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About three months ago, back when life seemed relatively normal, Marty was watching Animal Planet one night and happened upon a special about mongeese. Mongooses, whatever. Cute enough little fuckers, and pretty unassuming with their little cat faces and squirrel tails. Longer he watched the show, though, the more unnerved he got by the little bastards: whippet-thin, sharp-nosed and sharp-clawed, their amber slit-pupil eyes alert. Something seemed familiar about them, though at the time he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Rust Cohle ain’t much to look at these days--worn-down and wrung-out and who the hell even knows what’s going on with that thing on his head or that other thing on his upper lip--but when they pull up to the house and get out of the car Marty could swear it’s ‘95 again, Rust with his hands clenching the car door and his eyes, sharp as ever despite the crow’s feet surrounding them, scanning the yard; Marty looks at him and he thinks of the mongoose circling the cobra, ready to strike.
“Call Papania.”
“Shit,” Marty says, holding up his cell. “Can't get a signal.” One of them really oughta thought of that, here out in the ass end of nowhere.
“I'm gonna ask to use the phone.” Rust starts off towards the house, long legs loping over the grass.
I’ll go ask, Marty starts to say, because that’s always how it’s worked. I get people to talk, you write the stats, the prick had said, but even the first part was only half true; they both got people to talk, in their own way. You wanted an assist, you called in Detective Cohle. You wanted a favor, you called in his partner, the good ol’ boy who could sweet-talk like nobody’s business. Marty almost calls after him to say so, but he’s got that mongoose-look in his eyes as he makes towards the front steps and if there’s one thing that the last seventeen years have taught him it’s when to stay the fuck out of Rust Cohle’s way.
So instead he starts to poke around the edges of the yard. He can hear things on the porch starting to grow heated, and he starts to turn back towards the house when he catches a movement out of the corner of his eye and that’s when sees him.
The tall man with the scars.
~*~*~*~
“I think you should go now,” she says, and for a moment he almost says yes, yes you’re right, I should. He’s seen a lot of scary shit in his life and been scared by it less often than you’d think, but looking into her eyes is like looking into a well that has mad, gibbering creatures dancing at the bottom of it. I won’t avert my eyes, not again but Jesus fucking Christ he is not sure that he’s ready to see what she has seen.
He’s sure Marty would make some sort of small talk at this point, put her at ease, but Marty was always better at this part and Rust couldn’t smile right now if his life depended on it. So instead he shoves his foot over the threshold and reaches for his gun with one hand while shouldering up against the door.
He feels his stomach rise up into his throat the second he shoves his way into the house. It’s too hot, too close, too dark--detritus piled up in every corner, dust and grit a thick carpet on the floor. The stench is unbearable. He grits his teeth and thinks of Alaska, of the sparsely furnished cabin that his father kept spotless in spite of the shabby handsewn curtains and the chipped secondhand plates. He knows that he might die today, and he’s ready for it--hell, he welcomes it--but Jesus fucking Christ he does not want to die in this house.
He hears Marty shout his name.
~*~*~*~
“Come and die, little priest,” the voice says, and it’s echoing so goddamn much here in this hellhole that he can’t figure out if the fucking psycho is coming or going. “I will if you’ll stay in one place long enough for me to get there, fucknuts,” he mutters.
He hits a dead end in a sort of circular chamber with a round skylight, casting sickly yellow rays of hot late afternoon sunlight onto bones and rocks and ragged bits of cloth. He holds his gun at the ready, waiting; the whole structure is a held breath. He hears quick but cautious footsteps still a hundred yards off, a muffled shout: “Marty, goddamnit.”
“You. You’re not the priest,” the voice snarls; it sounds closer now but fucked if he can tell how far. “You’re merely an apostle, a follower, the one that always walked behind in his dust--”
“I’m no fuckin’ sidekick, you sonofabitch,” Marty retorts, and he’s so busy being pissed off that he doesn’t realize Childress is making a run at him with a huge fucking knife.
~*~*~*~
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Out of all the god-damned stupid pointlessness of the last twenty-five fucking years, this was supposed to be the moment that swept all the shit and rubble into a neat little cairn and give shape to the whole vortex of worthless bullshit: this is my blood, which was shed for you and many
(me, me, me, I, I, I, I’m so fucking important, I’m so fucking important, fuck you.)
It was never supposed to be Marty--Marty with his easy smile and hair that always lay like flax against his temples, Marty with his two girls and the woman who after all these years can still bear to wrap her tongue around his name because Marty belongs in this world in a way that Rust never will--
Marty is bleeding. Marty is going to die down here in the dark.
He drags himself across the bone-littered packed-dirt floor, every inch of him agony. The wound in his chest is leaking blood and he’s pretty sure Childress broke most of his ribs. It’s nothing, though, next to the horror show stretched out before him: red bruises already blooming into black on Marty’s brow, knife jutting obscenely from his abdomen, blood pooling beneath him, trickling over the dirt, fanning out like tentacles.
He sees Marty’s fingers close around the handle and he stretches forward to bat his hand away. “Quit that,” he says, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “It’s holdin’ your blood in, dumbass.” He digs around in Marty’s pocket for the handkerchief he knows he always carries and uses it to place gentle pressure on the wound.
“Never gonna be able to wear a bikini now,” Marty murmurs with a guttural cough.
“Shush, Marty.”
“Rust--tell the girls--tell them I said--”
Goodbye might not be the words he’s reaching for but it’s what he means and Rust feels fear, cold and slick, rising up in the back of his throat. “Shut up. Whatever it is, you can tell ‘em yourself.” A gleam of pale light suddenly illuminates Marty’s bloodless face and Rust looks up to see the flare arcing across the sky like a shooting star. “Here,” he yells as loudly as the screaming pain in his chest will let him, “we’re in here, you pricks.”
~*~*~*~
Marty won’t remember it later, but somewhere in the smoky haze before the paramedics get him stabilized, the skies open up and the spirit of Corporal Eric Hart descends from the clouds, glowers at his son from under his crewcut, and says “get your ass back down there, shitbird. You still got work to do.”
~*~*~*~
The first time Rust ever woke up in a hospital, he wasn’t a patient. It was somewhere in the blueblack predawn of what he would later remember as Day Two of that vague blurry seventy-five-hour hell; he was curled up small in a hard plastic chair at Sophia’s bedside, same way he used to curl up on the mattress in the cabin in the winter months, to lock in whatever warmth he could. It took about a half a second for him to remember where he was and then his eyes snapped open to pick out the glowing green line that still rose, unevenly and uncertainly, on the heart monitor. Then he looked across the room and there was Claire curled up in her own chair, circles like black bruises under her eyes, and after a moment her gaze shifted from her daughter and landed somewhere near her husband but it was clear she didn’t see him. Not at all.
The second time he was handcuffed to the bed and every nerve in his body was a white-hot dagger and he didn’t see anyone he knew, and saw a great many things that weren’t there at all.
And now, as he looks up at Maggie Sawyer--her fists clenched on her hips, her eyes flashing fire, lips a thin hard line--he wonders (with sort of a detached, academic interest, because he’s not a child anymore and he stopped believing in fairy tales long ago) what it would be like for someone to be glad to see him wake.
She won’t give him the tongue-lashing he deserves, of course; not with his sternum held together with staples and wire, not with his eyes hollow and haunted and staring at the opposite wall. Maggie can be a real bitch when it serves her purposes but she’s not a sadist and she’s not going to say this is your fault, you dragged him into this and then you let him run in there to die. Still, it’s printed in every line in her face and he can feel the accusation pressing on the back of his neck like a weight. It’s a look he’s seen before, always from women. Why weren’t you watching the baby, Rust. You must have been a great husband. You miss a shit ton of what’s obvious.
He figures he knows who the first woman was to ever give him that look, though it’s long ago enough now that he can’t remember it.
Yeah, he’d missed something, all right. So goddamn wrapped up in his own obsession with the case that he didn’t realize it was chewing up Marty just as bad, didn’t stop to think about Marty with his own lost daughters and his goddamn white-knight bullshit. Marty was the one who raised his gun and, for the second time in their partnership, gone in for the kill shot.
He can’t stand the silence anymore. “How is he?”
“Still in a coma.” Her voice is cold and clipped, every consonant a stab wound.
“Maggie, I'm--”
She holds a hand up, big-ass diamond flashing. “Not the time, Rust.”
“You should go be with him.”
She looks around the empty room. They’ve been here about twelve hours, probably long enough for Marty’s room to fill up with flowers and get-well cards, though Rust suspects Marty will only have a handful of visitors. “You be all right?”
“Always am,” he replies.
She’s the last person he sees besides doctors and nurses for the next two days, until Gilbough and Papania turn up. As they begin to debrief him he realizes Papania won’t look him in the eye, and he’d be amused if he didn’t feel like every nerve in his body was screaming.
“Pedophiles in Sulphur. Girl’s a nut. At least his half-sister--”
He’d suspected as much. There’s something particularly surreal to him about the Tuttle-LeBeau-Childress clan, the criss-crossing tangle of the family tree, the endless network of grandparents and second cousins and great-uncles. Family always meant two to him, except for that brief moment when it meant three; he can’t imagine being a thread in such a vast, intricate, fucked-up tapestry, held up by rusted hooks and slime-covered tentacles rather than free-falling through life. He feels his stomach flip over and he’s not sure if it’s this whole Southern Gothic nightmare or just more of the standard detox bullshit; he’s been puking, shivering, sweating by turns since he woke up. He tilts his head back for a moment, waiting for the nausea to pass.
“...are you sure you wanna hear all this right now?” Papania trails off.
“Fuck yeah I wanna hear all of it.” He looks around for his ledger, and then realizes it must still be in Marty’s car. “Don’t fuckin’ leave anything out.”
“Anyway,” Papania finishes, “there was a knife in his shed matched our Lake Charles case, another that matched Lange.” He mutters something under his breath, eyes downcast.
“Hmmm?”
“I said, we owe you on this collar.”
His fingers twitch, compulsively reaching out for cigarettes that are no longer there. “So am I still a suspect, Detectives?”
“No,” says Papania, “but you’re still an asshole.”
~*~*~*~
Marty wakes sometime not long before dawn, and the first thing his gaze lights upon is the figure curled up in the recliner by his bed. Her hands are folded up under her chin like the petals of small white flowers, strands of buttercup-yellow hair framing her face, her lashes dark shadows on her cheeks. And suddenly--before he’s even fully aware of where he is now--it’s 1993 and he’s in the car driving them all back to the hotel after a day at Disney World, and Macie’s still wound up tight from cotton candy and frozen lemonade and the excitement of the day, talking a mile a minute about Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck and the Country Bear Jamboree. But Audrey’s out before they’ve made it out of the parking lot, face obscured by her hair, arms wrapped around the stuffed Goofy they’d bought her on the way out of the park, and Maggie’s laughing and saying we should do this every year, you know.
He blinks and he’s back in the hospital and everything between his chest and his knees is fucking agony and he doesn’t care, because Audrey starts from sleep, rubs her eyes just like she did when she was little, and says, “Daddy?”
~*~*~*~
Fucking nurses, trying to tell him what to do. It’s true he might of tried to get up and walk just a hair before he was fully ready to, but a man can’t use a fuckin’ bedpan forever, can he? Now he’s got this goddamn “fall risk” bracelet fastened around his wrist and they won’t let him out of his room unless he’s in this fucking wheelchair. He rams the damn thing into the wall trying to guide it into Marty’s room and the head nurse at her station down the hall gives him a look of disapproval. They have informed him in no uncertain terms that Mr. Hart needs his rest. Well, fuck them.
He sits at Marty’s bedside and toys with a ludicrously pink water pitcher, gaze flickering over his face, watching for the uncertain twitch of eyelashes. Ten or twelve minutes and he finally stirs, gradually rising up to consciousness, looking for all the world like a goddamn puppy waking up from a nap.
“Watchin’ me sleep, huh?” There’s a lazy, stoned half-smile on his bruised face.
“Fuck no.” Rust averts his gaze, suddenly very absorbed in sucking ice water through the bendy plastic straw.
“No, of course not. You was just passin’ by.”
“Something like that.”
Marty stretches out one hand, flinching only a little bit. “Hey, gimme some of that. I’m thirsty.”
Rust hands the pitcher over and immediately regrets it; without his cigarettes, his hands aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to do anymore. He’s fairly certain that the visitor to a hospital bedside is supposed to make small talk, but he’ll be damned if he knows how. Marty was always the one in charge of that, filling the car with words during all those long drives, talking of everything and nothing.
Marty lowers the pitcher and grins. “We did it, man.”
“We didn’t do shit.” He shuffles uneasily in the wheelchair. Christ, he could use a drink. “Saw it on TV.”
“Since when do you watch TV?”
“Newscast. They can’t pin it to the Tuttles, or they won’t. They got away.”
“Jesus Christ, let me have this moment, will you?” Marty snaps, rolling his eyes and gesturing expansively with the pitcher. “Ain’t it enough that I damn near cracked my head open?”
“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t’a done that.” He tries to make it sound offhanded, as if it isn’t the only thing he’s been able to think about since he woke up: Marty bleeding out in the dark, for nothing.
“Well, I’m already so much better-lookin’ than you, it wouldn’t’a been fair to let you bust your face.” He sucks on the straw, putting on a comically innocent expression. Rust reaches out and snatches the pitcher back.
“Why’d you do it, Marty? Why’d you go in after him? You coulda waited for backup. I’d’a thought you’d learned your lesson after Ledoux, stormin’ in, guns blazing.”
There’s a pause as Marty looks out the window, unable to meet his gaze, and if there’s one thing Rust knows by heart now it’s that Marty only looks you straight in the eye when he’s lying to you. “Yeah, I mighta learned my lesson, but I bet you didn’t. I knew if I hadn’t gotten in there first you woulda run in and done somethin’ stupid.”
Thank you is sitting somewhere under his tongue, behind his teeth but he can’t bring himself to cough it out, and Marty looks like he knows it, too; he chuckles under his breath and then casts his eyes around as if looking for something to change the subject. “Hey, look at what Audrey made me, ain’t it--”
But the effort is too much; his hand is halfway to the hand-painted card on the bedside table before he winces and falls back against the pillows, his face pale and drawn.
Rust doesn’t speak but he reaches out and presses the little button on the side of the bed, presses it again and again and again until the nurse appears. She rolls her eyes when she sees Rust; he’s heard the nurses in the hallway warning each other about the guy in room 214 who, between the DTs and the quasi-philosophical rants and the making weird little stick figures out of empty juice boxes and the way he keeps trying to talk the nurses into bringing him cigarettes, has been an utter nightmare. “You’re in the wrong--” she starts, but something in Rust’s face cuts her off.
“Give him something,” he says shortly.
“Is he--”
“Hurry the hell up.”
She injects something into his IV and he counts silently until he sees the lines of pain fade from Marty’s face. He wonders idly where he can score some of that shit. Apparently there’s a warning about “drug-seeking behavior” scrawled on his chart, which he finds just a little unfair.
Marty’s eyelids are beginning to droop. “You gonna come by later?”
“I reckon I could,” Rust says, slowly guiding the chair back towards the door. “If I don’t have anything better to do.”
“Like you’ve ever had anything better to do.”
Rust flips him off before he goes and Marty, with the last of his energy before he slips into unconsciousness, returns the gesture.
~*~*~*~
“Sit the fuck down, man. You’re making me nervous.”
“Fuck that. I been sittin’ down for three weeks now, I’m sick of that shit.” Rust shuffles around the room, leans against the wall. He’s dressed in a pair of gray sweats that are a bit too large; once they let him start walking around he started raising a ruckus about wearing the hospital gown. Something about “retaining the fundamental illusion of human dignity,” although he confides to Marty that it’s just that he was cold.
“So when they lettin’ you out?”
“Tomorrow, I reckon.”
“Where are you staying?”
A noncommittal shrug, his eyes fixed on the window. Marty figures that shack behind Doumain’s bar is too pathetic for anyone else to have rented in Rust’s absence, but Christ he hates the idea of him going back there.
“See that cupboard over there? There’s a drawer. No, the one on the left.” Rust goes to it, wincing a bit as he bends over. “Get my wallet and keys.”
Rust stands there holding them loosely in his hands like he’s never seen such objects before, isn’t sure of their purpose, looking at Marty with something akin to the expression of an old dog that’s waiting to see whether it’s going to be fed or kicked.
“Whatever’s in the fridge will have gone bad by now, so take my card and get what you need--”
“Marty--”
“Shut the hell up. It ain’t much, but there’s a futon in the spare room. Cable, too, ‘bout time you started watching television.”
“It’s more’n enough.”
It’s a mutter, drawn up from somewhere under his breath like it’s being pulled out of him on a wire, but Marty knows what it means so he almost says you’re welcome but can’t. Can’t bring himself to say anything at all, not when Rust looks like that, fragile, like something made out of pine needles and parchment, like the breath of Marty’s words might knock him over; the keys twitching and rattling between his fingers, his fingertips rasping over the imitation leather of the wallet. So Marty just nods.
~*~*~*~
Marty’s not doing a whole lot of moving these days except between the couch and the bed--doctor’s orders--and Rust has gotten pretty good at predicting when he’ll want a glass of iced tea or another one of his disgusting peanut butter-banana-and-mayonnaise sandwiches, or a fishing magazine to get him through the television wasteland that is weekday mornings, or a pillow for his midday nap. But he’s out on the back porch having a smoke when Marty wakes to find a rerun of Cops on, and if there’s one thing Marty Hart cannot stomach it is, ironically enough, Cops. Which is how he pops a stitch reaching for the remote control.
Rust hears a sharp yell coming from the living room and drops his cigarette--a move Marty will take him to task for later when it leaves a scorch mark on the wooden deck, goddamnit Rust, I appreciate the gesture but you know I got a security deposit--and gets to Marty’s side just in time to see blood pooling beneath his Marshall Tucker Band t-shirt. And it hits him harder than he thought it would, Marty with his shirt all bloodstained again, and he’s back there again with the grit of generations of bone-dust in his throat, the stench of children’s mildewed clothes in his nostrils, Rust, tell the girls-- and by the time he gets Marty’s shirt pulled up to assess the damage his hands are shaking.
“It’s fine,” Marty says, slapping his hand away. “Quit fussin’.”
“You’re bleeding, asshole.”
“Go get me a goddamn bandaid, then.”
He gets surgical gauze and tape instead, wipes the blood away without letting on that his heart is yammering in his throat, patches Marty up and threatens three times to call Maggie if he don’t quit fuckin’ squirming, though they both know he’s bluffing. Lights a cigarette and gesticulates towards Marty’s face with the smoldering tip a little too aggressively as he tells him not to fucking do that again, what the hell were you fucking thinking, if he needs something just holler and Rust will fucking get it for him.
“Holy shit,” Marty says. “You’re actually worried about me.”
Rust ignores this in favor of winding the bandages back up into a ball.
“I ain’t been this shocked since that time at the office when you asked if I was seein’ anybody.” His gaze is searching. “What’s up, Rust?”
“Nothin.’ You just don’t need to be landing yourself back in the fucking hospital--”
“Maybe so, but it ain’t like you to play nursemaid.”
“You shouldn’t’ve gotten hurt in the first place,” he blurts out, before he can bite the words back. Rust does not, as a rule, regret things he’s said--only things he’s done--although a few choice phrases he’d lobbed at Claire would be an exception to that rule; but he’d unsay it if he could, because now he feels like he’s the one cut open and bleeding.
Marty looks alarmed for a moment, then leans back, and goddamnit if introspective ain’t an odd look on Marty Hart. Finally, “Rust,” he says gently, the way he used to hear him talk to the girls, “this ain’t your fault.”
“Never said it was,” he snaps, focusing a little too intently on getting the gauze and tape to fit back into the first-aid kit.
“It was that psycho’s fault, and he’d still be out there if not for--”
but he thinks of the Oliviers, the Fontenots, the Kordishes, the Guidrys; of Bob Doumain and the silence that covers him like grave dirt; of sleeping children pressed between the pages of sacred texts; of Toby Boelert and his brittle black-eyed smile and his maddening refrain of I don’t remember, I don’t remember; of the loose-limbed boy he carried out of that place, and of Kelly Reider and her endless screams, his face, his face; of Dora Lange and her halo of swamp grass, her hands folded in blasphemous prayer. Of Marty in the back of the ambulance, chalk-white, slack-jawed. Of what he could have spared them--
“Stop,” he says sickly. “Stop talking, Marty.”
They dug up twenty-eight bodies in the grounds surrounding the house, although they’ve only IDed sixteen of them so far. Out back, though, in that place he doesn’t want to give a name to, they’re not sure yet how many lie restless--maybe fifty or a hundred all told, waiting to be pieced back together like so many jigsaw puzzles. Most of them in the last decade or so, although forensics thinks some of the ones near the bottom might go back as far as seventy years, and he feels the weight of every single bone.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen,” he says hoarsely, and he’s pretty sure Marty isn’t the only person he’s saying it to. But she’s not here, if she’s anywhere; and she would have been too young to understand the words, and they wouldn’t have fixed anything anyway. He presses his thumb against the bridge of his nose and swallows hard.
“Rust--you gotta stop blaming yourself for shit. I mean--you’re a sonofabitch and Christ knows you’ve fucked up plenty, but who hasn’t, hey?” Marty claps a hand on his shoulder, letting it rest there for a moment, and Rust tries to remember the last time anyone touched him--other than Childress when he was putting a hole in his chest, and the doctors when they were stitching him back up again. “It’s okay--it’s okay to let some shit go, man.”
Rust nods wordlessly, clears his throat.
“If you really feelin’ a need for absolution, though,” Marty says, reaching a hand out for the remote, “you can watch Deadliest Catch with me without bitchin’ about it being an inaccurate representation of the Alaskan fishing industry.”
“Shit,” Rust says, settling back on the couch and letting the warmth from Marty’s shoulder seep into his own. “In that case, I take it back.”