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

“What the hell? Was almost forty, then thirty-six and change and now thirty-one?” Jim said. “That’s hardly more than if I keep going into work for the fat bastard.”

“Not really. Logic doesn’t have a year of debt left,” Linda said. “Dwayne’s going to sink the ship, and I’m not going with it, but your jobs will. Right down the drain.”

“And you can find another job somewhere else,” Cary said to Jim.

“Seems like a big risk now. Before it was like a year was free, a whole year of free living, but now…” Jim trailed.

“There is no future job at Logic. Sure, there’s three or four months early, but this is it, this is how you get your wage. And it’s already set. There’s no backing out now. We’re all in.”

Rusty frowned, he hadn’t agreed to jack or shit, but somehow they knew he would, even if he hadn’t yet admitted it to himself.

The group continued light bickering and Cary leaned close to Rusty, bringing him from reverie. “You’ll be able to finish school and go wherever you want, start fresh. It’s not enough to live on for long, but it’s a life without your family’s cloud. You can go with Christine with nothing holding you back. You can just go and be whoever you want to be.”

Rusty blinked. This was true, but Andover was home, always had been…then again, to hell with it. “Right. Yeah. What choice do I have anyway?”

“You just can’t say a word of this to Christine…for the obvious reasons,” Linda said. “None of you can say a word to anyone.”

“Damned right, I ain’t doing this so you can get us arrested,” Jim said, pointing with his eyes at Rusty.

Danny was looking at Rusty too, hard, that kind of look you gave foreign dudes who’ve come to your local fall fair.

“I sure ain’t telling my wife,” Craig said, sad smile playing on his face.

The joke fell flat. The atmosphere was heavy as the crime and it had them all suddenly silent.

 7

Rusty was nine and his grandmother was sixty-one. She sat at the kitchen table with an empty plate before her, toast crumbs freckling the white porcelain. The left side of her face was drooping and strawberry jam had nestled into the lowest section pf flesh like she was saving it.

Rusty had spent three nights in a row with the neighbors and was only just home—the neighbors sent him away on foot once seeing the lights of his grandmother’s Chrysler pull up her laneway.

“Come here,” she said, slurring the words.

Dutifully and terrified, he circled around and took his usual spot, doing his best to keep the chair feet from squeaking. Once he was on his seat, she grabbed his left hand with her right and pulled him close—the chair squeaking and rubber-thudding at top volume. She leaned her face at him, her breath strong and sour.

“You did this,” she said.

Rusty shook his head.

“I’m probably gonna die soon instead of in twenty or thirty years.”

Rusty kept on shaking his head as he attempted to reef free his hand, but her grip was too much for the scrawny little boy.

“If you never came here, I could’ve relaxed.”

Tears sprouted from Rusty’s eyes and shame fell in alongside his terror.

“You little crybaby. I’m the one dying.”

Rusty yanked again, but her fingernails dug into his skin and he squeaked at the scratched pain.

“I should sell you. Nobody would know and nobody would miss you.”

A mosquito began buzzing around the table before hovering next to his grandmother’s right ear. Rusty saw it the second after she released him to swat it away. He tumbled back, hitting the linoleum hard with his elbows and tailbone. He bounced up and ran.

“Nobody would know!” she called after him.

Rusty kicked open the door of his car as he shook away the memory. Something about the meeting had triggered it, but he didn’t bother to delve any further. Did not at all need the added stress.

His life was simple outside work and work wasn’t exactly brain surgery, and still, it was all difficult to maneuver. Rusty’s tastes and needs fell into the mold, perhaps simplistic enough to suggest ease of station, and yet, his road was bumpy as hell. Add in the sudden demands—between the robbery and Christine going off to school—his mind was again looking beyond and seeing all his shortcomings.

“Nobody would know,” he whispered his grandmother’s words and shook again, trying to sift that memory down the river because it surely carried no gold.

And perhaps it was totally wrong.

And wasn’t proving that it was wrong the reason for exposing himself to the trouble of returning to school? And wasn’t that the reason for dealing with life in the boarding house instead of getting a proper apartment, a proper job, rather than finishing his education?

He got into his room and immediately lit a cigarette. The smoke tendrils rose from the ashtray to join the bluish cloud forever lingering at the ceiling. Through the mounting and regularly updated haze, the walls featured very little by way of decoration, but there was a mirror, a round-faced clock, and a mounted-on-cork poster of 2pac Rusty had bought with the proceeds from his sixteenth birthday back in 1997—a couple weeks before he hit the road. He’d had to go back for it one day when he figured his foster parents weren’t home, which was tricky, but he’d gotten lucky. His foster sister was sneering at him when he grabbed it, sorry to give up the picture she’d hung in her room.

He looked at 2pac’s dark eyes and the puckered bullet wound on the right side of his chest, over a tattoo of his mother. The glossy surface of the poster had gone dull and a gummy yellow film collected