False River
by
Stinson Carter
Copyright 2011 Stinson Carter,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0072-3
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Prologue
There’s still a picture of him in his dress blues on his mother’s fridge. In a Sunday call home she told him how handsome he was, but he said it was just because there wasn’t anything to his face but sunburn and cheekbones after Hell Week. She told him it looked just like the posters, but he knew he was dripping mud and water from the waist down. She asked him to wear the dress uniform when he came home, whenever that would be. And he let her know it didn’t work that way.
They had to stand in line for hours on a parade ground in the rain, wearing just their skivvy shirts and trousers. There were only a dozen dress jackets and caps for a thousand worn out boys, neither the few nor the proud. They’d each slip into a jacket warmed by the grunts before them, then quickly hand it off after steeling their faces for a ration of Kodachrome. They don’t tell you to smile and they don’t offer retakes for blinked eyes. Cam reckoned that’s why so many dead kids have lousy pictures on the evening news.
Just a few months after picture day, Cam Daltry was riding in the back of a troop carrier to an Okinawa-bound cargo plane when he jumped onto the tarmac and ran like hell. He followed a dried-up storm drain to the 405 freeway and thumbed a ride to San Clemente.
Cam had lined up a short-term bed through a guy in his platoon whose mother wanted him out of the Marines. The night before Okinawa he got USMC tattooed on his arm and Cam got an address scribbled on his palm.
She was the other kind of mother than Cam’s. Some mothers become schoolteachers when they get divorced, and some become teenagers again; one chases old age while the other chases it away. The mother Cam stayed with in San Clemente showed a thong when she bent over to open up her fridge, instead of a pair of unloved handles. And there were bottles of water and sushi in the fridge instead of Carnation creamer and doggie bags.
Every night at 6, she drove him to his under-the-table job at a college bar and stayed awake long enough to pick him up at 3am. She would open his door to say goodnight; the hallway light through her chiffon nightgown showing Cam how nice her body used to be. And he would say “sweet dreams,” and she would ease back into her room without closing the door.
By the time Cam figured out it was really just a man she wanted back in the house, she’d already seen him with the girls at the bar; giving them the kind of eyes that would’ve paid his room and board. So the night came when there was no chiffon goodnight and no “sweet dreams,” just the sound of her door clicking shut for the first time. And his next ride from the bar was a ride back to Pendleton with a pair of MP’s.
The two months he spent in the brig weren’t much worse than boot camp. The 5 a.m. reveille gave him the same headache and the 10 p.m. taps the same heartache. And in between them, the showers were colder and the hours were slower but the food was about the same. When he finally had his hearing, they gave him a dishonorable discharge and shipped him back to the mother in Louisiana.
Chapter One
The spare bedroom in his mother’s apartment is just as ready to get a son back as she is. Ready for any kind of boy but the one who shows up. Cam and his brother’s old bunk bed is split into two twins, but stuffed animals and baby blankets tell whose is whose. Plaid boxers share a drawer with Superman Underoos, a high school graduate’s suit hangs on a closet rack with a four-year-old’s Dracula costume, and size-eleven Nike hi-tops sit next to size-three saddle oxfords on the closet floor.
After a week, the smell of fresh potpourri and stale teddy bears gives way to Right Guard and dirty laundry. When “college” and “a job” start haunting his conversations with his mother, he knows his period of adjustment is through. So he takes out a student loan from the Sallie Mae Servicing Company and enrolls himself in North Louisiana Tech.
On his third Friday afternoon home, Sallie Mae’s check shows up with his mother’s Southern Living and Thrifty Nickel coupon book. He’s never seen three zeros on a check made out to him, and the only place he’ll entrust it to is the downtown office of his grandfather’s bank, Citizen’s National. He dresses up for the trip: a blue oxford shirt tucked into flat-front khakis with a brass-buckled leather belt, his “game day” outfit in high school. And the Justin Ropers he used to wear out on his Grandfather’s plantation to shoot quail, when things like plantations were still in the family.
His mother has faculty meetings after school on Fridays, so she won’t be back with the car until after the bank closes. But his brother Andrew’s old pride and joy racing bike has been hanging in his mother’s gardening shed since he took a spill on it senior year and tore up his knee. Cycling was the perfect sport for Andrew because his drive more than made up for his lack of coordination. Instead of getting benched on the varsity teams, Andrew raced a daily Tour De France early every morning before the sunrise could remind him it was just a tour de Shreveport.
Cam pries open the loud aluminum shed doors, lifts the dusty Trek 400 off its hook and carries it out into the yard. The seat’s height recalls Andrew’s jealousy when their grandmother Munna would line them up against the wall in her pantry and mark their heights with one of her thick sketchbook pencils. Cam outgrew his 12th grade brother as a freshman.
He squanders the better part of a half-hour filling up the tires with a puny hand pump clipped to the frame, pitting out his shirt before he even gets on the bike. As he rides out of Bayou Grove, his boots slip off every other stroke because the pedals are meant for special shoes. But even if he could find Andrew’s biking shoes, they’d be too small for his feet. And he knows their grandfather would’ve shuddered at the thought of the metal-cleated shoes scratching up the Italian marble he handpicked for his lobby floors.
After twenty minutes he passes through South Highlands, the old money neighborhood where his father grew up and where Munna still lives, but which he only knows from school and Sunday dinners as a kid. After forty-five minutes, he stands up in the saddle to put his weight into getting through a dire neighborhood on the edge of downtown called The Bottoms.
Even a clear afternoon is dark in The Bottoms because all the freeway overpasses have been routed over it to avoid messing up the white neighborhoods. The place feels like the underside of a massive conveyor belt, as car wheels beat an endless rhythm against the overpass joints rumbling down concrete pillars to the grassless yards of tarp-patched shotgun houses.
He comes out from under the last overpass near the old Municipal Auditorium, where Elvis and Hank Williams Jr. used to play for the Louisiana Hayride radio show. Then he turns north towards the river and coasts down Texas Street.
Texas Street seems to Cam like it could be the old main drag of any city in the South: trolley rails buried in
