Substances And Qualities

He’s alive in 2012, and that’s a pretty big surprise in itself. Cohle’s no longer the wiry adolescent it was so hard to find a photograph of, giving a flat mugshot stare through two black eyes. He’s a 32-year-old with bad teeth, long brown hair in a lazy ponytail hanging down over his shoulder. He has one pierced ear, and a blurred-looking homemade tattoo of a bird that shows when he pushes up his sleeves. Unlike Hart, he hasn’t even begun to go gray. No amount of junkie living will take that out of him, Gilbough is ready to bet, if it hasn’t done the job yet.

Here’s the man who Marty Hart would describe as not a bad-looking kid when enumerating his potential. (Smart, tough, not a bad-looking kid; liked to read, liked to talk. Could have really done something. Hart must think he’s dead too, or the next best thing.) He’s not bad-looking to this day, if you were looking to call that particular combination of gauntness and extreme focus something attractive and not just used-up. Indisputably strung-out, with Charles Manson eyes. Plenty odd about the look of him, but if you could sit a guy down in front of a video camera and make him talk just because he looked odd you’d be filming every other man in the parish. Drugs, hepatitis, hard living. He works at a bar down in Bayou Gauche now, wiping down tables and pouring beers.

His account of the Ledoux case and its aftermath is full of surprises. He’s seen some shit, and half the stuff Hart and his real partner got decorated for back in the day seems to tie back to the irksome observations of a small-time hooker and full-time asshole. No hard feelings, of course. Regular old self-aggrandizement, when it’s all but impossible to imagine any of the detectives around the station deliberately taking credit for anybody else’s big discoveries. (Looks are exchanged.)

“What surprises you, exactly? That Marty Hart was so ungracious to the kid he owed all that evidence to?”

Murmured assent. Papania adjusts the video camera on its stand.

“These days I can’t blame him. If I wanted to get along with him I probably shouldn’t have screwed his wife.”

Water under the bridge, gentlemen. Says he’s got worse things to worry about now, but worse how – you think this living is easy, officer? no, no, nothing occupational, I just think too much. He taps on his temple with two nicotine-stained fingers.

Metal saws against metal, a high ugly sound. He pares a pack of aluminum cans into a cluster of little men. Something of a creative type these days, now that he’s cleaned up. (“I’ve got someplace to live. I paint, a little,” he says, stiffly guarded.) He’s not lonely out there in the sticks. He keeps in touch with other rejects of the Tuttle school system, they’ll get together to just talk. If you haven’t lived it, stories of what it’s like are almost impossible to believe – disjointed recollections of bad men and animal faces. Half the time he doesn’t believe it himself, but that there’s a kernel of something in it – some essential truth of the universe, some story about weakness and strength, about the essential vulnerability of youth. Cohle’d tried taking care of a baby once, the baby of some other runaway he’d linked up with, and the kid had died. He’d taken it to heart.

Gilbough has definite opinions on this case, and seeing his star suspect rematerialize looking like a washed-up hippie philosopher does little to dissuade him. At the very least, something in his gut objects to the thought of some kid back in the day having that case for his own personal playground, just because a guy like Hart took a shine to him. The kid had seen and done things that were none of his business, legally or morally. Who knows if he kept it up into adulthood.

Him and Hart hit the rocks around ‘96, collided again in ‘02 and broke it off for good. They haven’t spoken since. He’s more reluctant to speak than Hart, due to a healthy mistrust for cops, but what he has to say is not nearly so rehearsed; whatever spills out of him is fluid and natural, liberally laced with bullshit and peppered with the vocabulary choices of a man more or less self-educated. For every candid scrap of evidence Gilbough and Papania extract from him through relentless questioning, there’s a corresponding tug on one of their threads – he’s sounding something out, drawing something forth. Cohle has a way of telling a story that makes it last, and he’s watching them all the while.

He knows something he isn’t telling. If they look hard enough, they can catch it on tape.