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

Rebekah stood on the toilet. The window was plenty wide enough for her to get out, and the ground was only eight or nine feet down. She could drop the kid and climb out after him, save them both. Just grab him, toss him, jump, be some kind of hero. They’d written a newspaper article about this kid she knew who saved his family, everyone called him a hero until the cops figured out the fire started in his bedroom when a big box of matches met his bedspread. That’s how they’d do her, too. Call her a hero and then find out she was a little high and a little drunk.

Had to be done. She nodded at Rust and said, “Time—” But one word was all she got out before slipping off the toilet lid and cracking her right temple against the pointy corner of the sink counter. Blood spurted from a flesh tear where a piece of skull bone poked through like a nubbin horn. She flopped the rest of the way down, already dead, next to the tub while the house burned around her and Rusty lay back, his left eye and left cheek above water.

 1

November 2001

Christine Lawrence stood from the four inches of sheets and blankets piled on the floor where Rusty Talbot had slept since three weeks after his sixteenth birthday. If it wasn’t for the easy access afforded to the bugs that came in through unseen cracks in the foundation, the makeshift bed wouldn’t have been so bad. That was a fall problem, mostly, and Rusty had only needed to squash a couple hard-shelled potato bugs that unwittingly rose to Christine’s radar recently.

Christine stretched her back, curving in a way that sent her ribs jutting out beneath her breasts. She wore silky, off-white panties with lace edges. Her legs were shiny under the yellowed glass of the light fixture, smooth and pale, and led right up into something like heaven. She plucked her bra from the fuzzy brown chair of 100% polyester that belonged with the room—it folded out into a wildly uncomfortable single bed that sometimes a friend would crash on, though not lately, not for more than a year in fact. The whole sum of the room’s décor was pure ‘seventies chic.

Christine had pink wrinkles from the sheets crisscrossing her back and thighs from the folded and layered bedding. Christine’s curly blonde hair was a mess, but looked almost purposefully disorderly. She was smart, too smart—and too damned pretty at that—to mess with guy a like Rusty, but there she was, in the boarding house room he rented for $75 a week. A room that saw many insects, had tobacco-stained walls, and dirty dishes dotting the floor because there was no table.

“Thought we’d have a little morning fun,” Rusty said, still stretched out flat on his back. His eyes remained closed, but he’d been mostly awake for about twenty minutes. He wiggled his hips a little as he spoke. “Morning’s my favorite time and you’re looking like a peach.”

Christine was three years older than Rusty. They’d met six months earlier at Logic Appliance. She worked the phones and assisted with some of the repairs scheduling, and he did deliveries and labor around the store with a crew of underachievers just about at the height of all they’d ever be.

Rusty had been lugging appliances for Dwayne Siegenthaler since a week before his seventeenth birthday. Back then, and up until recently, he was full-time—he’d switched to part-time on September 14, after his direct superior and good friend’s words clicked in a way that had him listening. Which was rare. Rusty had no father figures growing up and typically revolted whenever something of that ilk presented itself. That it was Cary Watson who said it, and said it how he had, made something hit home and fit like it was right; and Cary rarely gave him any advice. At first, Rusty only nodded how he did when anyone tried to steer his life away from his norm, but the words had roots.

That Tuesday, September 11, 2001, they’d been on the road running deliveries and detoured to Cary’s farmhouse about twenty minutes outside their route because audio reports didn’t give the news any justice. The radio had ceased all music and aired non-stop coverage of the attacks on the Twin Towers—more broadly, the attack on America as a whole. Once in front of the big-screen TV, Cary handed Rusty a Budweiser and told him the world was about to get a whole lot harder. Rusty took this with a natural, silent scoff; at first.

When he was just a boy, his grandmother had showed him a news article with a photo of his home on fire. The headline disappeared from his memory, but the image seared as permanently as the blaze had against his face. His grandmother told him it was probably a mistake that he made it out alive when the rest of the family died—aside from the no good Leroy Talbot, who was outside, drunk and immobile next to a jerry can. She’d then touched that long, puckered scar running up his face and told him he sure was ugly.

Cary shook his head, watching the endless loop of the planes crashing, and then repeated himself, as if Rusty really ought to listen. For almost three hours he held his eyes on the fifty-inch Toshiba cabinet that sat as the focal point in his living room, his voice solemn and his message getting clearer by the minute: if Rusty wanted anything more from life than lugging heavy stuff for fat asshole bosses, he had to get those final four high school credits. It took two days, but the guidance finally did sink in enough to take action. Rusty could afford—barely—to work part-time and live in the boarding house; he’d done so before, for two years in fact, but