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

too bad. Probably the chickies like it. Gotta learn what turns’m on. Learn that and you get’m all you want outta women.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

Leroy lifted his hands. “Pussy. Fuck else matters?”

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

“Pfft, whoever told you I didn’t light the fire probably just yanking your chain. Was it a chick? Probably she’s trying to nail you, maybe I already had her and she’d going for some kind of double dip.” Leroy smiled with a wide open mouth and then ran his tongue around his lips.

It hit Rusty then. The man didn’t care, didn’t want out, didn’t need his freedom to get what he wanted from his pitiful existence. He was living the best life he’d ever known most likely. Possibly, the man assumed—could be rightly—that his women would forget him when he was free. He had a minimum of forty more years on his sentence, he’d almost certainly die behind bars, but it had become life and he’d manipulated it into a positive. Incredible. Almost unbelievable.

Rusty put his elbows on the table and spoke slowly. “Why would Landon Lawrence burn our house down?”

Leroy sat back again and licked his teeth beneath his lips. Then began slow nodding in something like surprised agreement. “Guess that might be right.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” Leroy was grinning again, on the sly. “Why do men always get mad at me? I beat as much ass as I pounded. Husbands and boyfriends—”

“Tell me why him.”

Leroy folded his arms behind his head. “’Cause of his wife. She was straight fiendin’ for it. What was her name again, Joelle? Janine?”

“What?”

“Not just his wife either. He had a better reason, that punk ass. Landon Lawrence’s kid wasn’t his.” Leroy began making a jerk-off motion beneath the table, thumping its underside. “She and me were wild together. That little dick cop couldn’t give her nothing how she needed it. His kid is mine. He wouldn’t even face me…”

Leroy continued talking, but Rusty heard nothing. The world sank and every ounce of oxygen in the universe became poison. Christine. Christine. Christine Lawrence. Christine Lawrence, his girlfriend, the woman he loved, the woman he…Rusty began gagging and coughing. He pushed to his feet and stumbled to his left, leaned against the doorframe.

“Hey, don’t go out there. Hey, sit down.” Leroy grabbed Rusty’s coat sleeve and kept him from going beyond the doorway.

“You done? Don’t move,” a guard said from down the hall.

“I think he’s gonna be sick!” Leroy said, poking his head into the hall.

In blinks, Rusty was passing the grey walls and the steel doors, passing a metal detector and more guards who wanted to see his ID, reaching into the dull mid-morning light and breathing in the crisp air. He opened the passenger’s side door of Christine’s car and fell in.

“How’d it go?” Christine asked.

Rusty was in shock, still couldn’t speak, and when he looked at her, he saw her beautiful nakedness. He felt her caresses and smelled the chemical reactions of their lovemaking. A little voice said, nobody ever has to know and you can forget.

“You okay?”

He managed to nod and with shaking hands withdrew a cigarette. She reached over and rubbed his thigh. He watched her hand like it was a deadly spider with bad intentions.

 18

It hit Rusty as he watched the hydro poles pulse by the window where he leaned his head: his life was completely and utterly over. Nothing could ever be the same again, nothing as he’d lived it would work out. Any positivity, any enjoyment, anything worth holding was gone. He had to rob a warehouse, get over the only love he’d ever known, and hope nobody connected him to Jim McManus.

And if they did?

To hell with his existence anyway. After everything else went south, what did it matter?

 A small patch of homes came into view amidst the nothingness of farmland and it was as if the vehicle slowed to a crawl despite keeping pace. Bungalows with vinyl siding over cement foundations, roofs greyed and in need of fresh shingles. There was a tree in the lawn of the first and one in the third. The front door of the fifth banged open and a little kid came tearing out, and then the kid grew into a teenager and the steps played in reverse, the forward motion on the roadway ceasing altogether. Rusty saw himself the last time the world decided he needed uprooted from his normalcy.

Into the house, no longer a bungalow, but instead, a big, old farmhouse with whitewashed interior walls and floral wallpaper borders—one ran below the ceiling and the other above the trim moulding. Probably somebody had thought this was cute. There were old pictures of men in military garb—ghosts in department store frames. The smell was there, the constant aroma of distant manure and boiled root vegetables. That scent was the intersection where hard headed poverty and an unwillingness to change intersected. It was bad days incarnate.

Rusty was in the living room watching TV with two of the other kids and their sneering foster father. The kids started fighting, rolling around the heavy brown couch next to Rusty, the man called them assholes and told them if they didn’t quit, he’d beat their goddamned heads in. They didn’t listen. The threat was empty anyway. Their foster mother came out and ordered the pair to their rooms. Then it was quiet and Rusty went back to watching a re-run of Friends with his foster father. The atmosphere took on a shift, something like that silence preceding the napalm in a movie about the slaughters for capitalism in Vietnam.

The second commercial break hit on the tube and Rusty’s foster father, all packed fat and old muscle, leapt from his chair shouting about foul language. He punched Rusty in the eye and nose and mouth,