Burn Scars by Eddie Generous (best novels for beginners TXT) 📕

Rusty shovelled fries into his mouth. The salt stung like hell, but he wasn’t about to show it. “Wasps,” he said around a mouthful.

Cary stood and reached into his pocket for his keys. “Well, close enough to five,” he said. “See you fine gentlemen tomorrow.”

Dwayne never said a peep if Cary left a few minutes early. Cary always started before the hour and often enough quit after the hour. Much after the hour, never said boo about it.

“You’re gonna do some cardboard tonight, the handicappers didn’t come in this morning.” Dwayne scratched at his nipple beneath his loose shirt, eyes hard on Rusty. “Geez, look at your face. Should put you on the sales floor, get a sympathy sale maybe…” he snorted, “imagine you out there, dealing with customers.”

Rusty swallowed that mouthful, found he was too tired to care about the insult or to rebuff the cardboard demand. At least it was outdoors work. “Then what?”

“Got a freezer needs cleaning.”

Before Cary was beyond earshot, he said, “Lord save him.”

—

Long as a casket and deep as a hot tub, the chest freezer had been in a customer’s garage. A fuse blew sometime when the family was on vacation in Aruba—perhaps the day they left, given the state of the contents. Only the lights and electrical sockets went with the fuse, the heat kept pumping around the freezer at night, during the day nothing had to be on, the sunlight coming through a window was enough to keep things cooking.

Estimated time to fester the goods: thirteen days.

The customers came home and decided the wisest move was to use Logic Appliance’s removal policy and purchased a new freezer rather than clean the one housing about fifty pounds of rotten sludge. Cary and Jim had used cranking straps to seal the freezer so as to move it, but once back to the shop took them off so Dwayne could assess and come to a decision on a plan of action.

Rusty spied the long white rectangle from the backdoor, knowing there was a damned good reason Dwayne had the guys leave it at the very edge of the parking lot.

No use in wasting time, Rusty started out into the cool evening. He carried a bucket, a garbage bag, rubber gloves, a jug of Mr. Clean, and a squeeze bottle of Goo Gone. Would’ve been smart to pack Vick’s VapoRub like a TV coroner. Couple daps beneath the nostrils would’ve done it. Maybe.

Rusty had no one to blame; this duty was his own damned fault. Back when he was new to the job, and thankful for the opportunity to earn minimum wage while breaking his back, he’d cleaned a trade-in refrigerator to something close to showroom quality. Ever since, Dwayne had him clean every nasty trade-in. But this piece, this was the ultimate.

He cracked the lid and immediately gagged, felt his supper rising, that secret Big Mac sauce especially. The burn crept up his throat and he dry swallowed a half-dozen times to keep everything down. Inside that freezer smelled like sun-sizzled roadkill, boiled down to its essence—from concentrate, like frozen orange drink.

“Christ,” he said, leaned on his knees, spitting saliva onto the pebbly parking lot.

Once he had his breath again, he cracked the freezer’s lid anew. His eyes burned and his nose tingled, despite that he hadn’t yet taken another breath. It was hot, like being near chili peppers boiling in a pan, but different. Once his lungs ached and he had to breathe, he choked up his throat a mix of fountain Coke and chewed Big Mac meal, and un-chewed half-pickle slithered out—an afterthought, afterbirth. He gagged and jerked his head like a pecking chicken as sesame seeds fired from his guts on a wave of meaty backwash.

The freezer lid had fallen closed again and that whooshed wind seemed to scorch his lungs and singe his nose hairs. On top of it all. Just the syrup yet, not even to the cherry: he had yet to reach into that special ice cream.

He leaned up from his knees and looked to the bay doors. Dwayne was smiling at him, chewing an open-mouthed bite from the Snickers bar he held.

It all fell into place then, all the trepidation around the heist became excitement. Robbing this sonofabitch was good and right and Dwayne deserved all the shame that would come with his public failure. Hell, probably he’d go to jail, fraud and debt evasion, something official sounding like that. Make the whole world see what trash he really was.

That string of thoughts alone gave Rusty the strength to open the freezer, to bag the soggy packs of putrid meat that floated in the thick pink swill a foot from the bottom of the freezer—up to his elbows almost when he dug deep for other hidden goodies. The drain plug was open, but only a trickle spilled. That liquid was too much solid food. He grabbed hunks of grey and green meat. Bits of blackened cardboard and a pizza still in his plastic—he laughed at a thought, he could wash it off, cook it up, and there was no doubt Dwayne would scarf the thing down, if offered. He pitched bucketful after bucketful like he was saving a drowning canoe and then scrubbed the interior to a magnificent white.

“Gonna make a bunch selling that one,” Dwayne said afterwards, his shadow looming over an exhausted Rusty, and then left. This was his idea of a compliment.

Rusty didn’t care, he even smiled as he cut and stacked cardboard in the recyclables dumpster after he’d bathed his entire torso and inside his nostrils in the employee washroom using gritty orange-scented industrial strength soap.

 9

Rusty bumped the main door closed behind him with his ass. There was a letter-size manila envelope on the chair that sat on the landing at the top of the stairs that led down to