Page 8 of The Damage Man

“Just—meet with us.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know. But you know Cyrus?”

“Yeah, I know Cyrus. Had a blade against my throat two nights ago.”

“This guy I’m with? Just put him in the hospital.”

A long, long pause.

And then: “Where you at?”

Waiting for Blake to arrive, Rusty and Evan sit in silence, steam curling up from Rusty’s mug.

Silence is comfortable for Evan but, he has learned, not for most other people.

Quiet comes easier to him than connection, which makes sense given his background. Raised in the foster-care system in East Baltimore never knowing his mother or father. Recruited out of a boys’ home by Jack to become an assassin in the deep-black Orphan Program. Decades operating as a lone wolf, eliminating enemies of the United States in violation of international law. He had a brief, unexpected overlap with his mother at the end of her life.

And met the man who was his biological father only once, for seven terrible minutes. Recalling the first words he spoke to Jacob Baridon, the lanky onetime rodeo bronc rider who’d had a weekend fling with Evan’s mother forty-some years ago, he still feels a sting of shame. My name’s Evan. I might be your son. The solitary meeting took place two years and change ago in a wind-blasted pink double-wide in Nowhere, Texas—a memory Evan has preferred to keep buried.

Rusty’s coffee remains untouched. The mug, it seems, is a crutch, something for him to hold on to. His once-handsome features are worn from rough living. He is puffy beneath the eyes and yet his pupils are clear, a youthful blue. Evan reassesses his age now, putting him in his mid-forties. Given that Blake is twenty-four, that means Rusty was around twenty when his son was born.

“Getting me for a dad, he drew the short straw.” Rusty sips in a breath, fidgets with the mug handle. “And his mother, god, what a mess. Borderline personality disorder, never knew what mood we were gonna get hit with. We were messed-up kids ourselves. Neither of us fit to be in charge of anyone. I jacked up my back on a construction job, got prescribed Norco for pain, moved on to Dilaudid, you know the drill. I just … buried myself. Left when he was fourteen. I tried to visit but I was … I was so fucking useless. In and out of work. An embarrassment to everyone around me. Figured he was better off without me.”

“You ask him?”

“What?”

“If he thought he was better off without you?”

Rusty looks down at his coffee. His eyes mist. “’Scuse me,” he says, rising creakily to head to the bathroom.

Watching him shuffle away, stoop-shouldered with worry, Evan is hit with the full force of another memory—his sole memory of his own biological father.

Inside the dilapidated manufactured home, Jacob Baridon faces a mirror hung haphazardly on the wall, beat-to-shit straw Stetson in one hand, the fingers of his other shuffling through his hair along the part, checking for thinning. Something about the act is so brazen, so shameless, vanity overriding any concern for privacy. He does not care that Evan is standing right behind him. He does not care that he has laid eyes on Evan for the first time mere seconds before. He does not care that Evan has just informed him that he is likely his son. “This is where you tell me who your mom is,” Baridon says, not unkindly, still going at his scalp. It seems a conversation he has had a time or two before. He turns around finally to favor Evan with eye contact. “There was a lotta ass back then.” A bonding snap of the head. “You been there.”

Baridon is tall and hangdog handsome, salt-and-pepper stubble and an easy smile. Since he has a woman en route—“Gotta get the tail while the gettin’s good”—he rushes Evan out, though not before asking to borrow twenty bucks. When Evan peels a hundred off a stack for him, Baridon has to reset himself in his full-quill ostrich boots. Inspired, Evan suspects, by the girth of his folding cash, Baridon tells him to look him up next time he’s around.

A few seconds later Evan is barreling up the dirt road in a borrowed Jeep, the pink-painted double-wide shrinking in the rearview.

He has never looked back.

Rusty returns to the booth, jarring Evan from his thoughts. A blessing.

“Sorry,” he says. “Gotta talk to my sponsor when I get … you know.”

“What’d he say?”

“‘Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.’”

“Any help?”

Rusty’s shrug comes paired with a shudder tic. He checks the door nervously for his son, fixes his hair, though there is nothing to fix. He spins the coffee mug in its condensation ring, notices he’s doing it, stops. Blows out a breath hard enough to puff his cheeks.

“I’m on the ninth step,” he says.

“Which is?”