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

the others got sick from leaning over the paint and chrome.” He sighed. “Sometimes there’s just a demon hiding inside.” He touched his chest with two shadowy digits.

Rusty knew some of that story, but never pressed. Cary had been a bachelor since 1990 and seemed like he’d accepted that life. Cary’s wife, Carol, had had stage IV breast cancer—heavy in her chest wall and skin—when she finally went into the hospital, and she died while the doctors were trying to work out a plan of hapless action, possibly taking their time, letting the cancer simply tick a job off their to-do list.

“Right,” Rusty said.

“I knew her to wave, but that’s it. Carol liked her. Now, your father—”

“Tried to murder his entire family when he was drunk? Almost did it. Yeah, heard all about that guy.”

Cary motor-boated his lips. “I guess, but he was pretty fun guy. If you were on his good side. I always got along with him. We played hockey together for years. He could fight too. Not just on the ice. He was wild, partied like a maniac. I remember this one time he had this chicky…” Cary trailed. “Probably don’t want to hear that one.” He barked a single nervous laugh.

“What?”

“He did very well with women, but I guess some of those times, your mother was at home with your sister and you, probably even when she was pregnant. He was shameless about getting women into bed.”

Rusty shook his head. “Another brick in that wall.”

“Yeah, but you’d get it better if you saw how it was back then. People were easier. You see it on movies about the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, people getting away from atomic households. Here, we’re like twenty years behind. That new freedom people were feeling in cities for years was finally coming here. Know what I mean? Like how the stuff in the theater’s sometimes been out for a year already by the time it comes to town?

Rusty nodded, took a sip.

“It was real different in those days. You might give your dad a chance, at least, I don’t know, ask him about what really happened. Might help you. You know, he signed that he didn’t remember doing it in a plea, but that was a bad deal. He had a public defender. Before that, he always said somebody else must’ve done it.”

“I’d say that, too, if I were…you taking therapist night classes or something?”

“Ha, no. That’d cut into my napping time. Just it never seemed to fit, not to me. I could imagine your dad doing some shady things, but burning people to death, it just seems…not him.”

“Man. I wouldn’t know. You sound a bit like my English teacher.”

“I don’t mean to—”

The door opened and Craig called up the stairs, “She’s here!”

Rusty finished his beer and then it hit him. “Her? Her who?”

 6

Cary left Rusty just inside the door and crossed the basement to put an arm around Linda Siegenthaler. An intimate and practiced dance, she pressed her lips against the skin above his beard and left a pink slash mark of Revlon. Rusty had never seen her wear lipstick—not pink, not purple, not anything, ever. His hand moved on motor memory and closed the door behind him as his legs pushed him forward. Linda looked freshly showered and clean in a way that she never had at work, on top of the color to her lips, on top of a dusty shading above her eyes. Her, like that, and away from Dwayne, and clinging to Cary was a sight beyond the relationship logistics that made any sense. She wore a light blouse and fitted black trousers with a gold clasp centering the waistband, not expensive, but nice.

Rusty didn’t ask, couldn’t in fact. He made it back to the couch and reached a hand into Cary’s cooler for another beer, his eyes hard on the improbable pairing. The way she clung was not the same way she touched Dwayne, the expertise wasn’t there, but the replacement vibe seemed something like passion.

Rusty peeled his eyes free and looked at the others. They were looking, but not how he felt that he was looking. The others had known, must’ve been it; they’d obviously met before as a group, only including him now, but for what reason?

“Okay, let’s start,” Linda said and separated herself from Cary’s side, and fell to her knees behind the coffee table. She began spreading out the contents of a manila folder like a magician’s card deck. “Rusty, sit, please.”

Cary nodded to him, told him to acquiesce with that nod, let him know everything was good and right. So Rusty sat. What else was he doing there but to listen?

And that had been the question all along, though he was suddenly asking from an altogether different angle.

“Cary’s pretty sure you’re more reliable than I’ve been led to believe,” Linda said. “We’ll have to see, but I trust Cary implicitly.”

Rusty cleared his throat. “What is this?” he said, frowning, looking from face to face to face.

Jim and Danny had scooted the beanbag chairs close to the table and Cary and Craig fell in on either side of Rusty on the couch, buoying him forward and up as if on a raising tide.

“It’s an opportunity,” Cary said. “Listen, okay?”

Rusty paused a beat, but gave a slow nod.

“As you probably guessed, we’ve discussed this before you were included. But it’s come down to needing you.” Linda spoke with an authority she never showed at Logic, despite that she was Dwayne’s partner, did the paperwork, and scheduled the deliveries. She was an ancillary facet who sometimes asked, usually coolly, though politely, to take care of something.

“For what?” Rusty was too confused to keep quiet.

“We’re jacking that fat bastard,” Danny said, glowing. Danny hated Dwayne with an anger that went unmatched by any