The night before Halloween, Marty says he’s heading out on a beer run and comes back home fifteen minutes later than usual toting three plastic grocery bags and a pair of pumpkins balanced in the crook of each elbow.
Rust thinks vaguely about neo-Christian constructs and brightly-colored consumerism, and then more distinctly about two weeks ago in the supermarket when Marty made a point to steer clear of the orange-and-black aisles strung with fake cobwebs, like bags of milk chocolate and plastic hockey masks were old stories he couldn’t brush elbows with in public. Rust could see him straining against some self-inflicted invisible bonds as they passed into the hardware department, looking away on purpose, a magnet trying to resist the pull.
Two weeks later, Rust thinks a little about inevitability.
“Are you gonna stand there and gawk at me or take one of these?” Marty huffs, toeing the front door shut behind him. His cheeks are bitten pink from the wind and the cool smell of autumn has soaked down into the fiber of his flannel shirt, something crisp and earthy-sweet that Rust wants to nose into and suck down in lieu of breathing.
“Pumpkins,” he says instead, like it’s a foreign word, holding out his hands to relieve Marty of one squash plus two of the bags. What the fuck did you buy pumpkins for? weighs heavy on the flat of his tongue but all that comes out in the end is, “You bought pumpkins.”
“Uh—yeah, Rust,” Marty says a little cagily, edging around with too-precise movements as he stows a couple six-packs in the fridge. He dumps the other bags out on the counter to reveal a rainbow mix of candy, different chocolates and sweets galore, and when he looks back up he thumps the flat of his hand against the hollow orange, not quite meeting Rust’s eye. “Neighborhood kids’ll be out in full force. Figured I’d do a little something this year.”
Rust’s eyes flick over the sprawl and then back up to Marty, focusing somewhere along the line of his jaw. He breathes out a sigh and touches the uglier of the two pumpkins, staking claim, tipping it forward to look at every angle. “You got a serrated knife you don’t care too much about?”
Sitting out on the back patio under a blanket of cricket song, Marty sinks his hand down into the innards of his pumpkin and draws a handful out, slapping it down on the sheet of newspaper laid out between them. It’s orange and stringy but he still swallows hard, feeling the glop squelch wet between his fingers.
For once, he doesn’t mind that it’s cold.
“Save the guts,” Rust says, disemboweling his own pumpkin with the practiced indifference of a slaughterhouse worker. “Can boil and roast the seeds with some salt later.”
“Alright then,” Marty snorts, working on scraping the inner walls with the edge of a soup ladle he peeled the sticker off of not ten minutes ago. “If the rapture comes down on us one of these days, I reckon you’re coming with me.”
“Pumpkin seeds ain’t gonna do us much good then,” Rust mumbles around a cigarette clenched between his teeth. He wedges his pumpkin between his knees to keep it steady, running his fingers over bumps and imperfections trying to figure the best working canvas. He doesn’t touch the black marker brought to sketch and outline, merely flips open his pocketknife and starts carving, blowing smoke from the corner of his mouth while he works.
Twenty minutes later, Marty fits the top of his jack-o’-lantern into place and clears his throat. Rust looks up and finds a crude face staring back at him, all snaggletooth smile and a set of eyebrows locked in everlasting consternation.
“Kinda looks like you, don’t he?” Marty says, grinning easy. “Needs a cigarette and a can of that horse piss to complete the look.”
“I’ve got better teeth than that,” Rust murmurs, though the line of his mouth wavers a little at the edges as he carves one last shape and wipes his knife along the hem of his flannel. He slips his cigarettes into a shirt pocket and stands, taking up the pumpkin with him. “You got any candles?”
“You’re done?” Marty asks, stooping to fold up everything into a square of newspaper before following the other man back into the house. “Uh—think I got some somewhere, lemme go hunt them down.”
Both pumpkins touch down on the top step of the front porch, now gone dark with the first fallen hour of night. Rust lights another cigarette and then flicks his zippo back into life, touching it to the wick of a white tea light. Marty presses another into his hand and he sets them in a pumpkin apiece before straightening, standing there smoking, a familiar grey outline inlaid with a burning pinch of garnet ember.
“Come out here for a second,” Marty says after a moment, eyeballing the neat symbols carved into Rust’s pumpkin, stars and a sickle and what looks like a crescent moon quartered up inside a glowing ring of light. “Wanna see how they look from the street.”
They come to stand between the light-throw of two streetlamps, shoulders almost brushing but not quite. “You know I’m gonna ask you what the fuck that is,” Marty says, dragging his right shoe across the pavement with a quiet scuffing sound. “If it’s some kind of Satanist shit the neighbors are gonna talk, man. Probably more than they already do.”
“Protection sigil,” Rust says on exhale, immersed in a rising cloud of blue-violet smoke. “Meant to safeguard a new home.”
“Well,” Marty says, looking down at his feet, Rust’s hands, the mismatched pumpkins sitting together on the top step. “I’ll be damned.”
He waits until they get back inside before he kisses him.