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
