Chapter Text
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‘Performing one’s rural past in potentially dangerous ways forced the revelation of one’s true self.’
— Rebecca Scofield, Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West
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The night before they catch the body, Rust sees a woman crawling out of the wall. He’s read Perkins Gilman and the night is moldy green like a softly departing bruise; he reckons it for an omen, a soundbite of truth. He watches her limbs distend, her eyes go luminous and fractal in bedroom gloom, nothing more than a shade but the brain fills the gaps in, they told him that at Northshore — he feels Laurie shift against his thigh, her head pushed off her pillow and somewhere into his hip. He’s stopped hiding that he sits awake most nights with her, most nights in general. She’s snoring at a high, feminine tenor. He blinks at nothing and doesn’t smoke in the bedroom because (she says) it gives her bad dreams. The woman from the wall looks at him laconically and then crawls, long-limbed, alien stretch of bone and unhinging of violent jaw, crawls up the mattress and swallows up inside him —
He peels back into the bathroom, chokes on Laurie’s cold white tile. Laurie’s decor is clean, economical. Tidy flourishes like conceding something. She remembers, sometimes, that she has a sophisticated life and she ought to read the magazines. She puts art up on the walls and never looks at it. He’s hated white tiles since Lubbock, remembers them as cool grit bone, something only clean because it’s been picked at and scavenged, nothing left. He hates her bathroom. He has a toothbrush by the sink and she got him to bend her over by the mirror once, didn’t figure how it took him out of himself to glimpse his own reflection like something wild and unearthed in the bone-stark sheen, didn’t know what to do with his fractured dissonance afterward, though she did a psych rotation in her day, though by rights and the definition of all the doctors of Northshore what’s wrong with him is diagnosable and easily defined as consequence. He is consequence; he has it in spades.
Her hand lands on his nape. She is here, now, though he left her sleeping. She soothes him with hard, ungentle fingers, like she would a horse. Digs her thumb into the side of his throat, makes her presence as a person known. Handles him. Says, “Gotta sleep, Rust. Gotta try.”
“Saw–”
Her other hand dwells somewhere around his bare collarbone, folding fingertips into the cleft of his clavicle. She likes it, his edges. The uneven ways he’s put together. She’s a tourist in this region, barely stopping by, only occasionally he looks up and the years have passed with her here anyway. Warm, bracketing his chest, leaning close with hot breath: “More flashbacks?”
Flashbacks. Time goes fucking nowhere; he could be looking ahead, could be looking across. He’s read Vonnegut too. She has a cross-departmental meeting in the morning and he told her he wouldn’t stay, told her he shouldn’t stay, but she handles him. She engineers him places. She talks to Maggie about him and Maggie’s worse at hiding what she thinks, worse at tucking those little holdings of concern into the pockets of her face. Maggie sweet pomelo to Laurie’s pomegranate tulip tannin taste, both of them scrubbed-up and clinical in the appraisal. He passes a hand over his face. “‘M fine, Laurie, go on back to bed.”
“I’m okay right here for now.”
He keeps his eyes closed, feels her fingers tighten at his nape, twist into the downy bottom curls of his hair. She likes to ground him into the real with her touch. Thinks when he says it’s red or vivid like star anise he’s poeticizing, he’s drawing out romance, but whatever beauty he spins with his words has always been and will forever be an accident. He ain’t being nice.
“What did you see?”
The woman from the wall didn’t go anywhere. Nowhere other than the slick creep towards his bones, his marrow, the alignment of her slack-spun face with his own — went only into his head. And she wonders why he doesn’t look in the mirror.
When Laurie gets him back into bed, he lies and stares at the ceiling and doesn’t sleep. At 5:50AM her alarm sounds; she kisses him on the cheek with morning breath; when she comes out of the shower, he’s already gone, having been given permission.
#
He is here, now, in a car warm and pine-nut, sawdust brown. Highway to a 419: Boys, you’re up. Marty has developed the habit of flexing his hand on the wheel as if to check his wedding ring’s still there. He doesn’t say anything when Rust rolls the window down to smoke but his patience is wearing thin, Rust can read it in that hard jut of jaw, the way the nicotine draw everywhere is running out of rope. Time catches them all. So does the little rodeo ring outside Iota, the hot yellow sky, Marty adjusting his slacks as he gets out the car and walking kind of bowlegged, wide, the thing he does where he absorbs his wants and displays them like a badge for all to see.
“You ain’t a cowboy no more,” Rust tells him, following the trooper through to the crime scene.
Marty itches at his neck, swats an invisible fly. “Once a cowboy, always a cowboy, that’s what they say, don’t you know?”
He’s in a good mood; maybe he’s screwing somebody new. Maybe Maggie’s rolled over and let him experiment. She tells Laurie things too but Laurie has a better poker face and Rust doesn’t ask, though she’d like to gossip with him, though she tucks herself into his side and says snide things about Marty and Maggie both, prodding to reformulate the pattern of alliance. It’s that way when you’re introduced two parties to a third, they tell him, always striving to catch up on the second wrong foot. He knows little about catching up or introductions.
There’s a delay going into the scene, shortage of plastic overshoes, crime scene techs making a mess, and Marty, in a good mood, says, “Laurie keeping you up at night? You look like you slept like shit.”
Rust is watching the walls and the way the troopers are shifting and sharing glances across prismic latitudes. He says, “This is a bad one.”
“What?”
“Look at this shit. Way they’re looking at us.”
Marty squints at him, not at them. “We’re famous, Rust, I know the concept of being generally perceived by the people around you is something freaks you out mightily but we are famous in the circles we ride in these days, been famous a while.”
“If we weren’t famous they’d tell us it’s a bad one,” he concedes. “But they’re not.”
“Quit psychoanalyzing, okay? Just fucking–” Marty shakes his head. The trooper beckons them in; they go in. Marty doesn’t get the chance to finish up exactly what Rust should just fucking do, because it is a bad one and they’ve had a year of death like soft wilting lillies, they’ve had a year of deaths look good in the news footage, ‘cause they’re allowed to be shown on primetime TV. They ain’t had this.
This: the stilted, AC-stuttered room, shitty cloistered feeling of ammonia and soil and old piss, all muddy earth things that don’t belong in an airless block built bureaucracy’s sake — shitty temporary walls, temporary enough they’re peeling body parts out from the cable chase like a person was right there in the middle when the building got dropped here out of God’s grand plan in the yellow petroleum sky and the smell like a ceiling. Smell like fleshy purple insides and rot.
Blood and viscera among gloves in crinkling biocide-blue; Marty steps right out again and throws up in the sun. Rust’s seen worse, but not for a while. The techs have their heads down getting on with it. He stretches latex over his own palms and leans in the doorway, runs a finger up the spine of his ledger. A smear of arm fallen out onto the tile, that’s where this began, flickering lights and an electrician with a nasty surprise like the B-grade horrors Laurie sometimes flicks past on the television she made him buy.
“Fucking shit,” Marty says, coming back to stand up next to Rust. Masculinity wouldn’t allow him to bow this one out. “Things you don’t ever get used to.”
“You seen shit like this before?” Rust can’t help but say. Goad. He don’t provoke Marty so much no more, ‘cause Marty’s used to it and resists provoking him right back.
But today Marty says, “Fuck no.” And, “You telling me–?”
After a moment, “No. Cartels eviscerated privately, made you a voyeur to it, or else a warning. No half measures like this. It ain’t clean.” Blood’s getting in his nose, getting back to his head. There are flies drifting around lazy, laconic, sated. Feasted fat already. Marty is smearing his own stomach acid across the back of his hand and Rust takes a step forward into the room because there is no going back. Sidesteps a tech’s photograph and then the tech ducks his head, concedes Rust’s authority here, Rust the box man but also, on some level they’re all uncomfortable with, the blood and gore and guts man. Carried the dead child across the field in Ledoux’s poison jungle and none of them forget it.
“Can’t see this a fucking half measure, man,” Marty says, from some way behind him. Rust crouches down in the viscera, the decaying leak of sludge gone black and purple in faulty AC’s heat, examines spatter and forethought. If all the dismembered pieces are in the wall, then it’s a small person got killed here. Killed someplace else and brought here to dispose, to decompose? But here. Where is here? A temporary office little more permanent than a trailer, erected sake of the rodeo circuit which is taking its day off these couple weeks, out of season, not that Rust follows the broncs and the buckles with any particular interest. Marty’s saying now, “Reckon anything, then? Some– metempsychotic or some shit this time? Another Ledoux?”
“Metapsychotic. Nahhh. This ain’t done with any sorta evolved design. This is just a mess.”
“You can say that again.” Marty, picking his way cautiously across the room. He stops near a scattered finger and says, “Electrician put this all the way over here?”
“Reckon they were stuffed in there like overfilling a suitcase. Electrician takes the panel out and–” Rust moves his hands, soft and fleshy explosion, tracking the spring all the way from wall to finger on the floor.
“Like you’d know shit about overfilling a suitcase.”
Rust has never owned much, has never been anywhere with anyone who has, except once when they took Sophia down to Rockport and it was all diapers and swimsuits and soft little socks, take up more room than you’d think they do, made Rust itchy and nervous watching Claire fold it all in. Rust read colors in the long sea sky and Sophia tried to eat sand.
He looks back into the cable chase. The horror like a mouth beyond. He can glimpse another arm, the whitening curve of a rib, which would have been a flex and a squeeze, no matter how small the body. Takes less strength than determination, though strength is important too. He opens his ledger and takes one glove off to hold his pen.
“You know we got photos of all this, right?” one of the techs says. “You don’t gotta–”
“Yeah, yeah, we know, thank you.” Marty is of the opinion that hostility to Rust reflects badly on him. They’re a byline together, it’s true, lied for each other, lay beside each other the night after Ledoux and unfolded themselves into different sorts of oblivion, drink and heroin and Marty watching his lips. Now he watches Rust sketch the bent-back panel on a creamy white page two-thirds of the way in.
“Fuck are we, man,” Rust says outside, ledger folded up. Cigarette between his teeth, scanning the stands and the chute and the ring.
“See, you say you’re from Texas, but I know you ain’t in the way that it matters ‘cause you don’t get any of this. Didn’t grow up with rodeo in Alaska, huh?” Marty’s got more color away from the blood and the AC. Pushing his dick out again with his shoulders angled towards the ring. He says, “What d’ya think?”
“It ain’t the season, right? For rodeo around here?”
“A little late for the bigger shows, yeah. But this place, I mean–” Marty shrugs. “Place small like this, you don’t gotta be registered in the big leagues. We gotta ask someone, be sure what the schedule is. What are you thinking? Thinking it’s connected to the rodeo somehow?”
“Thinking it’s too early to know anything yet.” That should please him, Marty the contrarian, and it does, eyes glinting at the corners. So Rust adds, “I figure they’ve been in there four, five days. Forensics should agree with me.”
“It never occur to you you should be the one agreeing with forensics, not the other way around?”
“Nahhh.” Rust takes his time with his cigarette. Swallows down soft smoke and watches them bringing the body out in pieces, scattered livid parts. Marty turns away like he wants to throw up again. It’s not as a favor that Rust doesn’t comment; it just ain’t particularly worth it, the itchy red face and brutalism Marty would perform in return. They’ve been getting along so well. “This ain’t a first kill, Marty.”
“Thought you said it wasn’t like Ledoux.”
“It’s not. I’m not seeing a signature here, the kinda organized progression you get in a serial like that, but you don’t cut a body up this way your first time. To hide it, maybe, to bury it, but to leave it here?”
“Maybe he panicked. Couldn’t get away, anywhere else.”
Rust inclines his head. “Yeah. Maybe he panicked. But where’d he do the dismembering? ‘Cause he didn’t do it here. Means he came back here with a purpose to it. Couldn’t think of any place better, sure, but interested more in destruction than getting away with it. Means he got away with it before.”
“You get that out of one of your books? ‘Cause I swear, man, you talk to me again about organization and MO versus signature like one of those FBI assholes and I won’t speak to you til Christmas.”
“They’re assholes but they got a good basis of ideas, Marty. I don’t agree that there is anything innate to the separation between good and bad as they describe it, like these little words they got, psychopath and sociopath and narcissist, speak to some truth about the fucking universe, decode it all and make it okay, when really what evil is is a thing that flings around in the dark without a name, laughs at us for giving it a name, but at least they look at the details. You gotta look at the details. How and where tells you who and why.”
Marty shakes his head, shading his eyes, though he’s wearing sunglasses. “Well, how about while you’re getting in touch with our vic with your ouija board, how about I do some actual police work. You wanna take the electrician or the guy who owns the place?”
“Guy who owns the place,” Rust says. “But you should be there.”
“What?”
“Rodeo shit, right? Electrician don’t have nothing for us. You know that. But I talk to this guy, I don’t know half the shit he’s saying.”
Marty puffs out his chest a little bit. It’s a vain exercise, like Rust approves, or else Rust is someone people want to give them approval, and neither of those things hold. Still. Occasionally Marty does things Rust can’t understand and that’s when he’s interesting, Marty is, when he defies explanation. So he comes with Rust to talk to the guy who owns the place, Owen Lloyd, a yellowed old cowboy with a handlebar tweaking out below his nose and a way of flourishing his sentences that gives every one the flavor of a lie, like licorice, like black tar. Lloyd tells them it’s out of rodeo season. Lloyd tells them someone must’ve broke in, that must be it, saw a nice quiet property like this’un with a big empty ring next to it and thought, hell, good a place to dispose a body as any.
Rust says, “Anything happening here four to five days ago?”
“Four to five days ago.” Lloyd makes a show of it, crossing his legs, scratching at his jaw. Rust glances at Marty and Marty lifts his brow back. Lloyd sighs, lights a cigarette — Marlboro Reds, real commitment to the rodeo brand — and says, “Reckon we had some people passing through, yeah.”
Marty leans forward. “Passing through. What’s that mean?”
“Well, I don’t–” Guy shifts in his chair. Behind his desk, fucking desk, there’s even a little star-spangled banner poking out of his penholder. Rust wants to stick it somewhere violent. Exists forever as a measure of containment, bites down impulses the way he swallows the smoke of a Camel Blue but still, still, it itches. Fucking itches. Knows this guy is lying.
Marty spreads his hands. “I mean, you know, we gotta do our jobs here, that’s all. Body parts found in a cable chase, I can’t see that being your fault, huh? You’re just trying to run an honest business. You’re doing your job too.”
He breaks off there; smart. Still surprises Rust when his subconscious, always alert and examining, assigns Marty the label of smart. But he does, he is, he has his moments. They sit in silence, side by side and facing Lloyd over his star-spangled desk. Office is cool and perfumed, somehow rose pink. Lloyd strokes his bolo tie down his front. “Four, five days ago, you say?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean–”
“Guy got killed here, let’s not forget.” Rust’s voice comes out sallow, hollow, unnerving, the way he’d intended it. “Or could be a woman. We don’t know yet. Gotta wait for pathology, y’know, when a body’s in that many pieces.”
Lloyd, who’s deeply tan, Louisiana baked bayou tan, goes pale. “Shit. You don’t know?”
“We don’t know.”
A hesitation. Lloyd flutters through the papers on his desk, glances heavily at Marty, looks between them, lands on Rust. Reasons Rust won’t dissect. When he speaks again, it’s barely audible. “Had the gay rodeo in.”
Marty’s chair creaks. “You had the what?”
“Gay rodeo, Marty, you heard what he said.” Rust leans back, hand hovering over his mouth, middle knuckle tapping his teeth. Registers the tic and takes it away again. “Unofficial basis, I assume?”
“Yeah. Not– didn’t advertise it none, y’know, none of the regulars’d take that shit, but it’s decent money, hire of the ring for a day, just a day. That’s all it was. It don’t– I mean, it don’t mean nothing about me or the place, we’re as red-blooded as–”
“But somebody got themselves killed.”
“Yeah.” Lloyd stares at his cigarette. “Reckon one of them queers did something– y’know, like some Jeffrey Dahmer type shit?”
Rust can feel a headache coming on, compound pressure at the root of his brain. Can’t even say he didn’t sleep, ‘cause he did a little, only it was scavenged in between women crawling out of walls and faces he’d rather not remember, Laurie telling him to lay down and forget about it, how can he just forget? He says, “Dahmer killed seventeen. If this guy’s been hiding them in walls at rodeos all up and down the country, your sport ain’t gonna have such a banner year.”
Marty shoots him a look. “You got the contact details of the people at this rodeo? Anyone working here at the time, anyone you know was in the vicinity we can talk to?”
Lloyd blusters, lies, gives them nothing to hold onto. Outside, Rust inhales gasoline air and closes his eyes over his cigarette. Leaves Marty to talk to the electrician, too, because the electrician doesn’t know anything and he can tell that already, easy as sniffing out a summer storm in the air. Easy as watching for the tracks of a buck in the undergrowth, his pop’s fingers curling his own over the hammer of a rifle because he didn’t like to do it himself, his pop, not if he didn’t have to, on account of ‘Nam. The electrician doesn’t know anything and Rust’s wishing he didn’t neither.
When Marty comes back, sun dipping low, Rust says, “Let me drive.”
Marty eyes him suspiciously. But it’s that, Let me drive, not asserting but asking instead for permission, that has him handing over the keys. Submission is a matter of handling someone. Rust hates to drive but he’s going to need something to do with his hands, with his eyes, some lost hall of memory to fall back into as Marty says, “Gay rodeo,” twitchy in the passenger seat, and, “What d’ya make of that, huh?”
Rust drives not with a hand but with a wrist, dug hard into the wheel. Checks his mirrors like he’s being chased, Marty said to him once. Then added, But, hell, probably learned behavior, huh? like he knows anything about Rust and Crash and the spaces in between, anything at all, like in two fell weeks he learned the sweep of Rust’s life and he doesn’t need to learn anything else, he only already knows. Rust lights a cigarette with one practiced hand. Says, “Guess queers like rodeo same as anybody else, Marty.”
“Same as anybody else,” Marty repeats. “You don’t like rodeo.”
Rust inhales, exhales, watches Marty watch his mouth out of the corner of his eye. “You figure me for anybody else?”
“The hell I do. Just saying–”
Rust wanted to drive because Rust didn’t want to grant Marty the power of pulling over and grinding something out of him, or out of himself, since he’s been teetering on a delicate brink for years and it’d take one thing, only one, to push the whole deck of cards over — the awareness he’d come to that first day, offering his hand to shake and taking note of the way Rust’s drawl went up and down with the grip of his fingers just the way his eyes did, the awareness rustic cops are usually only good at when they’ve got something to hide, the awareness he’d soon forgotten because Rust was a son of a bitch but not a punk, not a queer, they had a cover story in common — and this might be it, that thing, because in all their years as cops the two things have never yet coincided, that with which Marty shores up his masculine dick swagger and that which might undo it. So Rust drives and doesn’t think about stopping the car.
Marty’s drawing the words out. Stumbling over them. Manages, with a red-blooded, red-faced effort, “Saying, why they gotta have their own rodeo? Why can’t they just–”
“You want the queers at your rodeo, Marty? Want them riding your broncs and your brahmas?” Rust shakes his head. “‘S’all a convoluted trick, anyway, it’s just theater. We’re all masquerading something.”
“So you’re saying–”
“I’m saying there’s queers at your rodeo whether you want them there or not. They don’t gotta tell you about it. Way I see it, this is them doing you a favor. Letting you know to stay away.”
Glances over. Marty’s working his jaw. Looking down at his lap, where he’s holding the little flyer in a vice grip, some painstaking watercolor imitation of a Marlboro Man ad, close-up on a strong, supple ass in chaps and tight denim. It doesn’t say gay on it anywhere, but it doesn’t need to. That’s sort of the point.
Rust flicks ash out of the rolled-down window. Takes Marty’s silence for passive bewilderment. “Figure it might not be relevant. Or maybe it is, but the Dahmer shit, we don’t gotta treat them like–”
“Like what?”
“Rodeo’s just a sport, Marty, it ain’t your holy God and steeple. Ain’t nobody asking you to ride out in defense of it.”
“Fuck would you know about it?” Marty’s voice comes out ugly. “Jesus fuck, anybody’d think you had something in common with these nancies.”
Rust scoffs. “You get that word from your old man?”
“Pull over.”
Rust glances at him. Reacted on instinct, sure, shoulda held that last part in, but equally he underestimated the white iron grip of Marty’s knuckles on the paper, the tensile line like panic throbbing in the vein up towards his hair. “Why?”
“Pull the fuck over, Rust.” Tone low, bleeding out into oncoming rage. Huh. Rust squeezes his eyes shut and keeps them that way maybe a beat too long, considering he’s driving. Didn’t sleep enough last night for this shit. Hasn’t had enough sleep in his life for this shit. If he pulls over maybe Marty will deck him into the dust and maybe it would be nice, dreamless dark for a while. Come into the office with a blotched circle of blue around one eye and pupils different sizes, Geraci smirking, Hey, Cohle, your little old lady knocking you around some?
He says, “Marty–”
Marty doesn’t say anything in return. That’s sign enough. Marty ain’t crazy enough to grab the wheel, not sober, but keyed-up like this he can get under Rust’s skin somehow and that’s worse. Worse to see dull bayou-blue beneath his eyelids, worse for Marty to prod at it, kid irritating a loose tooth. Rust pulls the car over and gets out, leans against the hood with a fresh cigarette and a feeling like if he looks too far over the horizon something will look right back.
“This really don’t bother you?” Marty says, rounding the car. Flyer in a fist.
“Why would it, man? I seen most of the shit the world beneath the sun’s got to offer, and there’s shit worse than this.”
“Worse than that DB back there? Hell, not even a DB, it was in so many goddamn pieces. DiCillo’s gonna have a fucking field day, s’gonna be like fitting together a rubik’s cube.”
“But the DB’s not the problem, is it?”
Poking the fucking bear. Marty stares at him, takes a step forward. Kind of step that’s supposed to be threatening, and would be, if Rust weren’t halfway out of his own head and certainly party to a whole series of experiences Marty Hart, All Around Cowboy, couldn’t even dream of. Rust just leans there and looks someplace in the middle distance and identifies a blue-purple sheen, a rolling wave coming in for him like Andrew, like Opal or Frances or Josephine. He stares fixedly at the thing that waits and moves, himself, somewhere out of frame.
Marty’s hand grabs his wrist, hard. “Rust.” Snaps him out of it. “Where the fuck did you just go?”
Rust rolls his eyes. Puts his cigarette between his lips, but his fingers shake. “Figure maybe you should drive.”
“You don’t talk about my old man. You don’t talk about–” Marty looks out at the horizon, shading his eyes, shaking his head. Even the old rhythms feel false and rehearsed. “Shit, man, what the fuck’s wrong with you?”
“I’m taking this as a case, what it is. You’re the one taking this as something more than it needs to be.”
“You’re hallucinating like a motherfucker and you’re turning this shit back on me? Really?”
Marty, he sees, is grateful for the redirection. Rust could’ve slept more last night. Should’ve. His eyes are catching on the flyer in Marty’s fist and lingering there, and they all already figure him for a queer and Marty’s put off that awareness only because it’s convenient to do so. Rust ought to keep it convenient. Rust could plant one on him right here, a kiss or a fist, see what happens then. See how that shakes out the arrangement of things in the world.
But nothing changes; the world exists as a static circle and for them to change things they would have to have been changed already and they weren’t, not when Marty made a boyish, clumsy attempt at kissing him in ‘95 like practicing for something and not now, not since. Not ever. Expressions of personality exist as frail performances against a void; Marty is no exception. Marty is homophobic because he thinks he ought to be. Marty is homophobic because he can think of nothing else to be; because to be anything else would defy his programming, defy the strings of the thing that tethers him to this earth and he can’t do that, he can’t let go. And so.
Marty drives them back. Rust watches bruises flood out across the reaches of the sky, break over their heads.