The Last Orphan
Chapter 6

Battle-Testing

“The thing you should excel at most is being wrong,” Jack says.

The study glows amber from the fire, bronzing Jack’s reading glasses, the cut-glass crystal tumbler glass in his hand, the finger of liquor within, the walnut bookcases, even the mallard-green walls.

Evan sits on the worn leather couch, elbow resting on a heap of dusty books. At twelve years old, he’s still so small that the tips of his sneakers barely scrape the floor. One of his laces is untied, dangling. He knows that probably drives Jack nuts, but it is a small enough rebellion to be overlooked.

His voice rich with single-barrel gravel, Jack continues. “Pay attention to everything you don’t know and everything you’re getting wrong while there’s still time to learn.”

For much of tonight’s lesson, Evan has felt antsy, his thoughts desultory. “Time before what?”

“Before you get killed,” Jack says, in a tone implying that this is the most naïve question he’s ever heard uttered. “That’s why the First Commandment comes first.”

“‘Assume nothing.’”

“Yes. If you have to be hit over the head to learn something about yourself, you’ll be someone who thinks that people only learn if you hit them over the head.”

“And that’s bad?” Evan asks.

“Son, that’s what assholes are.” Jack takes a swig. Closes his eyes as he swallows. The booze does something to him, warms him, opens him up, too.

Evan feels warm as well. The study is the only place in the rural Virginia farmhouse that could qualify as cozy.

Resting on Jack’s wide knee is a vintage cloth-bound book, maroon-brown and tattered, spine letters long faded. “You’ll have to work at all this in small ways and build up. That’s why the Second Commandment comes next.”

“‘How you do anything is how you do everything.’ That’s what I need to know to be an assassin?”

“Being an assassin is easy. I’m raising you to bedangerous.”

“Don’t you have to be dangerous to be an assassin?”

“There are a lotta ways to be dangerous. You canthink dangerously. You can be a dangerous conversationalist or—”

“Conversationalist?” Evan says. “I want to f**k people up and stuff. Shouldn’t an Orphan befeared?”

“Feared?” Jack shakes his head, just slightly, but Evan feels the show of disdain in his spinal cord. Though he’d die rather than admit it out loud, he never wants to disappoint Jack. He hasn’t felt that way about another person, and the sensation is as terrifying as it is disorienting. “Feared is never the aim. If you’re an Orphan, a true Orphan?” Jack leans forward, fixing Evan with a stare. Licks of fire reflect in his dark pupils. “The world will never know your name.”

Evan feels it then in his chest, the loneliness that has been his lifelong companion, a black hole of dread. His lower back still hurts from practicing the traditional forty judo throws; hiskata guruma needs work, his frame not yet sturdy enough to support the shoulder wheel.

Jack parts the book of military strategy and resumes reading. “‘The human heart, and the psychology of the individual fighting man, have always been the ruling factors in warfare, transcending the importance of numbers and equipment.’” He lifts his square baseball catcher’s head, the fire tanning the skin of his face. “Who am I quoting?”

“John Boyd.”

Jack grimaces. “No. Major General F. W. von Mellenthin.”

Evan says, “Wasn’t he a Nazi?”

“Abrilliant Nazi. You think you get anywhere without learning from your enemies?”

Jack drains the glass, rises to set it down on the mantel next to the framed picture of his deceased wife, Clara. She’s on a black-sand beach a few steps into the surf, sundress clinging at her knees. She’s laughing big and staring at the camera with an affection Evan can’t imagine, can’t imagine Jack being the kind of free he must have felt that day having a woman look at him like that. Though Evan never met Clara, she seems to be the animating spirit of the farmhouse, of Jack himself.

“What was she like?” Evan asks, and Jack follows his gaze to the photograph.

For a moment Jack’s face loosens. Then snaps back into form. “Study your Musashi now,” he says. “Unless your delicate morality is offended by Japanese warriors, too.”

Evan doesn’t let the disappointment of Jack’s redirection show. “I still don’t get why I need to read about all these ancient people.”

Jack settles back into his seat. Gives Evan’s question its due. “You’ll be alone. Most of your life.” He lifts the venerable book. “These thinkers are your only companions for now. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t surround yourself with like-minded people. You’ll get limited or radicalized.”

“By what?”

Jack looks irritated-amused, one of his go-to settings. “Who the hell knows? The news, the community, the military-industrial complex. The only hope is to stay open to all perspectives as they come in.”

Evan shifts on the couch, grimaces.

“What?” Jack says. “You’ve been unfocused the whole day.”

“It’s nothing.”

“Don’t waste time.”

Jack hates nonanswers; Evan should have known better.

“My lower back’s stiff,” he says. “That’s all.”

Jack gestures with the tumbler, whiskey threatening to swish over the side. “Get up and stretch. Dangling pose, yin style.”

Evan obeys, folding over his legs so his chest rests against his thighs and his butt sticks up in the air. He pictures his head as a bowling ball pulling on his spinal column, opening up new spaces.

“Set aside the pain,” Jack says. “Let itbe. But don’t let it run you.”

Evan’s legs are shaking, but he holds the pose, lets his head grow heavier so his spine elongates, his crown moving millimeter by millimeter closer to the floor.

After a few minutes, Jack snaps his fingers. “Roll up now—”

Evan’s voice, muffled against his jeans, joins Jack’s: “—one vertebra at a time.”

Evan comes vertical and then sits once more.

Jack studies him a moment and then snaps the book shut, releasing a puff of dust. He sets it on the ledge of the armrest: reading time over.

Evan feels it then, that flicker of human connection when Jack opens himself up a crack and lets him in.

Jack waves a hand at the wall of books. “Battle-testing,” he says. “That’s what we’re doing here. For what’s coming.”

Evan tries to eradicate the fear from his voice. “Whatis coming?”

“You’re gonna get beaten and battered and you’re gonna look evil in the face. When you do, it won’t always look like evil. Sometimes it looks like …” Jack tugs at his mouth, callused fingers rasping over his stubble. “Power. Someone understanding the infinity of human options more than you and using that to hurt others. It’ll be terrifying. It’ll mess you up worse than drownproofing or choke holds or enhanced interrogation. Because it’ll get inside you, down deep in the marrow. But you can’t let it stop you.”

Evan’s grown to trust Jack enough to risk showing weakness in front of him. “What if it does?”

Jack gives the question some thought, weighing the heft of it. That’s what Evan respects in him most; he doesn’t serve up ready-made answers like most adults. Finally he says, “When you get stuck, remember that you can deal with physical issues intellectually and intellectual issues emotionally. You can work out emotional issues psychologically and psychological issues spiritually. Those are the spokes of the wheel—one breaks, you can use another to fix it.”

“I don’t get it. How am I supposed to solve one kind of problem another way?”

“How’s your back?”

Evan shifts from side to side. It feels surprisingly loose. “Better.”

“How’s your brain? Such as it is?”

Evan cracks a smile. “Better.”

“There you go.”

“Oh,” Evan says. And then, “Oh.”

Jack takes a weary pause, shadow catching in the texture beneath his eyes. “The emotional spoke will be toughest, because you’ve had a lotta rough road behind you and I’ve gotta put a lot more rough road ahead of you. That’s just how it has to be.”

Evan nods. “Okay.”

“We’re making you into anactual Renaissance man. Not one of your anti-intellectual street thugs or some dandy Ivy Leaguer. We want all the knowledge with none of the pretention. Mens corpus animus.”

The whole thing feels suddenly, crushingly overwhelming. Evan takes a breath. “How the hell am I supposed to do all that? I’m just some throwaway foster kid from East Baltimore.”

Jack places his hands on the armrest and leans forward as if to rise. His body is tense, snake-coiled, his face flushed, and his eyes darker than Evan has ever seen them. “Knock it off!”

It’s the first time Evan has seen Jack lose his cool. He is the most judgmental man Evan has ever met in all the right ways. And the least judgmental in all the right ways. So if he’s angry now, he’s angry about something worth being angry about. Evan is scared and secretly thrilled, as if he’s burrowed down to something precious.

“You have worth. You do.You.” Jack jabs an oft-broken forefinger at him, the joint swollen. “Not whatever shit you learn or what you accomplish or who you think you are to the outside world—and least of all from whatever f****d-up situations I’m gonna put you in. If you don’t have worth, no one does.”

There it was. The first of Jack’s Unofficial Rules.

“Do you understand me?” Jack asks, still mad.

Evan is taken aback, his throat dry.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Evan says. “Yes, sir.”

Jack’s contained eruption has knocked the book of military strategy onto the floor. He picks it up now, assesses the cover for damage. Then he slides it into its precise slot on the shelf, uses the backs of his knuckles to ease it into line.

Jack sits once more, his features still wearing the aftermath of his anger. “Don’t youdare be so arrogant as to forget that.”

“I won’t, sir.”

Evan feels raw and wounded and deeply respected at the same time. He wonders how all these things can be true at once.

For a long time, they breathe the scent of the fire, pine and beech, and listen to the soothing crackle of sap.

There seems nothing else worth saying.