Burn Scars, Eddie Generous [read full novel txt] 📗

“Fine,” Rusty said.

“Good,” Dwayne said and gave a fake smile that told Rusty to get moving.

The showroom was empty but for two salespeople and a DHL courier. None of them acknowledged Rusty as he passed by and made for the rear exit. He started up the ladder and got to finding the correct boxes for the TVs—down to the serial numbers—from the walls of the back bay where they rose almost to the twenty-foot ceiling. A bit like Jenga, Rusty leaned on the ladder and inched the boxes out, tilting them so the ones on top would slip into place without falling to the floor. He was experienced enough to extract boxes from middles of piles without tipping the works in just a few dozen seconds.

When time came to put the TVs in the boxes, Rusty did a once-through of the showroom, suddenly finding it emptied, and asked Dwayne himself to take the opposite sides.

“Someday soon, these TV will be so slim and light, they’ll hardly ever be on delivery trucks. Big ones will be, like fifty inches plus,” Dwayne said as he leaned over a boxy RCA. He smelled like McDonald’s grease and farted tuna fish, his shabby white button-up billowed out and his tit drooped from an edge like a kid peeking around his fingers at a horror movie—three-inch hairs sprouted from his areola and stood out stark as charcoal on snow.

“Save you some money on deliveries,” Rusty said, eyes tight on the plastic of the TV so as to avoid looking at the man.

“Save me money on labor, too,” Dwayne said. “You’re lucky appliances can’t really get much smaller.”

“Yep,” Rusty said, but Dwayne was already heading away. “You fat prick,” he whispered once it was safe.

The first TVs stacked on the dolly cart and Rusty wheeled them toward the bay doors. Just as he took up the van keys from a hook on the wall, Dwayne’s wife, Linda came out of her cubby office, kissed Dwayne on the mouth, and squeezed one of his hefty love handles. Rusty grimaced. She’d really been laying it on over the last three or four weeks, all over him and in front of everybody.

They were an odd fit as it was. She was average to slim, had a face that might’ve been pretty in her youth. She wore a short greying bob and dressed in heavy cottons and loose-fitting blue jeans, hiding any figure she had. Something about her size next to Dwayne’s made everything nastier.

Outside, he parked the cart behind one of the Aerostar minivans. One benefit of being on the Logic delivery crew was that he was gone more than he was there. It was perhaps the only thing that kept him from quitting or beating Dwayne to death with a vacuum cleaner.

—

Rusty punched in his employee code into the warehouse keypad. Back when Dwayne finally gave him a code, he half-jokingly warned that he’d know if Rusty stole anything or if he got kicked out of his place and tried to move into the warehouse by the entry code. Rusty was pretty sure it was more of a warning than anything else.

It never had crossed his mind to steel anything but time—that he took, but not even as much as other employees. He didn’t want for anything he might get away with taking and anything he might want—big TV or a banging stereo—were too obvious.

Then, if he stole something, he’d be right where most seemed to expect him: next to his daddy up north, behind bars.

He hit the lights next to the man-door. The fluorescent fixtures lit and shined on the rows of huge brown boxes with blocky black type and instructional areas. The electronics pile needing picked up had been separated from the rest of the inventory. It included two home theater stereo systems with subwoofers and three-foot cabinet speakers.

“One trip, my ass,” Rusty said into the warm evening air coming through the huge dock door.

The warehouse sat in a newish section of town that would never connect to the residential areas or the busy contractors on the far side of a grassy hill. That nothing section of grass was a buffer between one of six industrial sections and countless new and future subdivisions. A green section worth more empty as it kept homeowners happy.

He’d opened the big door only part way, more than enough to retrieve what he needed, also plenty enough to sit down over the lip with his heavy work boots dangling. On a four-hour shift, Dwayne didn’t give him a smoke break, so he took them when the opportunities presented themselves. He lit and puffed, looking at the nothingness surrounding the warehouse. There were no other buildings in the newly developed section, no streetlights yet that far down the street, and there were no homes close enough to watch him waste Dwayne’s dollar. Even the security cameras pointed inside, and none pointed at the big door.

He smoked almost to the filter, tossed the butt into the gravel next to the asphalt, and got up and got to work. It was dimming outside, cooling off quickly, faster than inside the warehouse. The lights of restaurants and a car wash a couple blocks away started to stretch toward him and what the warehouse ceiling offered, but would never come together.

The highway a quarter-mile away hosted regular traffic, and only got busy when the school buses fell into line alongside the shift change at the Butterball factory and day’s end at the Dickies factory. Rusty had once applied for a job at the Dickies factory, but never heard back.

A convertible rolled by with its music up high enough to entertain or offend the town, depending on where a listener sat concerning Ice T’s offerings. Rusty paused a moment, hearing the music only vaguely. He considered lighting another