“You don’t have to look so scared, Marty,” Rust says, breath cutting soft into the cold air between them. “I figure it’s plenty cold enough for me down here nowadays.”
“Yeah, but don’t you ever make me drag my ass up there without you pulling the lead,” Marty says, eyes thrown elsewhere, but when his hand bumps light against Rust’s hip they both know it wasn’t an accident. “You know I can’t read an atlas for shit.”
Rust reaches out and rests a hand on Marty’s side above his hipbone, light but steady, and thinks about the bullet-torn scar hidden somewhere beneath flannel and the pad of his thumb. “Where do I have left to go,” he asks, watching the line of Marty’s throat work, “that I wouldn’t take you with me?”
“Dunno,” Marty says, tensed up like an old spooked horse, and Rust waits until he feels the other man’s muscles ease and unfurl beneath his hand before letting it drop away. The next few words Marty breathes out are meant to be flippant but taste like relief in the back of Rust’s throat. “There’s that one biker bar in Texas.”
“There’s only one place I can think of,” Rust says, with a clear, untroubled thought about liquid darkness, and before he can think any further a voice is calling out behind them from across the street, high and feminine and loosely warbled.
“Mr. Hart!” the voice calls, echoing sharp down the otherwise empty block. “Martin!”
Rust and Marty turn in toward one another to look over their shoulders, vapored breath mingling together in one rising fog. The line of Marty’s jaw sets tight for a split second before slackening, settling easy into the kind of smile Rust knows is part of a finely-practiced skill set.
“Well hey, Miss Dolly,” he says, slipping his hands into his pockets. “What brings you out into the cold?”
The woman looks like she might be around Rust’s age—slender and pale, with a straight blonde bob and her arms wrapped around herself, hands rubbing into the warmth of a beige sweater. She walks through the grass until she stands on the edge of the rain gutter on her side of the street, not stepping any further into the river of black asphalt cutting between them.
“We haven’t seen you around much since—well, since all that unfortunate business happened a few months back.” She falters only for a second, but even from where he stands Rust can see her eyes wavering on him. “Have you heard about the block party?”
“No ma’am,” Marty tosses back, kindly enough. “Not a word.”
“Coming up the Saturday after next, just a little neighborhood get-together before the holiday down by the Walkers’ place.” Dolly clears her throat and tucks her hands up under her armpits, bouncing once in place as her eyes move from Marty back to Rust. “You’re both more than welcome to come, if you’d like.”
Marty laughs soft and light, like he’s remembering the ghost of an old joke. “Appreciate that,” he tells her. “I’ll have to consult with the committee, here—see if we’ve got anything else on the calendar, but I’ll definitely be thinking about it.”
“Alrighty then,” she says a little blandly, already trudging backward through the grass. “Don’t worry about bringing anything, there’ll be more than plenty to go around.”
Dolly turns without waving and follows the sidewalk back up to her drive moving on careful steps, briefly stopping to fetch the mail before disappearing inside.
“Let’s head on in,” Marty sighs when she’s gone, starting the trek back up the house and wincing a little as his knee creaks. “Yard’s just gonna have to take it as it comes, I can’t do nothing else to help it.”
Rust sucks down a long pull of air as he walks, letting the cold burn clean in his lungs. “Seems she was acting a little off-kilter,” he says, close to Marty’s shoulder.
“Don’t reckon she’s gotten a good handle on you yet,” Marty says, stepping past Rust’s truck into the garage. “You don’t do too much socializing with the neighbors, after all, outside giving the old man across the way a goddamn heart attack the time you went to get the morning paper with your fuckin’ stitches out and proud.”
He drops down into an open lawn chair by the door leading inside and bends at the waist to start undoing his laces. “I imagine Dufresne still has them shook up pretty bad. Normal people—well, people who aren’t you and me ain’t used to that kind of shit. She just don’t know what to say. Can’t say I fucking blame her.”
“She don’t know what to say about what happened,” Rust says, watching Marty’s hands while he works. “Or she don’t know what to say about you and me.”
“Shit,” Marty laughs, pulling his boots off and slumping back in the chair to look up at Rust. “Let’s see—I lived here nearly ten years by myself, not a goddamn peep, they all got a load of the Filipino girl I was seeing on the regular for about a year, and then last summer I’m in the news for helping uncover a backwater serial killer, I’m shacking up with you out of the blue, we get a damn housecat, and a year later I got a motherfucking madman shooting up the place on a home delivery call.”
Rust grunts and holds out a hand. “You wanna go to this Christmas thing they’re putting on or what?”
“I should’ve asked if Byron was bringing some of that kicked-up eggnog,” Marty says, gripping Rust’s hand and letting the other man help hoist him back to his feet. “Shit’s so strong it’ll put some hair on that chest of yours.”
He pauses a moment, blinking a few times. “Since when are you interested in any kind of party?”
“Just figure we can go, if you want,” Rust says. “It ain’t no big thing.”
“If I ever had to make a bet on that coming out of your mouth,” Marty says with a laugh, punching the garage door button before following Rust in through the laundry room, “I’d have lost a whole lot more than money.”
* * *
Marty’s back out in the garage a few nights later, kicking storage totes around and eyeballing the best patch of floor for the exercise bike they hauled home from the office when he finds the box.
He’s been real careful ever since that day spent cleaning out the spare room—not prying into places or things he maybe shouldn’t be looking at without clearance, figurative and literal alike—, but this one looks harmless enough, save for the fact he can’t figure out what the fuck it’s doing there.
The box rattles with the telltale sound of broken glass when he moves it aside, and with only one little half-guilty glance over his shoulder he pops the lid open and finds exactly that. There are two dark blue bottles with the labels peeled away, a hand-sized shard of silver-backed mirror, and about a pound of broken fragments, nestled atop a thin layer of newspaper in an assorted rainbow of greens, pinks, yellow, and one piece of opaque white milk glass.
Marty stares at the glass for a few seconds and then replaces the lid, quickly rearranging the box just the way he’d found it. He sets up the exercise bike in the corner a few feet away and by the time Rust walks out into the garage with a bottle of water just shy of a half-hour into his first cycle, his knee’s one octave short of screaming and he’s gone and forgotten all about it.
The following morning Marty wakes ten ‘til seven and reaches over into the space next to him, fingers brushing nothing but cold air before he realizes he’s in bed alone. Their work alarm won’t go off for another forty-five minutes but he sits up anyhow, massaging into his stiff knee for a few moments while the coffee maker gurgles and spits down the hall. He feels around for the cane he leaves leaning against the bedside table and pushes off the bed, bypassing the bathroom to walk to the front of the house.
Rust is nowhere to be found but his phone and keys still sit on the kitchen counter, the cat crouched over and crunching around a fresh scoop of food left in her bowl. Marty checks the back porch and makes sure the truck’s parked in the driveway before he opens the door leading to the garage, finding himself almost nose-to-nose with Rust standing on the other side of the jamb with one hand still outstretched to take the handle.
“The hell you doing out here?” Marty asks, trying to sound sleepy-casual, but then a furtive look thrown over Rust’s shoulder reveals that the box of colored glass has moved from where he left it the night before and his stomach drops like a lead sinker.
“Nothin’,” Rust says, blinking, standing there in a pair of sweatpants and a flannel unbuttoned over his chest. “What’re you doing up?”
“Wondering why the fuck the bed’s so cold,” Marty says, swallowing a little dryly. He makes himself blind to the box and turns to walk back into the kitchen. “Get in here out of that meat locker, looks like we got enough time to make breakfast proper now.”
Rust moves to follow without another word, but Marty doesn’t miss him quickly ducking off to the side, dropping the folded square of sandpaper in his hand behind the bin of newspapers before coming in behind him.
* * *
There’s a handful of days where they dance around one another throughout the weekend and evenings after work—roaming off in separate cars under the guise of running errands and meeting back up empty-handed for dinner, sitting behind closed doors and reemerging in a thin shroud of pliant mystery acting like it’s all business as usual, like they’re not under the influence of any kind of seasonal spell when they both damn well know what the other’s doing.
Marty’s just thankful the feeling seems mutual, because Rust’s immortalized reputation as the better box man ain’t any kind of mere propaganda and if he ever felt so inclined to wheedle out the truth, there’s no doubt he’d have Marty wrung out and broken down in about fifteen minutes flat, roaming lips and sure hands notwithstanding.
And it’s downright uncomfortable, thinking about Rust navigating through a shopping mall alone—doing anything there at all, really, much less buying goddamn Christmas presents. But Marty hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a logo-branded bag or a roll of wrapping paper in the house that he didn’t bring in himself, and it eventually occurs to him like a truth he should’ve known from the get-go that anything Rust would give him probably couldn’t be bought and boxed in a store.
Rust doesn’t stray too far from the house after one or two peculiar solo outings, but it takes him about a week of early mornings spent out in the garage—mornings that Marty carefully sidesteps, confining himself to the sunrise news and his old flannel robe, wordlessly passing a cup of coffee off to Rust when he finally pads back into the kitchen—before he finishes whatever he’d been doing out there with the kaleidoscope guts of that box.
But Marty’s got his own secrets to keep, one big and one small no matter which way you look at it, and carefully tucks them both away for safekeeping inside moments where Rust isn’t looking. One lands in the back of the closet in the spare room, shrouded in sleek black nylon and hidden behind his untouched rain coat and that blue windbreaker from back when they still worked the beat. The other he keeps in the pocket of a denim jacket he hasn’t worn in probably thirty years, a bonafide relic, sun-faded and scuffed and embellished on the back with old rodeo patches, one shoulder bearing the almost washed-out handwriting of Maggie Herbert before she became Maggie Hart.
Some nights he’ll lie awake with Rust breathing soft and easy next to him in some kind of twisted role reversal, counting down the days to the twenty-fifth like he hasn’t since before the girls. Since before Maggie, even, thinking back to those far-flung years as a boy when he’d hop out of bed on Christmas morning and fly down the stairs—stomach tied up in trembling butterfly knots—with an unwavering kind of wonder and belief in the possibility of something magic.
The magic’s long since gone nowadays, stamped out and resigned to death two lifetimes ago, but the wonder’s still there. Maybe of a different sort, though, with the nerves still camped tense and hot somewhere in the softness up under his rib cage.
But then Rust will slowly blink awake on those nights, warm and rough with sleep, and mumble you’re thinking so hard I could hear you dreamin’ while his hands reach out to find Marty in the dark.
And maybe it isn’t magic, Marty thinks, but it’s sure as hell something.
* * *
The last Saturday before Christmas dawns and slowly begins to wane, and around five o’clock that evening Marty goes out to get the mail and watches Walker and son pitch up an open canopy tent down the street while his old lady strings a row of icicle lights from the scaffolding. Somebody’s set up a couple orange cones in the road, keeping any passing traffic to one lane, and the smoky smell of a barbecue already hangs heavy in the cold air.
He goes back inside to where Rust’s folded down onto the couch, squinting at something on his laptop with a lukewarm cup of coffee balanced on one knee, and slaps and slides his right hand over the countertop on his way into the kitchen so his ring clinks twice on the formica.
“You got shit to do?” he asks, rattling around in the dishwasher. “Didn’t have any big plans for dinner.”
Rust blackens the screen and sets his laptop aside, lifting the coffee to his mouth. “If you want to go to that thing down the street,” he says, lips ghosting against the rim of the cup, “you could just say so.”
Marty swings the cabinet door open with a laugh and starts putting dishes away one at a time. “Guess what I’m wanting to know,” he says, thumbing at a spot on a tea glass before looking at Rust from under his brows, “is if you’re planning on going with me.”
“Do you want me to come, Marty?” Rust asks, resting his coffee back against his knee. His face is drawn neutral, eyes dipping down into one of those sleepy half-blinks.
“Well,” Marty says, turning away to stack plates in the cupboard. “I reckon I do.”
“All right,” Rust says, standing from the couch, and the next time he speaks he’s up behind Marty in the kitchen, bracing a hand around the sharp edge of the cabinet door before the other man can straighten and crack his head into it. “Then I’m coming.”
“You sure?” Marty asks. “Last time I remember you going to a Christmas party, somehow the tree tinsel down in the station lobby caught fire and nobody could figure out where the fuck you were.”
“That wasn’t me,” Rust says with the tiniest hitch in the back of his throat, turning to slip down the hall. “You gonna be warm enough in that jacket?”
They walk down the street together under the curtain of winter twilight, the sun still hanging by one amber fingertip on the horizon through the trees. The tent is up and the Christmas lights sparkle blue and white above the neighborhood tenants milling about, nursing beers and sipping glasses of eggnog through their laughter, picking around finger foods and shooing a screaming herd of kids away from the three-legged punch table.
“Alright,” Marty says on approach, cutting his eyes over to Rust. “I’m not saying nothing—but if you feel like you gotta bow out, what’s our story gonna be?”
Rust laughs low under his breath. “Don’t need one. Much as you’re wont to believe it, Marty, I’m not so much of a social pariah that I can’t fucking talk to people.”
Marty gestures toward the tent with his cane mid-stride, huffing out a cloud of breath. “Well listen, these are your run-of-the-mill people. They’re gonna ask you shit like why you’re still driving a ’95 Ford and if you want their brother to give you a quote on a paint job, if you tried the Waldorf salad yet—where you got your rugged Alaskan wilderness jacket, which I’m sure wasn’t out of any goddamn department store catalog.”
“It was on sale at a Sears in Montana,” Rust says, watching the headlights of a passing car trail past. “And maybe I’ve been wanting a quote on some new paint.”
“Okay,” Marty says, putting on a smile as they step into the throw of light bleeding out from under the tent. “I’m cuttin’ you loose.”
Rust walks alongside him in tandem and it’s like Marty’s switch flips the moment he steps under the canopy, all wide grins and rolling laughter, taking hands both familiar and not and already cracking off jokes about his cane like he wasn’t handling it like a snake the whole month prior. He blazes the trail and Rust moves around him in an easy orbit, shaking hands and exchanging short little greetings, always content to step back and let Marty take the lead on this kind of thing not because that’d been the way it was for as far back as he could remember, but because Marty had always been good at it.
“You must be—Rust, right?” a stout little man in glasses says, holding out a plastic cup of eggnog in one hand and a beer in the other. Rust takes the beer with a nod and the man keeps the cup for himself, drawing off a sip with a tight little hiss as he peers up over the rims of his glasses. “Byron Brigand. Good to see you come out, man. We were starting to think Marty kept you locked up in a room under the kitchen floor or something.”
“That’s actually where I keep him,” Rust deadpans, tipping his beer back to take a long pull, and Byron chokes into his eggnog so hard it spatters up onto his glasses.
Another woman walks up to join them and Rust spots Dolly a few yards away over her shoulder, eyes laying heavy on him from a sharp angle, speaking in low tones to a young woman with Christmas tinsel wrapped up in her hair. He catches her eye with a quirked brow and she quickly looks away, moving to greet an older man with snowy hair and a cigar crammed in the corner of his mouth.
“It took me a while to recognize you,” the new woman standing next to Byron says, after taking a bite out of a deli spiral and introducing herself as Maritza. She smiles a little lopsided, swirling punch around in her cup while she cuts fleeting looks at Rust like she can’t take him in all at once head-on. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but you look a lot—well, a lot better than you did last year on the news. Younger, I think. Maybe it’s the shorter hair.”
“Could be,” Rust says lightly, easing his weight back onto one hip, trying not to look too thankful for the reprieve when Maritza turns on a dime to shout after one of her kids sneaking past with a plate mounded high with cookies.
Byron drifts off and Rust slowly gravitates back to Marty, who is on his second round of hard eggnog and in the midst of the story about Ronald Whey and their summertime rundown—told with a lot more high-impact action on their part than Rust remembers, and then with the carefully skirting omission of what, exactly, happened to that bag of weed.
“You two really got your work cut out for you,” a man in a Saints jersey with a crew cut says, using the neck of his beer bottle to point between the both of them. Rust rolodexes back through introductions and thinks his name starts with an H—Harold or Hugh or Henry, with a handshake like a dead trout. “And then what with all that shit that went down at your place a couple months back? Jesus Christ, talk about bringing work home with you.”
Marty’s laughter sobers up a little at that, smile still in place but quickly dimming. “Well, I dunno how much that tied in with what we’re doing these days,” he says, clearing his throat. “That was more along the lines of what we used to do working with the state police—what we thought we’d wrapped up last year with Carc—with the murder cult. Residual trash kind of thing.”
“Fuckin’ A, man,” the guy says, and earns a withering look from his wife that doesn’t do much to faze him. “You gotta go through and tell us what went down, full monty. One of the cops out front said you’d blown the guy’s brains to kingdom come, said it was like a fucking horror show in there. I told Jen here—I said there’s no way they’re gonna clean that sonofabitch out of the carpet.”
Rust watches Marty’s throat work for a moment, wonders if he needs to step in and deflect, head this motherfucker off at the draw, and then Marty shakes his head like he’s tossing a thought away, knocking back another mouthful of eggnog.
“Listen, Hank—this probably ain’t the kind of stuff we need to be talking about at a Christmas party.” He laughs but his eyes briefly meet Rust’s, just the barest brush of something that reads private between them, and then he’s pointing off down the street somewhere behind Hank’s shoulder. “Speaking of horror shows, haven’t you been working on restoring that old Cutlass you got at auction? What kind of mileage you got racked up on that thing?”
Rust leaves them to it and wanders off to the far side of the long tent, taking a swig off his beer and then one off the cool night air. A couple young school-aged kids sit together at the edge of somebody’s driveway a few yards off, a boy and girl roundabout seven or eight, sprawled amidst an overturned metal scooter and a remote controlled car the boy keeps making speed through the rain gutter.
“Take it off the sewer like a ramp,” the little girl says, pointing an elbow toward the concrete drain at the street corner, and the boy pushes his knit cap up out of his eyes and doesn’t waste any time in lining the car up for the big jump. Rust watches without comment as he revs it up to top speed and proceeds to send it flying several feet through the air into a bed of concrete, and with a plastic crack and one long scrape it comes down hard, one wheel bouncing off on impact and rolling into the night.
“Aww man!” the boy yelps, tossing the remote control into the girl’s lap and scurrying into the street. He picks up the wrecked car and then trudges over to find the wheel, standing there looking at both in his hands like the bones of a fallen hero.
“Totaled,” he says in a put-on adult voice, and Rust can’t help but crack a smile as he brings his beer back up to his mouth, watching the boy collapse back down next to the girl with a long-suffering sigh. “‘M gonna have to junk it.”
Rust lets them sit there for a moment longer before he pushes off the tent pole he’d been leaning against, coming in from a wide angle with loose, easy steps. The kids look up to watch him approach and he puts a small smile back on, nodding toward the car sitting between the boy’s feet.
“Want me to call you a tow?” he asks, and when the boy shakes his head he stops a few feet away, watching the Christmas lights strung along the surrounding houses blink and twinkle around them. “Maybe I can take a look at that wheel.”
Two minutes later Rust is crouched down on the ground with his beer resting by his knee, finally popping the tire back onto the axel and giving it an experimental spin. “Give that a whirl,” he says, putting his pocket knife away and handing the car back to the boy, and when he flips the switch and gives it some juice it runs just as good as new, the long wound in the paint and a cracked front fender aside.
“Thanks,” the boy says, grinning outright now, and he and the girl peer up at Rust as he straightens back into standing, knees faintly popping and complaining on the way back up.
The little girl’s hair is braided into long pigtails and she twists one around her finger, dark eyes not quite wavering from Rust’s. Something about her gaze makes him feel small, somehow, not fully adept or too certain about much of anything, and when she opens her mouth he isn’t sure he could ever predict what might come out.
“Are you Mr. Hart, too?” she asks without any prelude, soft features gone quietly serious. “Mommy says you’re Mr. Hart’s husband.”
Rust hears himself breathe out sudden, a gust of startled wind that’s maybe a little less laughter in exchange for something else. He swirls the last few sips of beer around the bottom of his bottle and shakes his head, eyes thrown somewhere out into the night before they come back to the girl.
“Well,” he says, shifting his weight around. “We ain’t married, but I guess that might be close enough.”
“Okay,” the little girl says, like that’s all she needed to know, and then looks beyond Rust into the long stretch of tent, already moved onto the next pressing thought. “Ollie,” she asks, “is Mr. Hank telling jokes again?”
Rust turns to the side and clocks Marty from about twenty yards, still standing at the far end of tent with a herd of neighbors. The buzzing hum of laughter from before is gone, and he’s got his shoulders squared up with his chin lifted ever so slightly in a stance Rust knows all too well.
He leaves the kids behind and breezes easy back under the canopy, listening to his own quiet breathing and the steady beat of blood moving through his ears. Marty hasn’t moved and he slows on approach to hang back for a moment, stopping to pick a piece of broccoli off a veggie tray, and listens to the rest of the conversation unroll before him.
“I’m just saying,” Hank says a little thickly, “maybe you’re inviting shit like that into your life, living there with him and all.”
Marty gives a sharp shake of his head, eyes nearing the kind of coldness hard enough to splinter and crack. “What’re you saying to me right now, Hank?” he asks. “I want you to tell me exactly what you’re suggesting about me and my life.”
“Don’t know how specific I can get, being there’s kids here and all, but I think you know damn well what I’m talking about,” the other man says, not quite meeting Marty’s eye. “It ain’t any big secret what you’re doing. And when you start steppin’ off course like that, I figure some hell’s bound to catch up with you sooner or later.”
“That’s funny,” Marty says in a voice eerily calm, taking one step forward, “because I don’t recall one iota of it being any of your fucking busi—”
Rust makes a decision in a split-hair second and closes the distance between himself and Marty in a handful of easy strides, sliding up into the group with his eyes cast calm, standing at an angle that has Marty’s shoulder pressing into the heart of his sternum.
“How’s it going over here?” he asks, listening to the gust of wind that rushes fast out of Marty’s lungs. He reaches up to take the other man’s hand in his own without pause, wrapping their fingers together around the cup of eggnog so he can tip it forward to meet his lips.
“Shit that’s strong,” he murmurs, gently dropping Marty’s hand but not moving any further away, line of sight tossed out nowhere in particular. “One round of that and you’d be talking out your ass all night.”
All eyes are on them but Rust doesn’t falter, standing there with two fingers resting light on Marty’s hip until the other man draws in a steadying breath and says, “Yeah, maybe we’ve all had enough.”
Hank’s eyes dart between them but he doesn’t make any move to speak, only blinks a couple times and turns away, strolling out across the pavement and tossing the rest of his drink—cup and all—into the dying flowers around the nearest mailbox.
The crowd breaks up and dissolves after that and Rust can smell the shame rolling off most of them in waves, stinking hot and ugly through the cold. When they mostly clear out he guides Marty over to the corner near the punch bowl, meticulously pouring out two cups with the plastic ladle to busy his itching hands.
“You alright?” he asks quietly, coaxing the eggnog out of Marty’s grip and replacing it with the punch. “Thought I was gonna have to pry a cane out of that fucker’s ass.”
“Fuck him,” Marty mutters, and when he steps back out under the night sky Rust moves with him, both of them blinking against the few visible pinpricks of hot white. “I’m alright,” he reassures, without much convincing feeling. “It’s just some real bullshit, you know? Standing there saying that shit to me in front of you. Like you’re some kind of—fuck, man, I don’t even know. Makes me fucking sick.”
He hisses sharp through his teeth and takes a swig of his drink, cutting his eyes back over to Rust where they seem to soften on impact. “Thank God you got good timing. I was starting to wonder where you’d run off to.”
“Was helping a couple of the kids with something,” Rust says, and then feels the corners of his mouth pull up into a smile despite it all, despite everything. “They were wantin’ to know if we were married.”
Marty’s cup falters in his hand and sloshes a sip or two out onto the pavement before he gets a firm grip on it again. “You’re shitting me,” he croaks out, staring at Rust. “They did not.”
“Mhmmm,” Rust hums. “Sure did.”
“That don’t bother you at all?” Marty asks. “The—idea of it?” He shakes his head, laughing a little. “Jesus Christ. Straight from the mouths of babes.”
“Why would it bother me?” Rust asks, with Marty standing close enough to him that he can smell a faint note of cologne, a familiar scent now, light and clean and all too welcome on the nights and mornings when he leans forward to nose into it.
“I don’t know,” Marty says, looking down at his feet, the Christmas lights, Rust’s hands. “But I’m glad it doesn’t.”
And even when Hank excuses himself and turns in early on the pretense of having to be off somewhere in the morning, Rust sticks close to Marty’s side, listening to the other neighbors prattle off about yard fertilizer and the best place to get boudin in Lafayette, if they’d been to the flea market off the interstate and if Rust would ever be interested in selling his truck to Kitty Swanson’s 16-year-old boy, because that’s the kind of thing you want a young kid driving these days—something older and nothing too flashy, with trucks always tending to fare better in accidents and all.
“Appreciate the offer,” Rust tells them, “but I’ve put a lot of miles on that truck, and it’s seen a lot of hard road with me. I don’t know if I’m ready to give it up just yet.”
Back home, Rust watches Marty shower and go through his nightly routine without a word, laughter and warmth clipped off to the quick with the air around him smarting outright and gone brassy plum like a fresh-earned bruise.
There used to be a time where he would’ve sidestepped something like this, let the blood settle and fade to green on its own, but when he walks in from the bathroom and finds Marty lying prone on his side of the bed staring hard enough to peel the plaster off the ceiling, he wonders if it’d do him any sort of good to reach out and press a thumb against the soft contusion, not digging deep but resting there in a quiet way of saying I noticed.
Marty doesn’t move when Rust drops his towel and pulls on a pair of sweatpants, doesn’t say anything when the lights cut out and the mattress dips down as the other man slides in beside him, whispering across the sheets to curl in on his side.
“Be a shame if all four tires on that Cutlass came up flat a couple weeks from now,” Rust says, voice cutting easy through the blackness. “Maybe by the time it’s all pretty and fixed up.”
A second later Marty is laughing soft under his breath, reaching up to rub his fingers into his eyes until he sees spots of blue. “Guess we’re gonna start moonlighting as a couple car vandals,” he says. “Set Hank up with Steve in a fuckin’ bowling league.”
Rust hums low in something akin to agreement and then Marty is wringing out a tight wisp of a sigh, pressing against the night’s bruises on his own accord.
“It’s not even about the queer shit,” he says. “Well, I mean it is, because I never thought—Jesus, that just ain’t what this is. But that’s not even the worst goddamn part of it.”
Rust lets him work through it for a moment, not quite touching Marty by lying close enough to follow his little movements through the dark.
When Marty breaks back in he almost sounds rushed. “I get worried sometimes, Rust, like you might think what he said is true, that you’re some kind—some kinda burden on me.” He stalls out for a moment, hands skimming soft over the sheets, and then speaks more carefully. “Because you aren’t. There really ain’t anything further from the fucking truth.”
Quiet settles in while Rust’s lies still, eyes open against the darkened room around them. “You think that whatever came out his mouth is gonna change anything?” he asks. “That I give a shit?”
“Suppose not,” Marty says, and then with a little more feeling, “No—no.”
“So fuck him,” Rust says. “You’re not obliged to answer to anybody but yourself and the girls. Everything else is dead fucking airspace, man. Took me a while to figure that out, but you live a whole lot easier once you do.”
“And you,” Marty says, shifting around on his side. “Obliged to answer to you.”
“Naw,” Rust says after a few beats of silence, clearing his throat. His hand comes up to trace easy over Marty’s side, settling in the soft dip between his hip and rib cage while he shifts around to press their knees together. “Only if you want to.”
“Reckon I do,” Marty says, and closes in on the rest of the space stretched between them.
* * *
The phone rings early on Sunday morning over coffee and toast, and Marty keeps his mug firmly clenched in hand, holding out the cordless unit a couple feet from his face to squint one-eyed at the display before he recognizes the number and answers.
“Hey darlin’,” he says on pickup, and Rust promptly lowers the newspaper to peer over the top, forgoing the hard news to catch a read on Marty’s tone instead. “How you been doing? And—Rowley? Oh shit, Raleigh, yeah. He good?”
“Me and Rust?” he says after a pause. “Oh, you know how it goes, same old story. Didn’t have too much planned, just thought about getting a roast chicken or something, keeping it casual.” Marty swallows a mouthful of coffee and then sets his mug down, eyebrows knitting together tight. “Your mama said—hold up now, what?”
He briefly catches Rust’s eye and settles back into his chair, one hand hooked around his neck. “I don’t know how good of an idea that’d be, Mace. I mean, you know we keep it civil nowadays, but she doesn’t need to do something like—oh. Okay.”
Rust watches Marty worry the inside of his cheek while Macie’s voice hums low on the other end of the line, reaching up to trace a fingertip around the rim of his mug.
“Well you know it means a lot, honey,” Marty says, blowing out a quiet sigh. “Appreciate you calling, but you’re—you’re sure she don’t mind? Yeah, let me talk to him and I’ll call you back.”
“You said you’re doing what?” He barks out a sharp laugh, grinning crookedly at Rust. “I’m sure. Uh-huh, yeah.”
The call ends and Rust flattens the newspaper back out on the table, shuffling the glossy ad fliers into a pile between them while Marty taps the phone against his chin. “What’s the word?” he asks, eyes flicking up from the lingerie advertisement settled square on top.
“Believe it or not,” Marty says, setting the phone down and leveling Rust with a look, “we’ve been invited to Christmas dinner at the Sawyer household, courtesy of an invitation extended by none other than my two lovely daughters.”
Rust makes a noise in the back of his throat and knocks back the last of his coffee. “How hard you think they twisted Maggie’s arm to pull that over?”
“Pretty fucking hard,” Marty sighs, running a palm over his head. “But Macie says she and Audrey want the both of us there—doing some kind of little gift exchange and everything, supposed to be some kind of joke. Maggie’s gonna bake a ham, apparently. Sounds like the real thing.”
“You sound less than thrilled.”
“I don’t know. It’s not my favorite play in the book considering we’d have to sit through a civil meal with Ted Sawyer, but it’d be nice, seeing the girls. And the baby.”
“Yeah,” Rust says, quiet, picking the newspaper back up. “Think about what you wanna do.”
Marty watches him for a moment and then reaches out to thump the back of the paper, popping it with his middle finger. “Let’s check this thing out today,” he says, waiting until Rust gets a look at the flea market ad taking up a quarter of the page. “Been wanting to find some shit for the girls anyhow—whatever it is they like. Old timey type-stuff, looks like it’s been through the fucking mill.”
“Antiques,” Rust says, blinking at Marty. “You want to go—antiquing?”
“If that’s the word,” Marty says, reaching out to turn the glossy lingerie advertisement around to get a better look at it. “Sure they’ve got a ton of shit right up your alley down there, too. Sell knives long as your arm for twelve bucks, probably a bunch of obscure books nobody’s ever fucking heard of.”
“You don’t gotta sell me on it,” Rust says, standing to carry their dishes to the sink. “Whatever you wanna do.”
Marty is still peering down at the underwear ad, getting a good look at the long-legged models splayed out across the page, bronzed to high heaven and dressed in nothing but little strips of lace and rhinestone-studded satin. He’s studying a pouting girl with honey-brown curls in a pair of low-slung lace panties when Rust walks back up with the coffee pot in one hand, topping off Marty’s cup with a stiff roll of his wrist.
“Thought you might be beyond looking at girls with their rosebuds airbrushed out of the fucking picture by now,” he says, turning to set the pot back in the maker. “That ain’t even good cheesecake.”
“What?” Marty asks, looking up with a start. “I’m not—” he says, and then swallows fast, smoothing out invisible creases in the paper with a low laugh. “Huh. You reckon you like the red or the black better?”
“The flea market opens at ten,” Rust says by way of answering, hitching up his sweatpants as he ambles out the kitchen. “Get ready and we’ll take the truck.”
* * *
The sky looks ironclad to the touch and spits little gusts of rain for about twenty minutes before it relents—leaving the dirt parking lot cold and wet enough to be a minor hassle in terms of navigation for anybody with a bum knee and rubber-stopped walking stick—, but they make it inside in one piece and unzip their jackets, not too damp but still grateful for the little bit of warmth gathered between peddler stalls.
Rust strolls through the aisles with his hands planted in his pockets but there’s not much of anything his eyes don’t touch. He peruses tables of tanned leather belts and wallets, gaudy glass-set jewelry and finer southwestern sterling, endless boxes of ragtag books and records, a display case full of water bongs advertised as decorative table centerpieces, one booth dedicated entirely to secondhand silverware and then other random odds and ends scattered as far as anybody could hope to see. There’s a makeshift tattoo parlor set up in a plywood lean-to and a woman in a long purple skirt that moves like water around her legs, who asks to read his palm and—as he declines and walks away—tells him to not let the soul stray too far from the heart.
Marty’s resolve seems dialed up to twelve on a ten-point scale and he hones in on things for the girls with a glimmer of his old dogged tenacity put to new use, looking past hunting knives and turquoise-studded belt buckles branded with bygone years rodeo tours to ask blue-haired old women about their fine collection of pretties, as he put it. He charms them up nice n’ sweet until he closes out a deal on a crystal perfume atomizer inlaid with mother of pearl, followed up shortly by a good-sized walnut frame made up of finely carved ivy and garden flowers for no more than a fifty spot.
“They’re gonna love this shit,” he says when Rust wanders back with two paper cups of mulled cider, passing off one pillar of steaming warmth without comment. “Looks real classy, yeah? Thinking Audrey might even be able to put some of her work in the frame if she saw fit.”
“You on the hunt for anything else?” Rust asks, wedging the frame under one arm while Marty gathers up the boxed perfume bottle and hoists himself to his feet, both of them walking unhurried through the remaining stalls as they sip cider and listen to the occasional vendor hawk their wares.
“Not particularly,” Marty says, and promptly stops dead in his tracks, so sudden that Rust moves a few steps ahead before he can manage to put on the brakes. When he turns around and follows Marty’s line of sight he finds himself staring at a glass shelf stocked with a multitude of little porcelain pig figurines—pink, white, and spotted oinkers done up in a variety of costumes and poses, sunbathing in fold-out beach chairs, playing croquet, baking fruit pies with flour dusted over their snouts.
“There it fucking is,” Marty says, like he might be talking about a case-breaking piece of evidence or the holy goddamn grail, but no, he’s only staring clear and bright-eyed at a pale pink pig in a space suit, seemingly reaching out on tiptoe to pick a star from the sky.
Rust blinks at the figurines and then cuts his eyes back to Marty, flicking over his face. “There what is?”
“Maggie,” Marty says, clearing his throat and looking away. “Maggie used to collect these fucking things, guess from the time she was a little girl. Her great aunt would send her one every birthday until the year she died, same year Audrey was born.”
He looks back at the pig in the space suit with a funny look on his face, something Rust hasn’t seen enough of before or since to get a good handle on just yet. “She would always talk about wanting the space pig but she never could find it.”
“You gonna stand there and moon after it or make an offer?” Rust says, and then catches the attention of the vendor at the other side of the booth cluttered with pale china and figurines. “What’re you asking for these pigs, ma’am?”
The woman looks up from a book in her lap and squints at the shelf. “Come pretty cheap from an estate auction,” she says. “How much you wanna pay?”
“Rust,” Marty says quietly, giving a halfhearted little shake of his head. “I don’t think—listen, it probably ain’t my place anymore. She don’t want anything from me, and how fucking weird is it, buying your ex-wife shit in general, but then with your—with you right here to boot.”
“Fuck all that, Marty,” Rust says. “How much?”
The astronaut pig sells for a whopping $12, and Marty goes through the exchange with two spots of color high in his cheeks that maybe don’t have anything to do with the cold, and as they walk away he leans in and mumbles, “A lowly drop in the bucket compared to what I got planned for you.”
“Dunno about that,” Rust says with a sliver of a smile, hitching Audrey’s frame up to rest against one hip as they move on down through the market. “Pretty hard to beat a ceramic pig in a space suit.”
“Boy,” Marty says a little weakly. “Don’t you even start.”
* * *
They wrap up in good time just after the fall of noon, and as soon as Marty finishes eyeballing a pair of toddler’s cowboy boots—“Maybe by the time she’s walking, get her started early,” he says—they start the long trek back to the truck, weaving back through booths and shouting kids, past the fortune teller who only smiles as she watches them go, past a toothless man peddling saltwater taffy and then, finally breaking out into the bitter cold, a milk crate padded with old towels sitting just outside the entryway, covered with a damp cardboard sign that reads free 2 a gud home.
Rust gives it a cursory glance as he passes and then stops, boots turning to follow the prints they’d just made in the dirt. There’s nobody keeping watch in sight, just a few scant pieces of litter and the milk crate jimmied up against the tin building, and it only takes a moment to lift the cardboard away and peer inside.
“What’re you doing?” Marty calls back from fifteen paces ahead, leaning hard into his cane. “I made it this far, can’t be stopping now unless you wanna carry me the rest of the way.”
“I’m coming,” Rust says, already back on the move, and once he gets Marty and their plunder piled up into the truck he stands in the driver’s side door with one hand hanging on the frame, squinting out across the dirt lot.
“Not that I don’t appreciate your solemn profile,” Marty says from across the bench seat, “but are you gonna get in here and crank up the heat or what?”
Rust leans in to turn the keys in the ignition and dials the heater up to full blast before he leans back out again. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and before Marty can open his mouth he’s jamming the door back into place and striking out with that stiff-legged saunter across the parking lot toward the market.
Five minutes later the rain has drummed back up into a steady drizzle, and Rust reappears from behind a line of cars with his palm pressed against the side of his coat but otherwise empty-handed. He swings easy back up into the truck and lowers the heat a little, bringing the sharp smell of cold rain in with him.
“Huh,” Marty grunts. “Could’ve just pissed in the wheel well. You got a shy bladder all a sudden?”
“Nope,” Rust says, and opens his jacket to reveal a tiny whiskered face peering out of the interior pocket, jet-black with eyes like pieces of green sea glass.
“Oh Christ,” Marty says, thunking his head back against the seat. “Where the hell did you find that? See, you go and do this softhearted shit and it’s like I can’t even argue with y—”
“She ain’t for keeping,” Rust says, scratching around the kitten’s ears with a fingertip. “Who do you know that’s been pining after one since October?”
Marty stares at him for a second before his mouth quirks up into a sly kind of smile. “Shit,” he says. “She’d come unglued.”
“Call her in to the office tomorrow morning,” Rust says, shifting down into drive and heading back toward the highway. “Guess this one’s gonna have to spend the night ‘til then.”
* * *
Christmas falls two days away on Wednesday but Shelley answers prompt like always, says it’s no problem, that she needed to pawn off some baking anyways and that she’d be in around noontime to help get the paperwork started on a hot case Marty said they’d just picked up.
She shows up five after twelve with a cookie tin and her laptop bag slung over one shoulder, auburn hair pinned up in plaits around her head, and narrows her eyes at Rust and Marty when she finds them sprawled out around Marty’s desk in plainclothes with coffee throwing steam into the air.
“Coulda told me it was casual Monday,” she snorts, kicking off her heels by the door before padding up to slide the cookie tin onto the desktop. She eyeballs the lack of paperwork and drops her laptop off her shoulder to hitch her hands up on her hips. “Thought y’all might’ve started without me. The way you were talking on the phone, this was going to be the case of the year.”
“That was a ploy to get you in here two days before Christmas,” Marty says, grinning up at her while he swivels lazily in his chair. “Turns out we got you something.”
He picks up an envelope and holds it out while Rust stands and pardons himself to walk out of the room. “Don’t open it just yet,” Marty says, watching Shelley turn it over in her hands. “Rust is gonna fetch the big gift for you to open first.”
“Martin Hart,” Shelley says, looking around the room like she might be trying to clock a hidden camera. “What have you two gone and done?”
“Might be something crazy,” Marty sighs, watching Rust come back down the hall through the office blinds. “I know it ain’t looked too fondly upon, doing this kind of thing without asking first, but we know you’ve been wanting one for a while—”
“Please,” Shelley laughs, though when Rust walks back in with a plain white box her eyes dart fast between them, gone a little wide and wary. “I didn’t see a new BMW with all the fixings in the parking lot when I came in, so you’d better stop cuttin’ up.”
“It’s a little smaller than that,” Rust says, placing the box on the edge of the desk before stepping back to drop down into his chair. “Go on and open it up, lid comes right off.”
Shelley steps up and places her hands tentatively on either side of the box, and as soon as she bridges contact a tiny little meow comes muffled from the inside.
“Oh my God,” she whispers hoarsely, pulling the lid up and away, and the moment she lays eyes on the tiny black kitten inside she sucks in a gust of air and dissolves into tears on the spot.
“L-look at this precious thing,” Shelley sobs, lifting the kitten out of the box and cuddling it up close under her chin. Fat tears are already running down her cheeks, and she laughs shyly through rattling breaths, embarrassed. “Y’all went and got me my own little b-baby.”
“You like her?” Marty asks, smiling and watching Shelley press a teary kiss against the top of the cat’s head. Rust’s eyes are cast down somewhere in his lap but the corners of his mouth curl up just enough to give him away.
“It’s a little girl?” Shelley says, sniffling and running a finger under the smudges of black under her eyes while the kitten mews and tips her head back to watch. “Of course I like her. I love her already, she’s the sweetest little thing, just look at her.”
She suddenly remembers the envelope—since dropped on the floor—and stoops to pick it up, keeping the kitten tucked in the crook of one arm while she jimmies it open and pulls the card out. The voucher inside for a nearby pet store brings on a fresh wave of crying so heavy she can barely manage to speak.
“Thought we’d, uh, go ahead and get you started,” Marty says, palming the back of his neck and exchanging a fleeting look with Rust over her shoulder. “Considering we just dumped a live critter on you and all.”
“Whose idea?” Shelley hiccups, gasping a little and looking between them. “Both of y’all are pure meanness, I can’t hardly believe it.”
Marty nods in Rust’s direction. “All Mr. Christmas over there.”
Shelley walks right to Rust and braces one hand on his shoulder, leaning down to press a light little kiss to his cheek that's maybe a little wetter than it might otherwise be. “Thank you,” she says, still sniffling. “She’s perfect.”
Rust clears his throat and nods, reaching out to rub two fingers over the kitten’s sleek fur before dropping his hand. “You think of any names?” he asks, pitched quiet.
Shelley only thinks for a handful of seconds before she reaches a decision. “Stella,” she says, turning to lean into Marty for a hug with the kitten pressed between them. “Little miss Stella.”
* * *
“Wanna run up town real quick,” Rust says later that night, sitting down in the edge of the couch to start lacing his boots up. “You want to ride along?”
“Where to?” Marty asks, looking up from his laptop with his reading glasses low on the bridge of his nose. “It’s pushing nine-thirty.”
“You ain’t that old,” Rust half-snorts, still bent over tightening his laces. He finishes and rises to stand, palming the remote to click to the TV off. “C’mon,” he says. “It’ll be quick.”
Marty grumbles the whole time but gets his jacket pulled on and his feet jammed back in his boots, then throws a hat on, grabs his cane, and lets Rust herd him out the front door.
“What keys you got?” he asks while Rust locks up, zipping his coat up against the cold.
“Truck,” Rust says, leading the way, and Marty figures he doesn’t feel up to asking what or why.
Ten minutes later they’re pulling up in front of Jensen’s Liquors and Marty is leveling Rust with a dark look from across the cab. “You drug me out into this weather to fuck off at the liquor store?” he asks. “When we’ve got everything you could possibly want or need at the house.”
“We’re just parking here,” Rust says, stepping down onto the pavement and pushing his door shut, and then Marty looks over into the dirt lot next door and sees the Christmas trees.
There might be a moment where he has to blink a few too many times before he follows, but then he eases down out of the truck and catches up to Rust just outside the chain link fencing surrounding the trees. An older man is posted out front sitting vigil, taking a long drink straight from a thermos of something piping hot.
“Christmas Eve is tomorrow, boys,” he says as they walk up, screwing the lid back into place. “Hate to say it, but the pickings are pretty slim.”
“We’ll take a walk-through,” Rust says with a nod, and turns to peer back over at his shoulder with a pinch of moonlight shining like mischief in his eyes, and it’s so foreign there Marty hoots startled and reaches out to grab hold of him.
“You bastard,” he laughs as they walk through the meager sprawl of scraggly, lopsided trees. “I’d thought about it, but then it being just the two of us—I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that matters much anymore.”
“Course it matters, Marty,” Rust says, huffing out a cloud of breath. “Just a shame we can’t get our hands on a real one, these ain’t much of anything compared to the firs they got growing up in Alaska.” He leans to inspect the trunk of a sparse pine and then keeps moving down the line, nudging different candidates with the toe of his boot. “Pop and I used to cut and haul one back home every year, string it with popcorn and berries and shit. The deer’d have it picked clean in two days.”
They pass through two, three, and four rows of Christmas rejects before Rust stops near the back corner of the lot, stooping down to untangle a mess of branches until a squat three-footer is standing free, one side crooked and slightly mussed where it’d been pressed against the ground.
“What do you think?” he asks, shaking it out. “Fucked up and a little bent, but I reckon it’ll fit right in.”
Marty’s not even looking at the damn tree anymore, too busy watching a smile spread across Rust’s face as he fiddles with the branches before looking up to catch his eye, and in that moment it's not so hard to believe in something magic.
“Yeah,” Marty says, nodding a little and returning Rust’s grin in kind. “That looks like the one to me.”