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It takes Rust a long time to come down from the cold; jury’s out on if he can still like things, by then. Shot programming. Down to basics. As much as anything, though, he likes places that aren’t easy to get to. He always has. He remembers. In her first trimester, Claire had developed a craving for pomegranates. By the time they finally came to season, months later, Rust relegated himself to picking out the seeds by hand. It holds: the harder it is to get something open, the more it’s going to yield.
The CLOSED sign nestled in the window of Doumain’s Domain is sun-bleached, more salmon than red. Rust parks in the deepest corner of the dusty lot.
The paint on the building behind the Domain pulls up from its planks with what could almost be called vengeance. Everything around here is either too wet or too dry. The place behind the bar is up a few steps off the ground, and Rust climbs them with little enough hesitation.
He knocks. “Robert Doumain?”
Knocks again. The paint job on the door was likely cherry, once. Pomegranate juice varies in color a little, dependent on ripeness, but looks like blood— if you’re someone who doesn’t know what blood looks like.
Rust can hear shuffling behind the door: Doumain, appraising him with an eye to the looking-hole. It swings open.
Stale smell of smoke and something woody, too. Bar cleaner. Chemicals and artificial citrus. Robert Doumain looks like something whittled out of sycamore, with hard, unfocused eyes set behind shadow. His long hair hangs loose around his face, and his beard needs some trimming.
“Mr. Doumain? I’m here to ask you about your son.” This was never his role in these things. Marty told him once that it might behoove him to try tapping into his Texan charm. (“You remember how to smile, don’t you?)
Robert Doumain looks him up and down. The apron tied around his waist is littered with black. “No, you ain’t,” he says.
“I’m sorry?”
His voice crackles; music from a record player used as little as possible. “Ronnie went missing in ‘85. If you was here to tell me something I need to know, I’d already have found out.” He’s already retreating inside.
“Mr. Doumain,” Rust holds up a hand before he can shut the door in his face: a plead, maybe. A bad benediction. “I might know somethin’. ‘Bout the men who took your boy.”
The eyes on him don’t stop their appraisal, but the door stays only half-closed.
“You’re right about your son. I’m too late, there. But I might be able to bring down the ones who took him from you.”
“You ain’t a cop,” Robert Doumain says. “What are you?”
The carrier of a quiet disease.
A private detective.
“I’m tying up loose ends.”
“I saw you before. You were on TV in, uh. What, ‘95? ‘96? The thing with— those kids.”
It’s out there now, heavy as the child-shaped thing Rust had bore and been on the news for.
Doumain opens the door without a word.
The sun comes down hard on the cypresses. Gold lays itself down in a stripe across Doumain’s cluttered room. Been a long time gone from Rust, that gold light. It hasn’t changed. Everywhere, paper and cardboard: unopened letters, notices, newspapers. Puzzle boxes and their scattered contents, a few framed on the walls but mostly taking up table space: trains, rabbits, national parks, Santa Claus, a lone fisherman. The smell of cigarettes and time. Yellowing walls and ceiling. Doumain’s Domain.
Alaska to Louisiana, the places kept by lonely, grizzled men don’t vary much. The particulars are different— hobby-things, liquor preferences, number of heavy coats— but the tenor is the same. Rust let his hair go long up north, and his beard, too. He’s lost the beard, and is already starting to lose some of the muscle that comes as consequence on a fishing vessel.
“Ronnie went missing in ‘85,” Doumain murmurs. “There was a search, yeah, we did the woods n’ everything. Police said they was looking into it. Sons of bitches.”
Rust never was the condolence man; all he has is the corner of the rug that’s been curling up near his brain-stem for the better part of a decade and won’t lay flat, won’t tamp down but for drink— and not even then, most days.
“You got a picture?” He asks. It sounds like him, to Robert Doumain— he only has the one voice, nowadays— but it might be Marty talking, cordial, or some other man entirely, one who cares what wounds he reopens in the world. Doumain does this thing where he darkens and brightens at the same time.
“Boy and his mother,” he says, when he fishes a framed photograph out of the kitchen drawer it shares with rubber bands and pocket-knives and heavy duty tape. It’s the same picture of the little boy Rust’s already seen, expanded: the one plastered on the poster. A big-eared kid smiles at him with gappy teeth. A dark-haired woman wraps her arm around his shoulder.
(“Only one way to stay young forever,” Rust had let Crash say, once, better judgment in remission.
“What’s that?” Ginger asked, lolling high, attention only glancing off him.
“Get yourself killed.”)
Doumain considers him, long time, stony enough that it’s hard to get a read on him until he shatters his silence to say “If you can do this— I’ll help where I can, but I don’t wanna find out. What— what they did to ‘em.”
Rust nods.
“This is gonna take me some time,” he says, and, after a beat, “The bar. You use an extra set of hands?”
“You asking for work?” Doumain asks, and to his credit, he doesn’t say it dumbfounded.
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“Remind me your name.”
“Cohle,” he says.
“”Nother room out back, Cohle. Yours if you want it. You saw the hours on the window. Don’t try to talk to no one don’t want talkin’ to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You been in the army?”
Nah, Cohle in the army was my pop, he doesn’t say. Can of worms. He can still smell the salmon and canned peaches if he thinks of them; Travis Cohle’s last dinner. He shakes his head.
“Cut the “sir” bullshit, then.” Doumain chews his cheek. “Was a sniper once. Few bullets still in there to prove it,” he says, pats his leg. Rust considers this: flesh closed around metal. If that’s something he could tell about a person just from looking. The bullet-shard in his own side, nested on some layer of sediment deeper than the triangle of scars he’d once shown to Marty. He’d been heading on his way to drunkenness and pulled his shirt up to the top of his ribcage. Sometimes Marty looked like an animal. Rust considers this: past lives.
“And, Cohle?”
The set of Robert Doumain’s jaw is tense like something heavy is trying to push it open. Rust lets his stare bore twin holes in him.
“You better not be bullshittin’ me, you hear?”
&
The room behind the bar, like everything else, is desaturated and brown. Rust gets Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday off. On weekdays, men made of old smoke drift in and out of the Domain like ghosts, variations of the same face. End of the workday, the noise of the bar swells up like a drunk orchestra preparing to play; they don’t play, though, the way they did in Big Anchor, the haunt Rust frequented the last few years up north. Men move slow in heat like insects in honey.
Fridays and Saturdays spark up roughness. Best way, Rust finds, is to tune it out until it reaches fever pitch and step in before anyone does something stupid enough to find charges for it. He’s a mirror and sometimes he’s a guard dog; he’s strictly neutral— until, of course, he isn’t.
There’s a man in the bar and he betrays what Rust has worked to know about coincidence. He has that shape to him, one that betrays old strength. There’s cigarette staining on his teeth, and from the plume of dirty air working out of his current smoke, more of him comes into focus: stubble scattered across his jaw like birdseed, careless and grizzled, same corn-yellow color as his hair; hard bones; a measure of meanness in his eyes. There’s something dull about those eyes, too, that might be called dumb if Rust didn’t know it for what it was, which is dormancy.
Rust finds words and hastily pulls them down.
“What’ll you have?”
“Beer. Surprise me.”
His voice takes words and bends them. Rust’s understanding of space feels wrong— he slides the beer over, not even touching hands, but the urge strikes him to step backwards. He takes note of the feeling.
“Name’s Cyrus,” the man says.
“Rust,” Rust says, surprising himself.
“You’re new,” Cyrus says, peeling at the sticker on his beer bottle with a wide, dirty thumbnail. Rust nods.
“Where you come from?”
“Alaska,” he decides, fighting the urge to say what he thinks about that particular question, on the grounds that he’s playing host, and people don’t like to think too hard about things that scare them— blood, repetition; being from nowhere, or worse, from everywhere: an HIDTV and a house near a curve in the road and between the legs of a woman he doesn’t know a thing about anymore—
“Explains the accent.” Cyrus’ smile is toothy like a shark’s. Rust breathes, on purpose.
“Man can be from more than one place. I was born in Texas.”
“That right? I just got back from San Antonio.”
Rust knows landscape that looks to scratch you up and nothing done in small-scale; he’s never set foot in San Antonio.
“Business or pleasure?” He says anyways, because he says these things every day: scripted words that never fit quite right in his mouth.
“I always thought man can’t find both in one place is missing out,” Cyrus grins— leers, really.
The problem with Marty— one of the problems with Marty— was that he was more worried about seeming like a good man than acting like one. The problem with Marty was that he didn’t know what the ideal meant that he was always chasing; goodness. This man doesn’t seem worried about that. Rust watches as he picks fights across the room. If it comes to punches, he’ll stop them; he won’t want to.
When Cyrus finally gets in Rust’s own face it’s with a square jaw and beer on his breath.
"You're holdin' back, Rust," he snarls.
Rust wants to grab his wrists and twist them. He can taste the second-to-last time he pulled that particular trick. Something like skin and salt and acidic fruit and Marty, Marty’s particular orange anger. When his fist connects with the man’s face, bright red blood spills fast and hot over both of them. That ends all of it. Doumain doesn’t say anything when he hauls Rust up and away and out— or, if he does, Rust can’t hear it, the symphony of voices all but lost in his own ears’ heartbeat crash.
Doumain guides him into his room— why not, who gives a shit— and he stumbles into his bathroom; he took a hit to the stomach and he could vomit any second, realistically. When it doesn’t happen right away he sinks dry into the bathtub, lights a cigarette.
“Gonna start beating up on all my regulars?”
Doumain’s the shape of a man in the doorway. Rust stares at the shitty caulking job on the rim of the bathtub and the dark rot starting in on it. He’s too old for this kind of shit.
“Cohle.”
“No, s— Nahh.”
“Is it the drinking? Make you violent?”
Rust wants to laugh at that; he nearly does. Concentrates on his cigarette— better idea. “Confrontation wasn’t my idea,” he says.
“I know that. But you’re behind the bar four nights a week.”
What Doumain means, whether he knows or not, is that he’s another handler; he keeps his fingers on the pulse of the Domain and Rust’s part of that blood, now.
“Won’t happen again.”
“Cy’s just the type of guy lookin’ to pick a fight, and I seen you deal with that just fine, Cohle. What’d he say?”
A voice like Louisiana— wet and warm and low to the earth. Go on, man. Hit me.
But this is impersonal mutualism; a bird on the back of a bigger animal doesn’t take up anything more than space.
“I don’t know.” The lie is palpable only for a moment, and it tastes like salt. Rust banishes it with a wave of hand and unflinching eye contact. “He was drunk.”
“Okay,” Doumain says, and leaves him alone with the doorway. He’s a big, tired man— without the weight of years on him, Rust would put him at six foot three, maybe four. The door to the laundry room— that’s where Claire had wanted to pencil in their heights. Track the way Sophia grew. Keep your head straight, honey, and she took this big breath, like it’d make her taller. Now you, Daddy; Claire holding a book to his head, on her toes, laughing; sweet mouth at his chin; three heights delineated with carpenter pencil, forever.
He’s a straggler, now.
&
Rust’s always liked places that aren’t easy to get to. He remembers— scrawny and shoes in hand, picking over pebbled beaches, an abandoned barn with birds roosting in its rafters. He remembers: walks to the bus station and biting cold wind. Skinny arms, fingers on a bowstring, Travis in his ear and over his shoulder.
He pulled Rust out of secondary for a year. Rust learned how to hunt and then how to re-register himself with the school. Precious items, secrets; his library card, his box of food with bright, untrustworthy packaging.
The house was nearly the same as Rust remembered it to be— older, though. Travis was the same. Squinted when the door swung open and said, “What the fuck did you do with your hair?” Same way as when he limped home the cold, bright day in or around ‘75 he got the side of his foot clipped in a bear trap. What the fuck did you do with your foot?
I got hurt.
&
He’s there again on Friday and his face wears Rust’s knuckles in the shape of an ugly, puffed-up shiner. Rust eyes him warily as he approaches the bar, casual as anything, and slides heavily onto a stool near Rust’s busy hands.
“Beer?”
Cyrus’ lip curls up in a sneer. It moves the bruise under his eye and Rust can see it hurt him.
“You got a hell of a right hook, Rust,” he says, with some kind of implication on it, or maybe just admiration; nothing has one meaning, and recently they’ve been laying atop one another, complicating Rust’s picture until he can’t make anything out.
“Not bad yourself.”
Cyrus eyes him head to shoulders like a cut of meat. Rust is too old for that shit, and being too old to think of anything harder than he practices it, slides a peace offering Abita across the woodtop.
“You and I— there gonna be any more problem?”
Cyrus runs a red tongue over his tobacco-stained teeth. He has long fingers and longer vowels— “ Naaahh,” he says. “Just makin’ sure you’re up to snuff, Rust.”
Rust has watched a rabbit twitch it’s life out and he remembers bony hands making his soft parts hard and he knows well from these things the tests of men. His handler’s mustache had twitched up once with its own joke— you know that What Would Jesus Do shit? Well, it’s like that. What Would Druggie Do?
Crash, Rust had thought but not said. But Rust had put Crash down for good, laid him out on the side of the road in a shroud of his stomach contents and Marty’s stitched-together eyebrows; fine silky thread.
“Am I?” He levels. “Up to snuff?”
Cyrus lifts his bottle to his eye and eases into the cold glass touch.
“Yeah,” he says. He sounds disappointed.
Doumain raises an eyebrow at him during closing that night, ‘cause Rust has some kind of luck on his tail and he happened to be in the building. They end up in his house, where a puzzle languishes half-finished on the only clear strip of table; Death Valley National Park in 1,000 pieces. Rust starts.
“You know my partner? One who did the talking on the TV, when that case got big?”
Doumain nods.
“This Cyrus, he just—“ looks like Marty with no manners. Belongs to the same side of the color wheel, tastes like a bitter take on the same recipe. Could have a knife-sharp woman and two baby girls at home; Rust doesn’t know, doesn’t want to. “Reminds me of him.”
Rust’s fingers have already found a cigarette and Doumain leans over to offer him a light. Rust can light his own goddamn cigarettes. He accepts.
“We fought,” he says around a mouthful of his own filthy breath. “‘S why I quit.”
“Whose fault?”
Rust glances out the window, where the sun’s already begun to abandon the edge of the lot. Sometimes, fault doesn’t seem like a reasonable prospect— just another consolation prize designed to reassure, to smooth over cracks in the illusion; things fall apart because of personal failure, not because things left to mere people will always fall apart.
“Mine,” he says.
“What’d you do after you quit the force?”
“Job brought me here, and now I ain’t got no reason to stay. Went to Alaska; that’s where I grew up, a little.”
“Good fishin’ up there, what I hear.”
Good fishing. Good hunting, too. Good hands and cold, always, which Rust can’t disentangle anymore from illness.
“If you’re partial to that sorta thing. Work’s work.”
“You got family up north?”
“Not anymore. My pops— well, that’s why I came back. He got bad sick. Leukemia.” Rust glances down at his thumb, where a long white scar draws a line direct through the whorl of his fingerprint. Cut himself opening a can of peaches, yellowy and smelling like it, half of Travis’ kitchen— the dwindling remains from his old stockpiled mountain of cans. “Drowned himself,” he finishes, because that’s the part that matters.
“Shit. Can’t blame him.”
Inhale. A woman in pale yellow once tried to teach Rust breathing exercises, but he can only ever remember the color of her jacket. Exhale. One morning Rust woke up and the sun off the snow coming in was blinding and Travis didn’t exist above ice anymore. Some grieving people say they knew death had swooped down before they were told— they just knew. Echoes from eternal return. Rust didn’t say that to the state trooper; wouldn’t have made a difference.
“Figured it was time to clean up the mess I didn’t get to, with that ‘95 case. Governor tried to stop me in 2012, but I’m workin’ it private like, now.”
“Listen,” Doumain says. “This is what you got, now? You came back down here for this, not the partner?”
“Comin’ down here for Marty Hart would do about as much good as a dog chasing its own tail down.” No, Rust has one thing left to check off, and it’s got nothing to do with his partner. A feeling of inevitability, he knows, exists only to cope with the knowledge that he may very well never see Marty again. Permanence is existential and terrifying.
Doumain looks down at his puzzle and moves a few pieces into place on the edge of the picture— sky, from the blue.
“I got nothing in the world that’s mine but that counter, Cohle. So you do what you came here for, and I won’t have nothing to worry about no more. You won’t neither. So you and Cyrus just avoid one another, y’hear?”
Robert lets his mouth slide shut into its customary line, as if it’d never left its place at all. Most people have too much they need to absolve themselves of; Rust can tell when someone’s done talking, too.
&
Rust works only at the speed he needs to, which is easy enough through the pleasant gauzy curtain of drunkenness he wraps around himself like routine. Avoids Cyrus like he's been told, and bothers Robert as little as possible when they aren’t connected by their elbows on the same bar. Sometimes he sees yellow ribbons in the air and it means danger, but sometimes it just means his eyes are showing their age; old photographs, the sun baking the color out a little bit more on every up-swing of the earth towards its relentless gaze.