The Last Orphan
Chapter 3

The Butt-Clappers

The next day Evan did his twice-weekly circuit of the safe houses he maintained around the Greater Los Angeles Area to ensure that they looked lived in and to fine-tune his load-out gear and backup vehicles. As had become routine, he wound up at the home of Mia’s brother and sister-in-law for a visit with Peter in the backyard.

Evan’s relationship with Mia had been a confusion of starts and stops; though she no doubt sensed the contours of his secret life, as a district attorney she couldn’t ever know who he truly was or she’d be forced to arrest him. Despite all that, they had a basic underlying trust, especially when it came to her ten-year-old son. Mia had asked that Evan look out for Peter if anything went wrong on the operating table, to be the kind of old-fashioned influence on him that Evan had never had in his own childhood. When Mia had fallen into a coma, he’d tried to honor that promise as best he could.

It was the first of his standing obligations that involved another human being.

He and Peter ate sandwiches on the patio table while Peter’s aunt and uncle banged around inside, shouting at each other from different rooms in a manner that Evan continuously mistook for arguing.

The sandwiches, halved into isosceles triangles, consisted of bologna, yellow mustard, and Wonder Bread. With his tongue Peter shoved a masticated glob through partially clenched teeth, baring his lips to show Evan the result.

“Check it out, Evan Smoak.” Peter had a raspy voice that inexplicably made everything he said sound amusing. “Bologna Play-Doh!”

He leaned forward, let the mush dribble onto the paper plate. Then he mashed it with his fingers, building a starchy snowman. He paused, glanced up. “Why aren’t you eating?”

Evan looked at the misshapen bologna Play-Doh, streaked red from the traces of Kool-Aid lingering on Peter’s tongue, and did his best to calm the OCD swarming his brain stem like wasps. “Not hungry.”

The cloying smell of Tropical Fruit tickled Evan’s muscle memory. He stared down at the plates set before them, the kind of meal he’d seen on TV growing up in the foster home. Most people didn’t understand how broke broke could be. The kind of broke when bologna was too expensive so they’d eat mayonnaise sandwiches for dinner. There was a secret shame to that kind of poverty, carried on the inside like a stain.

“Okay. Didja know”—with a dirty fingernail, Peter dug at some bread lodged between his front teeth—“if your butt cheeks were horizontal, they’d clap when you walked up the stairs?”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“Wouldn’t that be so funny?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because then we’d just consider it normal. Like footsteps.”

Peter laughed that big openmouthed laugh, his charcoal eyes lit up. “So, like, at malls and stuff in the stairwells, there’d just be all this butt-clapping. Like a herd of butt-clappers.”

“If you start a garage band,” Evan said, “that should be your name.”

“Herd of Butt-Clappers?”

“Or go classic: the Butt-Clappers.”

“Like the Beatles.”

“With heavier percussion.”

Peter’s smile faded. He looked restless. He picked at his remaining half sandwich, tossed a grape and tried to catch it in his mouth.

Evan watched him, gauging the mood shift. Trying to be useful to a child did not come naturally.

“At school—” Peter stopped. Slid his finger into the opposite fist and gave it a squeeze.

“What?”

“Well, like, Mrs. Reimenschnitter says that you have to treat girls and boys the same. But that doesn’t make sense. ’Cuz I wouldn’t wrestle-tackle a girl, you know? I should be more gentle. And Uncle Wally’s different from Aunt Janet. And you’re different from Mommy.”

“How so?”

“She’s smarter.”

“Fair,” Evan said.

“And she wouldn’t like the butt-clapping joke as much.”

“She might.”

“Yeah, she might. She’d just pretend not to.” Peter chewed his l*p, lowered his eyes, and Evan could sense his thoughts lingering on his mother. “But girls treat me different! So how am I supposed to know what to do?”

Evan knew the mnemonic device for the top ten pressure points for inflicting maximum pain in kyusho jitsu. But gender-awareness counseling for elementary students was far from his area of expertise. He prayed for an interruption, a distraction, an incoming rocket-propelled grenade.

But Peter pressed on. “I can’t ask Uncle Wally about this, ’cuz he’s always wrong about everything. And Aunt Janet just says the opposite of whatever he thinks, which should make her right, but weirdly it doesn’t. It just makes her different wrong.”

“I usually replace,” Evan said, “that people will show you how they want to be treated if you pay attention. I’d think that’s something that Mrs. Durchdenwald—”

“Reimenschnitter!”

“—would understand. You can rarely go wrong by being gentle. Especially with girls.”

Peter pondered this. He took a slurp of Kool-Aid that left his lips glowing mime-red. “You’re not always gentle.”

Evan said, “No.”

“But only when you have to not be?”

“That’s right.”

A slight breeze stirred the golden leaves on the trees. There was a gopher-riddled lawn shaped like a kidney and a play structure that Wally had built with an abbreviated rock-climbing wall installed upside down. There was a rusting skateboard in the weeds, a sun-cracked Frisbee, and a cheap foosball table under the nylon awning of the porch. There was love here. But so much missing from the life Peter had before.

The boy stared down at his forefinger encased in his little fist, squeezing it in pulses that turned his knuckles white. “I read to Mom yesterday like they said to. And …”

“And what?”

“Tried to get her to squeeze my finger. But she didn’t. What if …?”

The wind riffled the blond cowlick rising to the side of Peter’s part. Evan could see him trying to muster the words and thought, Please don’t ask.

Peter folded his hands at the edge of the table. There was a formality in the pose that Evan found heartbreaking. “What if she doesn’t wake up?”

An agonizing question that deserved an honest answer.

“It would be terrible,” Evan said. “And then we’d deal with it.”

Next stop was Joey’s temporarily vacated apartment. She’d texted Evan to swing by because she needed a physical reboot on one of her servers; a memory leak in the video-recording software she’d written had left the system hanging when she tried to access it remotely.

To ensure that she’d be safe living alone here as a sixteen-year-old, he’d bought the building through a tangle of shell corps and had overhauled the security measures. Joey being Joey, she’d figured it out quickly and deemed him overprotective and paranoid. He’d informed her that those were his finest traits.

Approaching the building, he admired the stainless-steel digital call box at the front door. Before he could tap in the code, a college guy with an overburdened backpack hustled in front of him and used his key.

“Man,” the guy remarked. “It’s hot as balls today.”

He swung inside, held the door for Evan.

“Don’t let me in,” Evan said. “You don’t know who I am.”

“Dude, come on,” the guy said. “You don’t look like a problem.”

“What if that’s the point?” Evan said.

Standing in the foyer, the guy stared back at him, suddenly sweating a bit more profusely. “Um,” he said.

Not breaking eye contact, Evan swung the door closed between them. The guy watched him through the glass, frozen. Evan punched in the code, opened the door himself, and brushed past the guy on his way to the stairs.

Joey’s place smelled like her, vanilla lotion, Red Vines, and Dr Pepper. Her massive hardware station, a circular desk with mounted monitors stacked three high, was at rest. Dog the dog’s fancy pillowtop disk of a bed was in the corner, the skull-and-crossbones water bowl empty. Joey’s collection of speedcubes, all tidily solved, rested on the windowsill, and the air was unvented.

He opened a window.

Circling through the pie-slice opening in her desk, he nudged her mouse with his knuckles.

The monitors hummed to life. For a second, standing in the relative silence, he thought he heard the clatter of Joey working a speedcube.

He sat in her gaming chair, which cocked back so severely it nearly dumped him onto the floor. Righting the ship, he clicked the KVM switch like she told him to, performed the reboot, then sat a moment watching the screens repopulate.

His eye snagged on one of them, and his breath caught.

Details of his biological father, the man he’d never known. Jacob Baridon, an honest-to-God rodeo cowboy, as clichéd and ridiculous as that was. Against Evan’s wishes Joey had been tracking him down. The open file showed that she’d unearthed a debit card from a checking account that had been closed three months ago. A scattering of gas-station charges grouped around the town of Blessing, Texas, and a few more line items for Mixed Blessing, a local bar.

Before he could dig deeper, the screens wiped, replaced with images of Joey on every monitor. They all looked angry. “Why are you snooping around?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

She was on the bed in a hotel room with a scattering of room-service dishes and Dog the dog stretched inelegantly across the bed beside her. His head hung upside down off the edge of the mattress, mouth stretched in a smile, tongue lolling.

The multitude of Joeys said, “I told you to reboot my server, not look at all my files.”

“Why are you searching the man who … my biological …?”

“For you, X. I mean, he’s out there. How can you not want to at least see him? Just so you can put it to rest? He’s your father.”

“I didn’t have a father,” Evan said. “Jack. Jack was my father.”

“I mean, if I had a chance to talk to my—”

“You’re out there looking for answers right now. I’m not.”

She exhaled and leaned back from the screen. Dog tried to haul himself all the way up onto the bed, but the sheets avalanched beneath him. He landed with a thump on the carpet, lifted his head sheepishly, then lost himself in an Olympic bout of crotch licking.

“Fine.” Joey fiddled with a woven metal-fiber bracelet he’d given her, its magnetic clasp formed by stainless-steel skulls that clinked together. “I only got as far as a town he was in a few months ago.”

“Drop it.”

“I said okay.”

He glared at her. All the Joeys glared back. One of her death stares was generally scathing; 270 degrees of them felt nuclear.

“How’s your psoas?” he asked.

“Never better. Yours?” She evaporated from the screens, leaving him in her chair. He didn’t have long to drink in the silence.

His RoamZone was going, emitting its distinctive chime.

He extracted it from a cargo pocket, saw the familiar caller ID forwarded around the planet and then from one of his cover numbers. Every time it showed up these past two months, he felt his heart rate tick up.

Steadying himself for the worst, he clicked. Peter’s voice rushed through, loud with emotion. “It’s Mom!”

Evan’s voice stayed as steady as it had ever been. “What happened?”

“She woke up!”