“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.
Chapter Three
Andrew left the mechanical remnants of his old summer landscaping business in a storage unit when he went down to New Orleans for college. He’d intended to revive his operation over summers back from school, but seven years and two degrees later, he still hasn’t been back for anything other than a few Christmases and family funerals.
Cam calls Andrew in New Orleans for the key to the padlock and the unit number at the storage place.
“Hey man,” says Cam, working-in an unaccustomed familiarity to soften the fact that he doesn’t even remember the last time they talked, and that even now he’s only calling to ask a favor.
“Oh… Hey.” Andrew’s voice flattens out as soon as he realizes it’s Cam on the line, like he was expecting a friend but got a telemarketer.
“How’s it goin’?” asks Cam.
“Fine. You?”
“Alright.”
“Mom said you got into Tech.”
“Everybody gets into Tech.”
“What’re you taking?”
“Just some bullshit.”
“How’s being back home?”
“Livin’ with mom’s killing me.”
“You’ve been sayin’ that since you were ten.”
“I’ve