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In 1995, the nightmare’s still fresh.
The dreams start with the 419; Dora Lange; somebody else’s daughter. They’re not constant, but they’re bad in a way that is sharp on the inside of Marty’s skull. When he wakes Maggie, thrashing, sometimes, but usually mumbling in his sleep, she hums him down with just the tips of her fingers on the meat of his back. She starts finding him in the morning in the arms of his recliner, the TV hot from running overnight.
1995. Rust Cohle— the Tax Man— circles the body of Dora Lange with his ledger; he’s one of those detectives who, on a scene, looks like some kind of vulture. He’s smart, obviously. He knows it, which is almost worse than being stupid. In three months, that’s what Marty knows about him— he’s smart, he knows it, and he doesn’t talk when he has nothing to say.
“You ever play Texas Hold-’em?” He ribs once, when a state trooper tries to joke with him and it lands flat at his feet like a bit of roadkill. Rust just barely glances up at him, still poker-faced with a cigarette in his mouth.
“Why?”
In 1995, Rust starts telling Marty about his outlook on life, as if the case itself isn’t dark enough. He talks about Jesus in the garden, all sorts of shit. How nobody’s really anybody. Just his luck, Marty figures, that nobody’s anybody and yet Rust Cohle is his partner.
The more Marty learns about the case, the less he seems to know. After Rust comes over for dinner, he begins to feel much the same about him. Sometimes, on their drives, Marty feels like they’re the only two creatures for miles, save for the occasional hawk. Not that he feels inclined to voice this particular feeling. Rust’d say some shit that would make Marty shiver at the thought of being the last two men alive, together. Forever doomed to witness the inscrutable mind of the Tax Man.
“What would you do in the apocalypse?” Marty asks once, because apparently he’s in some fucking self-flagellent mood, that day.
Rust makes a face that hollows out his cheeks.
“What am I doing right now?”
Maybe he isn’t inscrutable, exactly. Maybe Marty’s worried about taking too close of a look.
Audrey and Maisey played a game, when they were small, called Dragon Princess. Hours would belong to the careful construction of a castle (couch cushion ramparts, pillow turrets, blanket moat) in which the princess resided. Marty’s not sure where they got the twist on this, but the princess, at the first sign of displeasure, would turn into a dragon. The dragon suffered no fools; the castle bore her anger. Made the living room look like a tornado.
In the middle of Dora Lange, Marty’s castle meets its first demolition.
Everyone acts like Marty’s out of his mind. Even Rust, who steers him out of the hospital with a hand planted on his chest, then his back, saying easy like Marty’s a spooked fucking horse. Rust, who leads him back to his place and doesn’t ask him to leave. Marty blinks and a week has passed; he’s waking up in the morning and fixing coffee in Rust’s pot, enough for two.
So it isn’t on Marty, how mixed up he gets in ‘95. Not all the way. Because, see, he’s already spinning out, and Rust— this is what’s hard to describe, later, harder to justify— has a gravity to him. He knows somewhere deeper than words, the second he sees the inside of that locked box, that he’s being pulled into orbit.
Marty learns a few more things about Rust Cohle.
He’s taller than Marty, so they can’t stand in the same place to look in his fucked-up little eyeball mirror, whatever that’s about. He doesn’t announce himself when he leaves the house.
He spent four years on narcotics, undercover, wearing a jacket that’s small in the shoulders when Marty puts it on and has holes in the side big enough to wiggle your fingers through, which Marty does.
His fridge is sparse; that’s no surprise. He likes his yolks runny. He owns his pop’s hunting knife and a meager CD collection, which Marty investigates thoroughly. (Lucinda Williams, Ike & Tina, Townes Van Zandt, some other shit Marty’s never heard of before. Leonard Cohen. He chuckles.)
He takes his own pulse often.
His wife was named Claire and she took the dog when they split. He doesn’t show Marty a picture of her or his daughter; Marty doesn’t know if he even has one. He doesn’t really date. (“What do you do, Rust?”)
He reads.
He goes to see Maggie on Marty’s behalf, and he doesn’t complain.
He calls a bullet in the head small stakes. He takes his coffee with milk, which surprises Marty a little. He only has one mug and he stops taking coffee at all when he’s “getting ready.” (Starts taking Jameson instead.)
When he puts two fingers beneath his jaw and finds what he’s looking for (proof of something?), Marty wants to feel it too.
His eyes skirt around Marty’s edges. The only times he looks right at him are when neurological damage makes him see things that aren’t quite there.
The night before they set everything in motion, Rust seems like he’s being pulled taut by a medieval stretcher, so Marty sits with him on his mattress swapping a bottle. Sometime after midnight, Rust strips off his overshirt and jeans, passes out. Marty stays with him— he doesn’t know how long— looking blearily at his own hands.
That night, he finds Rust dead on the floor. It’s the first time he’s dreamed of him that he remembers with any clarity; he runs downstairs in his boxers, but Rust’s only sleeping, curled in on himself in such a way that the knots of his spine remind Marty of something prehistoric. He doesn’t dare check his pulse. He goes back upstairs.
“Hey, Crash,” Marty jokes when Rust dons his jacket the next evening, and he shoots a look Marty can’t place. His eyes are too big. His atoms are moving too fast.
When there’s coke in him, he talks so close to Marty he can smell the Jameson and see the way his skin starts melting onto his bones— like he’s already dead. Marty didn’t know voices could sound so threadbare. Marty didn’t know Rust could make him so nervous.
“Rust,” he says in the car; he gets the feeling, when the other man side-eyes him, that might’ve been the wrong thing to say. “Be careful.”
Crash— ‘cause he’s Crash, isn’t he, what the fuck— smiles at him. Smiles. It looks like baring teeth.
Marty gets Rust back, after all, and when they bring down Ledoux, he gets his wife and girls back as well. Things are good, after that. Hell, even Rust starts seeing somebody.
Marty doesn’t think about Ginger or the way he’d looked at Crash (confused, angry, almost moony ) or the way he sounded like a wounded animal when Rust hit him. And if he wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes, still thinking about damage to the soft part of Rust’s arms, well. He forgets about that as best he can.
☆
2002, Marty moves into an apartment that is, for all it’s worth, a much sadder version of his old bachelor pad. He tries not to think about a number of things, and fails on most accounts.
Some nights— most nights— he drinks himself deeper into these things. He hears Maggie’s voices: her sweet-nothings voice and the voice they discovered from her the first time he was unfaithful (not his word). He hears his fist connecting with Rust’s face, his slow drawl from conversations Marty only half-remembers: We are the consequences of our fathers’ actions, Rust says, or the paternal instinct is naturally coupled with shame, or it ought to be , whatever that means. He hears Audrey telling him to fuck off. It’s hard to imagine Rust had been a father. Marty could have asked Rust about his daughter a handful of times; he didn’t. But Marty doesn’t think about Rust because he’s guilty. He thinks about him because he’s angry, he reasons, because Rust crossed a line; Rust slid his long, bony fingers into Marty’s family and pried it apart like a medical examiner to the deathlocked jaw of a cadaver.
He fucks, sometimes. It’s never satisfying enough to be worth the aftermath, when Marty’s no longer illuminated by the glow of a pretty thing who sees his old rodeo muscle beneath the drink weight and everything else he can’t seem to shrug off these days.
“So, Detective Hart…” the last girl he follows home whispers to him, “are you going to arrest me?” Her breath is cloyingly sweet in his ear. Long brown hair spills from her and onto his face, strands of wilting Spanish moss.
This is a stupid line of questioning.
Marty doesn’t like who the voice in his head sounds like. He swallows and tries to dredge up his hungriest smile.
“Sure,” he says.
☆
In 2006, Marty wakes up sweating in the middle of the night one too many times, images burned on the back of his eyelids without sound, like he’s skipped paying at a drive-in in hell. He puts in his resignation the next morning, before he can even get his coffee. To hell with the force, he figures. To hell with the scenes, the bad images, and everything else that pressed down on him, malformed and hardened him into something he doesn’t recognize any longer.
“And your former partner— Rust Cohle,” the department-mandated counselor asks him. “I understand he quit the force following an altercation between the two of you?”
Marty furrows his brow. “Yeah, that’s true.”
“Are you still angry with him?”
Blood— Rust’s and Marty’s. The taillight of the red pickup coming fast at Marty’s cheekbone. Maggie’s voice. You’re close. That dream he still gets sometimes, the one he’s trying to shake off, where Rust Cohle’s dead on the floor with a belt around his arm.
“It’s been four years,” he croaks.
☆
In 2007, Marty takes in a tomcat. He doesn’t mean to. He’s a long thing, bony as hell, with dark patchy fur. At first he just paces outside the window. When Marty realizes he’s begun to expect him in the mornings he picks up a bag of cat food, just ‘cause the sucker doesn’t have enough meat on his bones. He keeps checking for a missing poster, even goes so far as to knock on a few doors, and suddenly there’s a collar around the thing’s neck and he’s forking over vet bills— just to make sure things are in order.
“Is it true black cats are bad luck?” he asks the pretty young vet tech in a white coat who’s scratching behind the cat’s ears. He gives the cat a look as if to say you never let me do that and the cat looks at him like you never tried, asshole. There’s still a bit of raised red on Marty’s hand, the price of getting him in the car.
“He doesn’t seem so bad to me. Are you a lucky boy?” she croons.
“He ain’t really black, though.”
“Sure he is! Or he was . This reddish-brown is what we call rust. It’s nothing to worry about, just means he’s spent a lot of time in the sun.”
“Rust,” Marty repeats.
“Yes, you look like a Rusty, don’t you?” She asks the cat, a finger under his chin. Marty could swear the thing looks smug.
☆
People start asking Marty questions in 2012, questions about Rust. And, like a ghost who’s name’s been said three times, Rust appears to him in all his gray glory.
He smells strongly of cigarettes and beer. Looks like an ashtray, too. Marty’s a little impressed by the mustache, actually, but the rattling red pickup of the Ghost of Murders Past rolls up after he’s spent the day dredging up their history, so pardon him if he’d rather spit in his face than pay him a compliment.
There’s still something observational in the way he speaks, if more manic, like his thoughts are a change in the weather or marks on a DB. That conviction, this fervor— maybe not bible-waving in a tent, but Marty could see him being a real good preacher.
Marty quit the force in 2007 because he saw a kid get hurt one too many times. Now it’s 2012 and, for the same reason, he’s helping Rust put files into unmarked cardboard boxes in a storage unit, a dark bloody spiral hanging over both their heads. The Tax Man. Shit.
“You haven’t been staying here,” Marty hazards. Rust follows his eyes to the cot.
“Nah, ‘course not, Marty.”
“Where you at, then?”
Rust reaches up to unhook the devil’s nest— lord knows how or why he got a hold of that— from the ceiling. His eyebrow twitches upwards slightly.
“Place out back of the bar I work.”
Marty kicks his door shut behind him that night, six-pack in one hand and bag full of files in the other. He’ll meet Rust at the office tomorrow morning and they’ll consolidate. He didn’t need to, actually, the pickup isn’t a ghost after all— but he wanted to show he was in it, or something. Rust kept the worst of what he has, of course he did. Always has acted like he’s a beast of burden.
Marty wonders, feet up on the sofa and cat rumbling on his chest like an old machine, what the place looks like, where Rust does the living-people-shit he can never picture him doing. Do people change in ten years’ time? Does Rust have white walls? Furniture? Does he still do away with garbage and want-things or, alcoholic he’s become, do inane objects pile up on his surfaces like barnacles on an Alaskan fishing boat? He’s not meticulous— long hair— but he cares some— ponytail, no beard. He labors under the illusion of having a self. (Marty remembers that; he doesn’t remember everything, but he remembers that).
Marty dreams that night, mostly muddled images, photographs fished out of murky water: dinner dates with animal-faced girls, police reports with his daughters’ names, Rust on the floor— now, with an ashy halo of hair spilled out around his face.
Rust’s already waiting for Marty when he shows up at the office. Smoking, of course, leaned next to the door that reads HART INVESTIGATIVE SOLUTIONS.
They find what they need, and what they don’t find by the grace of God, they seek out. Jumper cables. Sniper friend. Jesus, Marty’s living in a B-List cop show.
They find what they need, and then there’s what Marty starts thinking of as The Day. The day before The Day is all last rites: talk to Papania, prepare packages for the press. Beer with breakfast, if you’re Rust. Marty’s already been to see Maggie, and he figures calling the girls would just upset them, so that only leaves one thing.
“Look, Rust, we got one more loose end,” he confesses at the office.
“Shoot,” he says.
“I got this, uh— I have a cat, now.”
Rust waits, as if to say and?
“And if something happens tomorrow, I don’t have anybody to look after him. And don’t give me some shit about this.”
Rust studies him for a moment.
“Plenty of rodents at the bar. I can talk to Bob. Shit, Marty, I didn’t take you for a cat man.”
Marty shrugs, trying not to feel sheepish.
“He kinda adopted me.”
In many ways, the darkness is like a nightmare. Marty’s almost had it before, minus the smell of wet rot, minus the ax to the chest. The real darkness has more blood, when Marty’s eyes get adjusted.
He’s got it bad, yeah, he’s breathing bad. Rust, as per usual, has it worse. He isn’t really here. His hair’s softer than Marty would expect. Rust on the floor. Stay with me. Fingers on Rust’s pulse point. Still body of Erroll Childress. I’m here, Rust. Marty’s almost had this before.
When the flare goes up high above their heads, finally, dazzling and white, he feels impossibly small. He yells, and yells, and yells, and wonders if his last words are going to be here, we’re here, and then Rust .
Marty’s in bed what feels like a long time. Maybe it’s made longer by the waiting; he’s never been very good at staring at nothing, thinking up bad possibilities— that was Rust’s thing. Rust, who they won’t say a word about at first. We gotta get you to the hospital. They’ll take care of him, Marty, you gotta let go. Marty, let go of him.
There’s news, eventually; that’s the part of the hospital that fits with what Marty had always imagined: people filtering in his door, telling him things. They got the collar. That’s good news. Rust is in a coma. That’s— well. He’s alive.
Rust wakes up on a Sunday. He’s staring out the window when they come in, and the first thing he does, supposedly, is ask if he can have a cigarette.
Marty spends a little time in Rust’s room every afternoon; Rust doesn’t tell him not to. He tells him about the girls coming to see him, and Rust tells him they didn’t get everybody. He tells him about the nurse who’s sweet on him, and Rust tells him he never liked hospitals.
On the day before Marty’s discharged, Robert shows up with an unzipped square cooler bag.
“Don’t tell nobody,” he says, which are maybe the second words the man ever really said to him. The first were on the phone Marty knows now is kept behind the bar, and were really more noises of affirmation than anything else.
“What’s all this?” Rust asks, when Marty wheels into the room with the bag on his lap. (He doesn’t need the wheelchair anymore, but hey, a little fun never killed nobody.) He can tell he’s just stirred from one of his quietly fitful sleeps.
Marty flips the top open on the bag to his cat’s big, baleful stare.
“Hey there, old man,” Marty grins, fishing him carefully out. He goes easy, surprisingly so, and lets Marty scratch behind his ears.
“You wanna?” Marty asks, turning the cat so Rust can see his face. “He’s real soft, man.”
Rust looks a little lost, so Marty decides to set him at the foot of his bed. Cat bumps his head against Rust’s foot, and when nothing happens, decides to venture further upwards. He manages to get his head under Rust’s hand, the arm where his bird tattoo’s been beheaded and stitched together again beneath about a roll’s worth of gauze.
“Got a name on him?” Rust says, when he lifts the cat’s tag and finds no inscription. And the thing is, Marty doesn’t call him, most of the time, by anything other than hey or you, and when he thinks of him, damn him to hell, it’s by the name of the man sitting in front of him.
“It’s the vet kinda named him.”
“Uh-huh."
Marty winces and takes a long slurp from his hospital cup— gotta love those big cups— and Rust’s still looking at him afterwards, so he fesses up.
“Rusty. She said I should call him Rusty.”
“Rusty,” Rust repeats. He nods.
“Marty?”
“Mmm-hm?”
“You named your cat after me.”
Rust gets a particular look on his face, when he knows he’s onto something— like he’s latched onto a thread and he can pull it just by looking at you. Almost self-satisfied, that look, the closest he probably gets to it.
“Like I said, it was the vet.”
Rust just stares at him.
“Look, man, I didn’t know I’d see you again. I figured I’d find out if you died, but who the hell knows? I didn’t mean to, but by then I guess it was a good— reminder.”
“A reminder?”
Rusty pads across the bed and back to Marty, who holds out his hand so he can rub his face on knuckles.
“A reminder about living with difficult realities, maybe, I don’t know.”
“You get more Catholic since I last saw you, or what?”
“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t know, Marty. Just seems like a pretty big leap from having not a shred of self awareness.”
Marty huffs. “You know, I’m man enough to admit that I drove my family away, Rust. I can own up to that. Besides, you was the one told me about meditating, all those years ago, on fucked up shit. Like being crucified and shit.”
“I suppose I did,” Rust says, a little quieter. He looks like Jesus, actually; if Jesus had two massive shiners and still smelled a little like Camel blues when they hoisted him down from the cross. Marty watches as he starts to lose him to something far-away; it’s midday, a few broken yolks of cloud gumming up the sky.
“You still do that? Meditate on that,” he says when Rust furrows his brow, though it might not be a look of confusion.
“I think as little as possible about Jesus,” Rust murmurs. “I told you, I picked up drinking again when I crossed the state line, and I didn’t stop.”
For a few minutes there’s just silence— Marty can admit, too, that he’s never been as good at sitting in silence as Rust. He’s doing it now, letting a cat with his name pace around on his hospital bed like he can’t decide if it’s a good place to hunker down or not. Marty glances at the faint lines in the crooks of his elbows, just a few of the scars Marty knows about because he was there. Marty’s been there, he’s realizing, for a fair portion of the rearrangement suffered on the body of Rust Cohle.
“You ever get, uh, bad dreams?”
“You know that I do.” Mirthless. Cold eyes.
“Well, I do too, Rust.” He swallows. “I dreamed you died.”
He doesn’t like the way Rust looks at him, then.
“What the fuck’s that got to do with me?” He’s snapping suddenly. “Your dreams and your cat aren’t my fuckin’ problem, Marty.”
Marty can feel his nostrils flaring like Rust’s waved red at him. “It’s got everything to do with you, Rust! Who else would say anything if you wound up in a ditch somewhere, huh? It’s been my responsibility since you stuck that needle up your arm in front of me, Jesus Christ—
“You can go,” Rust growls. “You ain’t my guardian angel, Marty, I didn’t ask you to come in here every fuckin’ afternoon. You got no fuckin’ debt to me, man, you can walk out that door anytime you want—”
“No,” Marty snaps, and that surprises him. Surprises Marty, too.
Rusty blinks at them. He’s got sulfurous eyes. Caution-colored.
“Rust, you’re an asshole—” Rust scoffs, and he holds up a hand as if to say easy. “It’s true, and it doesn’t matter. You don’t pick your family, you don’t pick your partner, and you don’t leave ‘em if you can help it.”
“You hated me, Marty.”
“I wanted to kill you, after that, yeah, ‘cause you were my friend , Rust. You are my friend. Fuck.”
For a while, they just sit there— Rust looking out the bright window at the ant-sized cars and people milling about the parking lot. Marty wonders how much time he’s spent, his whole life, just looking through glass like that. He used to pretend not to look at Rust— like he wouldn’t have noticed anyways. This isn’t the time for that; they’re alive, when by rights, maybe Rust’s right— maybe they shouldn’t be.
Marty’s been on the bull long enough, he figures, this is where he starts scoring points.
“What’re you seein’?” he asks, ‘cause he was a fine detective and he remembers the way Rust’s eyes went wide, back in the day. Crash’s eyes, too. Doesn’t suck in his breath like it’s through a straw anymore, which Marty figures for a good thing.
For a second, he’s not sure Rust’s going to answer, but then he murmurs, “how much do you know about painting?”
“Not much,” Marty says truthfully, “not much. I could point out the Mona Lisa. And Audrey does some real conceptual shit these days.”
“Ever heard of impressionism?”
“Sure.”
“I can see the brushstrokes, Marty, that’s all.” He holds a hand up to the window, outstretched fingers ruining the image of a man trying to keep the sun from his eyes. No, Marty figures, he’s getting all the light coming in.