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

Craig was upstairs, so that was everybody, the sum of the delivery team. “Who else?”

“All will be answered in time, Grasshopper.”

Rusty took a mouthful of beer and instantly wanted a cigarette. “Craig said—” He stopped himself, registering the heavier of the two interior doors in the wall behind him by the bottom of the stairs. “Gonna grab a smoke.”

“I’ll come. Beats the heck out of watching video games.”

Cary didn’t smoke. Wouldn’t fit him as a person if he did smoke. In fact, aside from drinking Budweiser and foreseeing the resulting effect of the attack as far as general, everyday stuff being more complicated, futures looking a little greyer, he didn’t seem to have much to him. A simple farmer turned to delivering appliances because it paid marginally better. And even if his moment as Nostradamus might’ve been simple common sense, he understood how people worked—much of the negative effects seemed to be fuelled by paranoia rather than necessity; stockpiling goods, pinching pennies, and keeping reserves of fuel, which drove up prices all over, on top of everything real. He saw the flawed nature in a world where capitalism had everyone terrified about tomorrow, terrorists or no.

Through the heavy, exterior door at the top of a set of cement stairs, Rusty led the way into the chilled night. His movement triggered a sensor light, revealing a space busy with junk, but also the second row of seating from a minivan, leaned against a wall. A steel Folgers tin was next to it; about a third of the way filled with butts.

Cary plopped down first, while Rusty fished his cigarettes from his pants pocket. He lit and sat clumsily, foaming a white turtle head from the mouth of his bottle. He sucked it away before it had a chance to spill. He wiggled to his right to get away from the female seatbelt coupler.

Sitting there like that wasn’t so different from work, aside from that they weren’t moving and they had open beers in their laps. When Dwayne had paired them up, which was the typical before Rusty dropped to part-time, Cary drove, sitting on the left behind the wheel, as he was then, too, sitting on the left as if by default.

“So how’s school going these days?”

Rusty blew an expressive breath through pressed lips, not quite whistling. “Man.”

“That good, huh?”

Rusty told the tale of the frog and then of Mr. Beaman. The ups and downs of it all. Cary and Christine were the only people in his entire world who cared enough to listen. They were the only two he cared enough about to talk to, really.

Cary laughed at the frog story, but not in a deprecating way. Laughing with Rusty. “I had Steve Bishop when I went there. He quit to write full-time about a decade after, in the mid-eighties sometime. He was pretty cool. This Beaman sounds all right. He’s not like a weirdo?”

“I wondered, but nah.”

“That’s good. Not that I give a heck, none of my business…guess you’re older than a normal student, so it wouldn’t be all that weird. Legal even.”

Rusty huffed at this. “Weird to me. My ass is for exits only.”

“Wait ‘til you get older, doctors’ll change all that. Dig in there like you’re hiding gold.” Cary then took on a somber tone when he said, “You think you’ll make it this time?”

Rusty exhaled a white puff of smoke and said, “Yeah. Already wasted as much time as I can. Can’t do it this time, there’s no next time.”

“Gonna go to college or anything?”

“I’m not exactly Einstein.

“I’ve known some pretty stupid college graduates.”

“Do I look that studious all of a sudden?”

Cary took a sip. “Open some options. Not even just college, I’ve known plenty of people dumber than you who do all kinds of things.”

“You sound like Christine. She’s going to college in August, the end of August. Hasn’t narrowed it to which school, but a school up north already accepted her.”

“She’s a good one. You going with her?”

Rusty tipped his head, left-right, left-right. “Long way away.”

“Not so long, and you’ll need something soon.”

Rusty turned to Cary at this. “Wait. Dwayne’s not canning me or something? Linda was fucking looking at me funny, too. Better not be canning me, Christ, I’ll have to drop out again and—”

“I didn’t say that. Cool it, okay, just…you don’t want to be lugging appliances your whole life and Dwayne has the business sense of an alligator eyeing pork on a hook.”

Rusty squinted at Cary. The motion sensor died and Cary became a simple silhouette—dark on darker. “Better be just that. I can’t lose my job, man.” Thinking about unemployment made the nights sleeping rough when he’d first took off from the farm flash like emergency lights. The hitchhiking to the cities and sleeping in church basements. The nights when he walked until the sun came up so he wouldn’t freeze to death. He couldn’t do that again. Not knowing what he knew now about futures and grey horizons. Not since he learned there was no better for certain people, there just was.

Cary tipped his beer until it was empty, gave an ahhh, and then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I ever tell you I knew your mom a little. Kim and Carol worked together for a bit before your mom got in at the deli. That was way back, well, a couple years before you were born.”

“Never told me that. Where was this?” Talking about his family with Cary was infinitely different from talking about his family with Mr. Beaman, or just about anybody else.

“The casket factory. Carol kept on and worked there right up to a week before she went into the hospital. Some people tried to get me to sue, like it was a chemical in the production, but none of