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

“Maybe. If you’re lucky.”

“Good enough.” He sat back down and took up his cigarette. Once she was gone, he’d have to do something about his hard-on…or not, easy come, easy go. “Have a good day, dear,” he said.

Christine waved as she left the tiny room and pulled the door closed behind her, though not before a waft of root vegetable scent entered—one of the other renters was on overnights and came home to eat stew when everyone else was just starting their day. Rusty lay back again and took another hit from the cigarette. College was an idea, one big enough that anything sexual fell by the wayside. It certainly wouldn’t fit in with the societal expectations for him, and if nothing else, that made it worth considering.

“More school.” Simply uttering the words made his skin crawl. Granted, college would be vastly different and he wouldn’t be the only adult. Still. More school. Costly school.

Once he’d smoked the cigarette to the wrapping letters above the filter, Rusty butted it out in the loaded ashtray, and grabbed the ratty blue bathrobe he’d picked up at the Salvation Army for two bucks—most of his clothes were purchased used. He headed out for the instant Maxwell House he kept in a jar next to the jar of off-brand coffee whitener and two-pound bag of granulated sugar. There had been days when he dreaded going to work, the promises of Dwyane’s inanity and back-breaking delivery slips, but nothing was as bad as going to high school as a grown man.

 2

The door wheezed and shuddered as if the hydraulic arm was counting the days until retirement in trash heap heaven. The Fall Street Café was the last place in Andover with a natural ambiance—so said a handful of regulars who’d been regulars since the place first opened. Rusty didn’t know about all that, didn’t much care, but liked the workaday men who patronized the place day in and day out, as well as the owner.

Twelve wooden tables, four of which remained pushed together, always, and a collection of steel-framed padded chairs purchased from Wendy’s Bowl-O-Rama during their 1976 renovation—the chairs had been old then, but in decent enough structural shape, so Jean Rodmay, owner of the Fall Street Café, had refinished the cushions. That was about all she’d done by way of sprucing up the dining area besides changing the lightbulbs beneath the dingy fixtures attached to the forever spinning fan blades, and scrubbing when necessary. That dinginess settled a dimness about the café that forgave most of the age spots and coffee stains. In the corner by the washroom door was a faded Wurlitzer jukebox. The neon embellishments had long ceased singing their silent tunes of color, but the crackly speaker kept on cranking out the oldies—whenever anyone bothered with the dated selections. Most times that happened in evenings when the patrons traded their cups of joe for glass bottles of Old Vienna beer, but even then, it was not commonplace to hear anything more than voices.

  Smoke poured free as Rusty stepped through the door. He’d walked the two blocks in the opposite direction from school because he had more than an hour until his first class—most days he left his 1986 Ford Tempo parked on the dead end street in front of the boarding house because going back to school meant cutting corners and gas prices seemed to rise every other week, and they had skyrocketed like mad since the attack on America. The guys at work all talked as if they understood how oil traded and the effect it had on gas, but they simply regurgitated whatever the talking heads on the news or the faceless voices on the radio said. Meaning Rusty bought into about half of what he heard. Though there was something about getting news from a man in workboats rather than a man in shined-up loafers and a fifty-dollar haircut.

“Hey there, school boy,” Jean Rodmay said, grinning. She was board skinny, her chest A-cup slim and her hips were a size twenty in men’s. She wore a tuxedo t-shirt tucked into her Levi’s, and Doc Marten’s boots, burgundy. She was the only woman in the place, but never acted like she noticed; maybe she didn’t anymore, as it was her norm. “Coffee?”

Rusty yawned and said, “Yeah,” stretching the vowels triple long as he reached his arms out to his sides to pop a crack from his spine.

Rusty was about as close to being a regular as one could come without quite fitting the bill. He took a chair at the social table next to an electrician and across from a couple grocery clerks. Dotted around the room were three other singles, breakfast plates, cups of coffee, and cigarettes smoking in ashtrays before them, same as every other weekday and some Sundays. The Fall Street Café was closed on Saturdays.

The men at the shared table nodded at Rusty. They’d all spoken before, but in that scene, Rusty was the young buck and he mostly listened when the others spoke. They all recognized him by the scar, remembered the tragedy and his father’s short trial. The whole town knew what Rusty knew about his family and how he got to be where and who he was. Nice thing about the café, nobody said diddly about any of it to him because getting on a man’s case about something he had no control over was for kids and rich people.

A while back, Rusty had discovered the place one night after work and was walking off some anger. Dwayne at Logic knew how to twist people, let them know how much—how little—respect he had for them. At the store, mentally handicapped workers came in mornings and nights to cut cardboard and vacuum the showroom, and Dwayne, showing Rusty the level of