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

stress had his guts acting up and wouldn’t let him sleep. Back then, that happened a lot. As precarious as his situation was now, it was smooth sailing back compared to when he first moved in.

“There you are,” Rusty said and grabbed the four eggcups. They were heavy plastic with blocky floral designs, probably from the ‘seventies.

“She’s a bit crazy.”

“Yeah,” Rusty said and hopped down. “It happens.”

“I told her not to say anything else.”

Rusty frowned. Lana looked so helpless. She was short and skinny, had on all black everything aside from a series of plastic bangles in a rainbow of colors and a pink scrunchy holding back her dyed black hair—her eyebrows were medium brown.

“Don’t worry about it. Seriously, it becomes a thing if you make a thing, just let her be weird.” Rusty stepped to the sink and rinsed out the dusty cups, and dried them on the tail of his shirt. He handed them to Lana. “For your shots.”

“You don’t want one?”

“I’ll stick to beer. I can DD.”

Lana nodded and her mouth moved, her expression suggested she might say something irritating, like it must be difficult or I can’t imagine or life’s just so unfair. Instead, she turned and headed back to the room.

Rusty followed her, thankful, and once through the door, Moon pointed and said, “It’s a family thing. The scar beneath the scar. Did a family member hurt you?”

“Moon!” Lana said, not yelling because Rusty had warned them, but emphatic.

“Guess so,” Rusty said.

Moon’s eyes were wide as wide got over this.

“Eggcups, classic,” Dylan said, trying to pretend they weren’t cramped, trying to party inside something like the world’s most awkward phone booth. “Only four. I’ll drink out of the bottle.”

“None for me,” Rusty said. “I’ll be the lightweight tonight.”

Moon tilted her head. “That’s part of it, right? There’s something to do with alcoholism. I can sense it. Your aura is very troubled.”

“Sure, somebody has to drive us to the bowling alley. That’s the biggest part as far as I can see.” Rusty offered something a little bit like a smile and reached for his beer and then for his cigarette pack. Moon kept spying him, as if there were tiny words printed into the ridges and shiny flesh running up the side of his face.

Christine held out two fingers at Rusty, asking to bum a smoke while on the boombox came the opening to Wu-Tang Clan’s Gravel Pit.

—

The bowling alley was all neon and shadows. The crash of pins and the buzzing of arcade games rang out alongside a background soundtrack coming from the end of the bar where a jukebox played Billy Idol. The crowd spoke over it all and despite everything good about the night, Rusty kept coming back to the plan and all the ways it might go wrong. Now and then he remembered how good it would be to stick it to Dwayne, too.

Moon held a pink ball clutched to her chest with appropriate fingers in holes. The ball glowed electrically under the partial black light shine. She stepped to the line, wound back, and threw. The shot missed picking up the spare by two pins. She turned, her expression not exactly all there. She, Lana, and Christine had been into whisky sours for the last couple hours and the effect was visible. Before Moon stepped off the slightly raised platform of the lanes, her expression changed and she pointed at Rusty.

“It was your father who burned you, right? And he was drunk!”

None of their party said anything to that and almost as if it was timed, the Billy Joel song concluded and nobody had re-upped the quarters feed, knocking the noise an additional few decibels. Luckily, the alley was loud enough otherwise that nobody beyond their lane heard the proclamations. She was just another hooting young adult having a good time.

Moon stepped down then and plopped her butt into the molded plastic seating next to Rusty. “And you haven’t forgiven him. You have to forgive him.”

Before Rusty had a chance to react, Lana grabbed her cousin and dragged her away. Christine draped herself over Rusty’s shoulder as Dylan stood for his shot, again making-believe there was nothing untoward going on around him.

“That bitch is fucking stunned,” Christine whispered and then kissed the scar and then his ear.

“Maybe, but she guessed pretty dead on…everybody this week is bugging me about my dad,” Rusty said, his throat raspy from smoking far too much since they’d been out. He became a character from a Mickey Spillane novel, lighting up in every scene he wasn’t getting into a fistfight or objectifying a woman.

“Steee-rike!” Dylan shouted after the telltale pin crash symphony ate all other background noise for about a heartbeat. The game wasn’t even close. Dylan was well above one hundred and the rest of them swam somewhere between sixty and eighty with four frames left. Their first game had been pretty well the same, though Moon was much better before she’d gotten slippery drunk and fallen back into focusing on Rusty’s scar.

—

Christine rushed back into Rusty’s room with only a towel around her after visiting the can. Her legs were shiny under the yellow bulb light and her hair was lank and stiff from hairspray and time. She dropped the towel and Rusty lifted the blanket. She snuggled in and spooned against his sticky, naked body. Most nights she didn’t seem really comfortable in the total buff when sleeping over and put on, at very least, her panties, as if the landlord might come in or one of the other tenants. But she was drunk and nobody was quite the same when they were drunk, so she nestled in, cool cheeks pressed against his flaccid sex.

Rusty held the clunky old TV remote and flipped through the mediocre late night offerings until he found