Begin Reading #3
“I’m with someone who can help.”
“One of your pillhead buddies?”
“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?”
“‘Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.’”
“How are you gonna do that?”
When he glances up from his mug, he looks utterly lost. “I’m not sure. But I’m gonna try.”
A rattling engine draws their attention to the window beside their booth. A road-scarred Camaro coughs up to a parking meter. Rust at the door bottoms, mismatched rear panel, hazy black coat faded in patches. Though it is battered to shit, it retains its muscle-car charm.
Rusty stiffens. His hands tighten around his mug, which gives a nervous clatter against the tabletop. His shirt is spotted through with sweat at the chest.
The groan of the opening car door is audible inside the coffee shop. The young man who gets out is on the short side, maybe five foot seven, but built, with gym muscles filling out a tattered white T-shirt.
Blake’s head swivels. He spots them inside and freezes on the curb.
The moment is excruciating, father and son staring at each other through the window, no more than a few feet away.
Blake’s mouth tightens into a thin seam.
His resemblance to Rusty is clear—even-set features, blue eyes, the cant of his powerful shoulders.
The strain of his situation shows on his face.
His eyes are jittery and he looks like he hasn’t slept in a long time.
He scans the block fearfully and then beelines for the entrance.
Rusty draws in a breath. “Thank you,” he tells Evan. “Whatever happens, I forgot to say thank you.”
The bell above the door chimes and then Blake comes in. He stands at the head of the booth looking at them. Rusty seems nervous to meet his eyes but he does.
Rather than slide in next to one of them, Blake swings a chair over from an empty table and sits at the mouth of the booth.
His neck is thick, trapezius muscles pronounced.
Evan thinks about the gym muscles, the muscle car, the protein-bar investment—a kid doing his best to armor up against a world he never learned to trust—and feels a pang of resonance.
Rusty says, “You look strong. Healthy.”
“Can we skip this shit?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Who’s he?”
Rusty says, “Evan.”
Blake offers his hand. Evan shakes it.
“Why are you helping my dad? You owe him money or something?”
“No. I saw him getting into it with Cyrus. Cyrus pulled a gun.”
“What happened?”
“It didn’t go well for Cyrus.”
“Who are you?”
“I help people.”
“For money?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It’s the only thing I’m good at.”
Blake nods and then nods again. “Well,” he says. “Thank you for trying. But I don’t think I can be helped.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“Dunno. Drive to Mexico.” Blake presses his palms together, smashes his hands between his knees. “Cyrus is the least of it. These guys, they’re bad news.”
“Why’d you take a loan from them?” Rusty asks.
“Like your judgment is so fucking great,” Blake says.
“Not when I was using.”
“Which was always.”
“It’s a disease.”
“I don’t give a shit what excuses you tell yourself.”
A few patrons turn at the sharpness of Blake’s tone.
Evan’s discomfort ticks up into the red zone.
Steel and lead do not faze him. He can take a punch and deliver much worse.
But this sort of domestic intimacy, the pain on Blake’s face, Rusty’s torn-open vulnerability, it strikes chords in him he does not understand.
His OCD flares, hitting on imperfections.
There’s a drip of maple syrup on the counter by his wrist. He glares at it with enmity.
With seeming great effort, Blake lowers his voice. “No wonder I wound up here. How’m I supposed to know how to do anything right? Couldn’t get it from you. Not from Mom.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Rusty says, “your mom was there. When you were sick with croup, she’s the one who got up with you in the middle of the night. Slept in the hospital for two nights when you had your appendix out freshman year—”
“How would you know?”
“Because I heard about it every time we got in a fight,” Rusty says, without edge.
Blake thinks about smiling, decides against it.
“I guess you’re right,” he says. “Mom’s crazy but at least she stayed.”
“Give me your phones,” Evan says.
They blink at him.
“Now.”
They set their phones on the table. Evan powers them both off, stuffs them in his pocket, and hands Rusty a burner phone. “I will handle this but you need to stay off the radar until it’s done.”
Blake says, “You can’t handle these guys.”
Evan smiles patiently.
Blake looks away, chews his cheek. “What’s ‘stay off the radar’ mean?”
“Don’t go home. Or to your mom’s. Or anywhere else they might find you.”
“Where’m I supposed to go?”
“I took over a friend’s sublease on a place in Rancho Park,” Rusty says. “No bills there or anything. You can stay with me.”
“I’d rather have bamboo shoots hammered beneath my fingernails.”
“Judging from what Cyrus had to say,” Evan tells him, “that might be on the menu.”
Blake’s forehead creases and the gray pouches beneath his eyes contract ever so slightly.