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“He’s a monster,” Colleen says without any bitterness or resentment in her voice, pulling a long drag off the cigarette between the second and third fingers of her left hand. Red-polished nails, though the paint’s been there long enough to start cracking. There’s no gold or diamond ring to be found and Travis only thinks about how he never noticed she was left-handed.
He’s sitting at the rickety kitchen table kitty-corner from Colleen, halfway down his third cigarette since he stepped through the door twenty minutes ago. He blows a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth and looks into the sparse living room, sights setting on the patch of carpet where the boy is playing with a mismatched set of toys. He looks up like he knows he’s being watched, blinking a set of bright blue eyes that might as well have been plucked out of Colleen’s head.
“I heard of kids in this situation being called a bastard before,” Travis says, turning back to the boy’s mother as he thumbs along the line of his jaw. “But I don’t know nothing ‘bout any kinda monster. Kid looks fine to me.”
“His name’s Rustin,” Colleen says, and this is only the fourth time he’s heard it aloud outside the night he read it scrawled on a letter in a foxhole in Nam, letting the name whistle across his tongue while mines lit up in the distance. The second time had been a clipped introduction while the boy kept a tight handful of his mother’s skirt, fawn-colored hair tousling in the hot breeze. The third time was an order: Rustin, go play with your toys.
Travis watches Colleen stub her cigarette out in an empty saucer and then pick up a chipped coffee cup with lipstick smeared on the rim, speaking low with it held close to her mouth. “He looks fine right now, but you ain’t seen it happen yet.”
“Seen what happen?” Travis asks, kicking one boot out across the worn linoleum as he rolls up his shirtsleeve, the revealed skin underneath needle-beat with black ink. “Throw a fuckin fit? The kid’s two years old.”
“Not that,” Colleen says, and when she puts the cup back down her hands are shaking, just a little. “But you will.”
* * *
The last of the frost is thin enough to press and melt into the earth under Travis’s boots, leaving a set of prints that lead from the back door of the cabin all the way to the pebbled shore of the lake. A pale ghost of the moon still hangs in the sky, fat and heavy with the full weight of the month.
He crunches through the rocks and sun-bleached wood until he’s nearly standing in the cold water, drops the basket hanging on one strap off his shoulder and then brings two fingers up to his mouth. He whistles shrill and loud enough that it takes wing and echoes through the surrounding forest, eyes already busy searching through the dark surface of the water.
It’s just now verging on daybreak and he catches a flash of something copper beneath the stillness, twisting around so that it gleams cobalt blue in the first prying fingers of sun. The shining iridescence comes and goes in the blink of an eye and then Travis waits through the lingering silence until the thin, fine-muscled body of his son is slowly splashing up from the deeper part of the water.
Rust is carrying a long string of fish behind him, a good ten or twelve that they’ll gut and keep in the deep freeze. He’s flush naked but doesn’t shiver in the cold, only steps careful onto the rocky shoreline and pushes his hair back off his forehead, stooping low to throw his catch into the empty basket.
When he straightens back up Travis hefts another pack off his shoulder, handing over a satchel that Rust takes in his hands and opens without hesitation. He pulls the dry clothes out first before biting into the piece of jerky he finds wrapped in a small leather pouch, letting his boots thud down into the rocks while he chews.
“You ain’t been doing no more of that savage shit, have you?” Travis asks, looking out across the brightening lake as Rust dries off with a scrap of blanket before pulling on his shorts and pants. “I won’t have it under my roof. We eat what we catch, but fuck if we eat it raw.”
“No, Pop,” Rust says, soft and quiet with his eyes cast low, quickly buttoning into his flannel. “Everything I caught is on the line.”
Travis waits until he’s stepping into his boots, then loops the strap through a ring on the basket and hoists it up onto his back. “Good,” he says, turning to refollow the path that brought him here. “Let’s go.”
Rust pulls another piece of jerky from his pocket and peers out across the lake. The sun is up above the mountain ridge now, bleeding rosy gold into the still water, and it takes him a moment to find the pinch of copper glinting amidst the pebbles. It looks like a new penny at first, more oblong than round upon second glance, glinting with a sheen that flashes blue when he turns it between two fingers.
“Rustin!” Travis calls from the edge of the forest, and Rust slips the smooth scale into his pocket before breaking into a jog despite the fatigue aching heavy in his muscles, never too keen on leaving the shore behind.
“You can’t leave here,” Travis tells him three years later when Rust is seventeen, sitting by the hearth fire with his needle and ink. He’s been sticking a symbol Rust doesn’t recognize into the middle finger of his left hand, pausing every now and again to wipe away red blood tinged black. Beat, break skin and bleed, drawn out into a quiet ritual that sometimes goes on for hours in deafening silence.
Rust had driven his truck the seven miles into town that morning and picked up his diploma from the school principal’s office, not expecting to be asked why he wasn’t at the graduation ceremony two days prior because they both knew the answer to that. He sits at the cabin’s kitchen table now, scrawling in the margins of a blank sketchbook more than halfway filled. He outlines a crude spiral in the face of a sealed sun and then looks toward his father’s working hands, careful to keep his features held blank.
“Where would I go?” Rust asks, only letting his mouth move enough to form the words without mumbling. There’s a star-spangled pamphlet he got in town carefully sandwiched between the pages of a stolen library copy of East of Eden , left out in plain sight in his bedroom because his father would sooner flip the mattress before he opened a book.
“Don’t know where the fuck you’d get it in your head to run off to,” Travis says, dipping his needle into the pot of ink. “But I’m telling you right now, you ain’t gonna make it. Not like you are.”
Rust bows his head back down and counts the humming thrum-beat of blood behind his eyes. He draws in a deep breath and doesn’t say a word. Travis goes back to his tattooing, and it won’t be long, now, until he finishes his work and drowns himself to sleep in a bottle. Always does on nights like these, when he’s kept off the jug all day to keep steady enough for a new piece.
The next moon is nineteen days out. There’s a marked North American atlas wedged behind the bench of Rust’s truck and two extra tanks of gas he filled up that morning while his high school diploma sat in a cheap folder on the passenger seat.
Travis’s skin is a mapped terrain of sigils that mean everything and nothing, a star chart only he can decipher to read, and following them has only ever brought his son to a dead end.
Rust watches his father work by the firelight and waits.
* * *
The water is warmer in Texas, salty blue and bright in the open arms of the gulf. Rust didn’t often find rhyme or reason to brave the sea in the far white north but he slides into it here like a welcome sort of dream, submerged again in the briny womb of his motherland.
He gave the country four years to get out of Alaska, a time carefully punctuated with a secret ritual performed over the course of one long night each month. There had been a few close calls but he’d made it out alive, cut free from Uncle Sam’s pocket into the sprawling flatland with nothing but his name and a cache of newfound time.
And so Texas is a small resurgence, all golden light and sun-fired sand and food that scorches his mouth replacing the bite of cold water and smoked meat and grey-blue rock. There is all that and more: a rookie spot on the local force, a little room above the Latin supermarket that he rents for dirt cheap to keep all his books and a single mattress, and then eventually, there is Claire.
Her first words to him are indirect, spoken low and meant for someone else’s ears, but he hears them all the same as he stands in front of the mango display with his handbasket of pre-sliced bread and a carton of eggs, drifting over one shoulder in the caramel-smooth tones of her mother tongue: nice ass for a white boy.
Rust turns and sees her, all dark curls and dark eyes, with her soft mouth painted like a ripe plum. She’s in an ocean blue sweater and jeans with holes in the knees and flushes dark when she sees him looking.
Thanks he tells her in a drawling excuse for Spanish, and then Claire laughs as if there’s nothing else to do, the sound of it like something citrusy and sweet bursting on his tongue.
“What’s your name?” she asks this time in English, and when Rust tells her she doesn’t press a name or number into his hand, only asks him to meet her back in front of the supermarket on Saturday morning before lunch. And when he does, they drive in her jeep all the way to the coast, not bothering to yell over the roar of the wind.
Claire takes his hand and leads him down to the water, and Rust thinks that then, maybe he’s finally come home.
It takes time, but the room above the supermarket is eventually emptied out and left vacant, its humble contents poured into a perfumed apartment filled with books and art easels and a soft bed done up in pink sheets. Claire works during the day and goes to school at night, though she offers many of her spare moments to Rust, passing them off in shared cigarettes and pancake dinners and the way her voice breaks when she says his name, trembling thighs wrapped tight around narrow hips.
Sometimes he stays gone for long nights, never on the station’s dime but in a routine like moon-timed clockwork, always leaving without his gun and returning the next morning smelling like salt and wind and sea with the ocean soaked into the waves of his hair.
“Where do you go sometimes?” Claire asks him one evening, sitting out on the terrace with her bare feet kicked up on the railing while they have a cigarette. Rust watches her from under heavy lashes before he exhales on a soft sigh, sending a stream of violet smoke into the orange dusk.
“To the water,” he says.
“All night long?” Claire asks, thumbing around the filter of her cigarette, the lipstick stain there faint in the dying light.
“Like to be alone sometimes,” Rust says, like that’s all the answer in the world, and she lets her eyes rest heavy on the sharp angles of his face, the top few buttons of his shirt forever undone, the veins standing out prominent along the backs of his arms and hands.
“Take me with you,” she says, after a few beats of quiet. “The next time you go.”
Rust draws the last pull off his cigarette and crumples it in the ashtray between them, blowing the smoke this time out through his nose in two long streams. The sight touches a thought in Claire’s head, about fragile things catching fire and someone looking down from atop a pile of hoarded gold.
“Alright,” he says, and when the time comes he takes her with him.
Rust drives to the coast on the edge of nightfall, only one stray finger of sunlight left hanging on the horizon. Warm wind whips through their hair and he doesn’t bother rolling the windows up when he parks in an empty sand lot along a vacant spot of coast, only pulls a bundle of blankets and a jug of water from the truck bed and motions for Claire to follow.
The closest buildings are a good half-mile or more off, yellow pinpricks of light like distant stars while they weave through the dunes and walk barefoot down to the crashing ocean. The sun has slipped from view behind them to the west and Claire watches Rust spread out a heavy quilt on the sand, setting the water jug on one corner and leaving a lighter blanket folded on top.
“You can stay here,” he says, easy enough despite his hands already working at the buttons on his shirt. “I won’t really be able to come back til sunup.”
Claire drops down onto the blanket and watches him shrug out of his flannel, pull his undershirt over his head and step out of his jeans on leg at a time. He drops the truck keys next to her and when he’s standing there flush naked the sky has gone dark, bruised blue-black save for the shine of a white moon flickering across the water.
“What are you doing?” Claire asks, hardly more than a whisper. “Rust, you—you’re scaring me, now.”
“You can leave if you want,” he says, looking down at his feet in the sand. “Take the truck home, I’ll find my way back. But you asked to know, so I—I thought I’d show you.”
Claire’s hand comes up to brace around her throat in an instinct she doesn’t quite understand, watching him there, lean muscle washed over in the glow of a full moon. “Show me what?” she asks, nervous now, and Rust doesn’t answer, only looks out across the water and then walks toward it.
He steps into the tide and wades deeper until the waves are licking around his thighs, and when it happens she nearly misses it, the quick shimmer of form and light and color and then Rust is gone, leaving something else to dive forward in his place.
The surf is empty for a moment and then she sees something like coppery brass crest out of the water, huge and solid, the body of it gleaming blue when it twists just so under the moonlight. There’s the sharp edge of something like a dorsal fin and then it’s gone again, slipping back beneath the waves just as quietly as it came.
Tears burn behind Claire’s eyes but she doesn’t cry, doesn’t scream, doesn’t do anything but wrap herself in the spare blanket and watch the water. The creature comes up closer to shore after a while, staying mostly submerged save for a long, elegant neck not too unlike a swan, and it watches her there without making a sound before slowly turning and surging back toward deeper water.
The night stretches on for hours and Claire stays where Rust left her. Curls up on the quilt and watches the waves through the curtain of her hair, occasionally catching a glimpse of copper until she finally feels exhaustion pull her under the drape of sleep.
Gulls begin their crying at daybreak, white wings guiding in the light of a rising sun. The tide has gone back out and the waves wash easy along the shore now, lapping soft around Rust’s calves and ankles when he trudges back up from the surf, soaked to the bone with his skin glistening in the early morning light.
His limbs bear the tired weight of a night without sleep but he steps through the sand until he’s back by Claire, setting down next to her on the blanket when he’s wiped most of the water away. Her eyes open and blink sleepily at him for a moment, one hand coming out to touch the soft skin on his side, drawing three fingers between his ribs and the jut of one hip.
“This is you?” she asks. “You’re you again?”
“That was me, too,” Rust says, but then Claire isn’t really listening, already sitting up and pulling her sweater over her head. She climbs into his lap and he sees the charm of The Virgin Mother glinting gold between the softness of her bare breasts, a quick glimpse before she’s kissing warm against his chilled mouth. She shimmies out of her pants and uses the cradle of her hips to hold him close, the two of them moving together in languid time with the rolling waves.
* * *
Later, Claire will cry. In bed, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, when Rust reaches out and touches the soft swell of her stomach.
“What if the baby’s like you?” she asks him one morning when he comes back home from the ocean, salt still coarse on his skin and in his hair. “Will it be a—a—”
“I don’t know,” Rust tells her, because he doesn’t. But he spends longer hours in the library after work, poring, searching, and halfway praying for something that might be an answer when the baby grows further into the eighth and ninth month. He sends away for books and manuscripts, pulls up slides on the projector and reads through them until his eyes feel like they’ve deflated in his skull.
There is no answer, no telltale clue or guiding compass about anything he’s grown up knowing about himself. And Claire stops her crying, though the first few weeks of the baby’s life feel like one long breath caught and held between them.
When the first full moon of Sophia’s life rises, Rust walks down to the water with Claire, the latter still clothed but with the baby loosely swaddled in her arms. She passes Sophia off to him, tentative, reluctant, but when Rust takes her and wades further into the water nothing happens. She blinks blue eyes at him in the moonlight and squirms a little, one tiny hand pressing against her father’s chest.
Claire takes her back up to the beach, the two of them lying wrapped up in a nest of blankets until sunrise. Rust keeps watch all night and finds the both of them still sleeping when he returns, Sophia just as soft and small and perfect as he’d left her.
* * *
Late one autumn Claire’s favorite aunt passes suddenly in the night, and the funeral is scheduled to take place beyond the southern border in four days’ time, far down in the heart of South America.
Sophia turns two in the same number of months and Rust tells his wife he’ll watch her, take time off work and keep her until she gets back. Claire doesn’t even look at the calendar before she’s bringing up the next moon like it’s a ghost they live with, staring him down with the baby hitched high on one hip.
“You can’t take her to the ocean and just leave her, Rust,” she says, almost laughing. “You think she’d stay put and wait for you til morning? She’s walking, now. And she—she wouldn’t understand what…what you are. She’s just a child—”
“Maybe I don’t have to go to the water,” Rust says, and even then Sophia is grinning, blue eyes bright as she leans toward him with her little hands outstretched. He takes her in his arms and presses a kiss into the honey-colored curls on her head, trying to smile a little for Claire, a quiet assurance to soften the lines drawn between her eyes. “Maybe I can bring the water here.”
Claire boards a plane and Rust drives to the hardware store with Sophia buckled into her car seat, buys a sprinkler and a tarp and a little plastic pool for her to play in while he works nearby, hammering a handful of stakes into the yard and unwinding the hose from its hook on the side of the house.
They live at a little bend in the road with no neighbors too close on either side, and he doesn’t worry much about being seen, at least not beneath the heavy shade of the oak trees once darkness has fallen. Sophia’s crib moves outside for the night, wedged on a dry tarp of its own on the concrete patio, and Rust wonders how crazy he might be, how far gone any of this is when dusk comes early and his body shifts into something else.
But his daughter doesn’t scream or cry, only watches him with wide eyes, her little rosebud mouth parted in something like wonder. Sophia touches him when he gently presses his nose against the bars of her crib, tiny fingers tracing over smooth scales cool to the touch and trailing over brassy eyelids. She bursts into laughter when he tries and fails to lie down in the plastic kiddie pool from earlier in the day, most of his body hanging crooked over the sides.
When she finally goes to sleep, Rust settles down on the watered tarp and lets the sprinkler arc over him, having already made sure that Sophia was far enough away to keep from getting wet. He keeps his ears open and lets her dream, taking the time to look up at the moon and stars above them, scattered like shards of diamond across the night sky.
* * *
Sophia slips off into the dark, quiet and peaceful, five days before the moon waxes full. Claire sobs by the hospital bed and slaps Rust’s hands away every time he tries to touch her, two-day-old mascara still somehow running in streaks down her face, and he doesn’t try to comfort her a third time.
What he does, the morning after the tiny casket is lowered in the ground several days later, is get in his truck and chain smoke all the way to the shipping port in Houston. He parks on land at a convenience store, leaves his keys in the wheel well and walks on foot down the Hartman bridge at dusk against the flares of oncoming headlights, climbing up onto the cement ledge and looking down into the dark water.
The sun slips beneath the horizon and the guards will be on him any moment now. Rust doesn’t think about whether or not the fall will kill him because he knows it won’t, only closes his eyes and steps off the bridge, feeling weightless for just a moment before his body shifts and plunges into the moonlit channel.
When the Coast Guard spends the next morning looking for a body, there isn’t one to find.
Rust drives to a house he no longer calls home at daybreak, naked and wrapped in a dirty towel without his ruined clothes and boots. He calls the station from the phone in the kitchen while Claire sobs down the hall and tells them he wants in.
* * *
Crash is a wild man, set loose on underground Texas like a pit dog rigged to go for the hind ankle before the throat, and what’s left of Rust will wonder later about newfound monsters of a different kind.
The first full moon under the thumb of the Crusaders, they’ve spilt fresh blood on the ground and are holed up in a park along the bayou, Ginger and most of the other boys taken to quarters with a lady or two for the night. Rust sits alone out under the darkening quilt of evening, wrapped up in black leather and Crash, smoking his cigarettes down to the filter in two long pulls while the cicadas buzz loud enough to rattle his skull like a donkey’s jawbone. The sun is dropping fast and there are a few men left out by the fire pits, doing up dizzy or already drinking hard, and none of them care to notice when he slips off through the weed-choked jungle and disappears into the dark.
There is no ocean out here, no lakes that aren’t bogs choked with muck and stagnant water, and Rust wades through the overgrowth until he’s standing along the edge of a swamp. The moon is nearly up and he peels layers of Crash away one at a time, wedging his jacket and boots in a nearby tree until he’s standing flush naked and sweating in the festering mouth of the bayou.
Shed down to nothing, he counts the constellation of pinpricks scattered across the insides of his left arm and then slides into the muck. The change happens fast, like slipping on a softened glove, and the sounds of the swamp pause for breath when they see him.
A seven-foot gator that Rust can see now turns tail and swims further down along the bank, moving like a silent wraith through the water. Glowing eyes blink at him from the trees and the water and one by one the frogs start up their singing again, grandfathering a new beast into the marsh.
Later on, Crash makes a point of visiting his favorite girl out in the park twice a month, a redheaded gal named Pollyanna who takes his money and keeps her clothes on and her mouth held shut. She sleeps without touching him some nights, only sleeping pressed up against his back if he asks, and then wordlessly watches him stumble out through the back door on others, vanishing into the swamp under the full-bodied moon.
Seven nights before the shooting at Port Houston, Rust parks his bike on the coast and slides into the ocean for the first time in what might be years. The water feels like something on his skin—cleansing, an ablution, though it would take a lot more than salt to wash his blood clean.
A final ritual before rebirth or death.
* * *
Rustin Spencer Cohle shows up at North Shore Psychiatric two weeks and a day before the next full moon. Upon intake he asks for a wall calendar and they hand him one full of American landscapes already flipped over to February 1993, the metal spiral pulled out and replaced with knotted string holding the whole thing together. They tell him he can’t keep a pen per safety protocol, and Rust looks at the lunar phases printed into the boxes of each month, smiles like the edge of a knife and tells them he never needed one to begin with.
There is a nurse named Charlotte who is softer around the edges, who doesn’t smack the Crying Man’s hands away and who will patiently indulge The Gardener, listening to the woman with a wild halo of white hair rattle off about ferns and flowers and seeds and saplings until Rust feels like there’s a garden planted in his head. It’s a place he visits sometimes when the lights go out and he’s alone in a locked room, nothing there but the shimmering visions and a crucifix nailed high on the white wall.
But he’ll offer Charlotte small smiles when he catches her looking, cuts his lashes down and away like he’s something demure and she’ll come to him every time. Rust draws her a picture one afternoon during rec hour, a mountain scape he remembers from Alaska, and when she takes it in her hands her face lights up so much in the fluorescent ward it’s almost gleaming.
It’s a system and he works it because he knows how—knows how and depends on it, on her kind hands and her trusting eyes when she looks at him, the key ring she keeps locked in the nurses’ station and the fact that she knows the path through the halls that will lead him to the indoor pool.
Two days out from the next full moon and it’s now or never, do or die, and Rust says her name when she passes by at breakfast, as sweet and pretty as he can get it.
“Miss Charlotte?” he asks, and she turns with a tray of oatmeal and toast in her hands, brown eyes already sparkling bright.
“Mister Cohle?” she answers by way of reply, and when Rust pulls out a chair she looks around and then sits, busying herself with fussing that he hasn’t even touched his eggs yet.
He knows right then that he’s got her.
“We could lose our jobs for this,” Charlotte says, guiding Rust down the green-tiled hallway on one side, the orderly named Hank gripping his upper arm on the other. “But out of the goodness of my heart, and Hank’s help—”
“Sure do appreciate it,” Rust tells them, watching the swinging doors to the pool room get closer, his heart hammering a little in his chest. “Y’all are doing me a real big favor.”
“If anybody asks, you’ve been in the infirmary with a sour stomach,” Charlotte says. “I don’t know how long we can stay but I figure Hank can keep watch, sit out by the door for a spell.” She pauses for a breath and stares straight ahead, keys jingling at her hip, not chancing a look at either man. “And if you hear me calling you, Hank, please come running real quick-like.”
She doesn’t trust him—not fully, not really, but enough to get him to the water. And that’s alright with Rust, that’s perfectly fine. He’s never been one to take that shit personally.
But when they’re standing by the dim-lit poolside with Hank sitting vigil out in the hall, Rust watches the sun sink through the barred windows and turns to Charlotte, trying to keep the waver out of his voice and the wildness out of his eyes.
“I can’t promise any of this is going to make sense,” he says, careful not to touch her but standing close enough to feel her body heat in his orbit. “But I need you—Charlotte, I need you to keep this between you and me. A real secret. Nobody else can ever know, least not til I’m gone and far away—you understand?”
She purses her lips and lets her eyes flicker over his face, a certain kind of sadness there, and he knows it’s the same pity she doles out for the Crying Man and The Gardener. “You’d better get to swimming, Mr. Cohle,” she says, gently. “I just hope to God you don’t drown.”
So Rust strips his hospital linens off, snaps his plastic ID band clean and steps down into the shallow water. Charlotte watches him without a word, eyes gone to the three pink-scarred points on his side and the smooth contours of his body, and when the moon comes out her eyes widen, a strangled gasp muffled behind the hard slap of her hand hitting her mouth.
At sunrise they find Hank sleeping out in the hallway, slumped over right where they’d left him. He startles awake when Charlotte says his name, standing up quick and wiping across his face with the back of his hand.
“All set?” he asks, peering at Rust’s damp hair and skin, since covered up with a draped hospital gown. “Everything alright?”
“Everything’s fine,” Charlotte says, smiling as they guide Rust back down the hall to the ward floor, stepping through beams of orange light slanting across the tile floor. “Time just got away from us for a bit, is all.”
She and Rust go through the motions of eating breakfast with the other patients before she insists on putting him to bed, leaving him with fresh clothes and watching him down his morning medication before she turns to go.
“Charlotte,” Rust tries again, suddenly feeling very small in this white-walled room, with its crucifix and blank calendar and rings of black light spreading open on the ceiling. “Please.”
Charlotte blinks and smiles, pulling out her keys to lock him in on her way out. “I’ll be back to fetch you for lunch and rec hour, Mr. Cohle.”
Three months later, she signs off on his release forms and presses something into his hand outside the barred ward, something small and smooth that he doesn’t look at until he’s standing in the parking lot and waiting for the hired chauffeur to pull the car around.
A polished stone, copper and brass, with a single vein of pretty blue cutting through the center like a bolt of lightning in an open canyon. Rust keeps it until the day he gets into his new truck and drives straight to Louisiana, only pausing long enough along the coast to fling it into the ocean.
He doesn’t bother making a wish.
* * *
There’s plenty of water to go around in Louisiana, the whole of the state sunk down in marsh and swamp and cradled by the broad shoulder of the gulf. Sleepless nights aren’t a new plague in Rust’s life but he’s glad for the excuse, on mornings when he showers off the smell of lake water in the station locker room and takes coffee Marty Hart presses into his hands like a daily offering, ritualistic caffeine passed off with a murmured prayer of, “Goddamn, you still not fuckin sleeping at night?”
His partner blunders and bluffs and blows like a hurricane through his own life but he’s trustworthy on the Job and a good detective, an omnipresent swill of something bittersweet in Rust’s mouth and the closest thing he’s got to resembling a friend.
Ledoux’s compound gets turned inside out and there’s an evening after they give two separate testimonies that match down to the harsh din of machine gun fire, an evening where the moon is full and Marty is still sitting amidst the Spartan guts of Rust’s apartment, a golden-haired puppy that followed him home and still hadn’t managed to leave.
Marty has toed his work shoes off and is sitting sprawled out on his back next to Rust’s wall of books, stripped down to his pants and undershirt and socks. There’s two coke cans and a mess of empty takeout boxes sitting on the kitchen counter and Rust slowly stands from his mattress with a cigarette jammed between his lips, not having to pull his boots back on because he never bothered to take them off.
“I’ve been thinking, you sure do have a lot of fuckin books on something that don’t exist,” Marty says, squinting at the slapdash stack of titles in the lamplight. “Dragons and murder manuals. Man, anybody else would think I was keepin’ company with a bonafide psycho killer. This is like some of that shit you read about where a kid chops up his mama and buries her in the basement in the name of the Lizard King or whatever the fuck.”
“Got somewhere I need to be,” Rust says, pulling his gun and badge off his belt and setting them on a crate next to the mattress. “Gonna be gone til morning, but I’ll be back here before work.”
Marty turns and sits up with a grunt, a crease drawn tight between his eyes. “Now where the hell do you need to be on a Tuesday night?” he asks. “We’ve capped most of—most of the Ledoux shit off, man. I thought you were done with that biker gang.”
“Ain’t like that,” Rust says, getting his truck keys off the counter. “Personal business. There’s something I got to see to once a month, and tonight it’s come due.”
Marty cracks his jaw and watches Rust for a long moment, then moves to pick up his shoes. “Fuck you if you think you’re running off on some fool’s errand without me, after the shit we been through this week,” he says, lacing up quick. “You’re acting real funny about it, so I reckon that means I need to come along for the ride. Why’re you leaving your gun?”
Rust lets out a breath like a slashed tire. He glances outside through the blinds and knows they’ve got about twenty minutes left until the sun drops behind the horizon. Ten of those he needs to get to the lake, but Marty is already standing up, shrugging his rumpled button-up back on and getting another soda out of the fridge.
He pops the tab on the top and takes a swig, suddenly a little more uncertain on his feet when he catches the look on Rust’s face. “Uh, well—on second thought, if you got something—something private to take care of, man, maybe I spoke too soon.”
Marty sighs himself and sets the coke down, reaching up to swipe along the bridge of his nose and clearing his throat. “How much clearer you want me to make it, that I worry about your ass sometimes?”
Rust turns on his heel and disappears down the hall for a moment, come right back with a pair of flannel blankets. “You wanna see something?” he asks, easy enough, though there’s an edge of something there that makes Marty’s eyes snap back up. “You’d better c’mon quick.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Marty snorts when Rust leaves the truck in a vacant dirt lot and starts for a grassy path that will lead them around a curve of the still lake, walking fast. “Probably pull some of that Vulcan death grip shit, don’t even need your gun.”
He follows Rust though, quick and silent, stepping through the grass and between the shadows of low-hanging oak limbs draped in moss. Rust disappears behind a throng of cattails and when Marty finds him again, he’s standing on a grassy patch by the water, throwing the flannel blankets on the ground and already working at the buttons on his shirt.
“Whoa, hey man, hey,” Marty says, stopping dead in his tracks, watching as Rust shrugs his shirt off his shoulders and starts unbuckling his belt. “I don’t know what kinda personal business you’ve got to tend to out here, but I reckon you’re gonna have to skinny dip on your own. You ain’t even got me liquored up proper yet.”
“Shut up, Marty,” Rust says, stepping out of his boots before he leaves his pants in a pile next to the blanket, tossing the keys down on top. “Come over here and sit down if you want. Probably be better if you weren’t standing when it happens.”
Marty steps forward tentatively, busying himself with shaking out one of the blankets and settling it on the bank, eyes cut low. “When what happens?” he asks, chancing a look at Rust just as the sun slips free from the sky.
But Rust is stark naked now and already thigh-deep in the water, gently wading further past a clutch of lily pads with their flowers still open against the moon. He turns and looks over his shoulder at Marty, their eyes brushing for the smallest moment, and then he’s sliding beneath the glassy surface of the lake like a dropped stone.
Marty sits up quick, suddenly more alert, eyes peeled and trained on the spot where Rust slipped from view. His stomach clenches tight and he whispers Rust’s name, just once, as if he’d be able to hear him from beneath the water.
No sooner does the name leave his lips than he sees something skim through the deeper part of the lake, scaled and finned almost like the back of a fish—but bigger, stranger, not like any fucking fish Marty’s ever seen on the end of his pole or anywhere else.
His breathing goes shallow and then it rises up out of the shallow water, a long neck and narrow back armored with what looks like new pennies bitten by blue tarnish. Marty makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat, something that might’ve once been a scream, but it never quite strikes air. He can’t move and the thing is staring back at him, inclining its head in a movement that looks vaguely familiar before its tail is rising up and smacking the lake, sending a cascade of lake water splashing up on the bank to rain down on Marty’s legs.
“Oh my god,” he rasps out, hands fisting in the blanket by his thighs as he watches the creature blink at him in the moonlight. “Oh my fucking god. Rust—Rust, is that—is that you? ”
Rust cocks his head to one side and then makes a sound almost like a sigh, blowing out heavy through his nose. And then he’s diving back into the water, only a dorsal fin sticking up beneath the surface as he glides across the lake.
Marty closes his eyes and presses two fingers into each socket until he sees a thousand colors bursting there in the dark. He opens them again and the creature— Rust , he figures, that thing is Rust—is nowhere in sight, so he pockets the truck keys from next to Rust’s abandoned pile of clothes in a useless sort of motion, wads up the other blanket behind his head and stares straight out across water to wait for another glimpse.
He waits for what feels like hours, but neither skin nor scales ever seem to break the surface again. The cool night wears on in a chorus of frog and cricket song, and eventually Marty’s eyes grow too heavy to stay open, slowly sending him off into a hard sleep.
Rust is the first thing he sees when he wakes up, standing there without a stitch of clothing on his body, backlit and haloed by the sun rising up over the quiet lake. He stoops over to fish for his briefs, picking up his pants and shaking through the pockets. “You got the keys?” he asks, and Marty rubs the sleep from his eyes, squinting as he pats the key ring in his pocket.
“Yeah,” he mumbles, and then sits up a little more once Rust gets his underwear pulled up over his hips, eyeballing the blue tattoo over his heart. “What the fuck did I see last night?”
“What do you think you saw?” Rust asks gently, stepping back into his pants and threading his belt buckle together.
“Think I been hitting the bottle a little too hard, is what I think,” Marty says, running a hand through his hair. “Because it don’t seem logical, to sit here and reiterate to you of all fucking people, that the Loch Ness fucking Monster is alive and well and shacking up in Louisiana.”
“Naw,” Rust says with something tugging at the corner of his mouth, pulling his undershirt back over his head before extending a hand down to Marty to help haul the other man to his feet. “Nessie ain’t real. Hoax, least as far as I know.”
Back on his feet, Marty takes hold of Rust’s elbow, the two of them standing there while mist curls up off the surface of the lake. Cars whir past in the far distance, though Marty hasn’t seen one on the road that brought them here since they parked the night before.
“Are you for fucking real, man?” he asks, almost whispering before he remembers they’re alone. “My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me last night? That was all—that was all real?”
“Yeah,” Rust says, watching Marty through his lashes. “Been that way since I was a kid. Once a month, like clockwork.”
“Jesus Christ,” Marty says, dropping Rust’s elbow and taking a small step back, one hand hitched on his hip with the other palming the back of his neck. He laughs then, a little giddy around the edges, shaking his head as he watches Rust. “Fuckin A’, man. You’re the real deal—full package, no matter which way we spin it.”
Rust bends to start folding up the blankets, flannel gone damp with morning dew. “You’re taking this real well,” he says, earnest enough. “I’m surprised.”
“Well what the hell do you want me to do, take an oath to shoot you down with a harpoon gun?” Marty snorts, helping Rust fold the other blanket. “Kind of exciting, ain’t it? Does anybody—anybody else know, about this?”
Rust is quiet for a moment, stepping back into his boots before leading the way to the truck. “Not really,” he says, pushing damp waves off his forehead with his fingers. “Not anybody I’m worried about.”
“But this isn’t something you can go telling to every cop bar this side of the fucking Mississippi,” he adds, crunching through gravel as they step back into the lot. “Even with my name lifted out—you hear me, Marty?”
“I hear you,” Marty says, grinning as he swings up into the passenger side of the truck, yellow hair catching light from the rising sun. “We’ll be keeping your time of the month a secret, just a little something between you and me.”
* * *
The good years come and go, capped off with one bad one and a long road that leads Rust straight back into the cold-choked fist of Alaska.
Working out on the wharf, the freezing ocean water hits him like a steel-boned slap and he almost hopes sometimes that it’ll finally kill him, freeze his lungs in his chest and help him sink clear to the bottom, forgotten far under the ice where nobody has to bear the burden of remembering his name. But it never does, and during the off season he walks into the warmer woods once a month, sheds all his clothes and dips into a lake not too unlike the one he grew up in.
Sometimes he hears a whistle blowing like birdsong through the trees and expects to find his father standing on the bank with a basket slung over one shoulder. Word has it that Travis Cohle has been dead going on fifteen years, and Rust believes it. The woods watch him like they know him and he finds shelter there like he had in the arms of his father.
Ten years go by, and Rust drives out to where the old cabin used to stand, long since broken down and halfway swallowed back up into the earth. He doesn’t go inside but takes the familiar path through the woods until he’s standing on a pebbled shore, looking down into the water with the eyes of a seventeen-year-old boy.
He pulls a copper-colored scale from his pocket, just as fine and beautiful as the day he found it, and sets it at the edge of the water before walking back to his truck.
* * *
After Carcosa, after the blood and the darkness and the flare lighting up the inside of what Rust believed was their final tomb, Marty is standing by his hospital bed, watching as a nurse gently guides the other man up into a sitting position so he can dangle his feet above the floor.
“Take your time, now,” the nurse says while she helps him into the wheelchair Marty holds steady, and when Rust grunts and waves her off she arches an eyebrow but steps back like this is a well-thumbed routine between them, none too quiet about the words she impresses upon Marty before breezing out of the room.
“Puppy masquerading as a pit viper,” she says, scrawling something on the chart outside the door. “And don’t give him any ideas about leaving just yet, I don’t care what Dr. Singh says under duress, it isn’t happening.”
Marty laughs a little and then steers the wheelchair around, pushing Rust out into the hall. “Where to first?” he asks, reaching down to adjust the box in his pocket, and Rust nods toward the elevator.
“Some fresh air’d be nice,” he says, and Marty hits the down-arrow button in agreement.
Halfway down to the ground floor, Rust clears his throat and cuts through the quiet, voice tinny and louder in the metal box. “I can’t be here when it happens, Marty,” he says, watching the numbers on the floor display go from five to four. “You gotta get me out of here before it does.”
“What?” Marty says a little dumbly, eyes cutting low to Rust’s face. “When what—?” he starts to ask, and then he remembers the night nearly a month before when they’d had to cut research short, when Rust had driven back to that little house behind the bar, watched the sun sink low and then slipped into the canal. It hadn’t seemed real, then. Not quite.
But it is now.
The elevator stops on the ground floor and Rust sighs as Marty scrambles to push the wheelchair out into the lobby. “Full moon’s in two days,” he says, feeling a hand touch down on his shoulder. “And here I can barely fucking walk.”
“Don’t you be worrying none,” Marty says, squeezing Rust’s shoulder before he lets go and pushes them out into the nighttime air. “We’ll get this figured out just fine.”
Two days later Marty drives them out to the coast and parks his car right on the beach, everything else be damned, and finds a stretch of soft sand far away from most of the people and lights. He helps Rust hobble down to the water, the two of them leaving barefoot prints that cross in the sand, and doesn’t let go even when they step into the surf.
The waves are gentle tonight, more docile in their swells than either man has even really seen them, lapping easy around Rust’s ankles while Marty helps him out of the thin robe he wore down to the water. There’s a sort of spell hanging in the night air and neither wants to speak at first, afraid to reach out and break it.
“Help me out a little further,” Rust finally murmurs, letting the silver moonlight lick over the long scar still stapled together on his naked belly, and Marty stops before the water hits mid-calf.
“I reckon this is far enough, you ain’t doing any Olympic swimming tonight,” he says, helping Rust ease down into the water so he’s sitting, the brine lapping soft against his lower stomach. Marty plops down next to him without a thought, soaking his shorts and the hem of his t-shirt. “Hope you don’t have performance anxiety,” he laughs, “because I’m not leaving you out here alone all night.”
The change happens in a familiar shift of color and light and then Marty’s sitting beside a Rust who’s twelve feet long instead of six, all brassy scales tinged blue instead of pale gold skin tattooed blue and black. He curls his neck around and sets his head right in Marty’s lap so it rests above the water, heaving out a gentle sigh.
“Look at that,” Marty says after a while, head cocked to the side. “Your eyes are the same color blue.”
Rust blinks at him and then lets his lids sink lower, curling his tail around the both of them. His stomach still feels sore and tight, and he knows that if he rolled over and looked the softer scales on his belly would be hewn together in a crude crescent.
The fact that he’s the only one with a voice doesn’t do much to deter Marty, and he runs his hands over Rust’s neck while he talks.
“Forgot how pretty you were like this,” he murmurs, clearing his throat a bit. “Well, not like you ain’t ever been too hard on the eyes, but you know what I mean. Don’t know if I’d be so apt to call you majestic when you’re walking around in my bath robe, smoking up the fucking living room.”
He watches the waves for a bit, still a gentle cradle rocking around them, and blows out a sigh fine-edged with a smile. “Not sure we can make the drive out here every time,” he says, patting Rust’s neck. “If you’re still in a bad way next month I might have to steal the neighbor’s slip-n-slide, get one of them water sprinklers and do you up like Free Willy.”
Rust would smile if he could, thinking back to a night thirty-odd years ago with a tarp and a plastic kiddie pool.
“And after that?” Marty says, looking out across the water. “I dunno, though I’m sure there’s a lake around the house somewhere, something nice. But if not we can figure it out.”
He’s quiet for a time, watching a night gull wing through the moonlight. Rust’s tail tightens around them a little and Marty lets out another long breath, one he'd been holding in.
“Maybe we could move,” he says, spinning out their future in less than ten words. “Somewhere closer to the water.”
The nights are shorter in the summer and Marty sits with Rust until the sun starts to rise. He doesn’t complain about his stiff back or the pruning tips of his toes, doesn’t mention being tired or sore or hungry. He only stretches and rises to his feet, reaching down to pull Rust up with him.
Gulls are crying louder now and Marty shakes out the robe still sitting in the sand, helps Rust into it one arm at a time and waits while the other man sashes it around his waist. Their walk back to the car is short but slow-going and when Marty gets the passenger door open Rust doesn’t make any move to slide in, shifting around in the arm Marty’s got hooked around his waist.
He turns into the other man without a word and wraps his arms around him, buries his face in the crook of Marty’s neck and breathes deep, in and out. It doesn’t take long before one broad hand is coming to settle around the back of Rust’s neck, the other sliding gentle up and down the line of his spine, Marty holding him warm and close.
They stand together like that for a time, neither moving until the sun has come up.
“You ready to go?” Marty asks after a while, and Rust nods against him, mustache tickling the side of the other man’s neck as he slowly pulls away.
“Yeah,” he says, letting Marty help ease him down into the car. “Let’s get on home.”
* * *
There’s a little house nestled right along the edge of the coast, so close to the ocean that Marty calls and tells the girls they could reach through the open window and touch the water if they wanted to. The walk’s a little bit further than that but Rust lets him have his moment, only raising an eyebrow while he brings his morning coffee up to his mouth.
“They’ll be here the day after next,” Marty says when he gets off the phone, watching Rust’s hair ruffle in the salty breeze that comes in through the back door. “Should be enough time to sleep off our little nighttime swimming session, I reckon.”
“You coming out tonight?” Rust asks him, standing and carrying their empty plates to the sink.
“Some of the best date nights I’ve ever been on, slick,” Marty says. “Fuck yeah, count me in.”
Later he’ll bring a thick blanket to the beach and spread it out on the sand, placing a flat rock at each corner to keep it from blowing away while they both go down to the water. Marty’s been swimming a lot more himself these days, cutting through the waves to trim up and slim down, and he dives straight into the water after Rust once the full moon has come out, holding onto a ridged dorsal that pulls him further out from shore.
He never stays out for the full nights anymore, letting Rust guide him back to the beach when he’s tired and had his fill. The blanket will be waiting and Marty will stretch out for a long nap, letting the crash of the wind and waves lull him until Rust finally returns with the sun.
At the break of first light Marty feels a damp body press up close, familiar fingers splaying across his chest while warm lips presses light against his own.
He cracks one eye open and hums into Rust’s mouth, hands moving low to span around the other man’s waist as he pulls him closer.
“What a wakeup call,” he murmurs, kissing the words against Rust’s neck when he feels long fingers draw up the hem of his shirt. “Good morning to you, too.”
Rust starts tugging around his shorts, pulling them down further around Marty’s thighs. “Why’d you even bother putting these back on?” he growls. “Ain’t nobody out here but the two of us.”
“The girls were coming over,” Marty says, gasping when Rust rolls his hips against him, stoking up a flash of hot friction. “You gotta—ah!—work on being decent.”
“Not til later,” Rust says, finding Marty’s mouth again and kissing there sweeter than before, one hand come up to brace light around the other man’s face while the sun shines warm against his back. “We’ve got time yet.”