False River

By Stinson Carter

False River is the story of a black sheep son of an aristocratic Southern family gone to seed. Growing up, Cam Daltry made a name for himself in his hometown by stirring up trouble. But the smirks he'd always been given for his boyhood sins turn to genuine shame when he goes AWOL from the Marines, gets thrown in the brig, and then gets shipped back home to Louisiana with a dishonorable discharge. So he enrolls in college, lands a blueblood girlfriend, and sets out to give the good old Southern straight and narrow an honest try. It isn't long before he finds trouble again, and this time it's worse than ever. The law comes after him, his parents write him off, and he sets out on a desperate odyssey to get help from his estranged older brother Andrew----an ambitious law student at Tulane. But after being drawn into the seedy underbelly of the French Quarter, Cam falls in with a wild slew of characters in a downward spiral that shows him the dark truth of himself and pushes him ever closer towards a final and irreversible attempt at redemption. He goes to daring but ever more pitiful extremes to escape his troubles, but they quickly reach such shocking depths that even Andrew is swallowed up by them. It's only in the painful wake of accidental tragedy that Cam sees how to follow his older brother's lead, and becomes determined to make a man out of himself with what will be the truest but also the hardest acts of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456600723

Book preview

Catherine

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 asphalt, fancy old department stores swapped out for a charity thrift store, a dingy hotel named after a saint, a sleazy 24-hour video rental, and a few dozen For Lease signs. Back in Texas Street’s prime, he heard that people’s grandmothers used to buy Saturday night hosiery and perfume in stores like F.W. Woolworth and Hearne’s. And on the sidewalks outside, people’s grandfathers sweated in Army dress clothes for the hope of walking those girls up the wooden steps of nameless hotels before they were taken off in the rail cars of the Southern Belle to New Orleans and loaded onto ships bound for the European Front; trading tossed-away nylons and perfumed breasts for cigarettes and laughter.

Cam wonders if he would’ve been a twenty-one-year-old man back then, instead of a twenty-one-year-old kid. Cam assesses his reflection as it slides across the empty storefront windows of Texas Street, blaming what he sees on sunless shopping malls and half-hearted wars, and wishing he could’ve gotten here a few generations earlier. He’d be wearing his own starched uniform, and cashing a check from Uncle Sam instead of aunt Sallie.

He leans the bike against a parking meter and stares at the cable lock coiled around the seatpost. He needs four numbers, so he tries Andrew’s birth year. He doesn’t know it by heart, only by counting back from his own. When that doesn’t work he tries Munna’s street address. Eleven-Seventy is both the address and the title of the Daltry homestead. Whenever they pulled into the driveway at Eleven-Seventy after church, Andrew was always the first one out of the car. And when they had to leave after Sunday dinner, Andrew would always hide somewhere upstairs to buy whatever extra time in the house it would take for their parents to find him. And it’s Eleven-Seventy that opens Andrew’s lock.

The main branch of Citizen’s National Bank is a showpiece of Southern Protestant art deco. Fancy enough to flaunt high caliber credit to the industry barons, but stripped of the excess flourishes that might intimidate the farmers. There’s a lobby with thirty-foot ceilings and seventeen stories tapering to a clock tower. In the mid-seventies, the original Roman numeral clock came down and a four-sided digital display went up, big enough and bright enough to give the time and temperature to two parishes.

Everything inside the old bank looks the same to Cam––the money-green marble pilasters between the windows, the Louisiana industry murals––cotton, lumber, oil, and sugarcane––lining the walls just below the ceiling, and the clean smell of un-licked envelope glue that is still the best way he’s ever been able to describe the smell of cash to himself.

When Cam was ten years old everyone knew him here, and they all wanted to be his favorite. He’d sit in front of his grandfather’s brass nameplate with his legs dangling over the edge of his desk. The men would come ask when he was going to take his Papaw’s job and the women would ask when he was going to marry them.

Cam waits in the Friday payday line with about ten other people, a paycheck-to-paycheck crowd made up mostly of dim-eyed desk workers from the Parish Courthouse and City Hall and sweaty public works men with hard-hat lines still showing on their foreheads.

When his turn comes, Cam walks up to the teller and smiles with familiarity. Hey, how are you?

The teller just nods in response. She’s in the 39th hour of her workweek and isn’t making any attempt to pretty her exhaustion. Her hands are swollen around a battered wedding band and her fingertips are dry and cracked from handling bills.

I need to get a cashier’s check with half of this and cash the rest, he says as he hands her his check and driver’s license, keeping his tone warm because the banker used to tell him you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

Account number?

I don’t… think I have one here anymore.

Then I can’t cash this for you.

I had one when I was a kid, but I don’t know if it’s still good.

The teller types his name into the computer from his license.

Cam Daltry, he loudly confirms.

Yeah, nothing’s coming up.

May I open one?

Our account specialist is already gone for the day. I can make you an appointment for Monday if you’d like.

"I need to get a check postmarked by today for college. Can you… make a one-time exception for me? You know Sallie Mae’s good for it," he grins.

I’m afraid I can’t change bank policy for you.

There’s a murmur over Cam’s shoulder that he senses concerns him. He glances behind him at two orange-vested D.O.T. crewmen making false starts at the front of the line and growling in a loud twang about how long he’s taking. The teller shakes her head for them in a show of shared frustration. 

I can help the next person in line, she announces.

Wait, says Cam, waving off the road crewmen.

Cam looks down the long row of teller’s cages to the bank officers’ desks in the raised and railed-off back section of the room, where he used to score pocketfuls of hard candy and guided tours of the vault. After a few moments searching for familiar faces, he looks blankly back at the teller.

I told you I can’t––

You see that portrait? he interrupts, noticing the row of bank president portraits on the wall behind her.

Portrait?

The very first president, he points. Read the name under it, if you don’t mind. It’s the same as the one my license.

She turns around for a few seconds, then back to Cam with a shrug.

"It’s my grandfather. It was his bank, he started it."

"I don’t know how to… verify that, but––"

Cam reads the brass plaque under the last picture in the row to put a name to its familiar face. "Is Mr. Ogilvie here, he knows me."

The teller sighs and stamps her way over to a floor manager who couldn’t be more than thirty-five, too young to know Cam. As the teller snips at him, he looks at Cam and then picks up the receiver on the countertop phone at an empty teller cage. He adjusts the knot on his tie and clears his throat before cautiously dialing a three-digit extension. After a few words mouthed into the receiver, beginning with an apology and ending with Cam’s name, he speaks a few words to the teller that send her back to Cam with a forced smile.

She gives him a blameless apology and splits his $4000 check between a cashier’s check and two grand in cash, which Cam takes in hundreds. She’s out of cash envelopes, but he makes her go get one from another teller. It was the kind the banker always gave him and Andrew for birthdays––filled with twenties until their teens and fifties until he died.

The cash envelope goes into the front pocket of his khakis, taking the place of an envelope addressed to the Tech registrar’s office that he seals up with the cashier’s check.

Cam, a voice calls out behind him.

Cam turns around as Jerry Ogilvie steps out of an elevator. The last time Cam saw him he was as young and nervous as the man who just called him down. He’s only in his mid-forties now, but his hair has gone gray and his eyelids and back droop from the heavy impatience of board members, foreclosures and defaults. He doesn’t carry his title with nearly as much poise as Cam’s grandfather did. His grandfather wore a three-piece suit with a kerchief peeking out of one pocket and a gold pocket watch chain hanging out of another, while Jerry’s suit looks like one that would go door-to-door handing out the Book of Mormon. And it drapes loosely on his slight frame, the thin body of a family doctor or a church choir director.

Nice to see you, says Cam.

I wouldn’t have even recognized you if you didn’t have your granddad’s build, he says, giving Cam a gentle shake with his delicate hand.

My grandmother says that, says Cam.

The kind of shoulders that look good in a suit and throw a hell of a punch.

Cam chuckles on cue.

I only witnessed the suit, the punching days were before my time. Back when Louisiana bankers got their hands dirty from time to time. Now we just sit in air conditioning and answer the phone.

"Maybe he’s the one that missed out."

Like heck, says Mr. Ogilvie.

Cam chuckles because he knows his grandfather would’ve never said heck when he meant hell.

What’ve you been up to?

Just going to school.

Good for you… They take good care of you? he asks, gesturing to the teller’s cages.

Yes, thank you. I just needed to get a check out today for my tuition.

You down at LSU?

No, I’m staying up here for a semester or two first.

Well, I’m sure your parents like having you home. And LSU-Shreveport’s a fine school, too.

Yeah, says Cam, deciding that this man’s assumption isn’t necessarily his lie. 

Well, give your Munna a kiss for me and give your folks my best.

Will do, says Cam, as he gets a brittle goodbye pat on his shoulder.

Cam nods his goodbye and joins the flow of people pocketing their deposit receipts and filing out through the echoing marble and glass vestibule. He jogs across the street to get his check in the mailbox a few minutes ahead of the 5pm collection, then strolls back across and unlocks the bike.

Somehow the road home doesn’t hold any appeal now that he’s got twenty hundreds in his pocket. He hasn’t had a dime to his name since he got home from California. And he wasn’t about to ask his mom for any, so he hasn’t gone out much. If he does go out, he can only drink through a trade with the kid brothers of his old high school friends that he runs into anywhere he goes. They buy him a beer and he has to nod through accounts of his glory days. He tries to always finish the beer before they get around to the present tense.

Other than this routine on the weekends, Cam’s nights start with a dinner based on whatever diet plan his mother read about lately, usually just a variation on chicken breasts and vegetables. Followed by the only vice she has that no diet guru will ever be able to sway her from––Blue Bell mint chocolate chip ice cream.

After dinner, they watch TV on the couch that still has a stain on the arm from where he spit up breast milk as a baby. It’s not that she can’t afford a new one, but putting the scraggly plaid beast on the street for bulky pickup day would give her more shame than a new one could ever bring her joy. After the ten o’clock news, his mother retires to get her eight hours before the buzz of the alarm clock she’s kept set for 6 a.m. ever since she took the teaching job at his old school. When the late night guys come on he watches Letterman, because Carson’s dead and Leno did commercials for Doritos. He doesn’t go to his room until he starts nodding off.

Tonight, his mother won’t be home to cook dinner. She has a women’s group on Friday nights that he’s come to learn means spurned women’s group. Fending for himself on Friday nights usually means nuking some frostbitten Stouffer’s offering from the back of his mother’s freezer. But tonight he’s got a taste for prime steak and the funds to indulge it, so he muscles up Louisiana Avenue to a place even the banker said was too rich for his blood.

The Village Grille is, or at least was once, the most coveted reservation in town. Kids Cam knew whose parents took them there would drop its name as smugly as they would that of the new country club, Southern Trace, when it opened up and lured the who’s who away from the original country club with forty-thousand-dollar memberships that weeded the rich out of the rich and the tenured.

He stashes Andrew’s bike behind the restaurant next to the trashcans and waits a minute to catch his breath and let the sweat dry on his forehead. Then he pulls his hem out of his right boot and presses his face against the one-way-glass door until somebody unlocks it for him.

It’s a tiny place, but there’s plenty of seating for anyone showing up at 6pm. Cam doesn’t know what exactly he was expecting, but the mirrored walls and glossy black tables and chairs are a decade late for the edginess they seem to be going for. The busboys are still folding napkins on the bar, and the hostess dims the house lights for him after showing him to his booth. While the busboy clears all but one place setting