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

his own pants and boxer shorts. He scooched down to where the padding ended and his feet dragged over the carpet until his socks balled up and slid off.

Christine slipped those pink cotton panties down over the gentle curve of her ass and Rusty leaned his face in close, taking in her scents and the heat emanating from the hidden spaces of her body. Hands on thighs, he turned her some, pushed apart her legs.

Seventeen minutes later as they spooned tight together amid the sex-sticky sheets. An old Unsolved Mysteries about a dead bachelor with half-a-million in the bank, 98 sets of shoelaces, and no family was on the television. Christine said, “Do I grind my teeth when I sleep? The dentist said it looks like I grind my teeth.”

Rusty wasn’t really listening to her and came to a decision outside conscious thought. “So something happened tonight.”

“What’s that?”

He took a deep breath, then spoke quickly. “Cary and Linda have a thing, and the delivery crew is planning a heist.”

She turned at this, away from Robert Stack’s eyeliner. “Are you for real?

Rusty nodded and told Christine everything. This despite that her father was the local constabulary’s lead detective.

 8

Keeping everything normal was a piece to the plan that was likely going to be difficult. From the onset, Rusty ignored one point of normal, skipping Friday’s classes, though that wasn’t entirely abnormal. The wheels of his Tempo hit highway asphalt and toured, passing by farmland and clusters of houses with huge yards and tall fences on the outskirts of town before hooking a right, bumping onto back road gravel in a plume of dust. Trees and fields and more trees and fields. Aside from the straight grey roads, it was probably not so far from what it looked like a century earlier. Deer and birds grazed while swarms of flies, big enough to be seen in passing, buzzed around carcasses in the ditches. In pastures with wire fences, cows and horses chewed glistening, dew-damp grass, while foamy globs of mucus trailed down their chins. The odd farmhouse stood flagpole amid all those greens and browns, all whitewash paint and asphalt roofing.

Rusty hooked a left at a beat-up mailbox and pulled into Cary’s laneway. He rolled to what would amount to half a suburban block in Andover, fields on either side, empty to distant treelines. He kept on around the back of the barn, passing the house, where Cary had said to go to find the truck. Old feeders and tractor loader attachments rusted in four-foot grass, rusty with flaking paint. Piled cedar rails filled in a corner next to the barnyard fence, a few feet from where it ran down a hill into a bush.

The old truck was there, right where Cary said: maroon with sunburnt patches of pink, paint bubbled and peeling, with ashy burn marks darkening the exhaust stack. Out front, a portable battery charger connected to the battery beneath the hood—cracked just wide enough for the cables to snake inside. An orange extension cord ran into some waist-high grass, trailing into the barn by one path or another. The hum from the machine was constant.

Rusty knelt down to look at the options on the face. Simple stuff. He switched the charge off to read the juice level. The truck’s battery remained in the red and maybe it would start if he switched the charger to jumper mode, but what if he stalled in the middle of a hayfield and the alternator wasn’t humming quite up to 100%? Couldn’t jump it again way the hell out there unless he grabbed his car—and who knew how well his balding tires would perform in that damp grass. Best to have a full battery. He switched it back to charge and stood straight, cracking his spine out with his hands on his hips.

The farm was quiet, it seemed even the crickets were sleeping yet. An appreciable gentle breeze pushed the manure scents away from him. The cows in the barnyard chewed hay and watched him with huge, dopey eyes. Rusty did not care for cows, or pigs, or sheep, or chickens, any food animals in fact—this stemmed from his years on the farm. His foster parents were never especially mean, but they were cold, and during that last year, his foster father, Douglas, had gone angry. He seemed to walk around the house with a fist cocked all the time, building a Hitchcockian level of suspense, though only a couple times did he let the abuse fly in Rusty’s direction. Both times seemed like enough, but it took until the second time for Rusty to hone the courage needed to hit the road—perhaps it was cowardice in not fighting back.

Eight months later, Douglas had a brain scan. An otherwise benign tumor pressed against his brain in a way that explained the drastic change that year. Douglas showed up at Logic Appliance one day with an envelope. Rusty was on out on deliveries, but Dwayne accepted the envelope and passed it on—I’m not your messenger, you know, he’d said. The note explaining the check for $2,300.59 read, simply:

What the government sent after you were gone and we figured you’d come back, but you didn’t. I had a tumor, so it’s not my fault I was different. Good luck.

—Douglas

Douglas had had that tumor removed, and if he went back to normal, Rusty never knew because he never cared enough to find out. The sum from the envelope was good though, it was the seed money for the next seven high school credits he’d managed to accumulate.

Rather than hangout with the cows, Rusty grabbed his travel mug and cigarettes and went up to the house. A modular home from the ‘seventies, built-upon and sunk into a cement foundation. At some point since he’d moved in, Cary had replaced the vinyl siding with wood siding, which classed it up a