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

“Well, actually…we’re going to have a few drinks at your place. Lana and Dylan had a pipe burst, so they’ve been piling stuff on chairs and milk crates all day. And before you ask, my dad’s home tonight.”

Rusty sighed, having guests sucked because the paper thin ceiling was auditioning to be a blow horn. “What time?”

Christine tittered and then leaned in, gave him a mostly dry peck on the lips. “You’ve got time to shower for sure,” she said, grinning as she pulled back.

—

In fact, he had about two hours to hit the store for a six-pack, shower, dress, and clean his room. The others would probably get drunk, might even want to after party in his cramped space—it beat the hell out of the soggy alternative—so he had to stay mostly sober or he might actually invite them back, and his landlords weren’t playing that. Inviting people back after drinking was something he’d never tested. Having one girl come home with him was no trouble, having a few of them…it wasn’t worth the risk.

He emptied the ashtrays into a grocery bag after putting on a blue button-up shirt and grey jeans. He collected the plates and put them in the shared sink to soak away the food and mold that had hardened. He then started a load of wash. That was the only aspect of cleaning he never really fell behind on—unless folding counted, which to him, it did not.

Finally, he stuffed the envelope from Mr. Beaman into his backpack with the rest of his school junk and put it in the small closet alongside all the stuff that needed tidied out of the way to allow space for standing around, even swaying to some low-volume music. He gave a cursory look around the tight space and said, “Good enough.” This despite that he really only took notice of the tobacco streaks when someone was about to come over, and he’d wished he could muster the energy to someday scrub everything.

A few minutes after sitting and stubbing out a cigarette into his freshly emptied ashtray, a knock landed on his window. He didn’t bother answering and instead hurried up the stairs to open the door.

 11

Moon was slim and tall. She had big eyes and smelled a bit like the bagged topsoil available at Canadian Tire. With a slender hand, she reached out and ran a finger over the long burn scar running up from Rusty’s jawline to beneath the outer corner of his eye. Rusty focused on the sparkly nail polish as the finger roved slowly over the ridges of the stiff, pink tissue. Andover was so small, hardly anyone even looked twice at him anymore—having gotten that out of the way in the years of his youth. The town, as a whole, knew all about Rusty and the tragedy, and that sonofabitch Leroy Talbot. His business was everybody’s knowledge by way of experiencing his presence, but this was something else, this was beyond strange.

Moon was Lana’s cousin and her given name was Jackie, but she had changed it because a lioness came to her in a dream and told her that was not how the spirits identified her. It was the first thing she said after introductions, got right into it while Nelly played on low from the boombox next to the old TV while the five of them held freshly cracked drinks. In the dream, the lioness then stepped to a cave in her childhood closet to mate with her father. Her mother was not there and therefore, her mother played no part in her destiny—could be for the good or the bad, of that, Moon was still foggy on.

He’d said that was a wild story and then she touched his face, no request, no preamble of questions. The term whackadoodie had come to Rusty as he glanced to Christine, who was grinning at him. He’d then looked to Lana, who was blushing, all the while Moon was still inspecting him. The contact was not short lived, not a quick graze to get that oogey sensation up through the hand.

“This scar travels much deeper than the surface,” Moon said, frowning.

“Okay,” Rusty said, not exactly upset, but he could get that way if he let himself. He’d been a sideshow before and he didn’t care for it.

“I feel it. There’s unfinished business here, isn’t there?”

“Hey, anyone want to do a tequila shot?” Dylan had a micky of Jose Cuervo white and a fruit-shaped squeeze bottle of lemon concentrate between the fingers of his right hand. In his left, he had a handful of salt packets from a restaurant. “You have any shot glasses, Rusty?”

Rusty looked at Dylan then and scrunched his eyes, thinking, even as Moon continued to trace the scar and hum her breath ever so gently to an indiscernible tune. There were things in the cupboards that belonged to the house that he never touched, but had permission to use if he put them back clean.

“Yeah, maybe,” he said and turned from Moon’s fingers, saying nothing else to her.

“Oh,” Moon said, as if startled, like she’d forgotten what she was doing.

He went out to the shared kitchen—best to leave the rest of the weirdness unexplored. The kitchen was a dim space with a single lightbulb in a fixture with no cover or embellishment—simply a lightbulb in the middle of a whole bunch of drab and dim. The unfinished walls, floor, and ceiling really pounded home the sense of poverty.

“This is a nice place,” Lana said. She’d followed him out.

Rusty barked a single laugh. “Not really.”

“No, but at least your pipes didn’t break.”

“Guess so.”

“Hey, I’m sorry about Moon.”

Rusty climbed up onto the counter with his knees and reached into the back of the highest cupboard. When he first moved in, he did a bit of snooping one night when