It’s only a quarter past three in the morning and the alarm isn’t set to ring until six. Marty is still fast asleep with Rust tucked up against him, warm and sleepy enough despite the fading pain in his cramped muscles, and that’ll do just fine for now. Neither one of them have any reason left to be in a hurry.
Rust closes his eyes and listens to Marty’s breathing while the old furnace groans and ticks under the window, almost like a third set of lungs in itself. They’re not folded inside four corners of a bedroom back in Louisiana, though Rust can remember a time when he first opened his eyes there, too, and didn’t know where he was. At least not until Marty snuffled awake and stirred in the bed next to him—and as surprising as that should’ve been, it was maybe the only thing left that made much sense at all.
There hadn’t been any surefire sign or signal for when it’d gone from Marty’s bedroom to something they shared in a mutual singularity. Rust lulls back along the edge of sleep and knows it had happened slowly, one little bit at a time, his dryer-warmed shirts hanging themselves in the closet and his watch and wallet gradually finding a home on the nightstand in lieu of where he’d been leaving them without king or country in odd spots around the house.
He hadn’t been the one to put them there, as far as he knows, and surely started out having every intention and more to get out of Marty’s hair the first moment it looked practical. But in the end somebody else’s intent had won out and Rust hadn’t found a good enough reason to move his shit back from where Marty placed it. Not the clothes from the closet, not his watch from the dresser. Not even himself from the offered side of another man’s bed.
A thousand and one miles away from a house and cozied right up next to what he calls home, Rust presses his nose into the soft material of Marty’s nightshirt and breathes in, slow and steady. It’d been too easy, in the beginning, letting himself stay with Marty. Nothing keeping him there but a matter of finally letting things stay put where they belonged.
But then again, maybe that had been the answer he’d been looking for all along.
The sunrise coming up from the east is something raw and Hellenic, rosy-fingered dawn and her watercolor fingers come to bleed shades of blush and amber over the snowcapped mountains. In Louisiana the mornings had always been touched with wet humidity, daybreak colors turned something sour and citrusy-sweet, but here it’s cold and dry enough that Rust thinks of other things—pinkish rock salt and pine sap, hard lye soap and the unshakeable smell of sweet wood rot.
Truth be told, some small part of him had missed it.
Marty is squinting off into the distance himself, though he’s since turned away from the sunrise to watch a battered old Chevy chug up from the dirt road that brought them here. They’re standing at the foot of a long tarmac with their bags dropped on the cracked pavement, and a windsock flapping in the cold wind is their only other companion outside the daily commotion coming from the neighboring sea docks.
“Hope that’s your man,” Marty says, holding a hand over his eyes. “Lest we freeze our balls off standing out here on this airstrip another goddamn second.”
Rust glances at the Chevy and knows exactly who it is without having to think twice. “You think this is cold, you got something else coming,” he says, even though he’s trying to bite back a shiver. “To think there ain’t even snow on the ground.”
“Fuckin’ wind chill,” Marty mutters, and then turns in a wide arc like something might’ve manifested behind them on the empty tarmac since he last checked. “You got any idea as to why we’re standing on an empty airstrip with no plane?”
“Was hoping we’d figure that out here in a second,” Rust says, slipping both hands into his coat pockets as the Chevy rolls to a gradual stop in front of them. There’s a white rabbit foot hanging from the rearview on a leather cord, probably more than a decade old, swinging there in a make-your-own-luck kind of charm. Both Rust and Marty watch fixedly as the truck’s door squeals open and a black cowboy boot steps down onto the tarmac.
The rest of the man seems to materialize in front of them until the full picture is standing long and lean at the side of his truck, hanging one bent arm on the open door. He’s old but by no means frail, probably already partway mummified into something long-lasting by the seaside cold and smoking two packs a day since he was seventeen.
Billy Moon tips his head to the side, making the turquoise-stoned band around the brim of his hat catch light from the early sun. The twin braids draped over his shoulders are gunmetal silver and long enough that they rustle some in the wind while the man himself squints at the pair of figures standing in front of him.
“Well hell, son,” he says, calling out to Rust from where he’s leaning on the truck. “What possessed you two to stand out here on the goddamn strip?”
Rust takes a single step forward, one hand already hitched up on his hip. “You told us to meet you at the airfield come first light.” There’s a beat of silence, and Rust loosely gestures to the sun-cracked tarmac between them. “Here we’re standin’.”
“Did I say that?” Billy Moon asks, laughing like a crow as his boot heels scuff across the pavement. “Well, maybe I had a few too many sippers by the time you’d called—that’s a Thursday night for you.” He mimes tipping a beer can back bottoms-up, waggling his eyebrows. “But you ought to know how to read an old coot’s tracks in the sand by now.”
He finally bridges the few steps between them and reaches Rust first, leaning right in to clap him on the shoulder with a gloved hand. “It’s damn good to see you, sonny. Looking good, looking real good—cleaner-cut than I ever saw your daddy, that’s for sure.”
Rust almost smiles, leaning in to squeeze the old man’s shoulder in return. “We both know that wasn’t ever too hard a thing to manage,” he says. “Good to see you’re doing alright, Moony.”
“Better’n alright, son, considering I’m still alive and kicking,” Billy says, and then turns to Marty. “The one and only Martin, I take it?”
“Yes sir,” Marty says, reaching out to take the gloved hand he’s offered, a little bit dumbstruck in the face of such a living character. “From what I understand you’re something of a local legend around here.”
“Just an old haunt is all,” Billy says with a crooked laugh, showing off a gold tooth shining in the corner of his mouth. “You boys ready to get this show on the road? We ain’t gonna get up to Fairbanks by flapping our gums.”
Rust runs his teeth along his bottom lip, squinting at the empty space around them. “Been meaning to ask you, Billy, where the plane in question might’ve run off to.”
Marty sucks in a sharp breath that’s so cold it hurts, and the choking noise he makes doesn’t do much to disguise his snort of laughter. Rust doesn’t smile but he’s got that little glint in his eye, almost like a cat getting ready to catch the canary, mouth carefully pressed into a neutral line.
“Well shit,” Billy Moon says, throwing a hand out toward the fishing wharf across the way. “You ain’t ever heard of a sea plane before? Standing there acting like I up and gone senile—hell no, we’re taking her up off the water this morning.”
“A sea plane,” Rust says, blinking. “Since when?”
“Since we’re in the twenty-first century, you little wiseass,” Billy growls, and even if Marty immediately flashes to a hard-backed chair in Ken Quesada’s office with Rust sitting like a steel rod next to him, the old man’s words don’t bite and burn with any of the same old acid or contempt. There’s a fondness there, funnily enough—weatherworn and natural as the broken day rising around them.
“Well let’s get on over and fucking see it, then,” Rust says, shaking his head as he bends to shoulder his duffel from where it’d been lying on the tarmac. He doesn’t laugh outright but it’s a close thing, and that says a lot in itself. “For fuck’s sake.”
“Hop along then, boys,” Billy says, turning with a scuff of his boot heel to walk back over to the truck. He pats the hood and then slings an arm around the open door’s frame. “Gave up my good parking spot to come fetch y’all.”
Rust and Marty bundle and sling their bags into the bed of Billy’s old Chevy before climbing in behind them, settling down with their backs against the rear window.
“A sea plane,” Marty says, waiting until the engine coughs and rumbles. He looks sideways at Rust, legs stretched out long and straight in front of him. “Of all the things I’d imagine you’d be wanting to do, we’re taking off in a fuckin’ sea plane.”
“We were looking at an eighteen-hour drive if Billy hadn’t offered to fly,” Rust says, eyes on the flapping windsock as the truck turns back toward the road. He’s got half the mind to reach down in his shirt pocket and see if a pack of Camels have appeared there by way of magic. “Sea part might’ve taken me by surprise, but I’ll be alright.”
Marty cracks his jaw but takes that as it is. “Considering the stunt that shitheel at the bar pulled last night, guess I’m hoping this is the strangest part of the trip.”
Rust offers up one sage shake of his head, reaching into his inner pocket to touch the handle of his knife, almost like he’s checking to see if it’s still there. “Can’t be looking at it that way, Marty—that motherfucker ain’t worth the pot he doesn’t have to piss in. Besides, we got a long way to go yet.”
“Guess I’m thinking more along the lines of not wanting to cross paths with Bigfoot or nothing while I’ve got my pants around my knees, pissing up a tree.”
“Bigfoot ain’t real.”
“Yeah,” Marty admits, making a vague gesture through the air, “but bears are.”
Rust smiles, then, as they drive over a divot in the road. “You and those bears, huh.”
Marty pushes his tongue along his bottom lip, shaking his head. “I don’t like the idea of it. Never have, but there ain’t exactly seven-foot grizzlies running around in Louisiana, and we don’t have to worry about it down there.”
“Already told you, I’ll pick up some bear spray before we do any real hiking out into the woods,” Rust says, and then cuts his eyes over. “Maybe we’ll see one.”
Marty barks out a crude laugh, kicking Rust’s boot with his own. “And you’ll see my ass, turning high tail and running for the hills.”
Billy’s truck rumbles out onto a road that leads into the fishing marina, the brisk smell of saltwater thick and heavy in the cold air. A few lone sea birds call out to one another from the docks where boats are anchored and idly swaying in the bobbing water. Further down the way they can see a blue-winged vessel moored and waiting, and Marty feels something tighten up in the pit of his stomach at the sight.
They swing down out of the truck once Billy rolls to a stop and cuts the engine, and Rust climbs over the tailgate before he drops it and waits for Marty to pass their bags down.
“Careful,” he murmurs, feeling a broad hand grip his shoulder for balance as Marty takes care with getting back down on the wet ground. Billy is standing in the middle of the empty street with one leg cocked out, busy packing a wad of chewing tobacco into his bottom lip.
Both men watch him go through his ritual and tuck the snuff can away, neither one saying a word. “Little bit of that worm dirt to get me started,” Billy says, and then hitches his hands up on his hips. “Y’all set? Let’s load her up.”
The sea plane is anchored at the end of a long floating dock, parked and waiting for Billy to unlatch the door. Old Moony takes the lead with his cowboy boots clicking along on the wooden planking, and Rust nudges Marty ahead of him down the narrow pathway.
Mast bells and crying gulls drift to and fro through the morning air while Rust and Marty make quick work of stowing their bags aboard. Further down the dock there’s a pair of men in orange waders and a scruffy dog loading up into a modest fishing boat, off on some errand of their own for the day. One of the men sees Rust watching from afar and salutes from a distance, throwing up a gloved hand in brief greeting before getting back to his work.
Billy has looped his docking line around the crook of one arm and opened up the door to the cockpit, throwing it inside under the copilot’s seat. He steps back to hold the door ajar beneath the plane’s wing, gesturing for both men to duck inside. “We’ll back her out from the port and then coast a-ways out there to open water for takeoff.”
Marty eyeballs the empty copilot seat for a long moment before clearing his throat. “Don’t mean to pry into your craft and all, sir, but do you usually fly—uh, alone?”
“Ha!” Billy says with a squawk, and neither one of them saw from where he produced an empty ginger ale can but that’s what he brings up to his mouth to spit into. “You expecting me to turn belly-up and croak sometime soon? Nah, it won’t be in the sky, I can tell you that much. The old devil would want me closer to the ground than that.”
There’s another rabbit foot hanging from a thin chain in the cockpit’s ceiling, twin to the one dangling in the truck’s rearview. Marty looks between it and Billy and then back to Rust before letting out a small laugh. “Guess I’ve done crazier things for you before,” he says, taking the lead to climb up into the plane, and Rust revels one last moment in having his feet flat on the ground before following behind him.
“Skies are clear, wind’s in our favor,” Billy says as he swings up into the cockpit like some crudely-hewn parody of John Wayne jumping into the saddle. “Should be a quick trip all in all,” he says with a grin, glancing over his shoulder at Rust and Marty in the passenger compartment. “I expect we’ll make it up to Fairbanks in time for lunch n’ a beer.”
He pulls his cowboy hat off and tosses it into the passenger seat, revealing a full head of steely silver hair. There’s a headset resting on the dash and Billy slips it on before flipping a number of switches on the console and bringing the plane to life. He secures his seatbelt and then flicks the white rabbit foot before touching two fingers to the roof. “Y’all buckled in back there? Say your final parting words if you got ‘em, it’ll get real loud here in a second.”
Marty checks his belt again for good measure and then makes sure Rust has bothered to lock his in place, finding the man in question sitting with his seatbelt neatly fastened, albeit with both hands wrapped tight around his thighs. He leans in closer so his voice is in Rust’s ear, low but audible over the hum of the plane. “We got the full honeymoon package tour, right?”
Rust blinks at him, almost surprised for a split second before his mask of composure slips back into place. But then he smiles, answer murmured close against Marty’s ear while the other man tries not to laugh. “Maybe a little something like that.”
The propellers kick in and they start moving out across the waterfront, further from the docks and into rougher waves. Billy steers them due north and then the plane picks up speed as he urges it forward, flipping another switch and plugging his headset into the radio. Rust keeps both eyes fixed in his lap as the engine roars, Marty beside him and looking out the window with something tender-feeling fluttering high in his stomach.
But then the choppy skipping along the water gives way, and with a satisfied little hoot from Billy the plane glides up into the air and takes easy wing. Rust allows himself a look up and out, then, and watches as they skim a few yards above the dark blue sea before climbing into higher altitude. The mountains loom in the distance and everything below starts to look tiny and unreal, like they’re peering down into a toy model landscape called Juneau.
The seaplane banks some to the left as it merges into its mapped route, and the last thing Rust sees as they fly out over open water is the lone fishing boat with its three-member crew fading out of sight. It slowly chugs out into the harbor with the same scruffy dog sitting vigil at the bow, looking forward to nothing but salt-bitten wind in its face and the promise of a new journey ahead.
For all his whiskey-bent rickety joints and laughter that rings like a tin can full of blackbirds, Billy Moon can still pilot a plane like a satin spun dream. It takes two hours before they’re touching down on the lakefront in Fairbanks, light as a swan, and coast right on up to the dockside like it’d been waiting with open arms.
Billy’s first course of action after tying up the mooring line is to spit straight into the water and perch his hat back atop his head, standing with one hip cocked out while he watches Rust and Marty shuttle their bags down from the plane. The wind here smells more of cold earth than salt, and he sucks down a deep lungful of it before casting his eyes toward the blue sky.
“It’ll be snowing here in a few days, mark my words on that one,” he says, the little leather tassels on his jacket fluttering in the lake breeze. “You boys got enough kindling built up in that cabin of yours?”
“Supposedly there’s a whole wood box stocked up in the back,” Rust says, glancing down to tug up the zip on his coat. “Space heater, too.”
“Ain’t any little space heater gonna cut through that cold,” Billy says, creased face pinching up even more at the thought. He lets out a low whistle and jams the cockpit door shut before sauntering down the dock into the marina proper, groping around for his snuff can again. “Jug of rye whisky and a warm body, more like.”
Rust doesn’t say anything to that, but when he feels Marty’s eyes on him he only raises his brows a hair and starts lugging bags down the dock. “We gotta get further into town and pick up a truck to get around in,” he calls over to Billy. “You got ties nearby or are we callin’ in for a cab?”
But Billy is already letting his boots lead him up a gravel path toward a modest wooden bait and tackle shop settled at the edge of the lake, braids swinging as he turns and waves them further up the trail. Before he can reach the entrance the door is swinging open wide on rusted hinges, and a stout little woman in a checkered apron steps out with her hands on her hips.
“Billy Moon,” she calls, already shaking her head. “I should shoot you on sight.”
“Miss Primrose, Lady of the Lake,” Billy crows in return, holding his arms out in innocent greeting. “Don’t go tanning my hide just yet, I got company here with me.”
“Like who?” Primrose asks, craning her neck around to squint at Rust and Marty lumbering up the walkway. “I don’t need any of your good for nothing friends up here giving me more trouble than they’re worth.”
Marty’s halfway out of breath when they reach the little shopfront, and Rust isn’t faring much better but looks a little more stoic while he pants through the cold. “Ma’am,” he says, nodding at her while she peers at him through narrowed eyes.
“You two aren’t local,” the woman says, feet firmly planted and set apart while she eyeballs their bags. She looks more like a guard dog than anything as prim and rosy as her name would suggest. “Got a couple names?”
“I’m Rustin Cohle, this here is Martin Hart,” Rust offers, taking a single step back so he’s at Marty’s shoulder. “We’re up here visiting from Louisiana.”
Primrose sniffs some and slips her hands down into her apron pockets, looking between all three men in front of her while she mutters. “Cohle, Cohle, Cohle,” she says, and then finds the thought she was looking for. “You any relation to Travis?”
Marty’s eyes swivel over to Rust’s face, watching the line of his throat work for the barest second before he lightly nods. “Yes ma’am,” he says, meeting her hard stare. “He was my father.”
Billy busies himself with idly polishing one of his silver rings against the sleeve of his coat, eyes cast down even though Primrose won’t look away. “He’s been gone for a good long time now,” she says, wrapping her palms around her elbows. “I don’t know if you and me ever crossed tracks before, but damned if I can’t see some of him looking back at me.”
“Maybe,” Rust says, offering up what may pass as a civil smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and Marty figures that single word draws out the difference in how two men can remember their fathers. Rust tilts his head, watching her through the midday sunlight. “I never thought we looked much alike.”
“It’s there, alright,” Primrose says, nicely enough. “Though you don’t look so much like a man hell-bent on running from something.”
Those words hang in the air for a few moments, caught on the wind coming in from the lake, before fluttering away altogether.
“We’re all three looking to get up into town from here, Miss Prim,” Billy says while the gold tooth in his mouth shines. “You’d only have to be giving my rat ass a ride back to the lake, scout’s promise—unless you’d feel up to joining me for lunch somewheres.”
Primrose levels him with a look that could wilt stone but pulls her hands out of her apron pockets and reveals a heavy key ring. “It ain’t like I’m not running a proper business or anything around here, Billy Moon,” she says, but slips back through the shop’s door anyhow to holler after somebody inside.
“It’s a good thing you boys are handsome,” Primrose says to Rust and Marty, slipping her apron over her head before exchanging it for a green coat hanging inside the doorway. She stomps down the porch to stand next to Billy, top of her head just barely even with his shoulder. “You’re buying the first round,” she says to him, and then tips her head toward a muddy blue dually truck waiting beside the wooden building. “Let’s roll.”
* * *
Fairbanks is a place built around the winding coils of a river and from overhead the plot would look like the heart of a flower, every bridge and channel a petal reaching out into the throw of country that eventually turned into wilderness. But it’s as built-up and busy as any midsized city in the Pacific Northwest—and still cleaner, somehow, with this corner of the country still not quite as trampled and trodden as anywhere else in the lower forty-eight.
They part ways with Billy and Miss Primrose, watching the pair head off further into town with a wave. In four days’ time Billy promises to be back at the lakeside with his seaplane to ferry them down on a return trip to Juneau, and he clasps Rust’s hand once more with a little spark in his eye, tells him that old man of yours would be proud, son, stubborn as you’ve ever been to believe it.
It takes some guarded slip-sliding around the skinny waif of a man working at the rental dealership, and Rust has to turn down a soft-top jeep and a bright white SUV before he gets what he came looking for, but they drive off the lot in a four-door pickup with a pearlescent shine dusted through the paintjob’s gunmetal grey.
Marty sits shotgun and runs his hands over the leather console and seats while they rumble through downtown, tutting approvingly. “This is real nice,” he says, leaning forward to squint at the navigation system set into the dash. “I bet you already got half a mind to get back home and kick that old Ford to the curb.”
“Wouldn’t be worth much as a trade-in,” Rust says, idly tapping a thumb on the wheel while he watches the light they’re stopped at. “Far as that thing’s gone, ain’t too decent trying to sell it off on some poor kid, either. Might as well drive it into the ground.”
Marty sighs but doesn’t try to hide his little smile. “Well, when the time comes, I reckon you ought to look into something like this,” he says, drumming his fingers on the console, and then lets out a snort. “In the meantime I guess I’ll start making funeral arrangements for your old friend. Think white roses would be fitting for a proper sendoff.”
“You’re real funny, Marty,” Rust drawls, turning into a Safeway parking lot sparsely dotted with cars. “Here I was thinking it might even make it to Lilah’s sixteenth birthday.”
“Lilah’s—her sixteenth birthday?” Marty says, sounding a little more sobered in his quiet surprise. “Here she ain’t even two yet.” He looks at Rust for a long moment, expression gone from something partway bewildered to downright pleased as punch. “You’re softening right on up with age,” he says. “I’m gonna have to write that down, remind you when she’s old enough to start asking Audrey and Orren for a Mercedes.”
“Go ahead,” Rust hums, content enough. “I’m not bound to forget it. And considering that’s her first name, I can tell you right now she won’t be wanting for a Mercedes.”
“How do you go and figure that?”
“Most kids that age, seems like they want to be anything and anybody but the name their parents gave them.”
Marty rubs a hand through the whiskers around his jaw, looking out the windshield even though Rust has pulled into a parking spot. “Huh,” he says, blinking as he mulls that over for a moment. “Shit, though—what makes you think she’s gonna want your old rundown antique from when Clinton was still in office?”
Rust gets a hand around the driver side door and swings it out into the cold, stepping into a puddle of gasoline-slicked water pooled on the concrete. “By that time, I figure it’ll be something cool again.”
“Cool,” Marty echoes, laughing as he hops down on the passenger side and goes about messing with his coat. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that come out of your mouth before, lest you were talking about beer.”
“Put that down on the list of shit we’re looking for,” Rust says, squinting ahead at the Safeway’s entrance as they cross the lot. “Sixer or two’d be nice to have while we’re out by the river.”
Neither one of them have touched pen to paper or made any bare semblance of what might constitute a list, but Marty places his trust in Rust knowing what they need to haul up to the cabin. The two of them disappear through the automatic doors that whoosh open with a gritty-sounding whine, and right at the store’s entrance there’s a stuffed wolverine posed in a perpetual prowl next to a sweepstakes stand advertising free cruises down to the California coast.
Marty glances at its yellow-glass eyes as they pass, Rust tugging a rickety shopping cart along by two fingers. “A taxidermy wolverine,” he says. “In a fucking Safeway.”
Rust doesn’t bother to look back, already heading down the first aisle full of canned goods. “Clearly you ain’t ever spent much time in Texas, either. Half the gas stations out on the western side have antelope and mallard ducks mounted up behind the register.”
He drops a can or two of baked beans into the cart and then keeps moving, eyes scanning along the shelves as they walk along. Marty passes jars of pasta sauce, tuna fish packets, bags of rice and flour and cornmeal. “What exactly are we shopping for, in terms of provisions?”
That coaxes a smirk out of Rust. “The cabin’s got running water and a fridge, Marty. Little two-burner stovetop. We aren’t in here looking for jerky and hardtack.”
Marty lets out a low swear and follows Rust down the rear aisle of the store, cooler and humming with refrigerated cases. “Well then, feel free to tell me what the hell we’re looking for so I don’t look any more like a schoolboy following his mama around the place than I already do.”
Rust’s sleepy eyes cut over for a second as he stops to drop a pack of sliced bacon into the cart. “Eggs and bread probably be a good place to start, if you were wanting breakfast in the morning.”
“You gonna be the one cooking it?” Marty laughs, walking a few paces ahead to start peeking through egg cartons, checking for cracks and broken spots in the shells. “I was under the impression this was a vacation.”
“Mmmhm,” Rust hums, sounding carefully undecided as he opens up the dairy case to grab a quart of milk. “We’ll see.”
They meander on through the store, adding a couple sticks of margarine and peanut butter, sliced cheese and lunch meat and a loaf of bread, a small can of coffee and a box of tea, a few things to snack on and then a bottle of faithful Tabasco. Some paper plates and towels, plastic utensils, a case of bottled water and then two brown-bottled sixers of something called Alaskan Summer.
“Can’t get this down south,” Rust says, thumping the cardboard carrier as he sets it on the belt up at checkout. “Think you’ll like it when you try it.”
They carry everything in paper sacks out to the truck, bundling it up in the back with the rest of their bags. Even standing in a grocery store parking lot, nature looms like a mural rising all around them, and Marty’s half-tempted to get his phone out and snap a picture of the mountains sitting like a wall of stone ghosts in the distance.
Rust sees him looking and steps up on the truck’s running board, peering over the Safeway’s roof and across the midday horizon. “Drive up there should be even prettier once we get out of town limits,” he says, something quiet that sounds almost humbled. “I’ll take you further north in a couple days, up there at the edge of the circle.”
“What all’s up there?” Marty says, and that’s a broad way of putting it but for once he doesn’t feel stupid for asking. There’s enough wonderment caught in Rust’s eyes at the mere prospect, almost like a boy believing in the promise of something magic ahead, and that alone makes a shivery little chill crawl up Marty’s spine.
“The wild,” Rust says, blinking to himself before gently thumping the flat of his hand on the truck’s roof. He looks back to Marty and then steps down off the running board, pulling the driver side door open. “C’mon. Let’s get back on the road, got about another hour’s drive ahead.”
Their destination is plotted on the map up until the main drag turns off onto a barely-paved mountain road through the forest, Rebecca had mentioned. The navigation system says much of the same, and points them in a winding route up through hairpin forest roads and across wooden river bridges until it stops short at a thin line marked Fisherman’s Roost.
“Should be somewhere off the beaten road, set a-ways back in the woods,” Rust says, tapping the compass marker on the navigation screen. “Easy drive up otherwise. Getting back down might be a different story if it comes up an ice storm, but we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it.”
Marty works his jaw for a moment, contemplating the backlit map in front of them. “How do you go about getting off the side of a mountain if you can’t drive?”
Rust reverses out of the parking spot and doesn’t wait for the navigation system to ding before he’s already headed in the right direction, merging into the steady lull of traffic. “Don’t be worrying about all that,” he says, low and sure, the lilac and silver sprawl of distant mountaintops like lavender syrup caught under his tongue.
There’s no use in rehashing old mornings now forty years gone, about a boy with bread bags hidden in his boots who followed narrow deer paths down through the snow for two days until he finally found his way back to a beaten hunter’s trail. No real use in getting anybody riled up about all that.
“This shit’s all news to me,” Marty says, laughing out something on the faintly brittle side. “Wouldn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground out here if somebody got the notion to come around asking.”
They both seem to silently acknowledge that one man’s at the other’s mercy, not that such a truth is a foreign arrangement for either of them anymore. Maybe that used to be more out of reckless necessity than anything else, a collateral part of the Job and trench-fought warfare, or maybe some little part of Martin Hart had simply always trusted Rustin Cohle with more than he’d ever care to fully admit.
He’d admit it now, if Rust asked. Now that it stopped being a matter of mercy a long time ago.
“Anything comes up, we’ll work our way through it,” Rust says. “I’ll be right there with you the whole time.”
Marty feels his ears pop about twenty minutes into their haul up into the sprawl of snaking forest road. The asphalt has been laid out and lined like a ribbon through a towering hall of giant spruce and mountain hemlocks, and the sharpest bends overlooking the steep fall below only have staggered guard rails between their truck and the open air. He cracks the window as they drive down the sun-dappled road and breathes in a hint of what the forest has to offer.
“Almost like Christmas,” he says, letting the cold wind blow in his face for a few more seconds before rolling the window back up. “Sure beats the hell out of swamp water and ripe roadkill.”
Rust must’ve caught a whiff too, because he draws in a deep breath to savor the last of it. Like a man with his nose stuck in a sniffer glass of something fine indeed, Marty thinks. Testing the bouquet of the forest.
“Louisiana ain’t all that bad,” Rust says, and that rouses a chuckle out of Marty. “Different place, is all.”
“I think too many years with the same view might’ve addled your judgement a little bit,” Marty says, lightly rapping his knuckles against the glass. “All this is a far cry prettier than anything we might see on the I-10 back home.”
Rust’s face keeps neutral, eyes tuned straight ahead on the road. “Maybe,” he says. “Though I wouldn’t want to stay here any longer than a season, least not anymore.” He goes quiet for a moment, watching the side mirror as they curve up and around another hairpin turn. “Never did feel like a place to call home—more like a place I should run to.”
Marty ponders that over for a moment, tongue caught at the corner of his mouth. “I always thought that leveled out to be about the same thing.”
“There’s a difference,” Rust says. “Sure you remember living in that apartment with me for a week, way back in ’95. Don’t go telling me that place ever felt like a home to you.”
“Shit,” Marty snorts, looking over with narrowed eyes. “Then it begs asking, did it ever really feel like one to you? Hell, place looked like a prison cell the whole seven years you were in it.”
He realizes how he sounds a second too late and opens his mouth to try and soften the blow, but Rust only huffs out something that might be a laugh and shakes his head.
“Naw,” he says, hands sliding around to the low point in the steering wheel with a whisper. “Way I see it, home’s never really been something I’d call a place.”
Marty clears his throat and nods, decides to let that stay and settle where it lies. It took him a long time to stop asking about things he already knew the answer to, and sometimes he still does, if only for the ease of mind rather than the satisfaction.
Sitting where he is now, on the side of a mountain road in Alaska in the company of one Rustin Cohle, is probably all the answer he really needs.
Their trek up and around slows to a halt two different times, only for a few lingering moments at first when Rust lets the engine idle while a thin red fox scurries into the middle of the road and stops. They watch and it boldly turns to stare down the truck, sniffing the air once before continuing on its way into the underbrush at the roadside, white-tipped bottlebrush tail gone in the blink of an eye.
The second time Rust makes a point of glancing out the driver-side window once and again before he lets the truck slow to a crawl, looking into the forest at something Marty can’t see. “Moose,” he says, rolling the window down to point into the trees. The diesel engine cuts out with the turn of a key and everything goes quiet. “You see her?”
“No,” Marty says, and that’s the truth—all he sees is a thick blanket of forest, glasses be damned, and he leans over the center console until his face is at Rust’s shoulder. “What the hell are you looking at?”
“Follow the tip of my finger,” Rust says, quiet, keeping his right hand steady. “She’s on the move.”
Sure enough, Marty spots the shaggy brown flank at the tip of Rust’s index finger and has to wonder how he ever missed it the first time. They watch for a few more moments as the moose snuffles along the ground and then lifts her head, visage framed by a pair of saplings, both ears pricking forward while she lazily chews. Even from this distance Marty imagines the beast stands at least two or three hands taller than a horse at the shoulder.
“If it was a male we could probably smell it from here,” Rust says. “They’re in rut this time of year—mean as all hell.”
“That’s great,” Marty says, leaning back into his seat with a sigh. “So if and when we get charged, which seems goddamned likely considering it being you and me and all, I take it you’re offering to give me the first boost up a fuckin’ tree.”
Rust watches the female moose through the window, keeping quiet until she slips further into the forest thicket and finally out of sight. “It won’t come down to that,” he says, moving to crank the engine back over. They haven’t seen another vehicle on the mountain road in about twenty minutes, and their stopping in the middle of the road went by without consequence. “If it does, I’ve already gone and made prior arrangements by way of extra precaution.”
“Of course you have, Rust,” Marty says with a little laugh, lacing his hands in his lap like he’s settling in for a story. “I’d have been damn near shocked if you hadn’t.”
Rust briefly glances over before his eyes go back to the road, corner of his mouth twitching on the side Marty can’t see. “Rebecca Barlow’s good for more than just clean sheets and a hot meal,” he says. “Got us squared up nice and pretty where it counts.”
The engine shifts down as they climb up a low incline and around another bend. Every few miles there’s been a little turn-off onto a dirt or gravel rut carved in a path leading further into the trees, usually marked with a little wooden sign rather than reflective green road markers issued by the state. Once or twice the forest along the roadside was cleared out enough that somebody had been able to pasture their livestock there, and they’d driven past a herd of goats foraging through the underbrush and then a pair of tawny horses a little while later, heads bent low and sleepy in the cold shade.
“How much further have we got?” Marty asks a few minutes later, shifting some in his seat. He briefly drums his fingers on the door, eyes gone a little worried and intent on the navigation screen. “Man, I really gotta take a leak.”
“Bout fifteen more minutes,” Rust says, glancing at the map. “You want me to stop?”
“Damn,” Marty sighs, and then unclicks his seatbelt. “Yeah, pull over real quick. My eyes are probably startin’ to turn yellow.”
A minute later the truck’s parked on a shoulder overlooking the forest sloping down beneath them, and Marty’s got his back to the road with nothing but untouched skyline ahead. Rust’s boots are balanced on the running board again, both elbows propped on the roof of the truck while he keeps idle watch. There’s a hint of that craving itch for a cigarette, so close he can taste it against the roof of his mouth, but he sucks in the cold mountain air until it burns through the urge.
“Maybe I ought to take a picture,” he says, mouth turning up into a small smile when Marty’s free hand slowly rises with nothing but the middle finger pointing skyward.
“Here’s your picture,” Marty says, turning his head just enough that Rust can see the arch of one eyebrow. He bounces once on his heels as he shakes dry and zips up, good knee bending a little like it always does while he fastens the button on his pants.
“Reckon I had to empty both tanks on that one,” he says, turning around with a low whistle to find Rust still watching him over the roof of the truck. “You don’t gotta go? Making me feel like an old man over here.”
Rust shakes his head, squinting some against the overcast sky. The clouds are thicker now but don’t look mean, still thin enough for the sun to glow through. “Naw, I’m not the one who had two cups of coffee this morning,” he says. “You’ll be glad this cabin has an indoor commode—used to be growing up out here, we had to drag ass out back with a Sears catalogue at the crack of dawn. Rain, snow, pitch dark—didn’t fucking matter.”
“Must be why you’re so ornery,” Marty says with a little huff of laughter, trudging back up to the truck. “Growing up in the stone age n’ all.”
“Must be,” Rust says, swinging back down into the driver seat before cranking the engine back over. Marty settles in beside him and reaches for his seat belt, but Rust shakes his head as they pull back on the road. “We’re just about there, now. Start looking for the sign that says Fisherman’s Roost.”
Just as promised, the navigation system loses track of the way a good mile or so before they find Fisherman’s Roost, doing nothing more than pointing them further ahead in an endless coil up through the highlands. The sign in question is little more than a piece of timber planking staked into the ground, chipping white hand-painted over letters carved into the wood. Marty spots it first and Rust slows the truck when he sees it too, easing off onto the single dirt lane that disappears through the trees.
“Only one way coming and going,” Marty murmurs, watching mottled sunlight roll up over the hood of the truck through the branches above. The greenery on either side of the lane is thinned out but only barely, and it’s clear that nobody has been out to prune or cut back the overgrowth in quite some time.
“Good,” is all Rust says, slowly guiding over a pothole on the right side of the lane. “We meet anybody else coming or going inside the next few days, I figure we’re gonna have a problem.”
Marty lets out a huff of throaty laughter. “If you wanted me all to yourself so bad, all you had to do was ask.”
Rust hums a little to himself at that, flexing his hand around the wheel. “Don’t imagine that’s anybody’s business but our own,” he drawls out, words innocent enough, though there’s something in his tone that makes Marty’s skin warm and prickle. But then Rust ducks down a bit, peering ahead just as they get within sight of a clearing opening through the forest. “Here we go.”
A shy patch of earth opens up in the crowded family of towering conifers, just enough room to comfortably fit the cabin and a vehicle or two with a little plot of what may pass as a yard to spare. Tire tracks worn into the ground serve in place of a concrete driveway, and if there was once a loose gravel lane leading in from the road it’s long since been pressed into the dirt and nearly worn away. The sunlight sifting down from the overcast sky isn’t over-bright or glaring, still filtered through the pine needles and leaves so it settles on the ground sparse and welcoming.
Just beyond the clearing, they can see through the trees enough to spot water moving over stones the color of wet seals.
The cabin itself is on the small side but well-built, a handsome gabled roof furnished with a wooden deck and kindling shed around the side. It’s been touched by the elements for more than a few good years, the porch nearing the color of sun-bleached bone and the roof and brickwork chimney spotted with a patch or two of lichen, but Marty only smiles as he finally steps down out of the parked truck with a puff of fogged breath in the air.
“Would you look at that,” he says, surveying the cabin with both hands hitched up on his hips. “A sight for sore eyes and asses if I ever did see one.”
“Ain’t nothing too special,” Rust says, squinting around the clearing, no doubt making his first mental sketch of the place. “But it’ll do just fine, I think.”
He smoothes a palm against the side of his coat and promptly reaches into the right pocket to produce a brass key. It’s just something plain you could buy from any locksmith or hardware store, but it has a braided red string looped through and knotted for hanging. It’s the same one, Marty knows, that Rebecca had pressed into Rust’s hand the night before.
They follow one another up the few creaking steps to the wooden porch, standing staggered beneath the awning on a worn and bristled doormat. A boot scraper has been left out where it’s bolted to the planking, and Marty eyeballs it with some curious sense of awe while Rust pushes the key into the lock and lets the door swing into the cabin with a weak groan.
Any of the cold barrenness he was partway expecting to find is nowhere in sight, and while Rust stands just inside the doorway Marty is already moving further into the foyer, turning his head to soak in the furnishings and modest trimmings tacked up on the walls.
The cabin’s interior consists of one big room without many doors, though it’s been partitioned off with walls so the kitchenette and bathroom have their own little nooks. Blackout curtains are pulled back in the windows, letting daylight sprawl across the room so it barely touches the heavy quilt made up on the wide bed. There’s a vaulted loft above with room for storage and another pair of twin mattresses, and the dark fireplace is nestled between the stove and a blanket-draped armchair.
A buck’s head is mounted up on the far wall, glass eyes clear black and cold, though somebody who came before them has hung what looks like a dog whistle and a tied bundle of herbs from its antlers. Other than the small kitchen table and a dresser with an ancient-looking radio set on top, the only furniture to be found beyond the bed and night table is a tall folding screen that hides a large basin tub fitted with a showerhead and curtain.
It’s a strangely rustic mix of new and used, weathered and clean, but all clearly cared for and well lived-in. The air itself smells faintly of earth but mostly of something like clean linen, and Rust figures Rebecca’s family must’ve laundered everything fresh just before they arrived.
“Shit’s downright charming,” Marty says, sounding distinctly pleased through his wry huff of laughter. “Almost like one of them little mouse houses in the books the girls used to read.”
“You gonna complain about it the whole time we’re here?” Rust asks, feeling a strange weight in his limbs even as he leaves the door cracked behind him. But Marty only shakes his head while he pulls the zip down on his coat, not bothering to give Rust a sideways glance to let on whether he heard any irritation in the other man’s voice or not.
“Wouldn’t dare dream of it,” he says, and immediately catches sight of the space heater set up along one wall before thudding across the floor to start tinkering with it. A few buttons and one switch later, the thing rumbles to life and starts puffing warm air out against the palms of Marty’s hands. “There we go—little bit of warmth was all it needed.”
Rust doesn’t say it had that the moment Marty walked through the door. Instead, he tries on a weak smile and leans back out onto the porch, tucking the red-strung key back into his pocket. The cold mountain air helps to untangle the knotted ball of something lingering in the back of his head, and he breathes it in again like a musky healing vapor.
“Best to go ahead and get everything unloaded and put away,” he says, fingers brushing the worn wood of the doorjamb. The grooved sensation is something strong enough that he can almost feel it in his teeth. “I wanna get a good look around the area before dark.”
Marty finally looks up at him from where he’s standing across the room, then, and gets a faint little brightness caught in his eye. He watches Rust for a moment and then slowly closes the few paces between them, and Rust feels his lashes dip and lower when Marty’s close, the line of his throat bobbing some in place. He doesn’t know why he’s full of something taut and quivering, or maybe he does, but it nevertheless starts to sink and ebb away when a whiskery kiss lands somewhere below his eye.
“Hey now, we got here in one piece,” Marty says, murmured close to Rust’s ear. “You did real good.”
Simple words shouldn’t do so much to set him at ease, and Rust tries not to sag in his boots where he stands. He’s tired, but not so tired that he’s ready to collapse into Marty and not move for the rest of the day, though maybe that’s a good thought for later.
“It’s just—a lot to think about, you know,” he mutters, and immediately feels stupid for having said as much, but Marty only smiles and kisses him full-on this time, one heavy hand in a grounding weight against the small of his back.
“Let’s get the truck unloaded, maybe eat something real quick,” he says, taking a small step back to give Rust some room. “Imagine a little fresh air and exploring might do us both some good.”
He nods a bit, and then having made sure that Rust is intent on following, smooths a hand down one thigh and takes the porch steps at a trot. They haven’t been fitted with anything skid-resistant and Rust makes mental note to keep his stride two short steps behind Marty’s at the first sign of wet snow on the ground.
For now he starts back toward the truck, mind idly working around the promise of a something to fill the gnawing in his stomach and how it’ll feel to get nothing but the untouched Alaskan soil up under his boots again.
Daylight is already starting to grow long in the tooth by three in the afternoon, dipping closer toward the peaked mountains to the west. Rust watches the forest from where he stands leant up against the deck railing, polishing off the last few bites of a cold turkey sandwich Marty’d thrown together and handed off to him nearly first thing.
The surrounding woodland is quiet but not eerily so, still awash with the natural white noise of everything Rust remembers. A rustling breath of wind through the trees, the low buzz of a passing insect; even the river’s rush downstream sounds tame out here, muffled down into something soothing. There’s none of the chorusing cicada song that he’s grown so used to hearing while sitting out under humid southern nights, but the chattering laugh of a ptarmigan bird rouses somewhere nearby and he knows that strange song just as well, too.
Marty sticks his head through the door and sniffs against the cold, idly twisting a faded dishtowel between his hands. “Before we get to running around the dawning wilderness here,” he says, “remind me what you meant earlier with all that extra precaution business.”
Rust blinks once but then starts forward in motion, brushing past Marty to head back inside. He looks around the main room and lets his eyes fall on the stonework fireplace, moving forward in measured stride like a cat balancing on a fence.
“Should be over here somewhere,” he says, gingerly testing his weight on the floorboards. They creak just the same as any of the others and don’t seem to give up their secret, so Rust moves further into a little corner behind the ash trowel and hearth broom and taps his heel on the wood.
When it thuds hollowly, he grunts to himself and crouches down to start working something with his hands. Marty’s curiosity long since won any front of a battle and he’s at Rust’s back in two steps, peering into the crook just in time to watch a section of floorboard pry loose with the help of a pocketknife.
Rust pulls out a bundle of something wrapped in plain oilcloth, and when it unravels in his hands he holds up a semi-automatic pistol and two clips. He checks the chamber on the gun and then stands back up, passing it over to Marty.
“Thought it’d be best to have that on hand,” he says, briefly stooping over to cover up the little compartment in the floor. “Likely won’t even need to lay a finger on the trigger, but if the need should arise…” He trails off, moving over to his suitcase to unzip the main compartment. “Figure I’d rather not take the chance and be caught without it.”
Marty hefts the gun in his hand, checking for a serial number he has to squint at to read. He looks up just as Rust pulls his holster out and lays it on the edge of the bed. “Guess you went and packed that away when I wasn’t looking.”
“Didn’t want your mind worrying on it too much with all the traveling we’ve been doing,” Rust says, undoing the buckle on his belt. He glances down to get the holster settled on his right hip before letting his flannel shirt drape back over it.
“Well, you ought to know I feel kind of spare without my piece, you over here carrying n’ all,” Marty says, fingering the edges of a magazine clip. He works his jaw for a moment, eyes cast low to where Rust’s holster is now hidden from sight. “What am I supposed to do if shit goes south and we’re put in a position where you can’t draw and fire?”
Rust gives a small shake of his head as he pulls a rucksack out and carries it over to the kitchen. “Get the gun if you can, run if you can’t,” he says, dropping a couple water bottles into the bag that already holds a length of nylon rope and the pack of lighters they picked up at the grocery store. “Aim for between the eyes, single flank shot won’t do much to stop a grizzly.”
“That’s real heartening to hear,” Marty grouses, passing the gun over for Rust to holster. “I feel so much fucking better, Rust.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Rust says, glancing up from under his brows. “You likely make enough racket to scare ‘em off before we ever lay eyes on one.”
Marty lets out a hoot before he laughs. “I’ll be taking that shit in stride, then.” He sighs a little and shakes his head, a trace of humor still hanging around his mouth. “God, feel like I’ve aged ten years since we landed in Juneau.”
“I’ve always found that time doesn’t move so much out here,” Rust says as he shoulders the rucksack, sounding on the softer side of being cryptic. “Tends to only catch up with you once you get out and look back on where you’d been standing.” He pockets his phone after checking the time and pulls up the zipper on his coat again, not giving much mind to the look Marty’s busy casting his way. “You ready to take a walk?”
Marty snorts at that. “A walk,” he muses, bending a bit to tighten the lace on his left boot. When he straightens back up he’s smiling and Rust is suddenly struck, maybe not for the first time, with how thankful he is that they made it this far.
“Lead the way, cowboy,” Marty says, tipping his head toward the door. “I’m following you.”
* * *
They follow the curve of the river for a half-mile or so, moving under the languid spell of the woods and easy silence. Birdcall and crunching leaves mingle with the slow rush of the water, and soon the current grows more distant as Rust heads further east away from the muddy bank.
A few words are passed between them like skipping stones, brief and bright before they drop beneath the surface. Warm and simple things—questions asked and answered, caution cast toward a gnarled root or slippery rock, pointing out some strange or fantastic facet of nature.
Marty contemplates the peacefulness of their shared quiet as he walks in stride with Rust, at times letting his eyes stray to his own feet carrying him along through the woodland. Memory, he realizes, starts to blur and burn at the edges after a while. Soft focus, Vaseline smeared on the lens of his past. There once was a time when being in Rust’s company felt like sitting at the foot of a simmering volcano—not in the sense that he was waiting in fear for an explosion, but that he coexisted with the man by always keeping one wary eye cast toward the mountain. Disquietude, is what it was. The general unease that coincides with how unpredictable and swift such a force of nature could be.
And so any silence between them had felt like too much like overwrought tension on a bowstring. Wound tight enough to snap and split if you pulled it just right, and Marty knows firsthand what the whip-back felt like when it was broken. He couldn’t have known that they’d get to where they are now. Wouldn’t have been able to believe it, truth be told—not from either of them, not even the sparest edge of an inkling.
And so Marty sometimes wonders if they’re hard men who grew weary, or simply bad men who finally managed to get comfortable.
“Look here,” Rust says, nearly two miles from the cabin with the fading sun slipping between the treetops to burn orange in his hair. He bends at the waist to pick something up where it’d been half-hidden in the leaves, and Marty watches as Rust holds up a long, sturdy stick that hits him right about where his first rib starts.
They both consider it for a moment, Rust brushing a few damp leaves away before passing it over. “Might make a good walking stick,” he says while Marty leans his weight into the thing to test its hold and give. “If you want to take it back we can whittle out a loop through the top later, make it easier to carry.”
“Probably a decent idea,” Marty murmurs, taking a measured step ahead with the stick in hand. “My damn knee’s been burning pretty good the last quarter-mile now.”
Rust almost looks pained at the suggestion, if it weren’t for the flash of something else that moves across his face in an instant. “Why didn’t you tell me it was bothering you?” he asks, and Marty knows what guilt looks like on Rust’s face when he sees it.
“It ain’t all that bad,” Marty says, almost too quickly, chewing at his bottom lip. He tightens his hands around the walking stick and doesn’t quite look Rust in the eye. “I didn’t want to hold us up none while we were here, y’know.”
They watch one another through the darkening shade beneath the trees. The sun is sinking ever lower, making the sky bleed at the throat into Alaskan twilight.
“You know this ain’t about all that,” Rust says finally, gone quieter. “I brought you here, Marty—” He stops short, lips curling around whatever it was he couldn’t say until they press into a thin line.
“Don’t you dare go getting that whipped dog look about me,” Marty says, shaking his head. “I’ll push myself as far as I damn well please, and if gets to be too much I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“You shouldn’t have to tell me,” Rust says, eyes flashing up. “This ain’t like taking an extra mile around the fuckin’ block—you push yourself too far out here, you get yourself hurt or worse off than that.”
“As I remember it, we came up here to see some shit,” Marty says, shifting his weight back onto his heels. “I’m more than perfectly aware that me being a part-time cripple ain’t so conducive to getting around to see it.”
“That don’t matter,” Rust says, dropping his shoulders down. His voice lowers again and he looks as the long cast of his own shadow pointing east. “I’d crawl if I needed to, Marty. You know that—I told you why I wanted you to come with me. Neededyou, to come with me.”
Marty sniffs some through the chill and huffs out a cloud of breath in a soft sigh. He smiles, though, just enough that Rust can see it hanging around his eyes. “I remember.”
“Good,” Rust says, stepping closer before looking back in the direction of the river. “I ain’t in any big hurry, so we’ll take our fucking time if we want to. Ready to head back in before it gets too dark anyhow.”
“You bring a flashlight?” Marty asks.
Rust grunts at that, forehead creased while he peers through the spruce and alder. “Didn’t see the need for one.”
“If it’s all the same to you,” Marty says, starting back toward the water, “I’d prefer we get some hustle going.”
They greet the riverbank again shortly thereafter, and judging by the slant of sun through the trees they should have another fifteen minutes until it sinks below the horizon. Rust brings his watch up closer to his face so he can read the time, noting that it’s only twenty past six o’clock. Three time zones ahead in Louisiana they’d be starting to head toward bed if they weren’t already there, and the long haul of the day is catching up with him quicker than he imagined it would. Marty drives a hard bluff when he’s stubborn enough to keep his mind on it, but if Rust is wearing thin he knows the other man is probably a few threads shorter than that by now.
Marty only whistles lowly to himself as they move along parallel to the water, one little tune before it tapers off. “You really do move different out here,” he says, watching Rust’s feet. “Never seen you so light on your feet before.”
“Reckon old habits die hard,” Rust says, not slowing or changing his gait. “Pop had it ground into me the second I was old enough to keep up at his heels.”
“Just strange, I suppose,” Marty muses, looking down to watch his own boots crunch through the leaves. “Thinking how this place has known you a whole lot longer than I have.”
Rust blinks at that, clearing his throat so a light gust of breath catches in the air. “Don’t mean it knows me any better,” he says, watching Marty from the corner of his eye.
“But it does,” Marty says, snorting to himself. “Not that I’m sitting here all jealous of the fuckin’ topography or nothing, but it seems pretty obvious—to me, at least—that these woods have seen more of you than most people ever did.”
“Quite an observation you’re making there,” Rust says, though he doesn’t try and deny it. He knows the feeling that currents through his blood when he gets deep out in the wilderness, how it digs its claws in and wells up lines of dark red. How you can try to leave a place behind and forget it even though it won’t ever forget you.
“You’ve made a name for yourself here that I haven’t ever heard,” Marty says. He doesn’t sound put off by it, more perceptive in his settling insight. “That much was clear to me right from the start.”
Rust only looks up ahead of them, peering through the falling dark with his jaw set at a harder angle. “I never really wanted it,” he says. “Crash, Travis Cohle’s son—parts I had to play, Marty. Only reason they ever lasted long as they did is because expectation tends to turn into reality, you leave it alone long enough.”
“Crash,” Marty murmurs, like he’s got to test the weight of it in his mouth. They pass that word between them day in and day out, casual as can be, but it hasn’t been something he took for a name in a long time now. “From what I could see, you were damn good at that too.”
Rust hums to himself, a soft noise low in his throat. “Think we ought to know by now that being good at something and enjoying it are two different things.”
That thought lingers between them for a long moment. The lonely call of a night bird moves above in flight, and the cabin has finally come back into view further ahead.
“Well, it’s just you and me,” Marty says at last, limping only a little bit that Rust can see. “And as far as expectations out here go, I ain’t expecting to find anybody but you.”
“That’s real sweet of you, Marty,” Rust says, dry as a bone, even though he feels himself smile all the same.
Marty only lets out a laugh and bites into his lower lip. “Hey, least I try.”
Behind them the last splinter of daylight drops beneath the mountain peaks. The cabin’s single porch lamp stands out bright and golden like a distant firefly, and they follow it through the darkness until they’re warm and indoors again.
With two armloads of kindling stacked up by the hearth, Rust locks up the cabin and starts building a fire with twisted sheets of newsprint and his old lighter. Marty’s shed out of his coat for the night and watches a skillet heat up on the little stovetop, ready to drop a pat of butter in to start melting down. He yawns while he waits, reaching up to press the heel of his hand into one eye.
“I ain’t gonna last much longer here after supper,” he says, slumped where he stands so his stomach paunches out. “Hope that bed is as soft as it looks.”
“Find out here in a little bit,” Rust says, crumpling up a wad of paper and stuffing it under the iron fire grate. Smoke has started to stream up the flue while the kindling faintly crackles, and he watches the flames until they lick up over the wood and finally catch.
Marty cracks the lid on a can with an aluminum pop and the sound seems to stir something in his head, because Rust hears him huff to himself while he empties tomato soup into a pot they’d found in one of the cabinets. It takes him a few moments spent buttering a slice of bread and dropping it into the waiting pan before he decides it’s worth sharing.
“Wonder how that cat’s doing,” he says. Grilled cheese starts sizzling and Rust follows the smell across the room so he can drop down at the little table tucked into the corner of the kitchenette.
He starts unlacing his boots before he drawls out a question. “You miss her already?”
“I didn’t say that,” Marty says, careful not to be too quick on the draw. “She just never ain’t been dropped off somewhere else before, outside the vet and all.”
Rust tucks his laces away and sits back up, watching Marty’s back while he checks the underside of a sandwich. “You forget we got her secondhand, maybe third, out of a kill shelter on Pont Des Mouton.”
“I ain’t talking about her past life shit,” Marty says, cutting one hand through the air with a gesture that looks like it was meant to imply something vaguely metaphysical. “I’m talking about ever since she’s been with us.”
“Sure she’s settling in by now,” Rust says, feeling himself start to yawn just as hard as Marty had earlier. “Can call Shelley tomorrow and ask her to put Ghost on the phone for you.”
Marty lets out a low swear and claps his spoon on the edge of the pot, shooting Rust a dirty look over one shoulder. “Do you want me to feed your smart ass or not?”
“I’ve fed myself more than a few times up here without having to get anything out of a can,” Rust says, folding his hands under his chin. “It ain’t pretty but it’s passable fare.”
“Well, I’ll let you go on out and dig up some roots and worms to tide you over, then,” Marty snorts, moving around to find a pair of bowls in the upper cabinets. “Maybe run wild with the wolves and howl at the moon, summon up a forest spirit or two.”
Rust gets up to pull a few drinks from the fridge, carrying them back over to the table before watching Marty at the counter. “Most of the Dena’ina people don’t fuck around with that shit,” he says. “We go down to the valley in a day or two, you can ask Aya about the stick people living out in the woods.”
“Aya?” Marty says, eyes swiveling over to the other man.
“That’s not her given name,” Rust says, and something small in his voice has softened into what sounds like humble modesty, shy and almost childlike. “Somebody I’ve known since I was a kid—she’s getting way on in her years, now. Probably older than my Pop would’ve been.”
He passes the pad of a thumb over his mouth, lost in thought for a moment. “I haven’t seen her in a long time, and I figure I ought to do it before—well. You know what the fuck I mean.”
“You think she’d be able to have company out of the blue?” Marty asks, and the implied question is unspoken but clearly there. Rust can go wherever he pleases in this place, untethered and unbound by whatever law he’s written for himself here. Marty isn’t sure where he stands just yet, though he’s got a feeling it’s somewhere inside the footprints Rust leaves for him to follow.
“She’s always been expecting company, even in the dead of winter when the sun ain’t set in two damn weeks,” is all Rust says, pushing off the counter to sit back down at their little table. “If I didn’t bring you out to meet her and she knew we’d been here, I imagine I’d be looking over one shoulder for the rest of my natural life.”
The soup is done heating up and Marty divvies it up between two bowls, scraping the spoon around the pot until he’s satisfied. “Well then,” he says, setting Rust’s share down in front of him before he goes back to get their sandwiches. “I’ll be looking forward to meeting her. She don’t live alone, does she?”
“Last I knew she lived with her son in the house where he was born,” Rust says, watching Marty settle across from him. Their knees knock together but he doesn’t draw back or shift away. “He’s about my age, maybe a few years younger—Abram. Works with the forestry division a lot, more of a rugged type.”
“Huh,” Marty says, and that’s the last they say of it while they start working through supper. It’s a quiet and comfortable enough ritual, though maybe a little strange without the easygoing lull of the kitchen radio, and he ponders that for a minute before he gets up and walks over to the old dresser across the room.
“You think there’s any reception out here?” he asks, checking the outlet plug before switching on the first knob that looks plausible. “We might be too far out in the sticks to pick up anything better’n static on this fucking antique.”
The speakers crackle and hiss and whir while he spins the dial, and it takes some jimmying in both directions before the low croon of a voice fades in. The tune sounds distant but is whole enough to make out through the airwaves, and Rust listens to a few words before he knows the source.
“Creedence Clearwater,” he says, spoon brought halfway to his mouth with tomato soup still steaming midair. “That the only station it’s picking up?”
Marty twists the dial back and forth again but they can only catch whirring static. “Seems like it,” he says, and leaves the last few notes of the song to linger through the cabin while he goes back to the other half of his grilled cheese.
They polish their plates and tidy up the little kitchenette, rinsing out bowls and pots and wiping down the counters. The cabin has a number of odds and ends squirreled away in nooks and crannies—not necessarily strange, but perhaps things they hadn’t been expecting to find. There’s a bag of mismatched glass marbles and stones and a yellowed copy of Wuthering Heights in the bedside table, a roughly knitted but soft and heavy scarf made from cranberry-colored yarn in one of the dresser drawers. Rust finds a half-empty tin of herbal tea in the otherwise empty breadbox, and it isn’t until they’ve pulled the curtains and Marty starts up the shower that he finds a little collection of soap in the hinged cabinet by the tub.
He’s stripped down to his boxers and bringing the little paper-wrapped bars up to his nose, making a sour face at the ones printed with purple lettering. “Lavender,” he laments, and then tries another sealed in pale yellow. “The sandalwood one ain’t that bad, though.”
“Mmm,” Rust hums, watching Marty from where he’s sitting near the fire with his socked feet propped up in front of the hearth. The folding screen is still between them but he can see the other man from his vantage point just fine. Marty checks the falling water behind the curtain and doesn’t deem it warm enough to get in just yet, but he still steps out of his underwear and leaves them in a pile with his other clothes on the floor.
He braces one hand on the edge of the bath while he bends to fish a folded washcloth out of the cabinet, and Rust’s eyes stray to the little pink scar on his waist, just above the softened jut of his hipbone.
That’s a scar he earned for Rust—not the first and probably not the last with how their lives inescapably orbit and tangle up with one another. A bullet through Marty’s side, and one more marker on the long map that brought them up here.
Rust thinks, sometimes, because he’s rehashed certain nights in their lives a thousand times in the ruined hallways of his head, that he can trace twenty years in scars on Marty’s body—that Marty could do the very same for him by now through memory alone. Some earned out of carelessness, others out of spite. Others yet out of something else entirely, and that’s the word that he can’t believe they’ve strung between them after all this time.
The careless, spiteful, crazy things a man would do out of hatred. Funny how he’d do much of the same for love.
Marty catches Rust looking and only winks before he slips behind the shower curtain, letting out a little yelp against the spray of hot water. He starts rinsing off and Rust watches the fire with his thoughts dancing alongside it, picture and memory flickering across his mind.
“You got any big plans for tomorrow?” Marty calls over the sound of falling water after a while, and Rust raises his head, blinking against his own fatigue. The smell of sandalwood is wafting through the air now and he vaguely thinks that it’s a suiting scent for Marty—warm and golden and heady, like cedar left out in the sun.
“Not really,” Rust says, reaching up to press two fingers against the pulse jumping under his jaw while he thinks. “Figured we’d get our feet up underneath us, stick around here for the day.”
“That’s fine by me,” Marty says, pausing to twist the faucet until the water stops running with a squeak. The drain gurgles and he fumbles for a towel hanging outside the tub before his fingers finally find it. “Considering I don’t know if I’ll make it out of bed before noon.”
Rust unthreads the gun, holster and all out of his belt loop and sets it on the dresser with the safety switched on. He waits for Marty to get out and dressed before he strips out of his own clothes and steps into the steam-warmed bath, tipping his face toward the hot water. He doesn’t think while he washes, runs through the routine of soaping and rinsing and brushing his teeth with sleep already snapping at his heels, and it isn’t until he’s sitting on the edge of the mattress that he really bothers to open his eyes and see.
They’ve turned down all the lights inside, save for the firelight and the single lamp on Marty’s side of the big quilted bed. It’s quiet despite the radio muted down low, familiar but different without the crickets lulling them off to sleep in the trees outside. Marty’s already curled up under the covers behind him, and when Rust feels a warm hand brush against his lower back he shivers with the submerging feeling of something like the unmistakable navel-tug of déjà vu.
But then it’s gone, and Marty’s yawning like a lion with two fingers tucked into the waistband of Rust’s boxers. He snaps the elastic once and withdraws again to his side of the bed, tucking the offending hand up under his pillow. “Will you come over here and settle down so I can turn this goddamn light out,” he murmurs, sleepy and already muffled through the pillow. “No reason to be thinkin’ so hard on a vacation.”
Rust half-turns, lashes lowered enough that he has to peer through them into the shadowed room around them. “Do you feel like the veil is thinner?” he asks, leaning more heavily into the soft sheets beneath his hands. Marty’s never set foot in Alaska before but he can’t quite bite down on the urge to ask. “Here. This place, this time of year—like boundaries aren’t so opaque anymore.”
“What’s this veil you’re talkin’ about,” Marty says, blinking at Rust’s back through the lamplight even as he sags further into the bed. His voice starts growing fainter, falling down the long well of sleep. “We ain’t…married.”
Rust’s stomach tightens up for a second before he lets out a deep breath. “The shroud between time and space,” he says, even though Marty isn’t really listening anymore. “Between here and there, what is and what isn’t. What—what we want, and then what we really deserve.”
Like a hissing sieve torn into the malleable fabric of reality, but Rust doesn’t say that. He’s too tired and the day’s been too long. Marty’s breathing has grown softer and more measured and Rust thinks he wants nothing more in this beating moment than to fall into a pillow and join him.
Marty doesn’t stir when Rust leans over him to twist off the light, though he lets out a contented sort of sigh when he feels the other man finally fold himself under the covers and curl up on his side.
“Go to sleep, babe,” Marty mumbles, even though he’s already there himself.
Rust closes his eyes and does just that.
* * *
The hearth and heater have both gone dark and cold by first light, though neither man bothers with hurrying out of bed to start tending a new fire. Rust’s toes curl under the quilt at the thought of walking barefoot across the cabin floor, and when Marty snakes an arm around his side to pull him closer from where they’d drifted apart during the night, he only scoots into the shared warmth and reminds himself the fire can wait.
“What time is it?” Marty murmurs, face pressed halfway into his pillow with both eyes still shut. The room around them is filled with that cool shade of familiar grey-blue that holds hands with dawn, and despite being so far from the South Rust can nearly smell the dewy grass and hear the mourning doves cooing out their first call of the day.
“Going on seven,” he says, squinting at the clock over Marty’s shoulder.
Marty’s brow scrunches up for a moment while he tries to mentally track the time. “Shit,” he says. “We slept just about ten hours.”
“So much for all your sleeping in ‘til noon,” Rust says, though he doesn’t make much effort to move beyond trying to push a knee between Marty’s. That’d been an odd sensation way back at the start of things, the feeling of their shins rubbing together like a pair of crickets, but they’d gotten used to it despite Marty’s halfhearted jokes about Rust forgetting to shave.
Here and now he only shifts around so they can fit together, cricket legs be damned.
“I forgot where we were for a minute,” Marty says, reaching up with his free hand to stifle another wide yawn. His face splits into a little grin and Rust feels himself smile back, content enough for the moment to close his eyes and listen to the other man’s sleepy-mussed voice.
“Wanna see what the river’s throwing downstream this time of year,” he says, and Rust knows Marty’s thinking of the fishing tackle and waders hanging up in the little cabinet around back of the cabin by the woodpile. They hadn’t been able to bring anything of their own up for the haul, but the lingering glance he’d taken at the rods the night before seemed promising enough.
Rust doesn’t nod, though he stretches the low arch of his back with a satisfied sigh that comes out more like a moan. The sparse shape of Marty’s eyebrows go up at that, and he reaches across them to throw the covers back without warning.
“Best get you up and out of this bed before we go getting distracted,” he says around a burst of laughter, gently thumping Rust somewhere on the high part of his thigh before pulling away. “Ain’t any use in an honest fishing trip if you don’t get an early start.”
The air’s cold enough that their bare skin prickles with goosebumps almost right away, and Rust swears outright against the chill as he rolls over to climb out of bed.
“Can’t let the fire die down like this again,” he mumbles, picking his way across the hardwood until he’s bent at the dark hearth. “Carelessness—you’ll regret it every fucking time.”
“Let me go ahead and get the coffee started, since you’re clearly in dire need,” Marty says from the little kitchenette, pawing through the cabinets and a grocery sack until he finds the bag of grounds he was looking for. Rust ignores him while he stacks wood in the grate, and it isn’t until the smell of coffee starts filling the cabin that the air seems to warm up around them.
Eggs over easy and two pieces of bread put through the toaster oven suffice for breakfast, and Marty fills up a thermos with the leftover coffee before stepping out the rear door to face the new morning. Rust can hear him rustling around in the storage cabinet after unhinging the padlock, and there’s a clatter of a tin bucket and something that rolls across the deck before Marty’s muffled voice drifts back in through the cracked door.
“Pretty good equipment they keep here,” he says, and Rust can imagine the furrow drawn between his eyes while he starts picking his tackle for the day, probably not unlike the way a lady would pick out her jewels and finery for a party. “Not the best, but not too damn bad either.”
Rust holsters the pistol and then shrugs into his coat, moving quietly between the dresser and the kitchen table. They’d left the radio running through the night, turned down so low it was barely audible, and he makes to click the dial off before thinking otherwise—it’d always been better to give off the illusion of somebody being home, at least when he wasn’t living alone. He tucks his ledger and pencils into the rucksack along with Marty’s thermos and picks up a paper grocery bag from the counter, folding it between his hands as he walks onto the deck.
“You planning on doing some shopping?” Marty asks offhand, glancing at the Safeway bag before going back to examine the box of brightly feathered fishing flies in his hands.
“For any waste you can’t bury,” Rust says, tucking the bag in next to his notebook with a short sniff. “Can’t leave nothing behind.”
Marty nods at that and then clicks the lid on the tackle box, gesturing for Rust to pick up the steel bucket holding the folded waders at their feet. “Get a handle on that if you could—I’ll carry the rods down if you got the lockup.”
Two minutes later they’re following a narrow footpath down to the river from Fisherman’s Roost, winding between a thick sea of ferns and underbrush. Early morning pries bright fingers down through the treetops, and Rust can feel the warm sun on his shoulders despite their breath fogging on the October air. Marty follows behind him with the long fly rods braced across one shoulder, tackle box swinging in his opposite hand. They hear the river before they can see it and the first glimpse is nearly blinding at the right angle, sunlight rippling on the surface like peeled gold.
“I haven’t been out on anything but the lake back home in nigh on ten years,” Marty says as they reach the end of the footpath and break out onto gravel bank. The cold pebbles give and shift under their boots as they walk between larger rocks, the crunching sound sharp and pleasing in Rust’s ears.
Marty picks out a spot in the sunshine and settles down on a flat rock the size of a recliner to start threading and dressing his pole. He pulls his knit cap down over his ears and works with cold but nimble fingers, delicately holding up a pheasant-feather fly to squint at it through one eye. Rust takes a seat a few feet away, watching the moving water until his gaze turns back toward Marty. There’s a certain fineness in his movements when he works like this—not something people would expect or imagine, maybe, thinking about Martin Hart with all his bluster and brightness as anything resembling an artisan.
Rust ponders that for a moment. Thinks of the Marty he knew from twenty years ago, what he’s said of his straight-laced father and what he might’ve formerly thought it meant to be a man. Perhaps there was never any real room for creativity outside the macaroni and glue pictures a little blonde boy stopped bringing home to his mama after third grade, no encouragement or approval for frivolous pursuits that wouldn’t put food on the table or notches in a belt—aside from what Rust is watching now, a trade’s craft spun out with hooks and twine and iridescent feathers that shine under the sun.
“You plan on throwing a line out or are you gonna sit there and look pretty all day?” Marty says without warning. “Remind me of that one statue where the dude looks like he’s sitting on the john doing a crossword.”
Rust cracks a smile. “The Thinker,” he says, looking up to meet Marty’s eye through the midmorning light. “Auguste Rodin.”
“That’s the one,” Marty says with a snap of his fingers, setting the finished rod aside to start pulling the laces on his boots. “Trust you to always know that Jeopardy shit.”
He reaches for the waders Rust had dropped nearby and stands with a little wince, starting the cumbersome task of toeing into the black rubber boots and pulling the legs up past his knees. His coat is too thick to tuck in so he shrugs it off for a moment to hoist the straps up over both shoulders until they rest against the dark fleece of his sweater.
“Well,” Marty says when he’s done, leaning over to get a hand around the fly reel before flashing Rust a lopsided grin. “Do I look the part or what?”
“Better than I ever did,” Rust says, and thinks that’s pretty close to God’s honest truth, eight years spent on a crab trawler aside. Marty’s bright-eyed and proud when Rust knows he himself had only ever looked and felt like a wet rag tied out with an orange crewman’s parka to flap in the arctic wind. “Could fit right in to one of those glossy nature magazines.”
Marty snorts at that but turns and heads for the river current. “You sure you don’t want me to fix you up a pole?” he asks, calling back over one shoulder.
“I’ll take a turn when you want a rest after while,” Rust says, dropping his pack down between his feet. He digs around and pulls his notebook out, the hardbound cover smooth and cold in his hands. “Sit here and watch for a little bit.”
Marty makes his first cast out into the water and Rust takes a graphite pencil in hand. He doesn’t open his ledger yet, only rolls the wood between his fingers and takes a minute to look around. New daylight touches everything as far as the eye can see, but there are a few trees across the water so alight with gold and umber leaves that they almost look like they’re on fire.
Grey pencil won’t do proper justice for those, and after lingering along the rocks and opposite shoreline Rust’s eye turns on a more learned subject instead. He could fill a blank book cover to cover with sketches made in Marty’s image—everything from disembodied hands to the slant of his brow to the curve of his bare back when he’s curled up on one side and sleeping. It’s not any new tradition, and Rust knows he once had scratchy inkpen drawings made in the back of his work ledger that were brought to life from the passenger seat of a Honda, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of it. And after all this time and the road they’ve traveled, it only makes sense to capture him again here and now.
He’s just finished outlining his partner’s shoulders when Marty’s voice breaks through the air.
“About that guy at the bar the other night,” he says, flinging his line back out across the water with a sharp zip as if to carry the thought. “Kinda wish I’d have said some shit to set him straight. Felt like a fucking idiot just sitting there twiddling my thumbs.”
Rust rests his pencil flat against the page and looks up, losing the posture he’d fallen into while drawing. “You still smarting about that?”
“Well it obviously ain’t keeping me up at night, but I was just thinking…” Marty says, and then trails off while he watches his line bob in the water. There’s only the sound of a few birds and the moving current for a few moments, no longer the gentle thrum of white noise. “Why the hell do we let people talk to us like that?” he asks. “When twenty years ago I know damn well you’d have knocked the man’s teeth down his throat without even batting an eyelash. Christ, I’d have probably done the same.”
Rust tries to move back into the headspace he was at Chinook’s, the steady beat of his pulse and his hand gripping his thigh under the table. He could’ve struck first and won—if only for a moment, before the whole rest of the bar turned over and came down on him and Marty both in a trampling cavalry run.
“Being outnumbered, mostly,” he says, and knows that part for a fact. “Other’n that, wasn’t much worth saying that you could’ve thrown at him. People talk—what they say ain’t gonna go and change what we’re doing or what we know.”
“I know it,” Marty says on a sigh. He’s angled just enough that he can see Rust in his peripheral vision, facing west down the curve of the river. “Too damn tired and old to go stirring up fights anymore. Just hate hearing that shit, is all.”
Rust flicks the tip of his pencil and catches the set of Marty’s jaw, squaring it up more than it’d been before. He tries not to smile, head bent over while he sketches a fold in the other man’s coat. “You remember the time we got into it with Geraci at that fundraiser.”
Marty lets out a whoop, shaking his head like it was a good old time with the boys rather than two against ten where they went home bruised and busted to hell. “That’s different,” he says. “I could be plumb near blind with both arms tied around my back and I still wouldn’t turn down the chance to lay a beating on Steve Geraci.”
“Glad we see eye to eye on that,” Rust says after a long moment, and Marty’s answering laughter is a sound that wings through the forest like it belonged there all along.
They stay down by the river until the sun has moved just past its high peak in the sky, warming up the air enough that Marty sheds out of his coat and keeps fishing in nothing but his sweater. It’s still bitterly cold under the cover of shade and Rust stretches out on the bank with his back and rucksack propped against a smooth rock, soaking up whatever sunshine he can before it starts sinking behind the trees.
Two stout fish wind up in the steel bucket and Marty makes a point to throw all the rest back, sliding the hooks from their wide mouths before stooping to drop them in the moving stream. They dart through the water and seem to almost shimmer beneath the surface, scales reflecting the sun like silver-backed glass and emerald.
“Figure it’s about lunchtime,” Marty says when he trudges back up onto the bank and crunches through the gravel until he’s standing before Rust. “Hope you’ve worked up an appetite sunning yourself up here like a big old cat all morning.”
“Reckon I have,” Rust says, tipping his head back to peer at Marty. He holds up a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, mouth pulled into a thoughtful sort of scowl. “Watching you has been plenty enough work.”
Marty cracks a smile, pink in the face and maybe just a little wind-chafed, but happy. “C’mon then,” he says, reaching a hand down to Rust. “Help me haul this shit back up so we can eat something. Think I’ve just about had enough fishing for one day.”
They retrace their own footprints back up to the cabin, finding that the chimney is still spitting up a paltry curl of smoke while a fat red squirrel watches them curiously from the deck. Its tufted ears twitch, black beady eyes unblinking, and the moment Rust stomps on the bottom stair it leaps away and scurries up the closest tree it can find.
Marty sets his bucket down on the wooden ledge and peers into it at the fresh fish, wrinkling his nose up in thought.
“What,” Rust murmurs, unlocking the back door to step inside the kitchenette. He leaves it open so the little gingham half-curtain flutters in the breeze, letting Marty’s voice follow him back in.
“You want these now or later?” Marty asks, reaching up to scratch through his whiskers. “Either way I suppose I’ll be the one cleaning them off and out.”
Rust hums to himself and digs through the cupboards until he finds a cast iron skillet with a fine layer of dust on it. He pulls it out and brings it over to the sink, fishing around for a spare rag. “Can go ahead and eat an early supper,” he says, letting the water slowly warm up. He walks back to the doorway and offers his deal. “If you clean ‘em up, I’ll do the rest.”
“That’s fair enough for me,” Marty says, and reaches into a pocket for his knife. He cleans the scales and guts out with a skilled hand that’s a little out of practice from disuse, but by the time the fish are butter-fried up and seasoned with a little salt and pepper they smell like a dream.
Both men carry their plates outside to settle on the deck, Marty with his dinner balanced on his knees, Rust with his boots kicked up on the railing in the remaining patch of sunlight. The forest birds have grown quieter in the last leg of day, though one screams out a sharp warning call that draws Rust’s eye into the underbrush.
“What is it?” Marty says, sounding halfway wary while Rust stands to get a better view. He only hears the river in the distance but waits, and soon enough the culprit starts rustling through the fallen leaves again.
“Polecat,” Rust says, dropping back down into his chair. At Marty’s muddled expression he pulls the black and white creature’s more common name out. “Skunk.”
“Shit,” Marty sighs, laughing a little as he sets his plate aside. “Had me halfway thinking the Alaskan version of Sasquatch was about to pop out of the bushes and grab us.”
Rust’s mouth tugs up on one side while he lazily studies the back of his left hand. “You know they say there’ve been sightings in these parts,” he says. “Some of the real old timers can remember seeing it far back as they can remember.”
“No fucking shit,” Marty says, leaning in closer. “What do they say?”
“Say he stands a foot taller than a normal man, probably twice as broad,” Rust says, squinting out across the forest. “Further north they’ve been known to slaughter a whole sled team in the night, ransack the supply runs. Reason they don’t ever catch the beast is because it can camouflage itself—blends right in with the terrain.”
“What, in the snow?”
“He grows out a white winter coat starting around this time of year, sheds it again in the spring. Me and Pop used to stuff our bedrolls with it.”
Marty’s face only falls at the last part, and he kicks a boot out to the side so it knocks into Rust’s chair leg. “I bet you get a real kick out of spinning me a yarn, huh,” he says, voice splintered by his own laughter. “You little shit.”
“Not my fault you go and fall for it,” Rust says, feeling mirth rumble up in his chest until it breaks free, and when Marty stands up to slap his shoulder with a holler full of put-on outrage he only ducks his head and grins harder.
The day wears on until dusk creeps in over the mountains, falling across their boots where they sit on the deck. Echoes of the lone radio station murmur low from inside and a pot of hot coffee perches on the squat little table between them, set alongside the empty wrappers of a few Little Debbie cakes.
Rust’s ledger is closed and resting across his thighs, pencil wedged in between the pages. Marty has both hands wrapped around a coffee cup and both men have their eyes on the horizon, not obliged into doing or saying anything but watching the sky darken and shift between violet and indigo.
“Do you think we could live up here?” Marty asks, a low and casual question even though Rust know he’s been mulling it over in his head for the past few minutes. “Like a full-time thing.”
Rust blinks and shifts a little so his chair creaks some underneath him, pulling in an easy sort of breath. “Is this a matter of if we could, or if I’d want to?”
“If we could do it on sheer principle,” Marty says, bringing his coffee up to rest against his mouth. “Think I already know you aren’t interested in keeping permanent quarters in a place where snow hits the ground.”
“Hmm,” Rust hums, running a thumb along the weathered edge of his notebook. “Don’t see why we couldn’t swing it.” He turns and appraises Marty through the dwindling daylight, heavy eyes trying to decipher something that may show itself on his face. “What’s got you thinking about that?”
Marty shrugs a bit, blowing out a quiet sigh as he balances his mug on his bad knee. “Oh, I don’t know,” he says. He looks out into the forest and then up at the horizon again before he really answers. “Just feel like nothing’s really—well, nothing’s too different from how it is at home, you know. Like all that’s changed is the scenery.”
“What were you expecting to be different?” Rust asks, eyes narrowing the barest bit.
“I don’t mean it like a bad thing,” Marty says, glancing over real quick. “It’s a good thing, I reckon. How…uh, easy things are, despite being across the damn country in the middle of nowhere. How we just keep to the same old, y’know.”
Rust’s lip quirks up once he deciphers what Marty means, and it’s getting too dark to tell but he knows the other man’s cheeks are tinged pinker. “Well you know a change of fuckin’ scenery isn’t gonna be too big an influence on all that.”
“Guess I just feel like it would for other people,” Marty mumbles, waving a dismissive sort of hand through the air. “And I know we ain’t exactly ‘other people,’ but sometimes this shit seems too easy.”
Too easy. Rust is both old friends and enemies with that thought, and shit knows he’s battled himself on it since the first night he touched a bare foot down past the threshold of Marty’s front door. And he knows Marty only means Alaska, only means the difference between here and Louisiana, but Rust can’t help but see beyond the margins of here and there. Too damn easy. It feels bigger to him, somehow.
“I don’t think there’s any real use in questioning it anymore,” he says, blinking against raw dusk, nose full of pine musk and wood smoke. “I’ve had my fair share of trying to whittle the fucking truth out of nothing, and sometimes there ain’t any good reason behind the way shit is, or why it happens. Maybe it all happens because it just is, man.”
Marty looks over, crease between his brow deepened into something thoughtful. “What are you talking about?”
Rust settles deeper in his chair, hand still slowly tracing the spine of his notebook in an afterthought. “What I’m saying is, you and me could go anywhere and do any fucking thing in this world, and we wound up choosing each other.”
“You think we did that because it was easy?” Marty asks, and there it is, just the barest hint of something bruised hidden in the well of his voice. Rust tastes sodden maroon in the back of his throat like an overripe fig and frowns, gently shaking his head.
“Yes and no,” he says, surprised at how soft the words fall between them. Marty’s eyes are on him and not a thing else. “Too easy because it was what I wanted, Marty—I used to think that way about it in the beginning. But now I tend to lean toward thinking we wound up the way we did because it was right.”
Somebody breathes out a sigh and Rust isn’t sure if it’s him or Marty, maybe the both of them all at once. It’s so dark now that the only lights are the single porch lantern glowing dirty amber and the rising stars. Marty clears his throat and stands, making the deck chair skid an inch or two back on the planking.
“We ought to head in,” he says, quiet. “So damn dark out here I can’t see past the first step.”
A faint ache tugs somewhere behind Rust’s ribcage but he carefully nods, standing up and holding his ledger close to one side. “All right,” he says, and turns to pass through the front door without another word.
He goes to the fireplace and bends to pull a piece of tinder from the stack, watching the flames lick up around the embers already glowing in the hearth. The cabin’s door swings shut and locks but Marty’s boots don’t thump and creak across the floorboards.
“I was scared in the beginning, y’know,” Marty says after a long moment of silence. Rust doesn’t look up yet but he goes still, listening. “Christ knows it’s hard to admit that even know, but I was goddamn terrified about what I wanted. What I was feeling. Going to bed every night and—and praying…well.”
Rust turns to look over his shoulder and finds Marty leaning back against the closed door, watching him with bright eyes. “Praying,” Rust echoes, straightening up again. “About what?”
Marty lets out a breathless little laugh, a short-lived sound that’s swiftly replaced with his voice steepened into something serious. He opens his mouth and then closes it again, taking a single step forward before stopping, and Rust wonders what locked doors they’ve still got left between them even now.
“Praying that you wouldn’t leave again,” Marty says, just like that, and then reaches up to press a tired hand over his eyes as if to hide in the wake of his own revelation. “Being a selfish and sad fucking bastard, I suppose, about what I wanted and not what you might’ve—”
He doesn’t quite finish that thought, because Rust is across the room and on him in an instant, and anything that was left to say is muffled when they collide hard enough that Marty sees stars wheel and burst behind his eyes.
“Did you ever ask me what it was I wanted back then,” Rust says, getting Marty by the shirtfront and pushing him back against the door, nipping the words at the corner of his mouth in a sudden fervor. “Did you hear what I fucking said outside?”
Marty feels dazed and invigorated all at once, buzzing with Rust’s body pressed along the full length of his own even though they’re still wrapped in their coats. “I—” he tries to say, but then Rust’s hands are shoving up under his flannel to grip around his sides, a shock of burning warmth and a pinch of cold gold that makes words wither in his throat.
“I wanted you so bad I thought I was losing my fucking mind,” Rust says, breathing gone faintly ragged. “So goddamn bad, Marty, I didn’t think I—I didn’t think I could ever deserve it. Not even the sheer fucking idea.”
His hands slide up around Marty’s ribs and the older man sucks in a short gust of air. Standing this close their eyes are almost level, except Marty has to look up the barest fraction to meet Rust’s gaze. A single inch between them. He always forgets their height difference until Rust tilts the world enough to show him.
“Maybe you deserved better,” Marty says, low but unwavering. Rust’s lashes dip and he closes his eyes, shaking his head at that, but Marty keeps watching him. “I just thank God I finally found the good sense to hold on to you and not let go.”
“You wanted me to stay,” Rust says, eyes still shut, thumb tracing one of Marty’s ribs beneath his shirt though he doesn’t even really know he’s doing it.
“Well,” Marty says, voice warm in Rust’s ear. “That, and I wanted you.”
Rust isn’t fully expecting the kiss when it comes, but he allows it—even more than that, he opens wide and falls into it, deepens it, feeling Marty’s arms come up to circle around his back even though they’re both slumped against the cabin door. They breathe hotly against one another and Rust swears aloud, feeling a rush of static along his skin when Marty bites at the hinge of his jaw.
“I’d lay awake at night and think about you, Marty,” he says, and Rust can’t find a good reason other than his own pride to stop now. “Touch myself like some lovesick fucking teenager sometimes and just dream and wonder.”
Marty groans at that and Rust drags his hands down to his beltline, crashing into Marty with another kiss. He starts undoing the buckle of the other man’s belt, frantic enough to nearly fumble his movements.
“Told myself you’d never want it like that,” Rust keeps on, and then Marty’s hands are trying to push his coat off his shoulders, the two of them twisted up in a tangle of want and hurry. “Resigned myself into thinking it was just a—another fucking trick my mind was playing on me.”
“Hush and help me get this coat off before I have a stroke,” Marty says, and Rust is suddenly aware of sweat beginning to bead and prickle at his own back. “If you don’t hurry up and get your hands on me, Rust, I swear to Christ.”
Rust chokes out something that sounds halfway like a laugh and all the rest like relief, but he does as Marty asks. They tear their coats off in a hurry to leave them on the floor and then Rust has got Marty’s pants down and boxers shoved around his thighs, making good time when he wedges a knee between Marty’s legs and then stops to start undoing his own belt.
“What’re we—?” Marty starts, eyes dropped down low to watch, and then Rust takes the both of their lengths in one hand in a movement that shouldn’t have been so easy, but the second their skin touches Marty sends up a silent prayer that it was.
“Oh shit,” he rasps, reaching up to brace a hand on Rust’s shoulder. “Oh hell, Rust.”
Rust tests their combined weight in his hand, gives a gentle squeeze that makes a shudder roll through his body. He already feels too sensitive and they’ve barely even started, but still gives way when temptation bids him to peer down at where he holds them both in his hand.
Marty’s cock was always wider, a heavier girth but never quite as long as his own—and now, already flushed rosy to match the heat crawling up his neck and into the height of his cheekbones. Rust gives a shallow thrust of his hips and revels in the friction between them, how the softness of delicate skin feels like hot silk in his hand.
He starts working them properly now, leaned back in close to kiss at Marty’s mouth while they both fuck into the roughened warmth of his palm. “Did you ever touch yourself for me back then, Marty,” he asks, running the pad of his thumb down to the tip of Marty’s cock. “Think about my hands on you like this.”
“You know I did, you bastard,” Marty groans, fingers digging into Rust’s shoulder. His eyes are clenched shut now, focused on the sensation of Rust on and all around him. “Always got to the task at hand quicker than you’d be mouthing off, though.”
Rust slows the pace some, gives them one long and languid stroke that’s got Marty swearing dirty in his ear. He can feel tension starting to wind up and gather as his skin tightens, and when Marty’s hips start stuttering he knows they aren’t going to last much longer pressed together like this.
“Come on, Marty,” Rust says, bracing his free hand against the cold wooden door. He’s moving on something closer to instinct now, trying to wring it out of the both of them. “I got you now.”
It ends with one final twist, sweet as can be, and Rust’s name gone velvet and heavy on Marty’s tongue. They rock against one another as the high lingers and then wears thin, and then there’s nothing left but a mess wiped on the undershirt Rust will have to wash in the tub later, and two men slumped against one another in all manner of wrung-out disarray.
“Don’t think you ever told me any of that,” Marty croaks after a while, breathing fast but steady. Rust’s forehead is pressed against his shoulder but he doesn’t move, panting a hot spot there against soft fleece.
“Don’t know if I ever really planned to,” Rust says, still hiding his expression. “Cat’s out of the fucking bag now, though.”
Marty tries and fails to wipe a smile off his face, though he reaches up to rest a palm at the back of Rust’s neck, briefly thumbing through the damp curls there. “Wasn’t nothing I couldn’t figure out on my own considering I was right there behind you, slick.”
Rust slowly draws his head back up, eyes full of something pliant and sated. He reaches up to fix the neckline of Marty’s sweater and then steps back to tuck himself into some semblance of order, though he leaves his belt undone and clinking while he moves.
“Call it a draw, then,” he says softly, and lets his fingertips skim across Marty’s chest before he walks back over to the fireplace to throw on another log.
Marty reaches up to start pawing at his clothes and lets out a wide yawn. He pushes off the door with a wince and reaches up to massage the back of his head where he’d been pushed into the door, gingerly pressing the tender spot. “Think you’ve gone and tapped me out for the night,” he says, though his voice doesn’t ring with anything but its usual warmth and contentment. “Surprised I’m still standing as it is.”
Rust has moved across the room to duck behind the folding screen, and the faucet rumbles and squeaks before the shower starts up. Marty hears him slowly getting undressed one piece of clothing at a time, knows Rust is folding his flannel and jeans in half to set aside but dropping his underwear and socks in piles on the floor.
He’s trying to decide whether he should just strip naked and go straight to bed or set up temporary shop in front of the fire when Rust takes a step back to look around the screen. His expression is drawn plain except for a slow blink that doesn’t give much of anything away. “You gonna come wash up or what?”
Marty’s first thought has the merit of being colored with past experiences, but he still feels like he needs to be sure. “Thought you were fixing to.”
“I was.”
Marty shrugs out of his shirt but doesn’t move forward yet, draping the soft material over the crook of his elbow. “Will the two of us even fucking fit in there?”
“Dunno,” Rust says, disappearing again behind the screen. Steam is starting to billow and puff on the air and Marty hears the telltale clink of the shower curtain being pulled along the metal rod. “I’m guessin’ we’re gonna find that out here in a second.”
The radio is back on again, songs weaving in and out of softened static like a sleepy ocean tide. It’s been dark for a few good hours now, though the room is still glowing with the orange flicker of firelight in one corner and a single lamp in the other. Rust is lying down on the bed with his eyes closed, somewhere between asleep and awake. He shifts beneath the sheets and heavy quilt until his calves meet the coolness of fabric not yet warmed with body heat. Marty is sitting up beside him with his reading glasses low on his nose, flipping through the paperback he’d found in the side table drawer with idle interest.
“This ain’t exactly what I’d be apt to call classic reading,” Marty says, licking at a thumb to turn between two pages. “In the sense that it seems to be turning out like something you’d see on Jerry Springer.”
“What’re you looking at?” Rust asks, eyes cracking open the barest bit. He’s been walking along the edges of something like a daydream for a while, preoccupied with not much more than the sensation of where he is and the sound of Marty’s fingertips on the yellowed paper.
Marty lets out a snort, face pinched up in a mild scowl. He holds up the book so Rust can make out Wuthering Heights fading on the cover. “For one thing the dude’s fucking crazy, but I reckon that’s just the short and sweet of it.”
“Most people in those old romances are,” Rust says. His eyes drift shut again, bare shoulders curved in where he’s curled up on one side. He hadn’t bothered to put on a shirt before sliding into bed and Marty can pick out a few sparse freckles peeking above where the blanket’s been pulled up for warmth. Just below that, at home and ever-present, is that blue tattoo above Rust’s heart.
Marty’s studied it a thousand and one times and probably even more. Abstract but deceptively simple—like a magician’s puzzle, almost. A riddle without clues that’s been loitering in his peripherals for twenty years. He doesn’t really know why he’s never asked.
The book returns to its home in the bedside drawer, tucked away for somebody else to find on a future trip. Rust draws in a deep, sighing breath and turns over onto his back so the light bleeds over and touches the ink.
“What is that thing?” Marty says without any preamble, waiting until Rust’s eyes slide open to peer up at him. He pulls his reading glasses off and sets them aside.
“What thing?”
“This,” Marty says, suddenly emboldened, reaching across to draw the tip of his middle finger down the symbol on Rust’s chest. “I know you told Audrey a while back, that one weekend—said it was a Nordic rune or some shit, but I looked that mess up and be damned if I can find the resemblance.”
“You looked it up?” Rust asks, a touch of something warm in his voice.
Marty huffs out a laugh and lets his eyes and hand drop into the soft bedding between them. “Well, yeah,” he says. “I know how to type something into the fucking computer. And as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, this doesn’t look like a spoke on the wheel of whatever that Vegvísir thing is.”
Rust hums in the back of his throat and his eyes glitter like beetle wings in the low light, one glancing flash before he’s tipping his head back and closing them against the ceiling. He remembers Audrey’s sharp eyes, so much like Marty’s, studying it from behind her easel like it was an iron lock she didn’t have the key to.
“You’re right,” he says. “It’s not the Vegvísir.”
“Go figure,” Marty grouses, even though he hunkers down on his side so he’s facing Rust. “And don’t tell me a bunch of blue pick-up sticks, now. Imagine you’ve always been a little too highfalutin with your symbolism for that.”
One of Rust’s hands moves to trace over the lines by memory, up the length of the cross and along the peak of its open triangle. “It’s just reminder now, more than anything,” he murmurs. “Artifact, guess you could say.”
Marty watches and waits, not pressing him along any further. If he’d learned anything in a decade alone, it was the twilight gift of being patient. Two years spent living with Rustin Cohle had only driven the lesson home.
Rust reaches up to briefly skim a finger along his brow, like he’s got to find something that hasn’t been brought to the forefront of his mind in a long while. His hand moves back down to cover the tattoo on his chest and Marty thinks of those holy men they’ve seen in documentary films, who can only speak their truisms through the power of some hallowed relic.
“It’s meant to represent a suspension,” Rust says at last. “Between two worlds, between ignorance and the attainment of wisdom. Neither here nor there, but caught in the snare trap of sacrificing oneself in order to pursue a higher vision.”
There’s a beat of quiet, not anything uncomfortable. Marty clears his throat and looks at the back of Rust’s hand, a smile wavering around his mouth. “Is that something else you found in a book?”
“Not quite,” Rust drawls, unbothered. “Tarot card was where I first saw it.”
“How’s that?”
“Rent girl holed up with me in a motel room one night when the Crusaders were in town,” Rust says, sliding his hand down to his stomach to uncover the tattoo again. “And there wasn’t any fucking thing to do but pound blow and watch five channels on the TV, so she brought out her bag of tricks out and read my cards after we did a line or two.”
Marty lets out a soft guffaw. “Don’t guess I’d expect tarot cards to be in a prostitute’s repertoire of offered services.”
“Maybe not for most of her usual clientele,” Rust says, and Marty sees the barest little twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth, but then it’s gone again. “But I picked three cards in light of the present and she laid them out—and I can’t figure the other two anymore, but one was what she called the hanged man.”
Any of the humor hanging around Marty’s face from before is quickly wiped clean. “The hanged man.”
“Sacrifice and surrender,” Rust says. “He’s suspended through inversion, but has found the possibility of enlightenment.” He goes quiet for a minute, looking somewhere along the beams in the ceiling. “It made too much fucking sense, least back then, so I took it and simplified it into a symbol only I would recognize. Another form of personal meditation, in a way.”
“I’ve seen the card before,” Marty says, scratching along the bridge of his nose. “I don’t like the sound of it, but I know what you’re talking about.”
Rust’s sleepy eyes move to find his. “I wouldn’t peg you for the type to get your fortune told, Marty.”
“Probably right about that, but Audrey had a deck of those things when she got into high school,” Marty says, getting a far-off look in his eye for a moment. His gaze drops back to the blue tattoo on Rust’s chest again, almost meditative. “Somehow, only card I kept pulling out was the fool.”
“Our fortunes precede us,” Rust says, and grins when Marty reaches out to jab him in the ticklish spot between his ribs and hipbone.
“So tell me,” Marty says, tapping two fingers against the tattoo above Rust’s heart. “Has this hanged man of yours found his enlightenment yet?”
“It took a long time,” Rust says, letting out an easy breath. “But I think he has.”
* * *
Breakfast and coffee is on the table just after first light, filling up the cabin with the smell of hot bacon and eggs. Marty’d put a few pieces of bread in the tiny toaster oven to brown up, and he sits buttering one at the kitchen table while Rust sits across from him, peering at an atlas spread open across his thighs.
“Wanted to take you into town today,” he says, tracing along the contour of a road Marty can’t see with his index finger. “Not Fairbanks proper, but down in Fox Hollow where I grew up. Bout twenty-five miles out, give or take.”
Marty chews around a bite of toast, trying to crane his neck around to look at the atlas. “You got anywhere in particular you wanted to visit?”
“Figured we might have to make two days of it, divvy up between town and then out where—out where my Pop used to live,” Rust says. “He’d be a-ways off the beaten path, further out in the sticks. We’ll crawl up on Aya’s place along the main road before we get anywhere near the old homestead.”
The atlas is folded and set aside so Rust can turn his attention back to the breakfast still steaming in front of him. He palms the hot sauce and holds it over his eggs, posed thoughtful for a moment. “We can probably stop there today on the way, pay her a short visit.”
“Color me curious about how you got to know this woman,” Marty says, leaning back in his chair with a half-eaten piece of bacon to watch Rust. “I figure she’s somebody important to you, above a lot of other folks, considering I keep hearing her name.”
“Suppose that’s true,” Rust says, reaching for his fork with his eyes cast low. “Told you I’ve known her since I was a kid.”
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
“Mmm,” Rust hums, going still while he turns the years over in his head. “Probably sitting past a decade, now. Not since I first got back up here in ’02.”
Marty nods, brushing crumbs off his fingers into a dishtowel on his lap. O-two, and if that ain’t the most loaded pair of syllables he’s come to brush with in his life. He wonders if he has a reputation with people he’s never met—if Rust would talk about how things went sour, if he’d mention Marty’s name in passing, but then again Rust never talked. At least not about the things that cut him the most.
“I guess it’s on me to make a good impression, then,” Marty says, and leaves that as it is. “Take all the time you need to visit, you know I ain’t in any big hurry to get anywhere.”
“You put an idea like that in Aya’s head, she might not let us leave,” Rust says, reaching for his coffee. “You’ll like it out there, though. Don’t imagine it’s changed much in forty years, much less ten.”
“What makes you say that?” Marty asks, narrowing his eyes. “That I’d like it.”
“Figure I’ve got a good enough read on you by now,” Rust says, watching Marty make a skeptical face over his coffee cup, even though he doesn’t make any move to deny it. “You’ll have to see when we get there.”
The temperature dropped another few degrees overnight, a change highlighted by the lack of sunlight filtering through a steely cloud cover masking the sky. Both men had broken out their long johns without much hesitation edgewise, layering up with flannel and wool socks before buttoning up into their coats. Even in the truck cab Marty keeps his hat pulled down low over his ears, hands bundled up in the old red scarf he’d pulled from the cabin dresser before following Rust out the door.
The miles stretch on while the trees bordering the highway grow thicker the further they move from the city. Twenty miles outside Fairbanks and Marty’s starting to wonder if they’ll ever see civilization again when Rust points with his middle finger through the windshield at something driven into the ground.
“That’d be the place,” he says, slowing to ease off onto a path worn into the shoulder of the road. The thing he’d been pointing out reveals itself as they get closer, and Marty can see a rusted length of what looks like steel piping fixed with the silhouette of a running horse on top. It spins a little in the cold wind as they pass, like the whole thing had been fashioned from an old weathervane retired from its original post.
“Horse people,” Marty murmurs, maybe more to himself than Rust, but the other man still hums in quiet agreement.
The road has been paved but it’s riddled with potholes and grooves, too many years spent weathering the elements without being patched back up again, and Rust has to slow the truck to a crawl to keep from rattling the cab like a tin can.
When the road gives way to a single driveway, its mouth is guarded by an iron farm gate standing wide open, painted a bright red with old horseshoes nailed to the post it’s hinged on. A mailbox stands silent sentinel, half-rusted itself with a broken red flag raised in salute. The lane beyond disappears back through the trees and Rust pulls off onto the grass before killing the engine.
“Be better to walk the rest of the way,” he says, looking over at Marty’s clouded expression. “It ain’t too far, and I’d rather not get the tires caught up in a mud hole.”
“We’re gonna look like a couple vagrants walking up on foot,” Marty says, though he tosses over the scarf in his lap before he opens his door. “Put that around your neck so you don’t catch cold.”
Rust picks up the scarf and as ugly as it is, it’s softer than he would’ve thought. “I’m not wearing this thing,” he says. “Don’t even know who it fucking belongs to.”
“They left it behind, so I reckon it belongs to you now,” Marty says. “If you don’t put it on I don’t wanna see your ass shivering one time out there.”
“Whatever you say, Marty,” Rust sighs, though when he slides down out of the truck he’s still got the scarf in hand, and by the time they pass through the gate it’s already draped around the back of his neck.
The lane leading back to the house is nothing but dirt and gravel, lined on both sides by barbwire fencing. Wide puddles linger with standing water and they sidestep around them as they go, watching the outline of a homestead take shape up ahead. The fence ends just as soon as it started, leaving nothing but wooded pasture beneath the heavy tree canopy, and before Marty even knows what he’s seeing they spot a few visitors trampling through the leaves to greet them.
“Abram must be home,” is all Rust says, stopping to watch the approaching creatures.
Doe-eyed and long in the ears, the first to step forward is a jenny mule the color of wet slate. She bumps her nose right into Marty’s shoulder and he lets out a startled laugh, pushing a hand against her flank.
“What on earth?” he says, watching as another mule walks up behind the first, and then another with a friend close on its heels. Their dark eyes are like chocolate, soft and curious while they come in for a closer look. Rust reaches up to pat one on the neck and waits while two or three more start coming up from further out in the trees, ears bobbing and tails swishing while they walk.
“Remember how I said Aya’s son works with forestry a lot,” Rust says, holding his ground while a sorrel jack mule starts nibbling around the edge of his scarf. “He leads a pack line up through the mountains in the spring and summertime—carries supplies and shit on his mules where the nature reserves don’t let vehicles travel, or where they can’t.”
“Jesus,” Marty says, marveling a little at the herd of creatures standing around them. There’s probably eight or ten that he can see, maybe more still loitering nearby in the woods. “And he just lets them wander free like this?”
“Naw, they don’t ever roam far from the horse,” Rust says, briefly looking up to scan through the clearing. “Should be around here somewhere.”
As sure as the world, further up the path they find a pretty buckskin grazing through the scrappy underbrush, wearing a leather collar and brass bell around her neck. She’s already starting to grow shaggy under the promise of cooler weather and looks up when Rust and Marty walk past, showing off a white star on her forehead.
Marty whistles to the mare and she doesn’t budge or blink, though the mules are happy to rush back up when he calls. Two jacks as brown as seals nip and kick at one another before loping off toward the trees, but the grey lady from before stays close and bows her head to let Marty scratch around both ears.
“Y’all sure are a friendly bunch,” he says, grinning while he rubs love pats along the mule’s ivory face. “Careful now, might make somebody jealous.”
Rust doesn’t even bother to cut his eyes over at that, though he gently leans into the mule’s side while he listens to the echoed sound of blunt chopping ring between the trees. It’s further out in the forest somewhere, a steady thrum like a slow metronome’s heartbeat, and then after a few moments it stops altogether.
“Somebody’s coming,” Marty says. Not nervous, but wary enough in the sudden quiet.
“Mmhmm,” Rust answers, a low sound in his chest.
They never hear any footsteps to signal his arrival, but then a dark-haired man is stepping from between the trunks of two white birches. He carries a heavy axe in one hand, the blade idly swinging down by his calf while he walks. Rust looks up and takes a slow step forward, and when the man finally recognizes him his face goes pale with disbelief before it breaks into a wide smile.
“Abram,” Rust says, keeping his clasped hands low at his waist.
“Rust—Rustin Cohle?” Abram says, almost immediately dropping the axe against a tree trunk. He reaches up and presses a hand against his chest, looking between Rust and Marty with question growing behind his eyes. “Holy shit, man, I feel like I’m seeing a ghost.”
“Could be,” Rust says with a small smile, reaching out to grasp Abram’s hand after they shoo a few of the mules away. “It’s been long enough.”
“You could’ve called ahead and spared me the heart attack,” Abram says with a laugh, rocking back on his heels. “We’re not so backwoods out here that we don’t have a landline at the house.”
Rust inclines his head a bit, and from where Marty’s standing it looks like an echo of old humility. “Sorry about that,” he says, briefly biting into his bottom lip. “I thought about it, but then figured it’d be nice to surprise Aya.”
“Ma probably knew you were here long before I did,” Abram says, and then steps up to take Marty’s hand in kind. “Who do I owe the pleasure to, sir?”
Rust clears his throat, reaching up to briefly touch Marty’s elbow. “This is my partner, Martin Hart.”
Marty introduces himself with a smile, and then makes a gesture that encompasses the land and animals surrounding them. “This is a really fine place you got out here,” he says. “Don’t know if I’ve ever felt so welcome.”
“Cricket there will try her damndest to convince you she’s a lapdog,” Abram says, tipping his head toward the grey mule still standing nearby. “But I appreciate that—I’ve been keeping it up best I can since my dad passed. I was born and raised out here, so I don’t intend on letting it go anytime soon.”
“You got anybody helping you run the place?” Rust asks, eyes strayed to some fresh mending done on a nearby fence.
“It’s still just me and Ma,” Abram says on a small sigh. “I got a man who comes up with me on hauls when we’re in the mountains, a girl I see in town sometimes—but otherwise it’s just the two of us and the herd.”
A bell jostles and dings as the buckskin mare ambles back up to greet Abram, and he rubs a hand along her nose before turning to pick up his abandoned axe. “Well, let’s get on up to the house,” he says. “I’ll get you two settled in and then I’ve got to head back out and throw some hay.”
He turns and leads the way, walking through the leaves almost as silently as he came. Abram isn’t a short man, exactly—maybe an inch below Marty but even broader in the shoulders. His face and hands are olive turned dark from working in the sun, though there’s a hatched design of intricate black tattooed at the base of each wrist.
The paddock and barn they pass first are built with raw timber, so dark and gnarled with age that they almost look petrified. A few hens strut around the yard and scratch in the dirt while a black billy goat jumps up on a tree stump to watch the newcomers walk by. The house itself is a handsome log cabin, old and weather-beaten but likely just as sturdy as the day it was built. Chimes made from scrap metal and wood sway and tinkle in the breeze, and white smoke puffs out of a brick chimney at the peak of the roof. The only thing breaking the scene into modernity is the dually pickup parked in the yard and a power box and pole situated on the far side of the cabin.
Abram pauses at the foot of a stoop at the side of the house, turning to address both men with a lowered voice. “Her sight is gone now,” he says, meeting Rust’s eye first. “Doesn’t get around much these days beyond the front gate, but that won’t do much to stop her. Keeps the dog with her a lot.”
Rust’s face is unreadable for the moment, held at a careful note of impassiveness. “You think she’ll remember me?”
That rouses a laugh from Abram, and he shakes his head before starting up the wooden steps. “Think you’ll find she’s just as sharp and determined as she ever was, my friend. So don’t try and hide anything if you can help it.”
It doesn’t sound like a threat or a warning, more of a friendly joke than anything, but Rust still catches Marty’s eye and lets a look pass between them. “C’mon,” he says, urging Marty ahead of him. “I’m behind you.”
They pass through a red-washed door into a cramped mudroom, and beyond that the entryway opens up into a bright kitchen washed over with warmth coming from a pot-bellied stove. The icebox is powder blue and dated, likely nearly Marty’s age by the looks of it. A black and tan shepherd dog looks up from where it’d been sprawled on the floor by the heating grate, and it gives one lone thump of its tail before standing and going to sit at attention by the kitchen table.
Aya reaches out to touch the palm of her creased hand against the dog’s head, and it lies down by her feet without a sound. She looks toward the mudroom doorway but doesn’t see, eyes clouded and milky but still somehow piercing. “Abram,” she says, in a clear voice hardly touched by age. “Who are our two guests?”
“A wayward pair of travelers,” Abram says, smiling enough that she can hear his jest. He walks across the kitchen and reaches for a tea kettle before starting to fill it up at the sink. “I think you might already know one of them.”
Marty watches the line of Rust’s throat work for a moment before he steps forward. “Hello, Aya,” he says, pitched quiet. “It’s been a long time.”
“Rustin,” the old woman says without pause, immediately smiling to herself. “Still as modest as the little boy I used to know, I see.”
She holds out a hand and Rust takes it between both of his own before squatting down in front of her, careful not to nudge the dog. “It’s good to see you again,” he says.
“I knew you would come back, ada,”Aya tells him, bringing up her other hand to squeeze his left. “And not alone, either.”
Rust nods and straightens back up, turning to beckon Marty closer. “I—I brought Marty with me, this time around. Marty Hart.”
Aya takes Marty’s hand as well and gently inclines her head, making her silver braids nearly pool in her lap. Behind them, Abram finishes putting the kettle on and silently takes his leave, the mudroom door faintly squeaking as he steps back into the autumn day.
“Please sit down, both of you,” Aya says, pointing to the empty chairs across from her at the table. “We’ll have tea and coffee in just a few minutes.”
They quickly mind her and settle at the table after shrugging out of their coats, draping them over the chair backs. Marty clears his throat a bit and looks between the old woman and his partner, feeling almost as if there is a conversation taking place that he hasn’t yet heard. Even though she’s blind Rust still looks into her eyes whether he’s speaking or not, and they seem to watch one another in their own way, perhaps one that doesn’t rely on sight alone.
“I feel as if ten years is a length of time where there is either too much or too little to tell,” Aya says after a moment. “From my eyes, I suppose it feels like no time has passed at all.” The room stays quiet save for the hum of the heating tea kettle, and the old woman smiles while she folds her hands on the tabletop. Both men can see a plain gold band worn on her left hand. “But for you, I suspect much has changed since we last met.”
“You could say that,” Rust says. He looks out the window at their right, fogged up enough from the stove heat that it seems to stream sunlight through a filter. “Most of any change I’ve found was in the last two years rather than the ten before it. Think I owe Marty for most of that.”
Marty feels a little jolt of something deep in his gut—maybe it’s a shade of pride or a pang of modesty, or maybe it’s something altogether softer than that. Across the table Aya doesn’t turn his way, but her lined mouth turns up at the corner.
“I am glad to know it,” she says. “In the face of many odds a strong spirit will always find its way back to the light, given time. I believe I have told you as much before.”
Something on Rust’s face wavers at that, and though his gaze drifts it doesn’t linger for long. “You did,” he says, quieter than before. “The last time I was here.”
Aya nods, making the silver baubles in her ears shimmer and shine. The kettle whistles and she rises up to move toward the stove, sidestepping the sleepy shepherd dog to turn off the coiled burner. She opens a cupboard by memory and pulls down three mugs of a kind, carefully carrying them and the pot of hot water back over to settle on a folded dishtowel.
After honey and milk are on the table, she settles back in front of Rust and Marty and opens a battered tea tin before bringing it up to her nose. The smell is so strong that it seems to surround them, something heady and black but with a slight sweetness on top.
“Well then,”Aya says, gesturing for each man to take a cup. “Tell me about some of these changes you have found together.”
They sit and pass conversation around the table until the tea kettle grows cool to the touch. Abram thuds in and out of the kitchen between his errands, stopping to pull up a chair and eat a cold sandwich before adding a few logs to the stove. He excuses himself after a while, buttoning back into his coat before disappearing into the barn.
“His favorite cow is due to have a little one soon,” Aya says, as if she knew where he was headed on instinct. “I told him all his restlessness will only make the calf shy to show itself, but he’s just as bull-minded as his father was when it comes to his animals.”
“Abram said your husband passed a few years back,” Marty says. “This is a beautiful place you two built here. I know your son is proud to keep it.”
Aya smiles at that, something soft and full of recollection. “It wasn’t easy to build our home here,” she says. “Abram’s father was a white man—gasht'ana, as my people say. The marriage was not something my family or Dena'ina ancestors encouraged, and the men made things very difficult for my Joseph for a while.”
“We lost some livestock in the exchange,” she says, not delving any further into the conflict. “It wasn’t until Abram was born that we found peace enough to begin a livelihood here.”
Aya is quiet for a moment, and then looks toward Rust again. “Your father came once, in the winter,” she says. “When I was still carrying Abram, and Joseph had gone to work a job in town.”
Rust blinks at that, carefully studying the planes of her face. “What for?”
“You had taken ill and he came to borrow medicine,” the old woman says. “There was ice on the mountain road and it was safer for him to walk here on foot than risk driving into town.”
“If Abram wasn’t born yet, I must’ve been small still,” Rust says, a small crease pulling between his eyes. “Maybe four, almost five—not much older than that.”
“Yes,”Aya says, thinking back. “He walked through the snow all that way. I tried to get him to warm himself by the fire before he went back out into the cold but he wouldn’t hear it. He said he had to get home and tend to you.”
Rust shakes his head, a ghost of a smile hanging around his mouth. “Stubborn old bastard.”
Aya laughs at that, a sound not alike the ptarmigan bird. “You aren’t so unlike him, Rustin Cohle,” she says. “I have a few old memories Martin might like to hear.”
“You don’t say,” Marty says, sliding a sideways look over toward Rust, who doesn’t do much more than arch an eyebrow. “I’d love to hear them.”
“Hmm,” Aya hums, settling back in her chair. “I recall a time when Abram was just learning to walk—perhaps the second winter after the one when Travis came for medicine. It was in the middle of the afternoon, and I hear a faint knocking on the kitchen door. I went to open it up with the baby on my hip and who do I find, hardly big enough to fill his boots?”
“Here we go,” Rust sighs, though he braces his elbows on the table to hold his head up while he listens. “That was the first time I cut out of class. Got in a fight out on the schoolyard.”
“I knew you weren’t up to any good, but I didn’t have the heart to turn you away,”Aya says. She tips her head toward Marty as if she’s letting him in on a secret between them, almost whispering. “He looked like a little soldier, blackened eye and all.”
“They ganged up on me,” Rust says, making an indifferent sort of gesture. “Wasn’t a fair fight.”
“You were always outnumbered,” Aya says, frowning faintly. “And so I told you to come inside and eat something by the stove. I don’t know if I ever knew such a thin child, before then or since.”
“You fed me more than just the once,” Rust says, something warmer in his voice. “You and Joseph were good people. And Abram, now. Still are.”
Aya’s expression softens some, but she holds up a finger to gently waggle through the air. “But there’s more to the story yet,” she says with a small laugh. “Don’t think that I would forget about you going back out into the yard and finding the snow shovel.”
“What he did,” Aya says, looking toward Marty again, “was go out and shovel hard snow off the lane and around the porch—no older than seven years old, a job a full-grown man would have taken more than an hour to do. And I had no idea until Joseph came home from town and brought him back inside, nearly soaked to the bones and shivering.”
“I wanted to repay your kindness,” Rust says, looking somewhere across the kitchen. “Was the least I could do.”
“For a hot meal and a place to sit,”Aya scoffs, shaking her head. “By that point I should have been paying you wages.”
Marty’s own memories stir beneath the surface alongside the sweet smell of freshly cut grass, and he knows that was a habit Rust never quite managed to break. An eye for an eye and one hand washes the other. He only wishes, so deeply now that the thought practically haunts him, that he’d been decent enough of a man to be gracious at the time.
And then he tries to envision a little boy with wavy hair the color of autumn, swallowed up in hand-me-down clothes and boots with tar patches on the soles. Piercing eyes, big and bright, shining like blue fire in his drawn face. Always with a battered book of some sort in tow—and petulant, withdrawn, the kind of child he would have chucked pebbles and taunts at as a boy himself. That’s a certainty that sends a phantom twinge of guilt through Marty, and he places his flattened palms on the table as if to steady himself when he leans forward to speak.
“You know, I’ve never seen a single picture,” he says, looking between Rust and the older woman. “From when he was growing up.”
“My Pop didn’t have a camera,” Rust says. “Didn’t believe in keeping one. Even if he did, I imagine anything he might’ve kept would be long gone.”
Aya’s mouth draws into a thin line, and she sits motionless for a long moment before pushing away from the kitchen table. “I have something I should give to you,” she says, and then pulla herself to her feet, her leather-soled mukluks soft on the floor. Even in old age she is tall, and in her youth would have struck a strong shape of a woman. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
The shepherd dog looks up when she clicks her tongue, waiting on a command. “Come, Lika,” Aya says, and together they walk through the doorway leading further into the house.
Rust watches them disappear with a faintly strained look pulling around his eyes. He taps a finger on the table and then traces the rim of his long-empty mug. “My father’s been dead for at least fifteen years now,” he says. “As far as I ever knew, he didn’t leave me a thing.”
“Maybe it’s just a gift,” Marty murmurs, voice held low. “What makes you think it has anything to do with your old man?”
Their answer comes a few seconds later when Aya returns with a plain envelope in hand, one gnarled finger edging along the open flap. Lika holds steady position at her side and only sits when Aya lowers herself back into the kitchen chair.
“We found this on your father’s land,” she says, holding out the envelope for Rust to take. “Many years ago, perhaps before you even went there yourself in light of his passing. It was after we knew—.” She stops short, regathering herself. “Well, it was after he returned to the forest.”
Rust holds the envelope between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it hard. Marty can’t tell if it’s shaking because the hand holding it is, or if Rust’s simply holding on tight enough to make the paper tremble. “What is it?” he asks.
“A photo,” Aya says, though she doesn’t say of what. “Nearly burned—we found it in the fire grate among the ashes. I believe the other is a cutting from the Fairbanks newspaper, perhaps something you will recognize.”
The kitchen grows quiet save for the faint crackle of tinder in the stove’s belly. Rust doesn’t move to open the envelope, and Aya folds her hands before bringing them up to rest against her chin.
“Forgive me for not doing it sooner,” she says, quietly. “But the time is more right, now. Your father may have intended them for the fire but did not see the errand through. I should think they belong to you.”
Rust nods and tucks the unmarked envelope away, the parchment rustling while he slides it into his coat pocket. “Thank you,” he says. “For being kind to us all those years.”
Aya smiles, shaking her head with a certain sort of fondness. “It was not a hard thing to do, ada. You always underestimate what it is you deserve.”
The mudroom door squeaks open and Abram stomps back into the kitchen, pulling his gloves off and going over to wash up at the deep basin sink. “You two staying for supper?” he asks, glancing back over one shoulder. “I’ve got my eye on a roasting hen out there, just about past her prime now.”
“Naw, that’s plenty kind of you but we can’t stay too long,” Rust says, slowly easing back from the table to stand. “Had some things to see over in the Hollow, and then we’ve got to drive back up the mountain to get home before dark.”
Marty stands alongside him and gathers his coat, waiting until Abram has dried off to reach for another handshake. “Privileged to have met you and your hauling team,” he says. “It’s not too often you find a man who does the amount of work in a week as I’ve seen you do in one damn day.”
Abram grins and pumps Marty’s hand before holding a palm out toward the door. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he says. “Let me walk you out so Cricket can get her goodbye kiss without running you down.”
Marty says his goodbyes with Aya, almost surprised when she wraps her arms around him to pat his back. “Behave yourself, Martin,” she says. “I wish we had met before my eyes left me, but I know there is great warmth in you.”
She doesn’t see the faint pink spread across his cheeks to the tip of his nose, though she still smiles all the same. “I’ll have Rustin back out to you shortly.”
Abram and Marty follow each other back out into the yard, their voices muffled and fading as they stroll further from the cabin. Aya moves to stand by Rust where he faces out the kitchen window, her shoulder lightly brushing against his arm.
“You belong to each other,” she says. “As much as the heart belongs to the spirit.”
Rust makes a soft sound deep in his chest, eyes still cast out the window. “It seems that way, sometimes.”
Aya turns and reaches up to touch the side of his face, letting her palm rest there. Rust doesn’t flinch away when her thumb traces along the ridge of his cheekbone, only tips his forward when she leans in to press a chaste kiss to his forehead.
“Have you gone to visit the lights yet?” the old woman asks, watching Rust with her pale eyes. “I know you would listen to them, when you were a boy. They will show you the way of it.”
Rust reaches out to touch her hand one final time. “I’m taking Marty up there in a day or two,” he says. “I wanted to show him the stars.”
* * *
The Hollow, as Rust calls it, is not much more than a postage stamp town nestled in the little crook between two mountains. There’s only one stop light from stem to stern, and as far as Marty can tell it doesn’t seem to glow any other color but green.
“Blink and you’ll likely miss something,” Rust says, slowly cruising down the main road through town. They pass a barber shop built into the same old brick building as the post office, and both shopfronts can’t be much wider than a few feet past a man’s arms spread wide. Most of the store signs have been painted and repainted over old lettering a half-dozen times over, like you could peel back the years and count down how many generations had kept quarters in a place since it was raised from the ground.
One modest protestant church with a blue metal roof, a tiny pharmacy called Watt & Sons, and then there’s the sheriff’s office doing business out of what looks like an old gas station with a pair of dusty cruisers parked out front. The busiest block on the drag by a long shot is the diner advertising a free slice of Nelly’s cherry pie with every dinner plate. They drive past and Marty can see a group of grizzled old men sitting out on the porch beneath a slanted awning, puffing on cigarettes and sipping coffee while one slaps his knee and barks out a laugh mid-story.
“This is where I went to school up to the eighth grade,” Rust says two blocks later, slowing to a stop in front of a squat building with colorful paper pumpkins and ghosts strung in some of the classroom windows. “Only four days a week, always took off for the winter. When Pop wasn’t around I’d have to walk ‘bout six miles to the road, hitch a ride into town with a truck.”
Marty makes a short study of the half-rusted playground equipment standing in the schoolyard, the monkey bars and swings chipping dark green paint. He wonders if it’s the same stuff that was there when Rust was but doesn’t bother to ask, thinking the picture of a little boy in his mind wouldn’t have ever felt the need to play on slides and merry-go-rounds. “Where’d you go to school after eighth grade?”
“Mostly stopped going after that,” Rust says, sniffing some. His wrist is hanging lazily over the steering wheel but his eyes are still caught on the paper ghosts in the windows. “I’d do all my reading and schoolwork at home, bring it back up for a teacher to look at once a week. If there was some big test I needed to take they’d have me do it while I was here.”
“That’s quite the fucking arrangement,” Marty says with a snort. “Here when I was that age, it’s a miracle I even graduated at all going to school five days a week, busy as I was chasing tail and getting up to god knows what.”
“They fast-tracked me and I got my diploma right after I turned seventeen,” Rust says, glancing at his side mirror to pull back out on the road. “Mostly because I think they were fucking sick of me, but at least it got me on the road to something else.”
Past the school there’s not much more to see, just an auto and tire shop and a few sparse buildings that look like they’ve seen far better days. One has been burned out to the blackened hull and left standing as a skeleton, but Rust doesn’t comment on it as they follow the road toward the outer town limits.
“Where’re we headed now,” Marty says, looking ahead into a wall of conifer and mountainside coming up in the distance. “Your dad’s old place out this way?”
“Naw,” Rust says, reaching down to turn on the radio dial to something low. “That’d be in the opposite direction, further up the mountain from Aya and Abram. There’s a place out here on the lake I’ve been once or twice, restaurant and lodge type-deal. Thought we could get something to eat before we head back home.”
“You need a reservation for a place like that?”
Rust loosely points out the windshield at the ironclad sky, even darker than it was in the morning. “This time of year they’re just about ready to close up shop for the winter,” he says. “Don’t imagine there’ll be many folks there at all, seeing how peak season ended sometime in early September.”
“Huh,” Marty says, shifting in his seat to stretch out both legs under the dash. They’d topped off the diesel in the truck a few miles before getting into Fox, and Rust still has the paper receipt in hand. It’d quickly been twisted up into a thin tube and has been getting rolled up and down his thigh in a mindless sort of movement for the past ten minutes or longer. Marty watches him for a few moments and wonders how bad the urge is to put the paper in the corner of his mouth and light it.
“Been doing good with giving it up, you know,” Marty says, feeling a little too much like he did on those rare nights when he’d drop by ballet studio to pick up Audrey and Macie from dance class. As if he really knows what he’s talking about. “Know it’s gotta be harder than you make it out to be.”
“What?” Rust says, eyes cutting sideways over to Marty. He follows Marty’s sights to the receipt paper and then clears his throat, promptly dropping it into an empty cup holder. “Oh, shit. Gotta do something with my other hand when I’m driving.”
Marty weighs out his options, thinks they’re both in a good enough mood that he’ll take the risk. “You know I brought something to take the edge off, if you need it.”
“Jesus, Marty,” Rust says with a rasping kind of laugh. “Make me feel like somebody’s fucking opium wife. I haven’t touched a pack of Camels in six months.”
“Alright, I’m just letting you know,” Marty says, holding a hand up in surrender. “Got that look like you’re fixing to chew through a box of nails.”
Rust grunts at that, growing quiet for a moment. He reaches up to thumb around his mouth and then lets the hand drop down to check the inner pocket of his coat. “I ain’t looked at what’s inside this envelope yet,” he says. “Not sure if I really want to.”
“Oh hell, I’ve been chomping at the bit waiting on you to bring that up,” Marty says with a laugh. “How haven’t you looked yet? I’d have tore into that the minute I got my hands on it.”
“There’s no telling what it is, knowing Pop,” Rust says, gone quieter. He looks straight ahead out across the sloping road again while trees tower on both sides, hiding everything beyond their branches and bodies. “Sometimes I think he was still just as much a secret to me on the day I left as he was the day I met him. Fifteen years of walking around the edges of a fucking shadow.”
Marty bites around his lip, brow gathered into something thoughtful. “You want me to look at them first? See what it is.”
“No,” Rust says, gently shaking his head. “If Aya wanted me to have it, I imagine it’s something I ought to see.”
The lodge is built right up at the edge of a dark lake, overlooking an inlet set into the rocks. Somebody has arranged a motley collection of orange and white pumpkins on a hay bale near the open foyer with a sign pointing ahead through the double doors. Marty squints at it as they pull around through the gravel lot, trying to decipher the slanted chalk writing.
There are a handful of cars loosely clustered together here and there, most of them with Alaska plates and rental stickers in the window. A lone man in a white server’s apron stands at the far side of the building, smoking a cigarette while the lakeside breeze blows in from behind. He only briefly glances at Rust and Marty when they swing down out of the truck and walk past him toward the entrance.
“Bickel Reception in the Atrium,” Marty reads off the chalkboard sign as Rust pulls open one of the doors. “I bet somebody’s gettin’ hitched.”
“Probably not a big crowd,” Rust says, breathing in cedar-touched warmth as soon as they step inside the lobby. There’s a fire roaring in a massive stone hearth across the lounge and his eyes stray to it while a clerk glances up at them from behind the desk. A brass plaque on the wall points the way toward the in-house restaurant, and he guides Marty toward the hall before anybody can think enough to ask after them.
The walls are lined with frames and sconces between the windows, everything glowing with the faint wash of overcast evening. It’s quiet and only when they near the atrium entrance do they hear the murmur of a faintly muffled voice, soft and speaking to the candid faces of two people on the edge of wedlock. Rust pauses at the closed door but peers through the plated window, and there’s just enough of a gap in the sash to reveal a bride and groom standing beneath an arbor together while the minister reads verse from her book.
“You were right,” he whispers, letting Marty lean in for a closer look. The wedding party is small, no more than a dozen people gathered to watch the ceremony, though the atrium has been strung with garlands of flowers and silver stars that drop down from the beams in the ceiling, flickering as they turn and catch the evening light.
“Now ain’t that nice,” Marty murmurs, stepping away from the door. “Under the stars n’ all.”
“C’mon,” Rust says, touching two fingers to his elbow. “We’re gonna get caught lookin’.”
They move further down the hall and follow a small set of carpeted stairs up into an indoor terrace that leads into the lodge’s restaurant. There’s the faint din of kitchen noise hidden under piano music, and the dining room seems mostly empty save for a family or two seated near the fireplace situated in the heart of the floor plan. One of the adjacent rooms is empty but overlooks the lake through a broad bay window, and that’s exactly where the hostess leads them with two menus and a pair of wine glasses in her hand.
“Can I take your coats?” she asks, briefly looking them up and down with mild curiosity, but Rust only shakes his head and gently pulls the red scarf from around his neck.
“Obliged, ma’am,” he says. “We’ll hold on to them if you don’t mind.”
Once they’re left to their own devices Marty pulls his arms free and moves to fix the sleeves of his flannel shirt, tugging them at the wrists. “Sometimes I feel like I ought to be helping you out of your coat,” he says, letting out a little laugh when Rust quirks an eyebrow at him. “Just old habits, y’know.”
“Don’t waste all your fine chivalry on me, Marty,” Rust says as he takes a seat. “What if I was the one wanting to help you with your coat?”
“Shit,” Marty says with a quiet snort, waving Rust off. “Suppose we take care of each other good enough, all things said and done.”
Rust rests his elbows on the table, watching Marty with an ounce of something like wickedness in his eye. “Have you ever considered,” he says, “that since we started livin’ together, a lot of your old notions about men and women have changed?”
Marty cuts a look from the corner of his eye, mouth pulled into a stern line. “What do you mean?”
“Mean like, knocking boots with another guy full time means you ain’t got a woman around to do the cooking and the cleaning, or pick out shit to put on the walls like they’ve done ever since you could remember,” Rust says, straightforward. “We’ve had to reevaluate our roles in this partnership and decide how we were going to split the load. Run a household and a business, the whole nine.”
“Well, Rust,” Marty says after a few beats of silence, reaching up to scratch along his jaw. “In case you forgot, I had about ten years there where I had the opportunity to figure a lot of that shit out for myself.” He goes quiet for a moment, and then clears his throat before catching Rust’s eye. “And when things started up like they did, between the two of us, I think I realized pretty quick that I had to try and take care of you best I could because you weren’t too keen on doing it yourself.”
Rust blinks at that, lips parting even though he doesn’t quite know what he wants to say. His eyes turn on the candle lit between them, one tiny flame he could pinch out between a thumb and forefinger.
“Marty,” he says, and doesn’t get much further than that. Tells himself this isn’t the time or the place for the discussion he’s got in mind. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Maybe ten goddamn years from now, if they’re lucky.
“So I figure a lot of my old notions and roles have changed,” Marty says purposefully, gracing Rust with a smile that looks more heartfelt for all its bashfulness. “And you might not be a woman, but at the end of the damn day you’re still my priority.”
“You’d better save that one and put it in a card,” Rust says after a moment, though the line of his throat works in place while he does. His eyes have moved out the window to watch the lake, sleepy-bright but full of something else. “I’m touched, Marty.”
“Touched in the head,” Marty teases, bumping Rust’s foot under the table. “And for the fuckin’ record, all obvious extremities aside, living with you ain’t all that different from living with a woman.”
Rust cuts his eyes back over at that, face masked over with indifference. “That something you’ve got a problem with?”
“No sir,” Marty says, grinning at him from across the table. “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
Dinner is a hearty spread of steak and roasted potatoes, glazed carrots, a split dish of stuffed mushrooms and a hot basket of buttered rolls. Their server pours out two glasses of wine and says the Baked Alaska is complementary on the house for the season’s end, and Marty doesn’t know if he’s enjoyed a meal this much in years, much less seen Rust do anything resembling the same.
They watch the sun sink lower in the sky while they eat, dipping closer to the lake as an hour slips by with ease. It’ll likely be dark before they make it back up to Fisherman’s Roost but neither man feels the urge to pull themselves away from the table just yet. It’s only after the remnants of dessert are melting together in a runny mess on their plates, and the little candle has finally flickered down to its dying wick in the jar, that Marty pushes his water glass aside and nods toward Rust’s coat draped over the chair across from him.
“Why don’t you take a look in that envelope,” he says. “Before we get back on the road.”
“Feel like it’s eating on you more than it is me,” Rust says, even though he reaches over to pull the aforementioned envelope from its hidden place in an inner pocket. He lays it flat on the table, giving the plain paper a long and scrutinizing stare before swearing softly to himself. “God damn it, Pop.”
“What’s inside is the past,” Marty says. “It ain’t nothing meant to hurt you, or else I know such a good woman like Aya wouldn’t have bothered with giving it to you in the first place.”
Rust blows out a long sigh through his nose. “Suppose you’re right,” he says. “I don’t usually make a habit of being this fucking stupid.”
Marty watches as he peels back the envelope’s flap and carefully pulls out two things, both clearly touched by age and time. Right away he recognizes one as a folded newsprint clipping, which Rust sets aside in favor of whatever else he’s holding between his fingers. It’s blackened on one side, burnt enough that the edge of the photo turned to ash and crumbled away, but Marty can still read the name written out in a looping hand in one corner. Colleen.
Rust’s eyes scan over what’s left of the photograph, up and down, studying and remembering. He flips it over to glance at the back, and then lets out a breath as he passes the picture over to Marty, having finished comparing his mental image with a two-dimensional one. “That’s my mother.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Marty says, somewhat at a loss, though he takes the small photo and reaches into his breast pocket to pull out his glasses. He slips them on and then considers the woman’s remaining portrait: most of her chest and the left side of her face have been charred away, but he can see that her hair had been curled and pinned away from her face. There’s no color to the photograph and the specifics are hard to pick out, but he would recognize those heavy-lidded eyes anywhere, painted or not.
Colleen was probably half Rust’s age when the photo was taken, but she looks weary already, smiling faintly without a hint of teeth. No pearls at her throat or jewels clipped on her ears, and the detective in Marty figures that she probably didn’t have much by way of money despite being pretty in an ordinary sort of way. Her nose is unlike Rust’s, more pert and sloped upward at the tip, but the eyes are unmistakable and they share the same bottom lip.
“You favor her,” Marty says, looking up at the man in front of him. He passes the photo back over, careful to keep it from getting wet on the table. “Course I’ve never seen your dad, but this is sure something.”
“She had hair the same color as mine used to be,” Rust says, running the edge of a thumbnail along his mouth. “I remember her fingers were usually painted red. Wore cheap powder for perfume because she couldn’t afford anything better. Don’t know if I remember too much more than that, least things that I didn’t imagine.”
Marty doesn’t know if he has any words, figures they’d all be empty anyhow if he did. He thinks of his own mother, permed and petite and sitting behind the wheel of his father’s big white Buick in her ironed day dress, fussing at him in the rearview about hanging too far out the window. How she’d folded his socks into bundled pairs until the day he moved out with Maggie and the lipstick smears he’d have to scrub off his face almost up until the day she died.
“She shouldn’t have left you,” he says, pushing his glasses up on his head with a deep frown. “No matter how hard the times might’ve been, being on her own with a baby.”
“Self-interest isn’t really a burden for the people who make a point out of seeking it,” Rust says, glancing down at the photo again. “I don’t imagine she had much guilt, seeing how I never saw her again.”
“I don’t know,” Marty says, reaching up to rub around his eyes. “Hope she did, doing something like that when you were as small as you were.”
Rust rolls a shoulder that passes for something like a shrug. “I’ll never know the difference,” he says, and then reaches for the folded piece of newsprint. “We never got the paper delivered, so I can’t imagine what the fuck this is.”
It turns out to be an article torn from the weekly section of April 1981, and right there in yellowed greyscale at the top is one Rustin Spencer Cohle, aged 18, standing between two other young men as he gets sworn into the United States Army.
Rust stares at it even after he hands it over to Marty, gone oddly still. “I’ve never seen that before,” he says. “Don’t even remember getting my picture taken.”
The boy in the picture is handsome, stern at the brow, still with a headful of wavy hair that would’ve been shorn off to the scalp shortly after the photo was taken. He’s thinner and wiry, tanned but a little blemished in the face, lacking a black bird on his right forearm. Even at 18 Rust still wears the same sort of expression Marty recalls seeing on the face of a man two and three lifetimes later. As if he’d seen into the desolation of his own future and kept marching toward it anyways.
“He didn’t want me going,” Rust says, almost distantly, drawing Marty’s eyes away from the paper clipping. “He told me I was as good as any coward, going off and joining up to fight another man’s battles. Said he’d only ever taught me to live and die on my own terms and I’d gone yellow-bellied and fucked fifteen years of everything he’d done for me in one fell swoop.”
Marty blinks, looking between the photo and the Rust across from him now. “From what I remember, you told me he did his own time serving back in Nam.”
“All the more reason to call it a failure in his eyes,” Rust says with a low breath, drumming his thumb on the edge of the table. He makes a vaguely troubled face for a moment, caught between two thoughts in his head. “Which is a big part of why I don’t see him holding on to that piece of paper.”
“Maybe he had a change of heart,” Marty says, carefully setting the clipping back on top of Colleen’s photo. Out the window darkness is starting to settle over the lake, slowly falling like a sheet tossed in the air. “Seems like you’ve got most of the proof you need right here.”
Rust puts both things back in their envelope, creasing the folded edge between his fingers. “Maybe,” he says, looking at the unmarked ivory paper like it might reveal something else if he stares long enough. “Maybe so.”
The restaurant is empty by the time they’ve paid and settled their bill. Bussers and waiters go about their nightly duties with practiced ease while the telltale sound of a wedding party can be heard as it unfolds somewhere else in the lodge. When Marty gets up and comes around the table to take Rust’s coat in hand, Rust only stands and holds an arm out, ducking into a secret smile while he lets himself be helped into it.
* * *
“You got your walking stick?” Rust asks the next morning, coming around one side of the truck with his breath fogging on the air. Dawn has only barely touched Fisherman’s Roost but he’s already pulled into the invisible rhythm of the day ahead, efficient and alert, something Marty watches with sleep still clouding his eyes while he sips at a thermos of coffee.
“It’s right here,” he says, nudging the said stick where it rests next to his knee. They’re both settled on the top porch step, waiting, Marty’s eyes on Rust while he kicks and makes a quick inspection of the tread on all four truck tires. When he squats down to tighten the valve cap on one his shirt rides up at the waist, just enough to reveal the pistol where it’s been holstered at his hip.
Marty eyeballs the gleam of metal in the faint daylight, not thinking too much about whether or not they’ll need to use it. Considers it an insurance policy of sorts, all things told, even if he misses the familiar weight of his Colt on his side. If shit hit the fan he’d be walking into a gunfight with nothing but a mid-grade hunting knife and a bad knee, but having Rust on your side always tended to up the odds in favor of winning. And if not winning, at least getting off easy.
Rust finishes his walkthrough and crunches back up through the sparse gravel to stand at the foot of the stairs. He hitches both hands up on his hips and shifts his weight over onto one leg, and Marty wonders if he knows how he cocks his leg out to the side whenever he does it.
“Gonna be a lot of walking today,” Rust says, looking up at where Marty’s still seated on the steps. “I don’t think anybody’s kept up the road since Pop died, and it wasn’t much more than a line in the dirt to start with.”
Marty caps the lid back on his thermos and sets it down between his boots, gazing down at Rust in kind. “Be some good exercise, then,” he says. “I told you I’d let you know if something got to bothering me good enough.”
“I figured I’d remind you in the interest of making sure,” Rust says, trudging up onto the porch to retrieve his coat off the railing. It’s cold enough this morning that there’s a thin layer of white frost on the ground, though it likely won’t last long enough to see past noon. Still cold enough, though, that Rust’s wrapped the red scarf around his neck again and even tied it for good measure.
He shoulders their rucksack and then reaches down to help pull Marty up, who pretends to wave Rust off before taking his hand anyhow. “Might have to help me out of the saddle later, slick, but you don’t gotta help me in it just yet.”
Marty gets his walking stick in hand and steps lightly down the stairs, pulling on his gloves while he waits for Rust to lock up the cabin. Their eyes meet when he turns to thud back across the planking, the porch light still lit up behind his head in the early hour, and they aren’t so different from the eyes of a man Marty met a long while ago. Sometimes it’s easy to think of bygone times where they toed around a partnership founded on little more than basic civility, but all that had changed into something else, eventually. And then much to Marty’s surprise it’d kept right on changing, given the right nudge and a little room to grow.
Rust had always been Rust, he figures. At least in the deeper ways where people couldn’t see or touch, or in all the ways that made up the substance and stuff of a man’s soul. Like he’d grown from the inside out while the rest of the whole goddamn world got it all backwards, trying to build themselves from the outside in. And then by the time they’d realized their mistake, it was already too fucking late.
Marty’d been one of those people too, once upon a time. At least he’d started out that way, going through the motions of life until middle age and one wild twist of circumstance dropped the last thing he ever expected, but the one thing he might’ve deserved, right back into his lap for another round. He tends to think about weird shit like that nowadays. Knows there isn’t much of a secret as to how and why, especially when the voice in his head tends to sound a little less like himself and more like somebody else.
Marty laughs a little as he swings up into the truck, and Rust looks over at him from behind the wheel, sleepy eyes blinking in an unspoken question.
“If twenty years ago somebody would’ve told you about all this,” Marty says, gesturing around them, and then between himself and Rust, “would you have believed them?”
“Twenty years ago?” Rust says, cutting a scowl out the windshield that slowly turns into a poorly hidden smile. “Naw. You were too much of an asshole back then.”
Marty throws up a halfhearted middle finger but laughs while Rust turns the engine over. “Trust you to never sugarcoat shit for me,” he says, heaving out a long sigh. “Though I’d venture to say you weren’t such a sweet thing back in the day, either.”
“As fate would have it, then,” Rust says in a vaguely cryptic voice that coaxes a snort out of Marty, turning to start riding down the lane that’ll lead them to the mountain road. “Maybe we were destined from the start.”
Today’s journey brings them down one mountainside and up the next, going miles beyond the dirt turn-off that led to Aya and Abram’s homestead the day before. Rust keeps passing signs that point toward Fox Hollow until there’s none left to be seen, and then hangs a right out in what looks like, for better or worse, the middle of fucking nowhere.
A shallow culvert is set back into the woods and around a bend, unseen from the main road like a little hidey-hole. Dirt tire tracks lead around it and disappear further into the trees, but the path is so overgrown with foliage now that Rust doesn’t even try to push through it.
“Suspected as much,” he says, shifting the truck into park before cutting the engine. “There ain’t any driving up through there anymore. Best we could manage is horseback or on foot, so it looks like we’ll be making the hike.”
Outside the air is cold and quiet, almost hushed as if the forest is waiting to draw breath again. The hill they’re standing at the foot of is steep enough that the trees seem to be bent at the waist, stretching their roots to peer at the newcomers. Marty turns in a slow circle where he stands, looking up at all of it, feeling the wind and smelling the evergreen and hearing not much of anything at all. He can’t shake the sudden feeling that they’re being watched, though he wouldn’t say he feels threatened by it—just that they’ve stepped into something else’s circle of awareness.
“How far have we got to go?” Marty asks, looking over at the overrun trail before turning to find Rust.
“The old place is about a mile back from this point,” Rust says, reaching into the bed of the truck to pull Marty’s walking stick out. He’s already got the rucksack on his shoulders, looking a bit bulky under the thickness of his coat but not any less agile. “But there’s some stuff further out beyond that, things I wanted you to see.”
The stick is passed into Marty’s hands and they both stand still, not doing much more than breathing. A little bird finally breaks silence and twitters somewhere above, likely a chickadee from the high pitch of its song. Marty looks over at Rust and works his jaw for a moment, watching the wind card its fingers through his hair.
“When was the last time you were here?” he asks.
“I drove up here once, year or so before I decided to come back down to Louisiana,” Rust says, not quite meeting Marty’s eye. “Place was already in bad shape, though I don’t think many folks had bothered to come around and fuck with it. Nature just reclaiming what was hers.”
“Your dad was gone by then,” Marty says, only partway a question. There’s an edge of hesitation in Rust’s voice. It might be a thread of regret or it might be something else.
“Mmm,” Rust answers, starting at a slow walk up the trail long since left to run wild. Marty falls into step at his side, one ear bent to keep listening. “We parted ways when I wasn’t much older n’ seventeen, after I enlisted. I never did see him again.”
Rust pulls a sapling back and has Marty walk ahead, gently letting the tree sway back into place before following. The road is narrow and crawls up through the trees, like a sidewinder curving around the mountain. Marty thinks back as far as he can, skirting around memories that might tease out a time when Rust spoke about his father.
“You never did go see him, that time you said he had leukemia,” Marty says. “Know that was just the alibi we had, but did he really—?”
“Naw,” Rust says, and then swears low under his breath. “Maybe. I’ll never know for sure what happened before he passed, but I know he wouldn’t have stuck around long enough to see the end of it.”
Marty frowns a bit, focusing on spearing autumn leaves across their path with the end of his walking stick. “You think he…well. You think he took matters into his own hands, then.”
“Seems like the most plausible thing,” Rust says, heaving out a cloud of breath. “He didn’t want to be beholden to any man—lived most of his fucking life on that philosophy, far as I can tell. So it’d make sense, I reckon, that he wasn’t even gonna wait around for death to come knocking in the end.”
“God damn,” Marty says, for lack of anything else. The chickadees are singing again, and their telltale calls almost sounds akin to a tiny voice saying swee-tie, swee-tie.
“I thought he was shithouse crazy for a long time after I left,” Rust says with a sigh, tipping his head back to look at the forest above them. “Still do, most of the time.”
Marty thinks of his own father, unwavering and firm-handed, a stoic cut of man even up until the very end. Maybe their dads weren’t all that different when snuff came to snuff. But whereas Rust was raised to be a soldier by a man who didn’t believe in fighting wars, Marty was passed between his mother’s lap and his father’s fists enough that he didn’t know what to believe in.
They’d loved him, though.
“How did you know?” Marty says, mentally stumbling for a moment while he tries to nail down his thought. “I mean you said, when we were at the hospital after Carcosa—you remember. You said you felt him there.”
There. Rust immediately knows what Marty’s talking about. That pool of black nothingness, inky and fluid and altogether intangible. But still somehow so warm and blissfully welcoming.
“How I knew he loved me?” Rust asks quietly, and then stops dead in his tracks.
A twig snaps and Rust yanks Marty back before he can even blink, pulling him flush against his side as they rear back to the edge of the trail. Everything is deadly quiet for a long moment, and then Marty sucks in a lungful of cold air before rasping, “What in the name of fuck?”
“Tripwire,” Rust says, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. He wordlessly coaxes Marty’s walking stick out of his hand and steps back over to where they’d been before, squatting down to look at a barely visible line stretched across the trail. He cranes his head around for a few moments, eyes whetted sharp, and then points off somewhere into the overgrowth. “There it is.”
“There what is?” Marty asks, squinting at nothing but forest. “Goddamn. If you’re pointing out some Raiders of the Lost Ark shit, I ain’t seeing it.”
“That old log,” Rust says, drawing himself back up to full height. “The one leaning over there between the birch trees—it’s hooked up to the trip.”
Sure enough there’s a heavy log leaning at a perilous angle in the thicket, like it’d maybe fallen and found itself lucky enough to be caught between two other trees, but Marty looks closer and sees that a half-rotted rope had been wrapped and knotted near the top.
Rust takes a step back and snags the trip wire with Marty’s walking stick. There’s the instantaneous sound of something splintering and snapping nearby, and then they both watch as the log groans and falls to the ground with a shuddering thud right across the trail ahead.
“Guess we would’ve had to walk anyway,” Rust says, squinting at the tree trunk blocking the entire road. It’s big enough in circumference that two grown men probably couldn’t touch fingers if they circled their arms around it. “Pop must’ve wanted to keep vehicles from trespassing after he was gone.”
Marty steps up to the tree trunk and nudges it with the toe of his boot, the petrified wood fully unyielding. He lets out a hoot of bawdy laughter and shakes his head in something like disbelief. “You mean to tell me this has been waiting for our asses to come trudging up here for fifteen, twenty goddamn years?” he asks. “Just biding its sweet old time.”
“I’d call it a favorable omen,” Rust says, swinging a leg across the fallen log before reaching a hand out to help Marty over. “Means there ain’t been a soul up this road since he set the wire. I’d be glad to know the old place hasn’t been torn down or vandalized since I last saw it.”
“Your old man was a piece of fucking work,” Marty grunts, stepping up over the trunk with one hand on Rust’s shoulder for balance. “A real comedian, screwing with us from the afterlife.”
Rust smirks a little at that, hitching his rucksack up as they continue down the remaining trail. “He never did seem to have much by way of a sense of humor. Least not when I knew him.”
“It’s a wonder you turned out to be such a charmer,” Marty says, though the pinch of warmth in his tone comes through with ease.
“You ain’t kidding about that,” Rust says, and then guides them both around a patch of brambles choking through the undergrowth. The trail is starting to taper and the first bend is up ahead, leading on an incline further up the mountain. Beyond that and through the trees, the sky opens up and shows them a snapshot of sprawling conifer spread like a rolling quilt over the land. Something flutters deep in Rust’s stomach at the sight—not nerves or any real excitement, but like an old homing current waking up after an overlong winter nap.
He wonders if the only reason he’s got the feeling now is because this time, he brought the thing he calls home back with him.
The old homestead is still standing, albeit on what is likely its last limping and hobbled leg. Nearly twenty years without repair and that must be Travis Cohle’s last boldfaced testament to the elements and God and anybody else who ever got caught looking: what you build with your own two hands will always outlast yourself.
There’s no rusted-out mailbox or little wooden sign staked into the earth painted with The Cohle’s, not that there ever was to begin with. No tattered chimes hanging on the eves, no empty flower boxes hanging by rusty nails off the window sills. Sun and rain and snow have eaten a hole in the east side of the gabled roof, and Rust suspects the wood rot inside might be bad enough that they’d fall through the floor in some places. He doesn’t even want to think about the privy house out back, which looks like a ramshackle skeleton left out to stand in the cold.
Marty, for all his usual laughter and chatter, doesn’t say much at first. They walk around the low stone wall that Rust and Travis built with their own hands the summer after Rust turned nine, and against the backdrop of a decaying cabin it has fared best against the turning wheel of time. The high summer grass has mostly died off and a hint of the footpath that leads to the porch is still there, just a groove worn into the dirt by thousands of footsteps that spanned two and three decades. Even if it wasn’t there, Rust knows he could still follow it blind in the dark.
“This is where you grew up,” Marty says when they’re standing at the foot of the small porch, a touch of something wistful in his voice. The heavy wooden bench and table are still there, covered in lichen and still scarred with grooves from Travis’s skinning knives and cleaver. Up in the eaves the twig and moss remnants of a bird’s nest are visible, long since abandoned with the departure of spring. There are no light fixtures, no humming electricity nearby. Just the distant song of birds and wind shifting through the treetops.
“For fifteen years,” Rust says, clearing his throat a bit. He feels a latent sense of urgency, like he ought to be making introductions even though there aren’t any left to be made. “It ain’t much.”
“Do you think there’s anything left inside?” Marty asks, taking an experimental step on the bottom stair. It creaks under his weight but holds strong, and Rust’s eyes go to the front door. It’s shut and latched and the twin windows facing out are unbroken. He figures there’s nothing left to be seen, and certainly nothing left of his father on the other side. Everything withered away but old ghosts and dust.
“We can look around,” he says. “Not sure of the integrity of the full structure anymore, so we gotta tread careful. But there’s not a lot left to see.”
Marty takes another careful step, and then another, until he’s standing on the porch. He turns and waits for Rust, eyebrows high on his forehead. “Thought you said there probably hasn’t been nary a soul out here but Aya and Abram in twenty years.”
Rust draws in a steadying breath before looking off somewhere beyond the house. “When I came back up here the last time, I figured he’d made a point of clearing most of his shit out. Gave it away, mostly, so I heard in town from anybody who remembered.” He feels like he’s come to terms with this reality a long time ago, but it isn’t as easy as he would’ve thought, saying it out loud to Marty.
“He didn’t—well, he didn’t want to leave much behind, you know,” Rust finishes. “Always preached that a man should clean up his messes. That’s how I knew he was gone.”
“Jesus,” Marty says, features creasing up into something pensive. He turns and gazes at the front door, then back to Rust. “We don’t need to go in, if you don’t want to. It ain’t even really my place to ask.”
“Course you can ask,” Rust says, stepping up to join him on the porch planking. “Didn’t bring you up here for fucking nothing, and it ain’t like anybody’s around to take offense.”
The knob turns like a key in his hand but the door itself takes two good rams from Rust’s shoulder before it finally gives in the jamb. He pushes it open the rest of the way, letting the warped wood drag along the floorboards. Murky sunlight streams inside through the dirty windows, and then a larger, brighter beam coming from the misshapen hole in the roof.
Their boots crunch through debris on the floor while dust motes rise up to drift on the cold air. There’s nothing left inside but signs of animal nesting and the heavy cinder blocks where an iron stove used to sit. Across the room the hearth is dark and empty, a gaping maw of nothing. When he was growing up, Rust can’t remember a time when the fire there had ever gone out.
“All one room,” Marty says, tapping the floorboards with his walking stick before taking a few careful steps. He turns and blinks at Rust, a vaguely curious look around his eyes. “How’d you sleep?”
“On bedrolls by the fire in winter, mostly,” Rust says, tipping his head toward the cold fireplace. “In the summer when I got older, we’d set up by the windows on opposite sides of the room, let the night breeze in. Had a makeshift curtain by the washtub for cleaning up.”
Marty lets out a low whistle, shaking his head. He looks surprised, almost. Like up until now he hadn’t quite been able to believe it. “You weren’t kidding that time you told me you didn’t watch a TV ‘til you were seventeen.”
“That was Pop’s way,” Rust says. “Only the bare-bones necessities and not much more than that.”
“I would’ve lost my mind out here,” Marty says, bluntly. “Lost it in no time flat.”
Rust manages to crack a tight smile at that. “It’s different when you’re raised up into it,” he says. “I couldn’t afford to get bored. Always had to keep myself busy with something.”
They walk the remaining perimeter of the cabin’s single room, and there’s not much else to be found save for a ratty squirrel’s nest in the rafters and a blackened scorch mark on the floor near the fireplace.
“Did that when I was about six or seven,” Rust says, scuffing the mark with the toe of his boot. “Dropped a hot coal.”
Marty’s question is nearly instant. “How bad of a whipping did you get for that one?”
“I didn’t,” Rust says, still staring at the burn mark. “I scrubbed the privy and cabin floor from top to bottom, though. Until my fingers were raw.”
The air around them goes quiet again and Rust puts his foot over the scorch, hiding it from view. “C’mon,” he says, looking up at Marty from between his lashes. “Still more I want you to see.”
Marty follows as Rust leads them back out the door, gracing the cold room with the warmth of his laughter. “I wouldn’t miss a grand tour of your old outhouse shitter for the world.”
“Not quite what I had in mind,” Rust drawls, firmly closing the door behind them. He holds the cold knob in hand for a lasting moment before finally letting go. “We’ve got to take a walk out to the lake.”
They step over the low rock wall at the back of the cabin and leave the cabin behind, walking out into nothing but the dense sprawl of untouched forest. Rust had packed a compass and his old map as an assurance, but he knows he won’t need either any more than he’d need them to navigate from room to room in the house in Louisiana. He steps lightly, though he doesn’t rush with getting there, eyes and ears honed a little sharper than usual. Marty is always close at his side though, the two of them weaving in and out between trees and dormant salmonberry bushes as they cut through the woodland.
When the ground turns from the softness of plant decay and dirt to the crunch of cold rock, Rust looks ahead and sees the trees part in their familiar divide, giving way to the dark surface of lakewater reflecting the overcast sky. A sliver of a creek feeds into it at the opposite side but the water here on their end is smooth, almost glassy in its stillness.
“Look at all this,” Marty says, soaking in the view from where they’d come to stop a few yards from the shore. “I’d say I wanted a picture but I don’t think a camera would do it proper justice.”
“Used to spend a lot of time out here—fishing, swimming, reading,” Rust says, squinting across the lake. He slips the rucksack off his shoulders and opens it up, pulling out their coffee thermos and a bottle of water before passing the latter over to Marty. It’s a far cry past noon now, and he’s eager to lighten some of the load in the pack. “Be a good place to sit and have lunch.”
“Pick us a spot, then,” Marty says, and they walk further down the shore until they find a grassier patch in the sun. There’s nothing to sit on but they don’t mind, settling down on the ground with their backs to the trunk of a fallen tree. Two sandwiches appear and get divided, a half of turkey and a half of ham for each.
They eat in relative quiet, passing the thermos back and forth to sip at warm coffee. Eating lunch in silence is an old holdover from their days spent breaking bread over the hood of a shitty Honda or at the greasy picnic table of some roadside joint, but it still suits them fine. At least these days the strain of a case doesn’t hang between them like a bristling haunt, keeping hackles raised and both sides ready to bite.
Marty’s busy brushing crumbs off his knees and taking his last bite of turkey sandwich when Rust goes stiller than before, looking somewhere in the distance beyond the other man’s shoulder.
“Don’t startle or nothing, but turn around real slow and look,” Rust says, tipping his head toward the water. “Standing at the edge of the forest, bout twenty yards. Must’ve been watching us for a little while now.”
Marty’s stomach does a little twist in gut but he turns without hurry like Rust said, already halfway praying to anybody listening that he won’t come eye-to-eye with a grizzly or a bull moose. But what he finds is a whole lot different, bobtailed and sitting elegant vigil with its black-tipped ears pointed in their direction.
“You got bobcats out here?” he asks, still watching the big cat. “We don’t even hardly see them down in Louisiana unless they’re roadkill.”
“Lynx,” Rust says, quietly correcting him. “I’ve only ever seen one two other times in all my years up here.”
The lynx watches them for another few moments where it sits on its lightly dappled haunches, and then slowly stands to pad down to the edge of the lake. It crouches low to take a drink, eyes and ears still alert, and then gives both men one last stare before turning to slink back into the trees just as silently as it arrived.
“You think that’s a kitty Lilah would wanna pet?” Marty says, laughing a little to himself. He’s given up on the last bite of his sandwich and sets it aside, reaching to take another swig of water. “Y’know, this still doesn’t even seem real.”
Rust looks back out across the lake. He’d spent countless hours here in the spare moments of his youth, sketching and reading and throwing stones out across the dark water and his mind alike. If he closed his eyes anywhere else in the world he could envision this place—the smell of clean water, heady spruce and birch and pine needles, the cold rocks under his hands and feet. A serenity and quietness so real that you could almost step into it through memory alone.
It’s why he’d come here alone, the last time. He twists the band around the third finger on his left hand and knows it’s the same reason he needed to bring Marty this time around.
“It’s not such a bad sight,” Rust says. The line of his throat works for a moment, skin prickling with something that isn’t cold under his coat. He doesn’t know if he can talk but he knows he needs to. “I thought it would be a fitting place, once—something to see one last time.”
Marty turns to look at him, blinking like he’d been shaken out of a daydream. “What was that?”
“I know my Pop came here,” Rust says, wetting his bottom lip before he keeps on. “When he decided he had to end things. I figure I always knew it’d be out here somewhere, peaceful-like. Where he wasn’t under anybody else’s time or obligation.”
Marty leans back where he sits to process that. His head is slightly cocked to one side, like an old dog trying to pick up something it’d heard in the distance. “I don’t know what you’re saying, Rust,” he says, and Rust thinks he means it. “Your—your dad? You said he killed himself.”
“He always said he’d get his gun and his knife and take the long walk out into the woods,” Rust says, faintly rasping around the words. “Ever since I was old enough to know what the fuck he was talking about. And I never really gave it too much thought, you know, because he’d get too far down the bottle and just talk. It didn’t mean anything real.”
“Shit, man,” Marty says, shaking his head. The line of his mouth pinches up for a moment while he contemplates the reality of all that. “That’s rough. It’s just—it’s a fucking shame, you know.”
Rust isn’t thinking about Travis anymore, though. He’s balancing on the brink of somebody else’s story, and while they might’ve crisscrossed once upon a time he knows they won’t ever end the same.
“But there came a time later—a time when I thought about what he’d always said,” Rust says. “And I knew it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go out. Out in nature, where you could see a little bit of beauty in the fucking world. Where you wouldn’t have to worry about nothing anymore.”
“Rust,” is all Marty says. He’s gone pale, jaw set into a hard line. His eyes aren’t even really looking at Rust now, almost like he can’t stand to bear it. “What are you saying?”
Rust lets out a shaky breath into the cold air, trying to ignore the aching tightness in his chest. “I’m telling you I came up here, Marty, couple months before I realized I needed to go back down to Louisiana,” he says. “I’d sold most everything off but there were some boxes in storage, all the things I’d kept and gathered on the Lange case up ‘til ‘09—wrapped them up, left your work address on them. I figured at least that much would get into good hands.”
Marty’s looking at him now, hurt starting to pull tight around his eyes. Like he already knows the answers but he’s still got to find it in himself to ask. “Why’d you do it?”
“I got here and I was trying to find a good reason not to,” Rust says, feeling the resolve in his voice begin to come apart. “But by that time I didn’t have anything left, Marty. My daughter had been dead for twenty years and I—I wasn’t ever gonna see her grown. My Pop was gone, and I’d spent eight years between fishing boats and bars after I left Louisiana, trying to drink myself to fucking death. But it wasn’t working fast enough.”
“It would’ve been easy, then,” Rust says, wiping a hand across his eyes. “I thought I’d finally worked up the fuckin’ nerve to go through with it. I had my gun, but there was thin ice on the lake at the time. All I really had to do was walk out—and not fight it anymore.”
“Why’d you stop?” Marty asks, voice like broken glass in his throat. He reaches out and puts his hands on Rust, on his leg and then his arm, like he’s got to keep him from going too far back into memory. “What made you change your mind?”
Rust tries to laugh, but it comes out more like a sob. “Because I still had a fucking job left to do,” he says. “I still had work that needed to get done.”
“Dora Lange,” Marty says, quiet. Her name sounds like something reverent in the frigid Alaskan air.
“Dora,” Rust sighs, nodding weakly. He can hear the tree and its decorated branches whispering in his head as clear as day. “It all leads back to Dora.”
Marty’s grip on him gets tighter and he moves until he’s pressed into Rust’s side, hands tangled up in his scarf and coat. His eyes are still dry but he sounds scared when he talks, drawn into the horror of what might’ve been. “I wish I could go back and—and show you,” he says. “How it didn’t have to be like that forever. If I’d have known, Rust, if either of us had—had any fucking clue, about how things could be.”
“You didn’t know, Marty,” Rust says. He tells himself he ought not to cry, but there’s nobody here to see him but the one person who wouldn’t fault him for it. “I didn’t, either. We couldn’t have fucking known back then.”
“I should’ve been better,” Marty says, sniffing hard. “If I wasn’t such a spectacular fuckup of a human being, if shit hadn’t—if it hadn’t have gone south with Maggie, it wouldn’t have—you would’ve never come back up here.”
Rust finds his hand and holds onto it, trying to still those thoughts before they go too far. “What’s done is done,” he says. “It happened the way it had to happen. There’s no reason to go and hold it against yourself now.”
They grow quiet for a time, still felled against one another and letting the past fetter off in the cold wind. The sky looks like a great pane of grey slate overhead and the forest has grown quieter. A dampness lingers in the air, just enough to burn when they draw in a breath too fast.
“I have to tell you something,” Rust says after a while. Marty shifts at his side but doesn’t move away, head inclined to listen. “When we were in Carcosa. When I took—when I pulled the knife out.”
Rust feels a spike of something like fear touch his nerves when he hears himself say it out loud. In all this time they’d never talked about it, never brought it up beyond the margins of what felt like a distant nightmare.
“Don’t,” Marty says, a little bit broken. He shakes his head, looking up at Rust and then away again. “You don’t have to say it. You don’t have to tell me.”
“I thought it’d be easy,” Rust says, feeling wetness on his face now. “And I didn’t know, Marty—I didn’t realize what the future was gonna be. I just knew I was tired and that room was as far as I was gonna get. I’d done all I could fucking do.”
His voice breaks in half, then, when his next thought comes to mind. “I thought you’d get along alright without me.”
Marty’s face crumples at that and Rust can’t see clearly anymore but he holds on tighter, pressing his face somewhere against the other man’s neck. “I wasn’t thinking about leaving you behind,” he says. “I thought I’d found the way out.”
“Do you know how many nightmares I’ve had,” Marty chokes out, shaking under Rust’s hands. “How many times I woke up thinking I’d really lost you. That I was—fuck. Fuck.”
He doesn’t say the word but Rust knows what he means. Because if love was the one thing that brought them this far, it was loneliness that tipped the first scale in bringing them back together.
Rust shushes him a little despite his own tears, pressing his nose somewhere behind Marty’s ear. “I made it back, though,” he says. “We made it back.”
“I thank God every fucking day, and that probably still isn’t enough to cover it,” Marty says. He reaches up to scrub a hand across his eyes, blearily looking at Rust’s tear-stained face, and then croaks out a ragged laugh. “If we ain’t a sore sight to see right now.”
“It don’t matter none,” Rust says, reaching up to touch Marty’s face without any hesitation, not an ounce of shame left to be had. He wipes a thumb under his eye and revels a little in the sensation of his whiskers against his palm, coarse but still somehow soft. “No good reason in holding shit back anymore, far as I can tell. Least of all from each other.”
Marty sniffs and chuckles again but tips his face into Rust’s hand for a moment. “You’re right about that,” he says, letting out a soft sigh.
Rust lets his hand fall away as he looks back out across the lake, features composed back into something more thoughtful. “The truth of it is,” he says, “in all the years I’ve been on this earth, outside my Pop there ain’t anybody else I’ve had longer than you, Marty. Not my mother, not my wife. Not even my little girl.”
Marty keeps quiet for a long moment, watching Rust’s face. “Ain’t that something,” he whispers, following Rust’s eyes to look at the glassy water.
“Means you’re something I’ve got to hold onto, now,” Rust says. “Reckon you’ve given me a lot more than I ever bargained for, this late in life.”
“And I reckon that shit swings both ways,” Marty says, letting out a long breath. He bites against his lip, turning something over in his mind before dropping it somewhere against Rust’s shoulder. “Thing is, I never gave much thought to deserving anything after—after Maggie and the girls, you know. Like you want it, yeah, but there was a time where I got to a point…I don’t know.”
“You can tell me, Marty,” Rust says gently, waiting for him to keep on.
Marty makes a pained sort of face, mouth screwed up into a thin line. “I thought I’d fucked it up too bad to get another shot, I guess,” he says. “Somewhere in ten years, all that casual dating shit leading to dead ends—you just reconcile it with yourself, that this is how shit’s gonna be. You’re gonna be alone.”
Rust knows that he’s never felt burdened with the same sort of fear—has been alone for most of his life, in one form or another. But Marty’s drawing in another breath before he can say anything, shaking his head in something like smalltime wonder.
“So imagine my surprise when somebody or something out there, I don’t know what the hell, but it just kinda…handed you to me, Rust. That it’d let me keep you, despite everything. Despite how close we came to something else.” He laughs a little breathless, bowing his head. “I don’t know how I got so damn lucky.”
Rust looks back out across the still lake, breath pillowing against the cold air. “What is a wise man if not the sum total of his sins?”
Marty turns to look at him, slow at first in the wake of dawning confusion. It takes him a moment to find his voice through the cold. “Maybe the things he might do in reparation,” he says, and then shakes his head, trying to shrug off the feeling that this is a conversation they might’ve bridged twenty years before. “Even if—well, even if you can’t fix everything in the end. Sometimes all an honest man can do is try.”
The tiny smile hanging Rust’s mouth grows a little bit wider. “There you have it,” he says. “We live and fucking learn, Marty. Maybe you earned your own luck.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Marty says, sputtering a little despite his laughter. “And here I went and won the jackpot with you.”
“That’s putting a little too much shine on it,” Rust murmurs, lowering his lashes. “I ain’t exactly a silver dollar catch.”
“I dunno,” Marty says with a grunt, watching Rust climb to his feet before taking the hand held out to help him up, too. “I don’t think I’d be in a hurry to throw you back anytime soon.”
They brush themselves off and start packing up, Marty retrieving his walking stick while Rust shoulders the rucksack. It’s getting late enough in the day that they’ll be chasing daylight all the way home, but Rust walks back down along the edge of the lake one more time, and then heads up the bank toward the tree line before beckoning Marty over.
“C’mere real quick,” he calls, walking up on a lone white birch. It’s standing out like a sore thumb among the other trees, nowhere near as tall and broad as the surrounding spruce and pines. All its autumn leaves have fallen but for a handful, and rust crunches through them while he reaches up to touch something on the pale trunk.
Marty can’t see what it is until he gets up close, and even then it’s hard to make out the initials carved into the tree. But there they are, crude but unmistakable—right there in the bark somebody had taken a knife and whittled RC.
“I forget when I did that, exactly,” Rust says, mouth twitching a little wryly as he brushes his fingers over the letters. “Young enough that I had a pocketknife and thought it’d be a good idea to stake out my claim on something, I guess.”
“You know,” Marty starts to say, brushing a finger and thumb down the whiskers on his upper lip, “most folks usually put a crooked heart around it and…oh.” His words trail and taper off, eyes swiveled back to the open air above the lake. He thinks it might be raining at first, but it’s coming down too slow to be water. It isn’t until Rust turns and looks, too, that he realizes it’s started to snow.
“I was waiting for it,” Rust says, peering up at the steely sky. “Good thing they’ve already got snow tires on the truck.”
The flurry of it is soft but getting faster, but Rust’s expression looks mostly unconcerned. “I thought you said it wasn’t likely to start this early in the year?” Marty says, reaching out to catch the first few flakes on his hand.
“Naw, it’ll get cold enough to snow,” Rust says. “I just said it wouldn’t likely get bad enough to snow us up in the cabin, yet.”
He turns and leaves Marty by the tree, walking closer to the edge of the water. Rust looks along the shore for a few moments and then stoops to pick up a smooth stone, turning it over in his hand before slipping it into a pocket. “We’d better get along, then,” he says. “Still gotta get back to the truck and up to the Roost again before too long.”
“Alright,” Marty says, though he reaches down to fish his knife out of the pocket it’d been hiding in. “Just give me a second.”
They leave the lake behind and start the walk back toward Travis’s old cabin, breath puffing on the air while the ground and fir trees slowly start to grow whiter. Rust pauses for a few moments to let Marty catch up from where he’d fallen a few steps behind, standing still while snowflakes gather in his silvering hair.
Even when they’re long gone the white birch at the edge of the lake still stands proud, keeping its secrets both old and new. Right next to the old tattoo scarred into its trunk is something new, fondly etched out with the blade of a gifted pocketknife. If anybody ever happened to pass by and look, they’d see that RC isn’t alone anymore. MH has been added on too, for good measure.
* * *
Fisherman’s Roost has undergone a transformation by the time they set foot on the ground, just a hair or two shy of nightfall. Rust had driven slow up the mountain road, minding all his corners and narrow edges, but it hadn’t taken too long to get back home without traffic to worry them. It’s quiet here near the cabin now, all the forest’s haunts and creatures gone to turn themselves in for an early night. Only the river’s voice can be heard now, muffled as it seems while snow continues to fall around them.
Rust doesn’t move to go inside right away, instead standing at the foot of the porch to face westward. Marty leaves his walking stick against the porch railing and turns to join him, wincing a little on the stairs but making no move to complain.
The sun is taking its last breath across the snowcapped mountains, its golden face making the sparse snow already gathered on the ground look like rose-dusted powdered sugar. Pale pink spreads over the treetops and kisses the peaks in the distance, swirling into a synaptic smear of misfired light and color that would look like bleeding neon if Rust bothered to look, but at the moment he only has eyes for Marty. The other man’s eyes are turned toward the darkening horizon, familiar blue tinted violet here on the edge of dusk. The cast of Alaskan twilight looks at home on his face, so much like the flushed ruddiness that burns there when he’s gone bashful or pliant and breathless, and Rust feels the gift of this moment soften every tired seam and cold joint in his body.
Like it’d been worth it, he thinks. Everything that ever caught fire and burned between them was all for this.
“Sure beats the hell out of anything I’ve seen in Louisiana,” Marty says, slowly turning to peer at Rust from the corner of his eye. He blinks when he finds that Rust was already looking at him, wrinkling up his nose into a goofy sort of smile. “What’re you over there lookin’ at?”
“Nothin’,” Rust says, though they both know it’s a fib he didn’t need to bother telling. “How’s that knee faring?”
Marty bends his leg a little, testing his weight, and makes a mild face. “Not too bad,” he says. “Sore enough that I probably ought to soak it for a little bit.”
“You can go ahead and fill the tub up if you want,” Rust says, reaching up to unwind the red scarf still looped around his neck. “I’ll bring some wood in and get the fire going again.”
“Feel like it’s too pretty out here to go in,” Marty murmurs, catching the last sliver of sun disappear behind the horizon. Behind them snow is starting to gather and pile up on the porch and eaves of the cabin. “Some real Christmas card shit.”
Rust makes a warm sound in his throat as he turns to walk back around toward the wood pile. “Aren’t you cold?” he says, just loud enough for Marty to catch.
Marty opens his mouth up to answer when a howl rings out in the distance, echoing through the trees in a long and lonely cry. A few seconds pass and then it’s joined by another and then another, all three harmonizing until they abruptly go quiet again.
“Welp,” Marty says, mostly to himself as he takes two short steps up onto the porch after a chill runs down his back. “That’ll be our cue to go in. Where’s the key?”
Rust shows back up a few moments later with an armful of kindling, the braided cord looped around his finger with the cabin key hanging from one end. His eyes gleam a little as he unlocks the door, stepping aside to let Marty in first. “You don’t like the evening entertainment?”
“Can’t say I do,” Marty quips back, waiting for Rust to follow him before he shuts and latches the door. “Think the radio over here’ll suit me just fine.”
Rust kneels to start stacking firewood in the grate and they go through a well-worn routine of shuffling around each other with the ease of familiarity, only different now in the presence of new surroundings. Coats hung up, boots off, Marty’s knit cap on the dresser next to where Rust unwound the red scarf and set it aside with the holstered gun. No coffee this time of night, but they sip around two frothy bottles of Alaskan Summer while their dinner starts warming up on the stove.
It occurs to Marty that he hasn’t touched a television or a computer in nigh on five days, outside checking the weather and peering at the odd email on his cell phone. Most of the time service hadn’t even come through up in the mountains, but hell if he even found enough of a spare moment to care or notice.
When supper’s mostly been eaten and the old radio has lost its voice in the middle of an old Buddy Holly song, Rust gets up to start clearing dishes and rinsing them off at the sink. He’s tired, and the day has been long for them both, but there’s no yoke of addled tension hanging in the air. The cabin is quickly warming up and his bones feel longer and looser now that they’re out of the biting cold, though his thighs and calves ache some in light of a day spent climbing uphill.
Marty pardons himself from the kitchen and moves across the room to disappear behind the folding screen. Water starts running shortly, and when Rust hears the plug chain rattle against the old ceramic he knows Marty’s decided to settle in for a bath. It isn’t really any luxury he often affords himself back home, at least not since his cast came off and everything had healed into shiny pink scars. Either he’d managed to do a real number on his knees or he’s got a penchant for relaxing in mind.
When Rust smells something floral and clean spark in the air, he follows his nose over to the tub, stepping from behind the screen to watch Marty wash over his neck and shoulders from where he’s sitting in the filling tub.
“I thought you didn’t like lavender,” Rust says, shifting his weight over onto one hip while he crosses his arms. Marty glances up at him but doesn’t stop his washing, the two of them long since familiar enough with the shape and image of each other now that there’s no need to hide anything from view now.
“Ain’t all that bad,” Marty murmurs, soaping up his cloth again to start washing down his arms, gently sloshing hot water around. “It’s got all those soothing properties and shit. Figured it’d be good after our big trek through nature.”
Rust offers a vague nod, mostly caught up in the mild spell of running water and steam in the air. He straightens and turns away, all sleepy eyes and soft lines, briefly disappearing somewhere across the room. The warbling radio turns down until it’s quiet, and when he comes back he’s already working at the buttons on his flannel.
“Are you finished washing up?” he asks, shrugging out of his shirt and letting it drop to the floor. Marty shifts around in the water and watches Rust unbuckle his belt before reaching up to pull his undershirt off.
“Uh, just about I guess,” Marty says, idly pulling his cloth through the water. “Did you need me to hurry up and get out?”
“No,” Rust says, stepping out of his pants and shorts until he’s not wearing a stitch of anything else. He cuts a look from beneath his lashes at Marty before stepping up to test the water running from the faucet. “You can stay right where you are.”
Marty blinks and laughs a little bit, watching Rust walk around to the opposite end of the tub with all his usual languid posture. The bath is deeper than the one they have at home but not much longer. “Not that I’m complaining or nothing, but I think you’re being a little optimistic about the two of us fittin’ in here at one time.”
“We’ll be alright,” Rust says, and then steps one foot into the space between Marty’s ankles, hissing a little against the heat before drawing his other leg in. He settles himself down at the other end of the tub, easing one of his legs in the space next to Marty’s. It’s a snug fit but they manage somehow, and when Rust finally sinks down against the ceramic he lets out a long and contented sort of sigh.
Marty keeps soaking his knee without complaint, though he reaches for the bar of soap and tosses it down to land in Rust’s lap with a splash. “Get some of that rind off you,” he teases, jumping a little when Rust presses a foot into his inner thigh. “D-don’t you start that,” he stammers, trying not to squirm while he keeps Rust’s foot from inching up any further.
“I ain’t,” Rust says, wetting the soap before he starts washing over his chest and then up around his neck. The tub is full enough around them to keep the view modest, but Marty still watches as he keeps washing further down his body, hands dipping somewhere beneath the water.
It’s not a hard thing, knowing that they’re both getting older, with the truth of that manifesting in ways that show up more in the mirror than the mind these days. But maybe it doesn’t bother Marty as much as it used to years ago. He knows he doesn’t cut as strong and sharp a figure as he once did, and he eventually gave up on his hair and buzzed it down without putting up a fight. Even Rust doesn’t look as lithe and tight as he once did, though his hips are still narrow and his profile is as handsome as it always was, crow’s feet around his eyes aside. There’s a comfort in knowing that they’re both well-acquainted with the small imperfections of one another, whether those things are potholes you steer around on familiar road or grooves lovingly worn into the warmth of old wood. Scars and all, Marty thinks. The real comfort is in knowing they’ve somehow stuck around long enough to collect them.
At the opposite end of the bath, Rust finishes with his washing and sets the soap aside, eyes on Marty like blue ocean glass. He shifts around in the water, slowly maneuvering his way up toward the other man so settle down between his knees. Marty draws his legs up to give him some room but Rust slips a little once he gets there, sloshing water up over the lip of the tub.
“There goes our deposit,” Marty says, though he holds Rust where he is, wedged up between his thighs with their legs tangled up under the water.
“S’alright, we don’t got one,” Rust says, and then dips his head to press a crooked kiss somewhere against Marty’s damp shoulder. He goes still then, lounging there with one hand braced against Marty’s chest. Half his ass is out of the water but he doesn’t seem to mind, caught up in thoughts of something else.
“Sometimes I feel like I can hear you thinking from across the room,” Rust says, simply. “Gets louder when I get up on you like this.”
Marty hums a little at that, reaching down to cup a handful of water up over Rust’s side. They could use some more hot from the tap, but damned if he wants to move and fix it just yet. “You must hear my old hamster doing laps up there a lot.”
“Don’t worry about gettin’ older,” Rust says. He lets out a small breath that feels cooler where it tickles across Marty’s skin. “I’m not worried about it none.”
A little thrill shoots through Marty at having been found out, but it doesn’t last, because of course Rust knows how to read him; he always has. “Have you ever been worried about a thing like that?” he asks, letting his hand rest around the curve of Rust’s rib cage, right next to the indigo bird there.
“Not really,” Rust says, quiet. “Can’t say I ever thought I’d have to be.”
Some of that fear from earlier in the day seeps back into Marty’s chest, like it’s a hurt he’s got to hold there when he thinks back on what he’s learned. And he doesn’t really know what to say—never has been as good with fancy words as Rust, and this feels like it’s something bigger than he is. Like it goes beyond him or maybe even the two of them together, further out, and he’s just lucky enough to still be tethered to Rust in the meantime. He remembers thinking that holding on to Rust in the beginning was kin to the impossibility of catching lightning in a glass bottle, and yet he’s sitting here now with a man who always felt like a wild force of nature draped across his lap, softly pliant and vulnerable.
So maybe it wasn’t ever about catching lightning, Marty thinks. Something smaller and simpler than that, since the answers to life’s questions had always tended to be right up under his nose when he least expected. Maybe all he really had to do this whole time was hold open a patient hand and wait for fireflies.
Rust had come to him willingly, after all, after everything. Folded himself right into back into Marty’s life and then his hands and heart, if only because there was finally an open spot waiting for him there.
“Well, I hope you’re looking forward to me hiding vitamins in your applesauce one day,” Marty says, bumping his nose into Rust’s hair. “When you’re white-headed and even more ornery than you are now.”
“Sounds about right,” Rust says, smiling just a little. He doesn’t tell Marty that hearing him talk about the future is what makes it seem real, but they’ll save that for another day, maybe. Now that they’ve got the time left to get there.
“C’mon,” Rust says, slowly easing himself up to stand from the tub. He reaches for a pair of towels and then for Marty, holding out a hand to keep him balanced while he gets his feet up underneath him. Marty steps out and pulls the drain, and when they’re both finished toweling dry Rust only turns off the overhead lights and pads across the cold floor toward the bed.
Marty watches him for a long moment and then silently leaves his towel hanging over the edge of the tub. Doesn’t bother with fishing any nightclothes out of his suitcase, only follows in Rust’s footsteps until they’re both standing at the side of the bed. They watch each other, eyes faintly shining in the dark, bodies silhouetted by nothing more than the orange cast of light coming from the hearth.
It’s a wordless sort of conversation, when Rust slides into bed and Marty follows. The frame faintly creaks under them but holds strong, welcoming their weight in a nest of soft linen.
“Lay down,” Rust says, gently. He waits until Marty does just that, lying back against the pillows with his eyes full of nothing but Rust, and then watches as the younger man moves to straddle across his hips.
Rust looks down at Marty, his eyes incandescent under heavy lids in the half-dark. He could wage an honest guess about the thoughts running through the other man’s head but decides to ask anyway. “What are you thinking?”
“Right now I’m thinking you’re gonna get cold up there all by yourself,” Marty says, thumbs tracing over the soft jut of Rust’s hipbones. “Thinkin’ you should come down here so I can warm you up.”
Rust hums in his chest, letting Marty’s hands move up his hips, slow and skimming as they follow a map from one thing to the next. Fingertips stray from the edge of outstretched flight feathers painted in bruised shades of blue-violet to three white points burned into Rust’s ribs, traveling lightly across his skin on a short journey to the top of a more familiar scar. Rust only breathes softly while Marty does it, eyes cast low to the man looking up at him.
It’s such an ugly thing but also intimately striking, warped and crude but not so much unlike a stroke of white gold seaming broken china back together. “Jesus,” Marty sighs after a moment, following the pale puckered line all the way down to the softer part of Rust’s stomach below his navel. His voice sounds strained, stuck in the back of his throat again. “We came up here for a damn vacation, and all I can think about is how many times along the line I could’ve lost you for good.”
One of Rust’s hands touches the back of Marty’s, resting there while he decides to indulge a spider-fine thread of his own curiosity. “How many?” he asks.
“Too many,” Marty answers, quicker than either one of them would’ve thought. “But I reckon once is enough.”
Rust stays silent, though he bows over Marty until he can press a kiss against his mouth, warm and light. Two hands come up to hold him there and so he stays, scooting down Marty’s body and into the space next to him so they can come together again.
It’s easy to lose any sense of time in these quiet moments, wrapped up in the relief of touching and being touched without any pretense. All of it a sort of joint rhythm spun out into a soft and tender exploration of skin, like they’ve never done this before despite knowing every inch of each other like the back of one shared hand. The old comfort of rediscovering something you love for the thousandth time, or coming home again after a long time away.
Rust unfurls like moonflower and burns hot under Marty’s hands—always has, ever since the first time he let himself be undone and put back together again. He kisses hungrily, almost desperately, like he wants to climb inside the safest parts of Marty and lose himself there.
“So you don’t ever think we’re gettin’ too old for all this?” Marty says when Rust finally lets him come up for air, a little rumble of laughter between them.
“Naw,” Rust says, nosing along Marty’s jaw to leave another kiss there, taking some small ounce of delight in the scratch of whiskers along his face. “You’d better go ahead and do me while you can, though.”
“I intend to,” Marty says, and then rolls over so he’s on top of Rust, coming back in to find his mouth again once they’re pressed flush together. He starts working his way down Rust’s body, pressing his lips near the blue symbol on Rust’s chest and then along the softness of his stomach, hands deftly working all the while.
Rust’s skin quivers and tightens where Marty leaves love bites at his hipbones and the soft inner part of his thighs, and when he feels a finger brush lower to touch that hidden part of him in a silent question, he lets out a soft hiss but cants his hips up into it.
“Come on, Marty,” Rust says, reaching down to grab at him. “All that packing you did, I know you brought something.”
Marty lets out a low huff of laughter, ducking his head away even though he’s got a wicked sort of grin on his face that Rust can see in the firelight. “Hold on,” he says, and slides off the bed to move through the shadows until he comes back again.
Past lives hadn’t allowed or indulged Rust in this sort of attention, and even though the fumble of getting ready tends to make him writhe around in impatience, he gives himself over to it tonight. Marty takes his time, easing him along without hurry, and waits until the muscles in Rust’s thighs are starting to strain before he crooks a finger against the spot that makes him shudder and gasp.
Rust swears and bucks his hips up, clutching at Marty’s shoulders while the other man presses him along again and again. Talented as he’s always been with his mouth and his hands, and Rust knows Marty could undo him just like this, leaving all the rest of him untouched.
“You’ve got to stop that,” Rust says, something he rasps halfway into the pillow while a shudder ripples across his shoulders. “Fuck, Marty—not yet, not yet.”
Rust breathes deep and evenly, already heavy-eyed and impossibly hard, though he almost regrets the moment Marty pulls his hand away and draws himself up to find Rust’s face. They’re both starting to flush over with arousal, noticeable even in the low light, and Marty lets his eyes roam down Rust’s body until he sees the drop of wetness gathered at the tip of his cock.
Marty keeps a steadying palm low on Rust’s stomach but reaches out with the other, giving him a light stroke until his thumb brushes against the damp warmth. A profound sort of thing, touching the pearled sheen of Rust’s desire for him, and the mere thought leaves Marty alight and aflame and overflowing.
He’s halfway dizzy when he leans sideways and finds Rust’s mouth again, nearly falling into him as their hips knock and slot together. “God help me, Rust,” Marty says, watching the other man’s lashes dip shut inside the same moment his lips part open in a quiet gasp. “Make me wanna love you down to nothing.”
Marty lets out a breathless kind of laugh at his own words until Rust looks at him again, dark eyes deep enough to wade into, and then he goes still. They watch one another open and unguarded, held suspended in a beat between seconds, and that’s all the time Marty needs to decide.
“Can I?” he asks, reaching up to push a hand through Rust’s hair, one thumb barely tracing along his temple.
Rust’s answering question is something Marty feels in his belly, earnest and softly spoken, only a low hum between them. “Do what?” he asks, even though Marty thinks he already knows. Rust knew the moment he led Marty to this bed, like an auspice he pulled from nothing but the snowy sky.
Marty’s eyes waver and dip away before coming back to Rust’s face, the moment briefly fluttering like a shy bird between them. He’s held this man’s life inside his body with his bare hands, but that had been an act unspoken. “Love you,” he says, and then decides he has nothing left to be ashamed of. “Make love to you.”
“Christ, Marty,” Rust says a little hoarsely, thinking he’d have laughed outright in anybody’s face had they said those words to him anywhere else in his life, had it been anybody else but Marty. “You know I’d let you do whatever you wanted to me.”
“I’m here asking, though,” Marty says, kissing the next few words somewhere under Rust’s ear, lips lightly grazing down his throat. “Tell me that’s what you want.”
“Yes,” Rust says with what little breath he can muster up, letting the word land against the side of Marty’s face while all the tension melts from his body with the admission of it. “That’s what I want.”
There’s the slow pull of something that feels like a ritual, alignment between the terrain of two bodies, Marty taking himself in hand and letting his body settle into the open cradle of Rust’s hips. The moment they finally fit together is almost like release in itself and Rust holds Marty still and close against him without moving, suspended in the spell of being filled again.
“I love you,” Marty says softly, a smile breaking through his voice, and Rust’s whole body thrums with the endless revelation of it—not love itself, he thinks, but finding this love with Marty.
But then his voice is gone and he can’t tell him, couldn’t say it back right now if he tried, because everything’s raising up like a hot welt in his throat and he squeezes his eyes shut, sucks in a shallow breath scraped raw around the edges and holds on to the thing that brought him this far. The thing he rises for at the break of every morning, the one thing he—against all odds, after everything—took into his hands as his own to keep and hold onto.
The room has bled and blurred into diluted smears of orange and golden shadow, a thousand different shades of the thing he loves, and Rust tries to breathe through the tightness in his chest but Marty still hears the rattle there, finds his face with eyes and gentle fingertips and goes still against him.
“Hey, hey now,” Marty says in a quiet voice, dove-soft and careful, one thumb reaching up to rest somewhere under Rust’s eye and wipe at the dampness there. “What’s wrong?”
Nothing Rust wants to say, because there isn’t anymore, but he can remember a time spent waking up in his bunk behind a bar so many years ago, burning up with sweat and all the licks of phantom fire on his body that felt like they’d known the heat of another person's touch. It hadn’t been real at the time but it rushes back through the sieve of time and memory and here he is now, body thrumming in all the places where his skin meets Marty’s, the two of them locked and wound around one another in a lover’s knot.
Rust has never felt so present in his life, never been swallowed so far down into the certainty of this feeling he’d finally found with Marty. Like Jonah camped in the belly of a great whale, only he’s uncovered a hidden world of unknown wonder here in the circle of another man’s arms.
“I’m here,” Rust tells him when he finds his voice again, hooking an ankle around Marty’s thighs as his hands trace easy over his back. “I’m here, Marty—c’mon.”
Marty pulls back and draws himself up a bit, kneeling there between the open spread of Rust’s thighs, the pale skin there soft and untouched and only ever for him. They move together without a word as Marty gets a hand braced up under Rust’s hips, holding him steady while he slowly starts moving with their pulses thrumming heavy in all the places they touch.
Their eyes lock and hold at the height of the next thrust and Rust gasps softly, hands fisting in the sheets as he tries to wrap his legs back around Marty’s waist. “Marty,” he says, calling him back down with that single word worn smooth around the edges. “Please.”
And Marty follows him because he always does, bowing back over low into Rust’s arms until he feels the other man’s breath warm on his cheek, one heel pressing like a brand into the small of his back. He’s so deep and they’re so close that it’d be a sin to pull out now, and so he just rocks steady, moving his hips until Rust sobs out something that might be his name.
Stripped raw and trembling, Rust reaches a hand down to touch the burning space between him and Marty. He’s lost in this room, unaware of anything and everything but the two of them brought together into one body. Lower and lower, until he finds the place where they’re joined and moving together.
Marty’s hips stutter and jerk when he realizes, lips parting open with a wrecked sound like he’s been held out at arm’s length and shot. “Rust—” he gasps, body curving like a drawn bow.
“God, Marty, just like that,” Rust says, not caring about the tremor caught in his voice. He wraps his legs around Marty’s hips and pulls him in tighter, feeling a divine kind of heat roll from his chest to his knees. “Just like that.”
Wetness wells at the corners of his eyes and gathers until it falls into his hairline, and Rust thinks he might be crying but not out of any bright pain or sadness, letting the tears come clean and freely while Marty rocks like a gentle current between his hips. He’s buried his face in Rust’s neck and whispers sweet things there that lack volume but not meaning, like time around them has turned to amber and they could stay like this forever.
When Rust comes he feels it break and unravel through his whole body in a low thrum, all the rest blooming across his stomach in hot ribbons of silk. Marty’s hands on him and Marty still inside him, working him over through the trembling bliss of it all, everything around them gone gold and rosy. But Rust holds on and waits, urging Marty along with his legs wrapped around his hips and his mouth at his temple until he finally shudders and lets go.
They breathe against one another for a time, still collapsed in the wake of what they’d found and made. Marty’s weight bearing down on his is one that Rust welcomes, all his soreness and sweat be damned. He traces the pads of his fingers up Marty’s back and over his shoulders, then back down the ridge of his spine to find the dimples in his lower back.
“I remember what you said to me, now,” he says, feeling Marty shift against him. “When I was in the dark.”
Sleepy confusion threads through Marty’s voice when he lifts his head to look. “What was that?” he asks, sliding a broad palm down Rust’s side to the notch of his hip.
“The old woman at the sunflower field knew,” Rust says, and it takes a moment before the memory of that day in the tall flowers even dawns on Marty. “When I was—when I was fading out. And you were there with me.”
That’s one memory Marty knows he couldn’t ever forget, no matter how much time and distance he puts between then and now. “What did I say?” he whispers, almost afraid to hear Rust’s answer.
“You told me we had to get back home,” Rust says, and knows it deep enough that the truth is buried in his bones. His eyes are clear now, earnest and open. “All I had to do was wake up.”
A chill runs through Marty, the two of them still so close that Rust can feel it current through his own body. Marty makes a broken noise, almost too small to hear, and Rust holds him tighter than before.
“I remember,” Marty says, rising up again to press the words against the corner of Rust’s mouth, his voice the only hushed sound while the snow muffles the outside world around them. “I remember.”
They stay together until weariness slowly pulls them apart to clean up, drawn back into the dip in the middle of the bed to face each other.
“Tomorrow’s our last day,” Rust says, watching Marty with clear and sated eyes. “Only have one thing left I need to show you.”
Marty smiles back at him, sleepy but still there. “The stars, huh,” he says, reaching out to touch a little curl of damp hair on Rust’s forehead.
“The stars,” Rust says, taking Marty’s hand and holding it close before he can pull it away again.
* * *
The forest has been shrouded in a blanket of white by daybreak, powdery and soft and nearly perfect as far as snow was ever concerned. Marty peers at the outside scene from where he stands at the windows wearing a pair of sweatpants that might be his or Rust’s, sipping at his first mug of tea for the day. He’d risen before Rust in a rare stroke of luck and shuffled around on bare feet to find a pair of socks and some clothes, adding more wood to the ember fire while he waited for water to boil on the stove.
He hears Rust stirring as he finally wakes, the bedframe creaking as he sits up to hang his legs over the side. He paws around for another pair of long johns at the foot of the bed before walking over to press himself up against Marty’s back, warm hands settling low on his hips.
“Reckon this is their first snow of the year,” Rust says, tipping his head toward the white world through the frosted window. “Usually it only sleets and makes a goddamn mess.”
Marty laughs, bringing his mug up for another sip of tea before passing it into Rust’s hands. “It’d be a crying shame,” he says. “Letting all this pretty snow go to waste while we’re up here.”
“I ain’t going out there and building you a snowman,” Rust says, though he kisses the nape of Marty’s neck before moving across the room to start pulling on more layers over his long johns. “Much as you’d be inclined to think otherwise.”
“What’re you doin’ getting all bundled up for then?” Marty snorts, walking over to pick up his tea where Rust had set it on the dresser. He fiddles with the radio while he’s there and switches it back to life, watching Rust do up his thick blue flannel one button at a time.
“Going out,” Rust says, picking up another shirt and throwing it Marty’s way so it lands across his shoulder after sweeping across his face. “C’mon.”
Their boots leave clean prints on the porch as they step out into early morning, Rust minding Marty’s feet as they thud down the steps and hit virgin ground. It’s as cold as all frozen hell out and heaven knows Rust hasn’t missed the bite of frozen wind on his hands and cheeks, but the look on Marty’s face more than makes up for any of his old resentment for winter.
At least for the most part, until he’s crouched down to study a set of animal prints in the snow when a frozen ball smacks him square in the back. It explodes in a burst of powder that startles him enough to stumble, and when he straightens up and turns around Marty’s only watching him with both hands tucked away in his coat pockets.
“Damn,” Marty says, letting out a low whistle. “That Sasquatch fella sure does move quick.”
“Mmhmm,” Rust answers, narrowing his eyes while he tries a little too hard not to smile. “He does.”
They trudge further out into the woods, everything bright white tinged almost peachy in light of the rising sun. Marty kicks through the snow on sheer principle, almost like a little boy seeing it for the first time, while Rust’s prints are long and spare behind him like a light-footed deer.
“We can head back into town for a little while before catching the highway north,” Rust says, warm breath clouding around him while he talks. “Takes about three hours driving time to get up closer to the circle. Better sky viewing out that way.”
“There a state park up there or something?”
“Not where we’re headed,” Rust says. “Just know of a good spot where it’s quiet and there aren’t too many lights burning.”
They keep walking along through a grove of fir trees, feeling the sun warm along their backs, until Rust points up toward the top of one at a pair of eyes blinking back at them. Marty stops and squints up to find a great horned owl tucked away on a high branch, and as soon as he opens his mouth Rust reaches above his head and yanks the end of a heavy bough, leaving all the snow gathered in the night to tumble down over his head like a burst of frozen flour.
“Jesus Chri—Rust!” Marty sputters, wiping snow out of his eyes and shaking himself off like a wet dog. He reaches out to grab at Rust but the other man is already loping away toward the cabin, his old crow-rasping laughter trailing along behind him.
Fairbanks is a whole new city under its fresh dusting of snow, though it’s nowhere near as heavily blanketed as it was further up in the mountains. There’s a little pancake and waffle joint next door to place set up with a window display full of old photographs and oddments and a half-scale bust of what looks like an orca carved from wood and inlaid with abalone. Rust and Marty burn through a late-morning breakfast of pancakes and bacon before wandering back out to the storefront, gazing in at the shop’s strange wares.
“You know what we forgot to do?” Marty murmurs after a moment, peering at the black and white photos of cloaked seal hunters and a shipwreck wedged between two icebergs. “Send Shelley that postcard she wanted.”
Rust nods, reaching up to tug a little at the scarlet scarf that has mysteriously wound itself around his neck again. “We’ll get one in the postbox for her before we leave town today,” he says, and then glances up at the shopfront’s name painted along the glass window. “Did you wanna bring anything back for anybody else?”
“Nah, they don’t need any token mugs or keychain shit,” Marty says, starting to stroll further down along the breezeway, and then slows to turn his head when he spots something in another shop window. Rust looks in to find what he sees and immediately knows who and what he’s thinking about.
“Well,” Marty says, smiling a bit sheepishly at Rust before turning to look at the plush baby harbor seal with spotted fur. “I know one little somebody who might need something.”
As it turns out, they find Shelley a variety of postcards and address all three back to Lafayette, Louisiana in Marty’s boxy handwriting. A grizzly bear, a cityscape of Fairbanks proper, and then one that Rust quietly picked out of the mountains splashed like watercolor against the evening skyline.
Miss Delilah’s little purchase gets wrapped up in a paper bag and loads up in the truck with its new guardians, and all three take the long highway north toward the Arctic Circle.
The land is raw and beautiful as it passes by, the road drawing them up through towns called College and then Livengood, where there’s a sign proclaiming that the James Dalton Highway will take you all the way north to the edge of the Arctic sea. Mountains loom and the forest is never-ending, but at times the ramshackle homes and withering townships running alongside the craggy roads tend to make Marty think of his earliest days spent with Rust.
Aluminum and ash and one big fucking ghetto stretching through whatever the hell a psychosphere ever was—but there’s a charm in that, somehow, or maybe a lesson if Marty reflects hard enough. People and places move through time and space but they don’t change much, at least not really, no matter where you go. They were always what they were destined to be from the start.
And here they are, a thousand and one miles away from the slum country of Louisiana, seeing the same things stamped onto existence in a picture he’s looked at countless times before. Marty wonders if the shade of his younger self, still blond-headed and full to the brim with swaggering bluster, could have pulled back the curtain and seen into this future, this now, this reality. Just waiting for time to catch up with him.
The snow grows thicker the further north they go, stretching out pure and white on open plots of land cut in between the wooded sprawl. The space between homesteads grows sparser and not many folks are out enjoying the weather, though they spot a few blanketed draft horses out pawing in their roped-off pasture before they whip their heads up and take off at a gallop across the field.
Rust slows the truck with nobody coming up behind them on the empty highway, and he and Marty watch as a team of sled dogs and a musher come barreling up toward the road at a full run. The dogs are a motley crew of ten, all different colors with their feet dashing through the snow as fast as they’ll carry them. The sled is empty save for its musher bundled up in a bright yellow slicker, and the whole team moves so fast across the land that they almost look like they’re flying.
“Now there’s something I’ve never seen before,” Marty says, smiling as the sled turns to run parallel to where they’re still slowly cruising down the pavement. The musher holds up a hand as the dogs sprint by and then all eleven are racing off, turning to disappear back over the bank they’d first come down.
“Never really done it myself before,” Rust says, picking up speed again while the diesel engine groans on an incline. “Those racing dogs are just about half-wild. Most of ‘em aren’t even considered pets—run like machines through the snow, though.”
Marty huffs a little, peering over at him. “Ain’t you ever had a dog before? Just some old mongrel to hang around with.”
“Nope,” Rust says. “Pop didn’t believe in using them to hunt game, so we had no reason to keep one around. Beyond that I can’t say I ever really thought too hard on it.”
“Would you ever want one?” Marty asks. “I mean, not now, but—later on. Course we got the cat n’ all, but I reckon she could learn to get along.”
Rust glances over at him before looking back ahead at the road. “If you want a dog, Marty, then I don’t see why we can’t get a dog.”
“I suppose I just took you for a cat person all this time,” Marty says with a snort, and then shakes his head. “Nah, we don’t need anymore critters running around. Anything else drops into my life, it ain’t gonna be something I went looking for, so here’s hoping we get surprised with something good.”
“Wonder how much is left out there capable of taking you by surprise,” Rust says quietly, shifting his hands around to the low point in the steering wheel.
“With all the shit we’ve seen?” Marty asks, shifting around to get more comfortable in the passenger seat. They’re sixty-two miles from where Rust had marked the map and the sun is already starting to dip in the sky even though it’s only a hair past midday. “I can’t imagine there’s too much more out there that’ll shock me.”
“Maybe not,” Rust says, reaching up to adjust his sun visor. “Guess we’ll just have to wait and find out.”
* * *
There’s a place somewhere in the vast wilderness between Fairbanks and the rim of the Arctic Circle, nameless and hidden away down a little dirt path that runs like a tributary through forgotten land left to go wild. There’s nothing of any note out there, not even tire tracks left from the last soul who might’ve come through here two or ten or twenty years ago. The road is mostly buried beneath a thin layer of melting snow and abruptly ends without rhyme or reason, opening up to nothing but a wide open slice of untouched earth.
As far as Rustin Cohle knows, this just might be the best place on the planet to look up and see the stars. He hadn’t found it until he was long past forty years old and wandering through life just enough to get lucky in being lost out here, but that didn’t matter. He’d laid out in the back of his truck under an old blanket and canvas tarp and watched the sky roll and twist and come to life. It’d almost been like a vision, one of those misfired and broken synapses in his head, but he knew otherwise. There’d been a time when he was a boy, before Crash and before everything else, when he’d come close to seeing the same thing.
But this is the place.
He steers off-road just before dark and drives the truck into the pure snow, far out into the middle of an empty field. There are trees scattered here and there, hardy enough to have stood alone or in small clusters, but not much else for what feels like miles. The face of the forest is a distant smudge on the horizon, looming far enough away that it almost looks like a dreamlike painting.
Marty steps down out of the truck and meets Rust at the dropped tailgate, profile shadowed and silhouetted against twilight. He helps pull out some of what they’d brought along—a sack of packed supper and a thermos of coffee, one old flashlight, two lumpy sleeping bags they’d found up in the loft at Fisherman’s Roost and a thick bundle of woven blankets. It’s twelve degrees below freezing and the wind can’t seem to make up its mind about being mild or mean, not to mention they lost cell service in full about an hour ago. But there’s nobody or nothing else in sight and when Rust finally cuts the headlights everything but the horizon goes dark.
They spread out a palette in the bed of the truck, laying down the sleeping bags before clambering up to sit propped against the back window. Watch the sun disappear over sandwiches and the last of the peanut butter crackers Rust won’t ever admit to being his favorite, even back in the days when Marty kept a pack or two in the glovebox of their old work car.
It doesn’t take long before the aurora lights roll in and brighten against their new backdrop of black night, standing out effervescent and eerie where they twist and shimmer across the endless expanse of stars. Rust wordlessly lies back in the bed of the truck, stretching out long with his hands tucked behind his head, and waits until Marty settles down next to him with his brightened eyes still cast toward the moving sky.
“They’ve been there the whole time,” Rust says, watching the emerald and sapphire swirl like marbled ribbons of sheer silk through bursts of pink, and it’s almost dizzying but he can’t look away. “Just easier to see once it gets dark.”
Beyond the borealis are the stars—thousands of them, perhaps millions, scattered like crushed diamond from one end of the velvet sky to the other. Big and small, white-hot and cooler blue. The moon is only a thin splinter in the sky, like a hook gone out fishing in this river of color, and it’s all so close and vibrant that Marty is almost tempted to reach a hand above their heads and touch the closest thing in reach.
“What do you hear?” he whispers, almost shyly, looking over at Rust in the dark. “You used to say—they had a song to them, I guess.”
What Rust tastes and hears when he watches the atmosphere shiver and dance like this isn’t something he could translate into any spoken language, but he tries for Marty. “They strike notes in my head sometimes,” he says, pointing out the Big Dipper where it shines the brightest. “Piano notes, bells, maybe something other than that. It ain’t like any music like I’ve heard before.”
Cassiopeia is visible here, too, though almost too faint to make out in late autumn’s sky. “The Lady in the Chair,” Rust says, pointing out the constellation shaped like a queen’s throne even as his hand trembles a little with the cold. “See her better closer to December.”
“And I can see you shaking like a fuckin’ leaf over there,” Marty says, softer than he might’ve intended, sitting up to shake out one of the quilts they’d brought with them. He throws one heavy side across Rust before tucking himself back down, bundling up under the two blankets they’d already laid out before scooching closer to Rust. “Must be a damn good reason we’re up here freezing our asses off, much as you hate the cold.”
“Course there is,” Rust says, tipping his head to look at Marty. “You hadn’t seen the stars.”
They both look up again at the northern lights, and Rust knows that the science behind all this would talk about electrons colliding through the magnetic field, about bursting solar winds and the earth’s swirling atmosphere, about things that don’t really explain everything beautiful in this world and beyond it. Being cold, he thinks, is but a small price to pay for all this—for everything he’s ever held and lost and found again, for the darkness and the light and for Marty.
He thinks of his daughter, her laughter like silver chimes and bluebells, her tiny hand warm on his neck when she’d lean in to give him a wet toddler kiss. And his father, hardened in body and mind, withdrawn and halfway crazy but still devoted enough to have raised his only son into a man.
“That’s how it goes, you know, with the things you love,” Rust says, eyes filled to the brim with green and blue light, though his thumping heart washes his senses over with gold and honey. “They’ll hurt you or they’ll leave but you—you can’t stay away, at least not forever. You love something enough, you’re always gonna come back around to it in the end.”
Marty stirs a little next to him, clearing his throat against the cold. “You talking about stars, or are you talking about something else?”
“I’m talking about everything, Marty,” Rust says. “I’m talking about forever.” He shifts some under the blanket, searching for something that Marty can’t make out or see in the dark. “And I’ve thought about a lot of shit these past few years, and it seems like I might’ve been wrong about some things I said way back when.”
Marty lets out a small laugh, though it cuts off short when he looks up and sees that Rust is reaching over to set something small on his chest. “What—?” he begins to ask, eyes gone wide in the night.
“So maybe a man can love, after all,” Rust says, voice shaking just a little bit. “Maybe more than he means.”
Marty has gone deadly quiet when he reaches up to touch the thing Rust had left on his chest. He picks it up with numbed fingers and turns it over in his hand before he realizes he’s holding a little velvet box, blue as a tiny robin’s egg.
“Rust,” he says, suddenly gone hoarse but not from the cold. He squeezes the box into the heart of his hand and nearly forgets to breathe.
“Open it, Marty,” Rust says softly. “Please.”
And when Marty does, the first thing that falls out is a curl of silver ribbon, just as fine and pretty as the day he’d tied it in a bow one long Christmas ago. But then there’s a curve of gold, too, tinted a tiny bit blue under the Alaskan sky.
Marty pulls the ring out, weighs it in his hand. Pinches it between two fingers and wonders if it’s real, if holding on too tight might make it wink out of existence. But it’s there when he looks again, and his throat’s gone awfully tight, and he tries to talk a few times before he actually gets around to finding any words.
“You bring me all the way up here just to do that?” he asks Rust at last, blinking fast while he looks at the gold band.
“Not at first,” Rust says around a wavering smile. “I’ve been holding on to it for a while now. Guess I was just looking for the right time to give it to you.”
“Well you picked good, you asshole,” Marty says, not even managing to get the ring all the way on his finger at first because he’s smiling too damn hard and his eyes are burning maybe just a little too much to see. “Always gotta go and outdo me some way or another.”
Rust is grinning now, and when Marty twists under their blankets to plant one on him he wraps his arms around his neck and holds on, the two of them smiling hard enough that the kiss is more teeth and noses crashing together than anything else.
“Let’s see, then,” Rust says, taking Marty’s hand in his and holding it up in front of them. “Pretty sure I got the right one.”
“I’d wear something you got out of a fuckin’ gumball machine at this point,” Marty murmurs, though he fits the ring on his finger and then reaches for Rust’s hand to compare. The bands are identical, just the same, plain gold and perfect.
“Nothin’ snooty,” Rust says, threading his fingers through Marty’s.
“Nothing snooty,” Marty echoes, holding their hands up against the darkness of night, only this time filled with all the world’s color and the brightness of a thousand stars.
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