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“Hey.” Marty throws a paper clip across the desk to get Rust’s attention. “You gotta come by the house tonight.”
Somewhere between that first you gotta come to dinner and the third or fourth blind date, Rust has realized that Marty no longer attempts to maintain the illusion of asking him to participate in any social event; he just informs him. He brushes the paper clip to the floor. “What for? It’s the middle of the week.”
“It’s Halloween. You did notice that it’s Halloween, right?” Marty gestures to the cutouts hung up around the station--jack-o’-lanterns, arched black cats. “‘Cause sometimes you don’t seem to operate on the same calendar as the rest of us. It’s always Octember twelveteenth with you, or something.”
Rust just blinks at him.
“Maggie’s working late so I’m on trick-or-treating duty. You’re comin’ along.”
Rust takes a stack of notecards out of the drawer and starts to organize them into stacks according to type of fatal injury described there. Laceration, evisceration, blunt-force trauma. “Ten and twelve seems old enough to go on their own.”
“Thanks, Dr. Spock. What the hell do you know about it? I ain’t lettin’ them wander around by themselves.”
“Yeah, well, it won’t kill you to spend a couple hours with your own kids.”
“Of course I want to spend time with them, Jesus Christ, what the fuck do you take me for?”
“Then why,” he asks, irritation starting to creep into the edges of his voice, “is my presence required?”
“Do you have any idea what preteen girls are like?” Rust doesn’t, but he leaves that one alone. “That’s the word they use for themselves, pre-teen, ain’t good enough just to be a goddamn kid anymore. It means they gotta shriek like banshees every time they see their little friends and spend all their time on the damn phone and treat every minor disappointment like it’s the end of the fuckin’ world and steal Maggie’s mascara every chance they get--”
“You even know what mascara is, Marty?”
“Course I do, it’s the shit that goes on your eyes, and it runs everywhere when they cry and they cry about everything. Seems like they’re always either yellin’ at me or cryin,’ these days. And they wanna dress like hookers for Halloween and I’m not allowed to talk to, or look at, or make any comment about them when they’re out trick-or-treating with their giggly-ass friends and I gotta walk ten paces behind ‘em ‘cause they’re embarrassed to even have a fuckin’ father.” He dumps Equal into his coffee with a gesture of profound defeat. “Don’t leave me alone to deal with that shit, man.”
Rust stacks the notecards, closes his ledger, and walks away, which is how Marty knows he’s acquiesced.
He appears on the front step promptly at six, barely dodging out of the way as the girls come barreling out the door, shouting a breathless “hi, Mr. Cohle” in unison. Macie is dressed as a cheerleader, and Rust suspects that a lot of the recent crying and screaming that Marty mentioned had to do with the length of her skirt. Audrey is sporting a lot of black lace, large plastic fangs, and twin trickles of fake blood down either side of her mouth.
Marty, in jeans and a faded Hand over the candy and nobody gets hurt t-shirt, eyes Rust’s familiar sportcoat and slacks. “You realize we’re not at work, right? Don’t you own a pair of jeans or something?”
“I’m not always at the station,” Rust replies, “but I’m never not at work.”
Marty rolls his eyes, reaches just inside the door, and grabs a bright-orange plastic pumpkin. “Let’s go.”
“Why the hell are you carrying that thing?”
“They give me any candy they don’t want.” Rust stares at him evenly. “Shut the fuck up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Well, whatever you’re thinking, don’t say it.”
Rust toys with his cigarettes but doesn’t light one. Marty doesn’t know it, but a month ago Maggie caught Audrey and her friends smoking behind the changing rooms at the local pool. He’s tried to abstain from lighting up around her since. “How long you expect this to take?”
“Like you got plans.” Rust looks away. “Holy shit. You do got plans.”
“That friend of Maggie’s called. The doctor. Told her I’d see her after we got done here.”
“Aww, shit, man. I woulda let you off the hook if I’d known.” Rust just shrugs, with that uncomfortable look that he gets sometimes, at their dinner table or at Audrey’s softball games or the time he came to Macie’s school play, like domesticity is a garment that he keeps trying on in spite of the fact that it never quite fits right.
The girls scamper down the street, picking up friends along the way, giving the grown-ups trailing behind them a wide berth. About five houses in, Audrey comes over with a handful of rejected treats. “All right, what we got?” Marty inquires in a brisk tone that Rust has heard as they’ve approached crime scenes.
“Jellybeans,” she says--a grin breaks out over her father’s face at that--“and Bit-O-Honey.”
“Aww, sweetie, nobody likes that shit.”
She turns to Rust expectantly, holds out the candy. He stares back at her for a moment, and then takes it silently, unwraps it, and starts to chew with the same hangdog determination with which he does everything else.
“This is the height of absurdity for men like us,” he finally says when his jaw has stopped working.
“Well, you always did seem allergic to fun.”
“I mean, think about it. What’s the purpose of Halloween?”
Marty pauses to consider this. “Candy corn?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Marty. We have this conversation every holiday. The purpose of Halloween is not candy corn. The purpose of Easter is not jelly beans, not even the fruit punch flavored ones. The purpose of Christmas is not--what the hell was it--”
“Those little chocolate Santas.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“The ones that come wrapped in tin foil.”
“Dad!” Macie calls down the street. “Do people really put razor blades in candy?”
“No, honey,” he replies. “Just an urban legend.”
“See!” Macie crows triumphantly to a curly-haired redhead in a witch costume. “My dad says it’s not true and he would know ‘cause he’s a murder expert.”
“Homicide detective, doofus,” Audrey says, “not murder expert.”
Rust carefully folds the candy wrapper and tucks it away in his jacket pocket. “Holidays are about death, Marty.”
“How’s that?”
“The inevitability of death and the possibility of regeneration; that’s why we celebrate them yearly. Christmas is about new life in the midst of winter, Easter about the illusion of resurrection after death, birthdays make a cause of celebration out of the inevitable march toward--”
“Stop it. Jesus Christ.”
“The threat of death is always with us, but for most people, it’s distant, it’s inaccessible. They put their parents in nursing homes and their children in carseats. They buy pet insurance. Pet insurance, for fuck’s sake.”
“Let me guess. You had a dog once, but you and your dad had to eat it to survive a cold Alaskan winter. Y’all even do Halloween up there, or did you just make jack-o-lanterns out of caribou skulls or something?”
Macie walks by and drops something in the pumpkin before scurrying back to her friends; it lands with a loud, hollow thud. Marty peers inside, reaches in, and pulls out the offending object. “Who the fuck gives apples to trick-or-treaters?”
Rust reaches over, grabs the apple from Marty’s hand, takes a bite, and continues without missing a beat. “No one has fears anymore, not real ones, not of death or famine or plague or war. Instead they fear high taxes, public embarrassment, that their children won’t make the soccer team. Meaningless, useless, petty bullshit.”
“I am begging you to get to the point sometime before next Halloween.”
“My point is that we, as humans, need fear, same way we need food or sex.”
“Says the man who never gets laid and probably ain’t had an actual nutrient this week outside of that apple.”
“So they invent this holiday in a misguided attempt to access fear in a safe way, by covering it with plastic bats and cotton spiderwebs, dye it orange and dip it in sugar and pretend what they’re feeling is a real emotion and not a piss-poor facsimile of one--”
“I wish there was a razor blade in that apple.”
“But why the fuck do we need plastic pumpkins and fog machines to simulate horror, Marty? Guys like us who encounter the real thing every day? Last week a guy cut another guy’s face off ‘cause he stole his VCR. Week before that--”
Marty coughs nervously, looking somewhere over Rust’s shoulder. He turns to see the girls, white-faced and wide-eyed, holding toothbrushes and packs of marshmallow ghosts.
“Someone’s face got cut off?” Macie whispers.
“Way to go, asshole,” Marty mutters.
He’s seen Rust so drunk he could barely talk and so high that he couldn’t string three logical words together, but he’s never seen him stunned silent before. “No,” he finally blurts out. “No, it-- I-- I was telling your dad a-- a ghost story.”
Macie just looks skeptical, but Audrey rolls her eyes. “You are so full of shit, Mr. Cohle,” she says, politely but firmly. “C’mon, Mace. The Hendersons always have Kit-Kats.”
Rust fumbles with his cigarettes and finally manages to get one out of the pack. It takes him three tries to get it lit. “Fuck, man. I’m sorry.”
“I told you,” Marty says. “Preteens. They scare the shit out of me.”