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

cup of the morning and then lit his fourth cigarette. He took a deep breath, thinking it might just be easier to give up, maybe one of the construction crews would take him on. He could learn a trade, maybe, didn’t need to be a high school grad for that. Not yet anyway, but the way things were going…he knew a dozen college graduates who’d taken jobs at Butterball just as soon as they got home.

“You doing okay?” Cary said.

Rusty understood when Cary asked that it encompassed all facets of Rusty’s life, he also knew he didn’t want to burden the man with complaints. “Good as it gets,” he said.

The construction workers lit up and place was hitting the stage of blue where Jean would soon prop open the door for a few minutes. Rusty spied them without being obvious, trying to imagine doing another kind of labor—a sore back was a sore back. Getting away from Dwayne, and to a lesser extent, Dwayne’s wife Linda, was the most alluring point, but in reality there were Dwayne’s everywhere, bred to ruin days, bred to be bosses of mediocre establishments, bred to give fuck-ups all the shit they could handle.

“You coming out for beers tonight?” Cary asked, peeling open the plastic drinking tab one-handedly on the cup to the right before taking a sip.

“Guess I’ll have to go grab a sixer at lunch or something. Keep it in my locker like a cheerleader before a dance.”

Cary laughed. “I used to do that, not the cheerleading; mind you I could’ve. I was a tart.”

Rusty flashed an image of a bearded Cary Watson rocking the purple, white, and gold skirt and sweater of the Andover Trojans squad. He barked a great laugh.

Cary grinned. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll bring a few extra for ya. Don’t need to get suspended for something harmless.”

“Yeah, if I get suspended I should at least break something.”

“Steal some one-ply.”

Rusty paused a second to imagine failing out like that. It sounded exactly like the kind of luck he had.

“Why aren’t we meeting at the Trent or Randy’s?” he said, brain back on pertinent subjects.

“Privacy.”

Rusty tilted his head slightly and furrowed his brows. “Privacy for what?”

“You’ll see.”

The door to the washroom hallway opened and Danny stepped out, looking light on his feet. Cary stood then and nodded once at Rusty. “On with the grind,” he said.

“Have fun out there,” Rusty said.

Danny took his cup from Cary and said, “Fun, my ass. Got six fucking frontload washers on the truck and two forty-inch Trinitrons.”

 “I hear there’s a new fridge coming in. Sub Zero it’s called, weighs just shy of six hundred pounds,” Cary said, eyebrows high. “So, could be worse,”

“Could be worse,” Rusty parroted, completely intrigued by the idea of getting together as a group, outside Logic. The delivery crew had never met like that before. The walks of life didn’t really mesh outside the job. The job was all they had in common. That and beer.

Two minutes after Cary and Danny left, Rusty dropped a two-dollar coin on the table and started home—had to grab his backpack.

 3

The rubber-tipped chair legs squeaked against the stone flooring—that sound that can only be made by chair legs—the way they had since the school installed them sometime in the late ‘eighties. Rusty felt almost as if he’d been there since then, installed at the same time as those chairs and desks. Rusty didn’t recall his first days at Andover High, didn’t recall the trepidation he must’ve felt, the nervous excitement of moving onto the big school; whatever the emotion, it was gone and what remained was the sense of sickly familiarity. From the stone floors to the white paint on the cinder block walls, to the cork drop ceiling, spotted with pencil holes from bored students with practiced aim. The room, like the three other classrooms he’d been stationed to, and the washrooms, and the cafeteria, and the hallways in-between it all, hadn’t changed at all since that first year of school. The students looked the same. The homework felt the same and the teachers sounded the same, mostly.

All that and still, the vibe was wholly different. The other students looked at him with big museum visitor eyes—the dinosaur exhibit in their midst—and the teachers either resented him or pitied him. It was part of what made it so easy to give up last time, and it had only gotten worse.

The bell, same as it always sounded, rang and the students departed in a flood around Rusty. He wasn’t in the same rush, didn’t have any socializing to do, and wasn’t aching to get into line at the cafeteria for crinkle-cut French fries or flour dusty pizza subs—he guessed if he went down and checked the menu, he could indeed order the same damned dried out bun with pizza toppings, same crinkle cut fries, or same overcooked, better safe than sorry, chicken burger. The long tables, more than were ever necessary, lined all the way to the chained doors that led to the music room’s storage department.

In the ninth grade, he and a couple future mechanics broke into that room and smoked joints, and when they burned up the two Zig-Zag papers they had, tried to make a pipe out of a dented saxophone. Those days, he spent as much time in class as he spent dodging teachers in the hallways—those days, he was too young to kick out. Memories everywhere and they’d just about all gone sour. If only he’d tried a little harder that first time, tightened his belt and didn’t succumb to the siren’s call of full-time minimum wage.

Everything else the same, basement to roof, he was the only thing that had changed. No more drug dabbling or laughing friends, no more dodging teachers. He was new, but so damned old.

The other students