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Rust had always been a skinny kid.
When he was born, they’d expected a nine pound bundle of joy, but that was before anyone knew to expect the unexpected when Rust was involved.
Back then, his father was still attentive and sweet, if a little shell-shocked, and his mother had yet to lose her baby fat. She had taken to pregnancy well, curling up like a soft, newly found stray dog, in the hand-me-down armchair in the warmest corner of their cozy trailer. Texas nights got cold. Travis Cohle, his daddy, waited on her hand and foot. In those days, there wasn’t much use for sonograms or what have you, so when Rustin Spencer Cohle came quietly into the world, he was preempted by a stillborn twin no one knew was coming. Instead of the plush baby boy they had expected, Travis and Lena were granted one death and one life, and that life belonged to Rust, who came out stretched too thin, with his eyes sealed shut like a newborn pup. He was immediately loved and somewhat maligned.
Lena Hempstead, his mama, was bright and too young to be a mother. She was the kind of lazily beautiful girl that got what she wanted without having to ask much. When Travis met her, he was a veteran of a terrible, muddy war and she was a girl in a paper cap standing behind a soda fountain pull. To say that he fell in love with her immediately would be an understatement. The curve of her plump, pale hand on the metal soda pull was enough to make heat drop into the pit of his stomach, and more than enough to get him walking up to the counter, and pulling out one of his last crumpled up dollar bills.
Tavis wasn't a happy man. Anyone could have told her that, even folks who didn’t know him. And he wasn't a particularly safe man, either, but all of the girls were taking up with Vets in her town, and Travis just happened to be the one that came to her. He wooed her awkwardly. He didn't have a lot of money, but her poppa did and he was willing to help Travis take his girl out. She was the last of his unmarried daughters, and he didn't mind the idea of having an empty nest regardless of her momma's simple heart.
Lena and Travis never married. He moved them into his comfy old trailer when she started to show, and he went back to school and got a degree in forestry courtesy of the GI Bill of Rights. He took up hiking for long days in the deep woods behind their home. Lena bore the burden of motherhood with less grace than she bore her pregnancy. Rust was a constant thorn in her, and she felt a deep, cold regret over the daughter he must have killed inside her.
“If only it’d just been a little girl,” Lena told Travis, her rich country drawl dripping with disappointment. “Things are so damn simple with little girls.”
Travis took a long drag off his cigarette and blew the smoke out through pursed lips. “Little girls are bigger trouble than little boys. You should know.”
It wasn’t long before Lena started going out and leaving Rust with her poppa, or with the neighbor girl who wasn’t much older than 13 and half simple. Truth was, Lena had grown up some, and she was prettier and slimmer than she had been before her pregnancy. Everyone noticed her when she didn’t have the baby, and she made new friends. Friends who never knew she’d carried a baby at all. So Travis spent time in the wild and Lena went wild. Rust wiled away his time at the Hempstead homestead.
Eventually Lena skipped town.
She took Travis’ old army duffle bag, some rolling papers, what was left of the Mary Jane they kept around, and one picture of her and Rust. She left Rust. Kissed him goodbye on the top of his curly auburn head, waggled her fingers, and told her parents she was meeting up with some of her girlfriends to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the fifth time or so. Her mother had smiled. Lena always had loved cowboys. Later they realized she must have hopped a bus out to San Francisco. Later she sent Travis and Rust a letter composed of the kind of frenetic language that comes from too much intellect combined with too many substances. There were daisies pressed between the pages, and a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge, but Travis had already taken Rust to Alaska by then, and only Lena’s parents saw the letter. No one saw fit to forward it to Travis and his boy.
Most of the folks in their town seemed to have forgotten they existed at all.
--
In Alaska, Rust grew up in a little house on the outskirts of Anchorage. Travis worked as a lumberjack. He never married. Rust was too smart to think of himself as a lone wolf or any kind of romantic outsider from an early age. He knew he made people uncomfortable, that he disconcerted them and he made his peace with that before he hit his teens. Travis didn’t talk to him much, not really, so he read a lot. Took book after book out of the library. He fell in love with Freud. With Nietzsche. With Walter Benjamin. He devoured Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. He grew taller and he stayed string bean thin. He took up drawing.
“You’re a queer child, Rustin,” is what Travis said to him one night, sitting in adirondack chairs on the snowy expanse of their vast acreage. The aurora borealis danced overhead.
“No pa. I’m just not a child is all,” is what Rust said back in his slow, measured way. His accent was a constant shifting mess.
“Suppose you ain’t.” Travis nodded and sipped his eighth beer. Everyone was an alcoholic in Alaska in the 1970s, at least that’s what they say.
Rust shrugged and cradled his mug of coffee in his hands.
Travis didn’t care if he slept or if he didn’t. Travis didn’t reprimand him unless he was well and truly off the path of what he considered appropriate living. Rust had been praised for outsmarting a bear, or cutting a hole in the ice and letting down his line to bring home supper; but Travis never said nothing about his good grades, or his clever talk, or even the pictures he drew of their small, strange Alaskan life.
Rust didn’t mind much. He didn’t like his father. Maybe he could have, if things were different. But he didn’t and they weren’t. To him, Alaska felt like the long darkish morning before a brighter day that never came. To him, Travis seemed like an aborted story, a person who came halfway through their own tale and then walked clean off the page. Rust didn’t care about his father’s growing obsession with nuclear winter, and he didn’t care about collecting flat currency or small arms. He didn’t remember the oil crisis.
It was hard for Rust to leave Alaska, if only because Alaska was so far away from everything else. Eventually, he left just like his mama had. Didn’t offer up much of a goodbye or an explanation. Didn’t tell his papa he’d been accepted to college back down in Texas, and his papa never forgave him. Rust cared a little bit about that.
But not enough to write. Not for a long good while.