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

“Oh, you’re Leroy’s boy, huh? Surprised there ain’t a gang of you running around by now.”

Rusty upturned his eyes at the woman. What did that mean?

She was looking at the door where the guard had taken the boys in bowties and their mother. “Sign here,” she said, gaze still elsewhere. “Usually it’s just Leroy’s women who come to see him. You ever meet any of them?”

Rusty signed his name and handed up the clipboard. “What women?”

“Ooh, boy. He’s got murder honeys. Some women…they’ll do anything for a man that bad. They’re all nuts, you ask me. They all think they’re the only one or the relationship’s different, something like that. Leroy does conjugals with two of them lately. He’s had plenty over the years. We have a couple rooms made up to look like regular family houses. More like trailers, I guess. You aren’t going to one of those now, just so ya know.”

“Wait, what?” Rusty said.

The guard reappeared at the doorway and the woman on desk duty said, “Okay, follow that man. He will seat you, do not wander.”

Rusty started away and the woman asked for more identification from the man and boy who’d stood behind him in line. He continued on until he met the next guard. He was tall and soft, and had tattoos on his fingers. Wore his head shaved and looked a bit like one of those neo-Nazis from the movies. The guard ushered Rusty through a door that led into a hallway of several open doors and mingled conversations. They passed a sign that looked something like a fart warning: a silhouetted figure had its knees bent and motion lines trailing its backside, the words SIT DOWN above and WHEN SHOTS ARE FIRED below. Pacing the hallway were two more guards—both tall, thin men. Through most of the doors, civilians sat at shining tables with an inmate, snack foods littering the tables like Halloween hauls. The walls and floors of the drab rooms were the same hard grey as the rest of the building. Above it all, looming like an angry god, was a tower. It had wire screens with spaces big enough for a shotgun. There were holes in the ceiling from where shots missed the bullet box—a We Mean Business warning system—high up on a pillar about ten feet away.

“Holy shit! That you, Rusty?” Leroy said, standing with his arms wide, as if awaiting a hug. He looked strong and fit. Had the jawline of a movie star, but his teeth were crooked and one was missing, all were yellow.

The guard said, “Twenty minutes. Don’t leave this room.”

Rusty nodded and skirted his father’s hands to sit on one of the seats fastened to the table—they were firm and round, like how they had them at McDonald’s, but the seats did not spin and probably nobody’s kids begged to visit.

“All right, no worries. Good to see you. Knew you’d come eventually. I even got a letter from your foster father once, you know that? Then I got one from your teacher. You look a little old for school.” Leroy made a face as if calculating age in his head, and then kept on with the fast-talking. “You gotta be nineteen or twenty? Usually I get the family units for visits. Got me some girlfriends.” He made an oval with his left hand and worked his right index in and out like a piston. “Usually the visits is one of my girlfriends and I need the family space ‘cause it’s got a bed. These women are starving for a real man; bunch of them is married and still come to me. You got girlfriends? Bet you do, probably just like me, though you ain’t as good looking. Bet you do, though, like your old daddy.” He humped up into the table and stuffed his bottom lip under his top row of teeth, eyes downturned.

Rusty swallowed a golf ball of mixed emotions. This wasn’t what he expected. The man was happy and strange, euphoric; a drunk who’d tumbled from the stool and smacked his noggin too damned often, left him dim as a candlewick in a hurricane. He reminded Rusty of this disabled older kid from the special ed. class who sometimes beat his meat under the slide at lunch.

As Leroy moved around, contoured muscles bulged from his arms and shoulders. He had two tattoos on his neck and at least one on his chest, more elsewhere—crude prison art up and down his arms. He had LEROY on the knuckles of his right hand. He wore his head shaved and had no facial hair. The only visible expectations being met were that he wore the uniform: a white t-shirt and dark blue pants, denim slipper shoes.

“Man, I had this one chick in here, right? She found out about this other chick and where she lived and everything, went to her house and tried to kill her. What happened next was real wild ‘cause the chick who got attacked wrote me a letter, said she fell in love with the chick who tried to kill her and said they would both have to break it off with me. How about that? Psycho bitches, but man, they love to fu—”

Rusty interrupted. “I know you didn’t light the fire.” Rusty forced a calm he did not feel.

Leroy stopped moving and frowned. “Oh yeah? I don’t remember nothing ‘bout it. Had lots of girlfriends say I didn’t light it, wanted me to make appeals. The best ones is the ones who know I done it. They get so hot about Kim dying in a fire. They’re all nuts, but I get the benefits, so it’s all I need. Hell, I’m basically the king of this here cast—”

“But you didn’t kill Mom or Rebekah.”

Leroy folded his arms over his chest and stretched back to lean against the wall. “That scar don’t look