"I'll answer them the best I can," Muddy said affably, pivoting to look over his shoulder. Emmit could just make out the misshapen knot of his bad elbow bulging through his “armor”.
"How'd you break your arm? Not to be rude, it just... looks painful."
"Because he's a fuckin' retard and he wasn't wearing a helmet," Poke sneered. Emmit felt a hot rush of hatred flow through him like a passing demon.
Ah, so you are listening.
"Do they make helmets for your arms, Poke?" Emmit asked, raising his voice slightly and not bothering to hide his derogatory tone. "I've heard of elbow pads, I guess, but arm helmets..."
"Fuck you, faggot," was the best reply Poke could think of. "Fucking new blood."
Emmit had been hearing typical bully shit like that for as long as he could remember. It wasn't the insult itself that got under his skin; his skin was much thicker than most people gave him credit for. What burned him was that it came from someone like Poke. He opted not to reply, thus validating Poke's digs at them and maybe even spurring him on to keep his festering mouth running. Muddy didn't seem phased either, and Emmit thought, with a slight tinge of guilt, he's numb to it too. Muddy just grinned and shook his head, like an exasperated single father throwing his hands up and saying, "Boys will be boys."
"I fell off the roof of the Gas ‘n’ Grab," Muddy said, pushing a snowy pine branch out of his way. The trees were beginning to thicken now, steadily closing in on them like a living maze. Tiny needles jabbed at their hands and faces, breaking off and peppering their clothes. The smell of pine and sap was cloying, but not entirely unpleasant in the tasteless winter air. "I'm a firebug, I guess that's what I done wrong to get me here."
Emmit ducked under a low hanging branch, burdened by a thick frosting of heavy snow. Naturally, a large clod of it plopped off and landed squarely on the back of his neck, melting instantly and trickling all the way down the juts of his spine to the crack of his ass. That, too, wasn't entirely unpleasant. He was grateful for his "armor", but it was growing stiflingly hot under all those layers.
"Arsonist," Emmit said to himself, rubbing at his neck. "Were you going to blow it up Muddy? That probably would have killed you, man."
Again, Muddy began to giggle. The thought of his own death, which was not as far off as he probably believed, seemed to be just another joke on par with a nickname he got from crapping himself.
"I didn't try to torch anything, I just wanted to see. I wanted to see what I had to do if I ever wanted to blow it up. I was trying to watch the man from the gas truck, when he was putting the hose in the hole. The cops had been after me for a while, but I mostly tried to light up old ugly buildings that were empty. One time though, there was this homeless camp. They were living in one of the buildings I lit up. It was just an accident though. I never killed nobody on purpose."
Emmit swallowed hard, nodding and thankful that they were walking. It made it hard to maintain eye contact, and Muddy's confession might have been a little harder to stomach if he had had to look into the man's bright but simple eyes. No, the patchy back of his head worked just fine.
God, we really are all criminals here. But at least I didn't kill anyone... right?
That part of his brain was still a blank chalkboard. There were remnants of something there, but it had been hastily erased into a grayish-white smudge, leaving behind shadow memories that existed just outside the edge of thought, like a random forgotten word that dances on the tip of one’s tongue. Emmit didn't think he was capable of taking the life of an innocent person— but then again, he never would have thought himself capable of robbing a bank either.
Muddy had been talking the entire time Emmit had been out in space. He slipped back into the conversation as slyly as he could.
"Yeah, I mean... we all did what we did," he said lamely.
"Yes sir. So, I'm running like mad because from up on the roof, I could see the cop cars coming. It looked like Christmas lights. I guess I wasn't too hard to follow, and a big tank of gas is a real prize for a firebug. I tried to slide down the ladder real fast like they do in the movies, but I fell. Tried to catch myself with my arm. I heard it break, you bet your ass I did. It sounded like when you crack your knuckles."
Emmit cringed at that thought. Up ahead, he could see Poke stealing the occasional curious glance over his shoulder. Perhaps he had never learned why Muddy's arm looked the way it did, and the curiosity was superseding the need to push them around.
"You didn't go to the hospital?"
"Couldn't," Muddy said, kicking at something in the dingy snow under his feet. It looked like the stained sash from someone's bathrobe, lying discarded in the mush like a dead snake. "The cops would have found me there. 'Course they did anyway, not too long after. I was kinda happy that they caught me, because it hurt so bad I couldn't sleep, and I kept puking up any food I was able to steal. Anyway, that was years ago. I can't use it much anymore, but I do okay."
Poke had stopped and
