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

“Is it breakfast or supper?”

“Looks like supper.”

“Big Mac meal and a Coke,” Rusty said, thinking about something that managed to cling beyond the abbreviated visit to dreamland.

Whatever it was in the dream that reminded him, he needed advice on how to deal and Cary had always been the guy to go to. Rusty touched his jacket, certain the extra copy of the disc Christine had copied would be busted after the walloping he took. He reached into his pocket and pulled out what was there. Somehow, even with Dwayne sitting on him, thumping knees on him, punching and choking him, the thing appeared okay. The paper case was all dog ears at the corners, but the circle in the middle seemed peachy.

“Man, I need some advice,” he said, holding out the disc.

“Wear a rubber until you’re married,” Cary said, straight-faced.

“Christine’s on the pill,” Rusty said and felt that nastiness rising in his guts once again.

Cary pulled to the drive-thru box and set to ordering while Rusty thought about his words, didn’t want to blurt the worst of it, didn’t want to jumble the order. Once they got to the second window, before it opened, Cary said, “So what’s up?”

The window opened before Rusty could say anything. Cary accepted the drinks, placing them into the flimsy swing-out cup holders and handed over the money. He waited a few seconds as the woman on the till counted out and then accepted the change and then the bag. He pulled forward into a drive-thru only parking space.

“Let’s sit here and eat. I got something you need to hear,” Rusty said and held up the disc in the paper case, turning it gently.

Cary sucked in deeply through his teeth, but agreed. “But only for a few minutes. Be good to toss the garbage anyway, huh? Might be our luck runs out if we get pulled over again.”

Rusty nodded and slipped the silver disc into the stereo. There was silence for ten seconds before the opening chords of Amanda Marshall’s Let it Rain came from the speakers. Rusty skipped a track. An Alanis Morissette song began next, then some Natalie Imbruglia.

“Something about Natalie Imbruglia…I get it,” Cary said, stuffing fries into his face.

“What the fuck. No, this isn’t it.” Rusty skipped over thirteen tracks before he got back to the beginning. “Must’ve grabbed the wrong one.”

Cary shovelled more fries into his mouth, swallowed, and then said, “What was supposed to be on it?”

Deep breath, hands rubbing his sleep-crusty eyes, no time like the present. Rusty decided to begin with Mr. Beaman’s story and depending on how that went over, he’d go onto the thing his father had said about Christine. That incredibly painful thing that made too damned much sense.

“Uh, so my English teacher, Mr. Beaman, Todd Beaman, he was at a sleepover the night my house burned down. He and a couple friends were up in a treehouse next-door and they saw what happened, all of it…” The story was out of him too quickly, he’d missed many of the details that built the reliability of the story. “There’s more, but that’s the just of it.”

Cary tongued at something in his teeth, bulging his cheeks out. The burger wrapper had only a bite left resting on it. The last bite went into his mouth.

Rusty then seemed to notice his own meal had gone mostly unacknowledged. Waiting for an answer made him uneasy, so he tackled the box of fries in four handfuls and the Big Mac in six bites as Cary made minute expression changes around his lips and eyes. Like he was working out a reply.

Rusty finally had to say something. “Well?”

Cary then started the truck and then reached around for the garbage. He kicked out, the interior light had lost the very same sum of power the darkness had lost with the distantly rising sun—though it was still plenty dim beyond the lit parking lot. Cary stuffed the bag and the Timbits box into a brown fiberglass receptacle. Then he was back in and reversing from the parking spot.

“Sounds wild. You want me to tell you what to do?”

“I guess so, or, like, if you have any opinion. You’ve always been…you know, good and I need…hell, I don’t know what I need.”

“Let me think on it. Sometimes things aren’t exactly as they seem, sometimes things don’t go how they’re supposed to. Has to be more to the whole story.”

Rusty was about to interject that Christine was his sister, that his father did what he did with many, many women with the cop’s wife, but Cary cut him off.

“Let me think, okay. Just let me think about things, okay?”

“Sure, man.”

This was a good thing. Cary was the last good pillar in Rusty’s existence.

The lights of Andover were in sight a couple minutes after they got moving, and despite the missing the rear window and having the wind wipe in unabated, everything smelled like grease and indigestion. Rusty ran his hand on the zipper of the duffle bag, the tines like little teeth and he was teasing out a bite. He’d meant to ask, but forgot in the heat of it all, why the bag said Time Magazine.

Any other day, he would’ve told Cary how his foster mother had one just like it. She got it for signing up and cancelled the day the first issue and the bag came free in the mail, before they’d have a chance to charge her for the rest. Then he might’ve said something about how it was funny what people remember, what they hold onto by accident, but didn’t.

Maybe another time.

 23

Gravel ground beneath the wheels of the pickup as Cary steered off the asphalt to park crossways in the area in front of the warehouse. Cary left the engine