Can you hit the lights?”

He flips the switch and the bathroom goes black, except for a column of light from the room that follows the angle of the open door and spotlights a rhinestone stud in the center of her taught stomach as she pulls up her shirt. She isn’t wearing a bra. “C’mere a sec?” she says, her words muffled by the folds of her blouse as it brushes across her mouth.

As he steps closer, she drops her shirt and comes at him with soft plump lips and an eager tongue. Her hand works down the ridged muscles of his stomach down to his crotch, and against his chest he feels her nipples harden from rubbing against his coarse dress shirt. She backs him across the floor with the force of her kiss and rams the door shut with his body. Then she slows down, gets quiet and puts her mouth against his ear.

“You kiss better than he does,” she whispers.

Cam goes back in to kiss her, but stops on the loud knock at the door.

“Why’d you kiss me if––“

“I’m sorry,” she says, pulling away from him in the darkness.

He can hear her breathing start to slow and the sound of her feeling around the floor for her shirt.

“What’s going on here?” asks Cam.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats, and opens the door.

Cam squints into the light from the room as Johnny pushes Mary Beth out of his way and pins Cam against the bathroom wall.

“She didn’t do anything,” Cam pleads.

Johnny reels back and takes a swing at Cam. Cam flinches and closes his eyes but the punch never comes. He opens his eyes on a fist hovering an inch from his face. Johnny grins, “Never seen you flinch before.”

Johnny lets go of Cam and steps back out into the room.

“You ready to go?” Johnny asks Mary Beth.

She nods.

“We’re leavin’ already?” asks Colleen.

“We gotta go, Colleen,” says Mary Beth, as she zips up her purse on the desk and slings it over her shoulder.

Colleen follows Johnny and Mary Beth out of the room with a look on her face that’s dazed and lost even for her. Then the door slams shut in that heavy hotel way.

Cam turns off the hip-hop on the clock radio, then closes the room service menu on the desk and puts it back in the drawer. He dumps all of the empty mini-bottles in the trash and ties up the plastic liner to hide them. He takes the second and last bottle of Jack from the minibar fridge and forces the door closed until the lock clicks back into place.

After fishing the remote out of the bed sheets, Cam finds HBO on the TV. Not because it’s playing something he wants to watch, but because his mother doesn’t have it at home. He sits on the edge of the bed to pull off his boots, lays out his keys and wallet on the bedside table for the morning, then reaches into his front pocket and feels lint where a Citizen’s National cash envelope used to be.

Cam doesn’t bother looking around the room. He just jams his feet back into his boots, runs out to the elevators and rides back down to the lobby. Mary Beth and Johnny’s little Bonnie and Clyde swindle comes together in his head as he rides the ten floors down: the trip to the ice machine, Mary Beth’s apology and Colleen’s confusion. And all because he tried to be the big man with the hundred-dollar coke straw in front of a guy who killed his own granddad over twenty bucks.

He searches the Karaoke bar and the casino for over an hour, knowing all the while that Johnny’s probably halfway to New Orleans by now. By 4am, Cam is filing a police report in the hotel security office with Horseshoe security and a Bossier City cop. Cam gives Johnny Haughton’s name and his grandparent’s street in South Highlands. He writes out a sworn statement and signs it. The only thing he leaves out is the drugs and the girls’ names.

After the business with lowliest rookie of the Bossier City police department and the top brass of casino security, Cam asks at the front desk if he can switch rooms. The guy doesn’t understand why Cam can’t sleep in a place he was robbed in, and Cam can’t explain that it’s because it’s his own fault he got robbed and the room won’t let him forget it. So he hands back the key and wanders out to the parking garage to get his bike and go home, where there aren’t any reminders around of any kind of money at all.

–––––––––––––––

Cam unlocks the bike from a handicapped signpost on the first floor of the garage. Crossing back over the river into Shreveport, he checks the time on his grandfather’s clock: 5:58am. In two minutes, his mother will indulge in the single touch of the snooze button she allows herself every morning. Then she’ll slip into an old pink terrycloth robe with a monogram of her married initials and a flattened pair of matching slippers, and walk to the kitchen wondering where Cam ended up that night.

As he pedals back towards her and away from his grandfather’s clock, he wonders if its tungsten hours and minutes will be the only part of that man’s legacy he’ll ever have a share in.

He’s sweaty and beat when he wheels his bike around into his mother’s back yard and shuffles in through the kitchen door. His mother startles when he comes in, spilling a few grains of Folgers on the counter as she spoons them into the hot water waiting in her Breast Cancer Walk-a-thon mug.

“What happened to you?” she croaks, her first words of the day.

These have been her first words of the day too many times, Cam realizes. “I went downtown on Andrew’s bike, and ran into… some people I used to know.”

She looks at the analog clock between the dials on the stovetop, “Must’ve had a lot of catchin’ up to do,” she says, in the playful way she’s learned to call him out without setting off his defenses. “Why were you downtown?”

“Went to cash the check at Papaw’s bank.”

“Oh, I meant to tell you…” she says, pausing to sweeten her coffee with almond-flavored creamer from a plastic bottle in the fridge. “I know you said you’re gonna use some of that money to get an apartment, but you should ask about a place here first, just to see.”

Cam looks at her hopeful eyes and then down at the floor.

“I’m not gonna be spyin’ on you,” she smiles.

“I started a savings account with it instead.” He looks up at her. “I was thinking it’d be nice to stay here a while.”

“Really?”

He nods.

“Stay as long as you want,” she says.

He smiles his thanks, takes a glass down from the cabinet and fills it with tap water in the sink. As he leans over the sink and gulps down the water, her rubber-soled slippers flap towards him across the vinyl tile floor. “You need a bath,” she says, touching the sweat on his forehead.

Cam snickers to himself.

“I meant a shower,” she says.

“Bath is fine, mom.”

“You’re punchy, buster… go get some sleep.”

Cam goes to the sink to wash his glass.

“I’ll do it,” she says.

Her hand strokes his hair as he passes her on the way to his room. He pushes the door closed and falls back onto his old bunk in his boots.