It was nine minutes long. He talked about what had happened in the diner. He did not make excuses. He did not say the video had been taken out of context. He said that he had been arrogant and careless and cruel, and that he had treated a stranger with contempt for no reason except that he could, and that he had gotten exactly what he deserved, which was a lot less than he could have gotten.
He said that he had found the man and apologized to him in person. He did not say the man's name or where he lived, and he asked everyone watching to please respect his privacy and leave him alone.
He talked about his father. Not in a bitter way. He just said some of the things his father had taught him, and said that he loved his father, but that some of those things were wrong, and he was going to try to unlearn them.
He talked about Earl Watkins and the question about the two different things.
At the end, he looked straight into the camera.
"I'm fifteen and oh in the cage," he said. "Outside the cage, I'm zero and one. And it's the most important loss I've ever had. I'm going to try to deserve it."
The video got two million views, which was not nearly as many as the diner video. But the comments were different.
They were mostly kind.
* * *
The next Tuesday night, he went back to O'Malley's.
It was not raining. The neon sign was pulsing red and blue against a clear, cold sky full of stars. The bell over the door had been fixed; it hung straight now and gave a single clear chime when Damien pushed the door open.
Sarah looked up from the register. When she saw who it was, her face went still.
Ray Pruitt was at the counter in his usual spot. He turned around on his stool and looked at Damien with an expression that suggested he was prepared to get up, bad back or no bad back, if it came to that.
Damien stood just inside the door.
"Miss Sarah," he said. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"
Sarah set down the pen she was holding.
"I'm listening," she said.
He walked to the counter. He did not sit down.
"I came to apologize," he said. "For what happened in here. For how I acted. For not listening to you when you told me to sit down. You told me twice, and I laughed at you. I've been coming in here for years and I've never once treated you like a person. I've treated you like you were a machine that brings eggs. I'm sorry, Miss Sarah. I'm really sorry."
Sarah looked at him for a long time over the top of her reading glasses.
Then she reached under the counter, took out a coffee mug, and set it in front of him. It was a white ceramic mug, slightly chipped on the rim, with a thin crack running down from the lip. She had glued it back together.
"That's his," she said. "The one you broke. I fixed it. I'm keeping it for when he comes back through."
Damien looked at the mug.
"Sit down, Damien," Sarah said, more gently. "You want your eggs?"
He sat down.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "And I'd like to pay for Mr. Pruitt's coffee too, if he'll let me."
Ray grunted.
"I'll let you," he said, "on one condition."
"What's that?"
"Next time some young punk comes in here running his mouth, you're the one who gets up and tells him to sit down."
Damien looked at the old man for a moment. Then he nodded.
"Deal," he said.
* * *
Spring came to West Texas the way it always did, all at once and without asking permission. The mesquite leafed out in a week. The bluebonnets came up along the shoulders of the interstate in long purple streaks. The wind blew hot one day and cold the next, and the sky went back to being so big and so empty that it was hard to remember it had ever been full of rain.
Damien kept his word to Ray Pruitt.
He went to O'Malley's every Tuesday night after the last class at Ironclad. He sat at the counter, two stools down from Ray, and he ate his eggs, and he talked to Sarah like a person. At first the conversations were short and awkward. Sarah was not a woman who forgave quickly, and she watched him the way you watch a dog that has bitten somebody once. But Damien kept coming. He tipped thirty percent. He carried trays back to the kitchen when Hector got slammed. One night, when a pipe burst under the sink in the ladies' room, he spent two hours on his back on the wet tile with a borrowed wrench and a flashlight in his teeth, and when he finally crawled out soaked to the skin, Sarah handed him a towel and a slice of pecan pie and said, "Well. Maybe you're worth something after all."
It was the nicest thing anybody had said to him in a month.
Ray, meanwhile, had started talking.
Not a lot. Ray never talked a lot. But in the long quiet hours between eleven and one, with the neon buzzing outside and the grill ticking as it cooled, the old man began, a little at a time, to tell Damien things. About the 173rd. About a hill in a place called Dak To that he still could not say the number of without his voice going strange. About coming home in 1969 to an airport where a girl in a peasant blouse spat on his uniform, and how he had stood there and let her, because he was too tired to do anything else. About the forty-four years in the oil field afterward, and how work had been the only thing that kept the noise in his head at a level he could live with.
"Your trucker friend," Ray said one night. "He drives for the same reason I worked. You understand that?"
"I think so."
"Man like that, he's spent his whole life being ready. Ready for the worst thing. Once you've been ready like that for long enough, you can't turn it off. You just find something to point it at that won't hurt anybody. For me it was a drilling rig. For him it's a steering wheel." Ray sipped his coffee. "And then some young idiot walks up and puts an arm around his neck, and all that ready comes back at once."
Damien looked at his hands.
"I didn't know," he said.
"Course you didn't. That's the point. You never know. That's why you treat everybody like they might be carrying something heavy. Because most of them are."
Damien thought about that for a long time afterward.
* * *
At the gym, things changed slowly, and then less slowly.