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