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

cows had given him. All the way around the back end and up to the driver’s side, he opened the door of the old Freightliner. The hinges creaked and settled off-kilter, revealing just how often someone had pulled themselves inside by the door handle. He could appreciate that, his car had the same damned problem, somehow.

His cigarette pack was soggy as oatmeal. He opened up gently. The brown sticks came out of the sticky paper wrapping and lined the dash of the rig—after Rusty gave a cursory swipe at the thick dust collected there. He picked the one that looked the most smokeable and lit it on the twelfth flick of his damp Bic. He rolled down the window and watched the wasps circle the hole in the ground.

This idea was doomed before it even began and he put his head in his hands, palms over his eyes, careful to avoid pressing on anywhere painful. Maybe he should go meet his father, get to know him before Rusty moved in himself. Could be there was some prep he could manage to make his future a little cushier.

He let his hands fall and looked around the cab. Spice Girls and Brittany Spears stickers littered a steel toolbox between the seats. The air freshener was so faded it was nearly white, but the ghost of a naked woman lingered, breasts so high they might stand in for CN Tower advertisements.

The whole damned idea was doomed.

—

Things were going better than expected. The truck was more lenient than the one and only sports car Rusty had ever driven—in the ninth grade, another kid stole his father’s Corvette, but got too drunk and Rusty, deemed least drunk at the party, and most able, had to return it to the shed at the kid’s house. He stalled it a handful of times before getting it to roll. Unlike the car, the truck seemed to want to run and proved a smoother ride.

By the lunch hour, he was doing rounds in a hayfield like he was trying to beat a personal best in steadiness. By three o’clock, he had it up to third gear, rolling a bit faster than comfortable on the relatively short, uneven tract of land. He practiced breaking, heavy wheels rutting into the earth, kicking up plumes of dust and strewn grass. He found that stopping and starting were by far more difficult than driving itself. At four-thirty, he parked the nearly dry truck by the locked diesel tank. A day burning fuel made the plan seem less impossible, made a happy ending seem not just plausible, but likely. He really felt more like he’d get his share of the cash and stay out of jail, so long as everybody did their parts as well as he was going to.

“This could work,” he said as he slammed the door shut behind him. His face had numbed, but talking brought forth small jolts of pain yet.

One point that kept lingering about his mind was how they’d get Dwayne to accept his fate. Even after the circumstantial evidence buried him, he’d be snapping like chunky pit bull. He wasn’t the kind of guy to accept anything that pushed against his livelihood, and even as slovenly and hopeless as he was, the man had pride. A few years earlier, he’d tried to run over an employee who’d sold electronics at Logic and only got out of that situation when it came to light the employee had a cocaine problem and had tried to sue two previous employers. Dwayne was lucky, because no matter the prior situations the salesman had gotten into, Dwayne had lined him up and driven a van into the dumpster the employee had jumped behind. There was no doubt or chance at suggesting accident, he was undeniably trying to nail him.

“Linda must have something,” Rusty said and then moved his mouth around, attempting to force the stinging pain to abate—it was working, too.

Rusty left Cary’s because he had to work at five. By the time he got to Logic Appliance, a few minutes to the hour—bag of McDonald’s in hand—he was thoroughly exhausted, though completely dried out from his dip in the water trough. His remaining cigarettes were loaded into the dry and sturdy decks of an empty pack retrieved from the floor of his car.

Cary was in the lunchroom going over sales notes for the following day. He glanced up for less than a second. “Heya. We’re together tomorrow,” he said, business as usual tone, eyes down on his paperwork.

“How’d it go today?” Rusty asked, his voice rising strangely on the word go, his lip still aching from the swelling. He sounded a bit like an early pubescent.

“Had the first of one of those damned Sub Zero fridges. Dwayne must’ve had to special order it in early—been out for a year in some states. Barely fit through the door and Jim had to remove part of a cupboard. You go to school today?” Cary lifted his gaze from the paperwork to asked the question. “Holy crow! Look at your face!”

Rusty touched where it had swelled the worst—above his right eye. “No, well, not school school, but driving school.” Rusty said the last part like the secret it was. “You have wasps a few feet from where you put that charger. Damned things were not happy to see me.”

“Yikes.”

“Didn’t see them until I’d already pissed them off, royally.”

“Holy, yeah. They got ya all right.”

“Had to jump in the water trough.”

Cary smiled with the right side of his mouth. “Oh, that’s good. That’s gold. Next time film it. We can send it to Bob Saget.” His face soured some and his mouth leveled out. “Should maybe go to class these next days. Might regret it later if you don’t.”

Dwayne stormed into the lunchroom. “What’s he gonna do with school anyway? Look at your face!”