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It’s Christmas. That’s what they tell him, on the radio, in the bullpen, driving on down the street past the inflatable Santa already wilting in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. Johnny and June Cash: King of Love, That Christmasy Feeling. No snow on the ground, just a hint at cool air, mild mornings. Rust ain’t used to that. Like Alaska’s creeping back on down to him and this is his first Christmas without spoons or belts or citric since Ginger got him on the dope back in late ‘90 and he’s still running from everything but it’s like also they just cut his legs off, left him lame. Can’t get goddamn fucking nowhere. So here he is, refusing Marty’s offer of beers, cop bar, made only ‘cause he’s already merry early on Christmas Eve, topping up his coffee with a festive tipple, generous Christmas spirit. You wanna come out with us, man? Good opportunity to get in with the guys, I mean, we ain’t hardly talked and it’s been what, two months, three months now?
It’s been seventy-one days. Rust has exchanged no personal information with his partner that does not extend beyond: robbery, then narco. Yeah, I was undercover for a bit. Feds, no, I wasn’t with the Feds. Texas. Got here in October. Sat the exam in Austin. No, not married. Nah. No. Yeah. Yeah, you drive.
What he knows about Marty could fill up half his square black ledger and then some, entirely against his will. He doesn’t ask but information sort of spills from Marty like from a cup too full, cheap whiskey, foaming beer. College and cowboy and wife, always the fucking wife, always the kids. Recitals, parties, grade school. Got a photo framed on his desk like nobody can see him leering over that stenographer, comes in with files and a short skirt, that deposition for you, Detective Hart, you said you wanted to–
He could write several books about Marty Hart. They wouldn’t be very interesting.
Besides, he was never much of a writer, better at talking, what struck Claire as ironic the whole time, the way for days on end he could not say a word but when he started he wouldn’t stop. Now he doesn’t write and he doesn’t talk and he doesn’t think about Claire. He knows what Marty wants him to know and he knows more than that, again against his will, being that Marty is already an open book.
Marty doesn’t want him to come to the bar. Rust doesn’t need to make much of an excuse. Gets as far as Nah, I gotta– before Marty’s nodding, waving him off. Saying only instead, “You got Christmas plans for tomorrow?”
Not as in, you busy, but as in, you ain’t gonna make me feel bad about my not asking if you’re busy, right? For the wife. That’s for the wife.
Rust says, “Heading out of town.” And, for a semblance of truth — new state, new life, he’s spent the last year and ten months training himself out of Crash’s habitual dishonesty — “Ain’t never been big on it. Christmas.”
Really, he’s pissed he can’t work, but this is Louisiana and they all think they’re doing him a favor. Quesada thinks he’s doing him a favor. Quesada knows about things, certain things, maps them out across Rust’s face and body like he’s a normal person, responding the way normal people would. What would Quesada do? What would Marty?
So far he saves them the lecture on how personhood’s a myth, normality’s a racket designed only to prolong the cowardice it takes not to conduct mass suicide and erase this whole mess, back to basics, square fucking one — because new state, new life, he’s also trying to return to the body. That same normal personhood. Being a coward himself.
So he leaves the bullpen at three minutes past five and the second he stands up from his desk Geraci comes to sit on it, ignores him putting his jacket on, leans over to pour whiskey over Marty’s afternoon coffee dregs. “‘Tis the fucking season, my friend,” Geraci says, and, “If you say one goddamn word about your inlaws tonight–”
Outside, sun’s drawing down into dusk. Everything blue, lit artificially, fake snow. Rust lights a cigarette and closes his eyes and doesn’t open them for maybe ten minutes, nothing but smoke and far off traffic. The impermanence of this relief is made clear by a car pulling away nearby, some recent festive hit sounding out muffled, mostly bass, tastes not like cinnamon or candy cane but like wood as it rots under snowmelt. When he tilts his head back, he catches no sky, just dark. Too close to the refineries for stars. It’s ugly down there, Travis told him, leaving. Your life’s gonna be fucking ugly. Stuck with Rust because it wasn’t the sort of thing Travis ever cared about, beauty, didn’t make any effort to pretty the cabin or the way they lived in it, disdained the frills of a superficial life. Still.
Christmas in Louisiana’s ugly. No uglier than Houston, barely remembers Houston, either way it’s never a Christmas card, never a Hallmark scene. He drives back home and considers heading out of town but where would he go. In the countryside, people live in the countryside, where would he go?
He could find a bar. Round out a year he spent getting sober getting drunk again. Buy cough syrup, marker pens, glue. Not eat anything and smoke his brain into static; cut himself in a neat line, white out his head for a moment. None of it good enough. All of it pathetic in some way, indulging the illusion of the self. Fragmentary, he’s clinging. There’s a little girl wearing mittens by the side of the road and he didn’t know you could even buy those down here.
In his house, he reads Hare’s Without Conscience until his ears begin to ring, and then he surrenders to Roethke: In a dark time, The edge is what I have. He is not free in the tearing wind. There is no wind, and across the way somebody’s having a party, lights and figures moving, and it feels trite and pathological to say he feels more alienated tonight than other nights, tonight being a night like any other, the baby Jesus being an adult’s comic book hero without the tights and cape and Saint Nicholas a cookie-fatted Nordic fraud — he don’t even have the edge, he feels too far from the edge, like it ain’t even an option to jump.
It’s all too well-rehearsed to say he hates Christmas. Like a poor novel, or else the shrinks, seeing him off: Remember what we talked about, Rustin, remember your strategies. Don’t underestimate the effect of birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. And in Austin NA, mandated then quietly forgotten about, all of them had stories. Cocaine in the family bathroom, puking all over Christmas dinner. No money for kids’ presents. One guy’s year with his kid ‘cause the ex didn’t give a shit enough to notice how he was jonesing, dropping the kid off, not looking her ex in the eyes, so then the guy took the kid with him to score and left him in the parking lot to be snagged up by a couple bored prosts — business takes a dive come Christmastime, apparently, maybe that’s where Rust should go today, solidarity and lipstick — in heels, bruised legs, cooing and getting him candy from the motel vending machine. Guy remembers his kid after his high and comes back the day after, tries to fuck one of them as a thank you. Can’t get it up and stiffs her on the change. Reflection shattered into a thousand faces, red tinsel wrapped around the girl’s bedframe — Rust’s got a visual imagination. Empty condom and the kid waiting outside. Everybody who gets high gets high on Christmas and here he is, needleless, needless. Here he is watching midnight pass and somewhere far off, bells.
Wonders if Marty made it home yet. If the wife’s up wondering, waiting. If she’s only grown to expect it. What’d we do that for, Travis said, when Rust, aged four, asked why they weren’t going to church like everybody else. Rust didn’t know what they’d do it for, what anyone’d do it for. Stockings and lights and eggnog, these were the province of other people, Rust didn’t live there, wherever there was. Later he learned it was nowhere. That it was nothing, a celebration against nothing, a desperate plea like there was anything more religious about the lights and the candy than there was the dark and the snow. Crash worshipped that nothing and, contrary to popular belief, Crash liked Christmas. Liked telling Ginger happy holidays, motherfucker, before crashing out on something special for as many hours as he could before it wore off and then he was shooting up again, always a good binge, those last Christmases. First time Ginger got him a Christmas present, it was a little glassine envelope with a plastic bow sticking it closed, contents self-evident, even then, something close to holy about that Christmas. Christmas before that one was white, eight-balls and racing pulse, but this and the ones that would follow were purple, true purple. Those Christmases, he made it to church, even if it was to kneel at the altar of hypodermics and Ginger’s thighs.
Marty probably hasn’t made it home.
The Christmas after, there was no Ginger, and there was no easy access to pre-cut premium heroin, either, but right after Northshore he found a quack didn’t care to read Substance Use Disorder on his forms and so he stored up a couple bottles of Tramadol, best he could get, for special occasions. Meaning of course his sobriety was doomed from the beginning, the way it was for all the guys at the back of NA exchanging numbers, bills, crumpled little baggies. Alcohol hidden in the walls, stashed under the floor, Poe’s telltale heart: Rust never assigned morality to the thing the way NA insisted but he did think, sometimes, how by their own fucked-up logic surely it demonstrated more virtue and strength of character to hold the substance forever within reach in suspended temptation, straddling that fine sharp edge, than to foreswear it and move far away beyond its touch like pretending it had never existed; he had no interest in virtue, or character, purity and clean white hands but 12-step was a lesson in contradiction and in Northshore, God, was he bored. So he stashed a couple prescription bottles and snorted the contents of one on a single hot day in August, snorted the others that following December and January. Blanked out but not good enough, a gray sort of high. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. That Christmas Claire called, said to his voicemail, Just checking you’re still alive. He never returned the call.
This year, she don’t call, proof that maybe now she knows he’s dead. He’s out of Valium and Tramadol and Quaaludes and he ain’t got a contact in Louisiana yet, new slate, new life, all that good shit. Method acting. He sleeps a fitful hour with his head on the Roethke book and no more, no longer. People get murdered in a higher percentage on Christmas and he’s hoping to get lucky. The phone doesn’t ring. He thinks of streetwalking, car windows, do anything for a hit. Calling Quesada, going back into the office, begging for a cold case, archives, paperwork. Calling Marty: you don’t give a shit about your family anyways.
Though that ain’t quite true. The complexities of Marty’s paternalistic ideations form a whole chapter in the Book That Is Hart, spell themselves out every time he opens his fucking mouth, which is often, for beer or coffee or snide, smug commentary. Swell and self-satisfied in the bayou. Rust knocking on his door, starving like for a meal. Don’t let me in. Take me someplace else.
The phone doesn’t ring. He doesn’t go to Marty’s, roast potatoes and pie. The wife. The daughters. He stares at the blank wall until his eyes sting, he drops a mug and cuts himself but only accidentally. Doesn’t clean up the shards but can’t seem to move far enough to make adequate, sensible use of them. He feels being sober to be somehow a failure. His Christmas list would be blank, not because he’s short of things to want but he’s somehow forgotten how. His ledger, too, if he were asked to write the book of Rust. Who the fuck is Rust? No, he’s all full up with the demands of a hot bloated world, a world that thinks too much of itself.
It’s Christmas. He doesn’t want to know.
.